Beach Reading Read online

  Beach Reading

  © 2013 by Lorne Elliott

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

  P.O. Box 22024

  Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island

  C1A 9J2

  acornpresscanada.com

  Edited by Richard Lemm

  Cover and interior illustrations by Timothy Elliott

  Cover design by Matt Reid

  eBook design by Joseph Muise

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Elliott, Lorne

  Beach reading / Lorne Elliott.

  ISBN 978-1-894838-91-7

  I. Title.

  PS8609.L5495B42 2013 C813’.6 C2013-901578-7

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Elliott, Lorne

  Beach reading [electronic resource] / Lorne Elliott.

  Electronic monograph.

  Issued also in electronic format.

  ISBN 978-1-894838-92-4

  I. Title.

  PS8609.L5495B42 2013 C813’.6 C2013-901643-0

  The publisher acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund of the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council for the Arts Block Grant Program.

  1

  My father died when I was seventeen, and I found myself more free than I would ever be again, suddenly cut loose from the expectations of success which he had held for me. He only wanted me to be happy, and to someone like him who in his youth had known poverty, success was a necessary component of happiness. So he’d worked his whole life to achieve goals which, although they afforded me protection, also insulated me from ever really knowing the sacrifices he had made. I must have seemed to him an alien creature, blissfully ignorant of at least one of the wellsprings of his energy, as well as his demons. But he loved me, and I loved him, even though I didn’t weep at his funeral.

  It was odd. All I felt was that sense of freedom, and an uncertain guilt about whether I should be feeling worse. I wondered if this was shock, or if it was just that I was a cold-hearted bastard, though I guessed it wasn’t that, because I was deeply moved by what Mom was going through.

  From the time Dad died she acted mechanically, dealing with all the details efficiently, holding everything back. Then the undertaker asked her what clothes she would like him to be wearing in the coffin and without thinking she said, “He likes that blue tie…,” then corrected herself. “…Liked,” she said, and with that change of tense a string snapped inside her, and she crumpled visibly and sobbed. “I’ll be all right,” she kept saying, “I’ll be all right,” not wanting her family to be put out. She looked older than I ever remembered.

  A friend of hers took charge, and from then on things were arranged by others. Food was prepared, hushed conferences were held, rituals were observed, and a few days later, in what was undoubtedly a good-hearted attempt to make things easier for everybody, somebody got me a job.

  It might have been meant more as a gift for my mom. Although she would never have even thought it, her friends may have sensed that, particularly now, I was perhaps becoming a bit of a burden. Six months before I’d flunked out of my first year of university at Christmas on account of not having done a damn thing the whole time I was there, wandering around the campus with my hands in my pockets and my head in the clouds. I had all the time in the world, so I wasted it. A previous tenant of the dorm had left behind a banjolele which I carried around with me or strummed while sitting in the corner of the Student Union building. No passing girls swooned. In the few classes I attended, the pall of boredom settled on my shoulders like chalk dust. Finally I simply neglected to go at all.

  I think that I got away with a lot because of my strangeness. People who would have otherwise demanded that I smarten up tended to give up on the idea once they saw me in person. My dress consisted of plaid pants, a pyjama shirt and a tuxedo vest and when it was cold I would don orange overalls, virtually identical to prison wear, which explained my lack of success when I tried hitch-hiking. For footwear I went through flip-flops, Chinese slippers, construction boots and tennis shoes before I finally settled on a pair of my father’s brogues, which fit perfectly when worn without socks.

  Nobody knew quite what to do with me, but because I seemed harmless they let me be. It had been the same at home. Born at the tail end of a large family, by the time they got to me my parents had become tired with meting out any real discipline. It wasn’t the worst way to grow up: it all depends on the personalities involved. Now, at the age of fifty-eight, I see how lucky I had been.

  I didn’t feel lucky then, though, after the funeral, with a job that I didn’t really want. Apart from everything else, it would interrupt my development as a banjolelist.

  Near the end of July my mother saw me off at the train like she was sending a four-year-old into heavy traffic. I rode into Windsor Station where I caught the overnight connection to Moncton, then took a bus to the ferry at Cape Tormentine, crossed Northumberland Strait in the rain, and remounted the bus on the other side to ride through countryside sharp and green, with wrecked cars in farm yards and wet soil the colour of liver. Work began in two days and I had three hundred dollars to last me to my first pay-cheque. I had turned eighteen a week before and I felt as free as oxygen.

  In Charlottetown I walked from the bus station down to the waterfront by the oil tanks, past three scowling men who stood deep in conversation, then stopped talking as I came near. Low secrets, I supposed, about unions and management, power and corruption, who was doing what to whom and how to get even. One of the personae I was quite willing to act out was of a revolutionary and friend of the working man, although that might have been hard to pull off if I kept using words like “personae.” I might also have found it difficult to adopt with any sincerity their attitude that the world sucked. On the other hand I wasn’t looking forward to my job, so maybe there was still hope for me. As I walked I practiced saying to myself, “I hate this goddamn job” and “This goddamn job sucks.” I found if I spat that it helped with my characterization.

