Beach Reading Read online

  I waited but didn’t feel any different.

  The music was good, though, bass-heavy with a stress on every third beat. One two THREE four, One two THREE four. The fifth song on the tape was a pleasant surprise as well, a version of “Deep, Deep In My Heart,” which they had laid over a different rhythm, and they’d added a little talky section in the middle that rattled on in double-time.

  “De Jah voice come, de mighty run like salmon always upstream,

  But down dey go, one two and fro and shine de light eternal.”

  Although English, I found it incomprehensible. It was like the van painting put into words.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “You have to listen a few times,” said Bailey. He handed me the cassette case and I looked at the cover. “I’ll make you a copy.”

  “You can make copies?” said Wallace.

  “We got all de gear,” he said, gesturing into the van.

  “Maybe you can dub ‘As Softening Shades of Evening Fall.’”

  “What is it?”

  “You gotta hear it,” said Wallace, and positively ran inside to get the tape.

  The joint came around and Bailey offered it to me again.

  “No thanks,” I said. “It doesn’t make me feel any different.”

  “First time, sometimes it’s like that,” said Bailey.

  “Oh.”

  “Then it gets better,” and he nodded his head in the direction of Melissa and Robbie, who were dancing, held together as though by little magnets on the tips of their fingers, circling like planets locked in orbit, in odd slow motion moves, purple in the shadows against the sunset above the dunes. I had certainly felt like they must be feeling, but had Claire?

  The Mighty Voice of Jah tape came to an end and Melissa and Robbie stepped apart.

  Wallace reappeared out of the kitchen door with Brucie holding onto his leg, trying to restrain him. “No! G-G-God! Not “S-S-Softening Shades!”

  Wallace broke loose laughing, and came toward us as Brucie on the ground mimed ripping both his ears off then squirmed around, covering his head with his arms.

  “What’s “Softening Shades”? said Melissa.

  “Wallace thinks it’s funny,” said Robbie.

  “Men!” said Melissa, raising her eyebrows and shaking her head