  I picked up this year’s tide charts at the Coast Guard Station, then walked up Queen Street and around town, passing government buildings, boarding houses and private homes, a plywood taxi-stand and a dance studio, an upstairs tae-kwon-do gym and a pool hall. There was no sense to any of it. The architecture was either nondescript or beat-up. The Department of Ugliness had apparently passed a mandate that all new buildings would be hard to look at, while the old ones continued to rot. A poster at the Arts Centre showed Anne Of Green Gables brimming over with unbridled phony ecstasy in a suspiciously pristine landscape, but it didn’t represent anything I ’d seen here so far and so could probably not help me with any real information. Rather it was meant to manipulate my emotions and sell me something, so as a result I felt no need to see the show. Instead I walked along Grafton and into a slummier area, where things looked more hard up. A woman leaned out of a second story wooden balcony and said exactly this: “Eugene? Get the fuck in here right now Eugene! Are you listening? I don’t want any fucking problems with you, you little fucker. Now! I said Now! Fuck!” Then she added, “And don’t swear.” She probably wouldn’t be auditioning for the role of Anne.

  I saw a junk shop on a corner and went in. It was chock-a-block full of what nowadays would be sold in trendy retro shops, but back then was just crap.
There was a broken washing machine, a broken porcelain lamp and a broken blender. A sign on the wall said, “If You Break It, You Buy It”. But how could they tell?

  A radio wrapped in scotch tape sat on a shelf, and from it a voice was singing over a jangly guitar, “Crimson effervescent stardust, universal rainbows of your mind…” I looked towards the back of the shop and saw a massively obese man sitting in a chair beside the counter. He lifted his eyes at me heavily as I approached, and sighed with the very thought of having to deal with someone. I asked how much for the bike leaning against the wall, and he said it was his nephew’s and wasn’t for sale. He added that he had another out back, then immediately regretted that he’d said that.

  “Could I see it?” I asked.

  “Are you gonna buy it?”

  “I’d have to see it first.”

  He’d been afraid of that. He sighed again mightily and looked at me like I had ruined his week. He grunted and wriggled forward to the front of his seat with roughly the same effort as it takes to push a mountain up from the earth’s crust. Leaning forward as far as he could go, he grabbed the corner of the counter, pulled and straightened, found the tipping point and rocked onto his feet. He looked at me accusingly and tilted his weight till one foot reflexed forward, then the other, and he was walking, negotiating the narrow path between a rusted metal cooler and a push lawnmower.

  I started to say, “I can help you with that…” and made like I was coming around, but he held up his hand like a traffic cop and said, “Stay on your side of the counter please,” and left through the back door. I waited, looked around and read some of the advertisements taped to the front of the counter. I heard swearing in the yard and noises like a combine harvester being demolished by a gang of navvies.

  As though in counterpoint, the radio was now playing the heartfelt song of a young swain who, having spent the night with a woman, was explaining to her how he was the wandrin’ ramblin’ kind of guy who couldn’t be tied down, that the open road was a-callin’ and that there were just too many other women out there for him to love. It must’ve made her feel great. The song came to an end, and the DJ said that next up was The Barley Boys, who would be playing at the Towers Mall tomorrow night. It reminded me of something, I didn’t know what, but then my eye fell on the front of the counter again where, sure enough, an 8x10 black and white handbill advertised the date and time of their show. It was printed over the xeroxed photograph of the boys themselves standing in the rain in front of what looked like the wall of the prison they had just been released from, a group mug shot, all three of them furtively looking from under their brows, large, bearded, Irish and scowly. In direct contrast to the Anne of Green Gables poster, they gave the impression that they didn’t care whether you showed up or not. No phoney ecstasy here. Life was grim, and human beings were mainly bastards. I wondered what their show was like.

  And, as though to inform me, from the radio they started into a song in jig-time, a high-speed ballad with harmonies. It was rough-edged and rowdy, but during the instrumental break the guitar was taken over by the banjo and suddenly there was something new in the world, fluid and mercurial, intricate and heavenly…

  From out back came a particularly long drawn orchestration of swearing, gasping and industrial percussion, like tin sheds being ripped apart as wild boar were slowly slaughtered. The shopkeeper appeared at the back door, glaring murderously at me and drenched in sweat. He wrestled the bicycle in, then wheeled it forward. “There,” he said. “You gonna buy it or what?”

  It was a faded pink CCM. I took it from him, rolled the chain back onto the sprocket and spun the front wheel. It seemed true. I squeezed the tires. They were taut. But…

  “It’s a girl’s bike,” I said.

  “So?” he glowered. I’d better not push it.

  “How much?”

  “Two hundred bucks,” he said.

  He had to be kidding. “I was only planning to spend five,” I said without thinking.

  He sighed, then sat down heavily and felt for his pack of cigarettes. “OK,” he said. I thought of asking for a receipt but that would have been too cruel.

  Outside the shop I hummed that banjo solo I’d heard on the radio and strapped my small pack and banjolele onto the frame behind the bicycle seat. I hopped on and started pedaling towards the North Shore.

  I stopped at a gas station and picked up a road-map of the Island, looked where I wanted to go, and saw how I could do that and how long it would take, about six hours, I figured. University Avenue looked hot, so I took a side road through leafy streets with small neat family houses on quarter-acre town lots, toward Brackley Beach Road. One pedal on the bike jerked a bit with every revolution, but I didn’t mind: it was a beautiful day. I came out onto a street with welding shops and garages, crossed a railway track and pedaled up a hill halfway, walked the bike to the top and coasted down the other side. A breeze was blowing from the south behind me, and no dogs ran out and chased me. I walked the bike up another long hill to the airport, and looked back at Charlottetown below, church steeples like inverted carpet tacks, the Hillsborough River at full tide under perfect clouds like a Dutch painting.

  Past the airport I took a road to the right, until it bent around to the north again and I was biking through farm country, red lines of soil between potato rows, and three shades of green on the fields: pale oats, dark corn, and silvery barley which the wind brushed back like a cat licking its fur.

  Since I had heard that banjo lick at the junk shop I must’ve been turning it over in my subconscious, because I suddenly realized how I could break up a chord to create that sound. I stopped beside the road, unstrapped the banjolele off the rack, tuned it differently and rolled my fingers across the strings. I placed my left hand in different positions until I could play a repeating major scale, an uncomfortable stretch for my little finger, but pleasant to my ear. When I moved the second note in the chord down a half tone, running my fingers over the strings produced the first few bars of “La fille aux cheveux de lin” by Claude Debussy. I re-packed the banjolele and hopped back onto the bike. Coasting down the hill I thought how I could play the rest of that piece, and, distracted, I almost drove into the ditch.

  I came over another hill and saw the ocean off the North Shore, cobalt blue against the red soil in front, the colours vibrating against each other, and I turned east and biked along back roads, some of them red dirt, some paved, finally crossing into King’s County. A merlin left his perch on the single telephone wire, performed a little circuit of flashy flying, and returned back to his perch behind me after I passed. I crossed another railway track, my bum a bit sore from the seat already, but I didn’t care. Two turtle doves looked at me from the wire. They’d better watch it or that merlin would get them. One time I heard heat bugs trill then go silent as I passed and at the bottom of a hill three geezers with trout gear stood on a bridge and smiled at me and said hello. And so, all that summer day, I bicycled the back roads of Prince Edward Island, heading for the North Shore.

  ***

  Near my destination I came to a T in the road with a potato stand that operated on the honour system: take potatoes, leave the money. I left the suggested amount and took a five pound bag, strapped it on top of my packsack and coasted down a hill and past a sea-marsh to come out through a spruce wood where the dunes started. A park gate stood beside a newly built park office where I was due to report the day after tomorrow. There was an advertised fee to enter the park, but nobody was around so I continued straight through. This was different than the potato stand, this was government, and for a moment I imagined myself again in the role of a revolutionary.

  I turned left behind the dunes with the sea sounding out of sight, and the bike suddenly swerved as I pedalled over a tongue of sand which had drifted across the pavement. I came down onto a natural causeway with a shallow bay on my left, and now I could feel the breeze strengthening into a
steady wind. The sky was bluer than anything I’d ever seen and a great blue heron flew across it with his legs dragging behind. Double-crested cormorants were grouped on a sandbar, noses in the air pointing windward, one ring-billed gull just off to its side, an alien. And over on the right on a dead spruce was an immature bald eagle. White-throated sparrows flitted about in the spruce trees. Ipswich sparrows were also a possibility here.

  I knew about birds because when I was twelve my father, seeing my interest in this direction, had given me A Field Guide To The Birds, which I picked up and didn’t put down again for a month. It was printed on heavy duty waterproof stock and designed to survive arduous expeditions to remote parts of the globe, but by the end of the summer my copy was worn out. If you had a bird identification question I was the guy in the family you went to.

  All of my siblings had attempted at some point in their youth to become experts in one thing or another. I thought all families acted this way. Around the dinner table my father would instigate debates on everything from the Warsaw Uprising to The Bhagavad Gita, then sit back and watch as impossible positions were defended vigorously on subjects we initially knew very little about, but by this very process would soon become familiar with. Books were hauled out and consulted, arguments adopted and adapted. If it was an escape, I think it was a healthy one. It encouraged a curiosity about the world outside ourselves.

  Here for instance, by a path which led across a low spot in the dunes I recognized Wild carrot, also called Queen Anne’s Lace after Anne of Denmark. I don’t even remember how I had learned this, but I must have taken it in with everything else from the family, by osmosis.

  I stopped the bike and, partly pushing, partly carrying it along with my packsack, banjolele and the sack of potatoes, I walked over and down through the marram grass, around the side of a quarter-acre field of driftwood, then onto a sand beach, rock-strewn, with waves lapping on the shore. It was empty and beautiful.

  I was hot and sweaty from pedaling, so I took off everything but the swim shorts I wore under my pants and walked down to the ocean. The smell of salt air made me feel about fifty percent more alive. I watched two sanderlings chase the lip of the waves like kids near cold water. You could almost hear them say eek! as they narrowly escaped another drenching, then on some sudden signal they took off together and flew shakily around the point to the west. What were they eating which only existed that close to the wave edge?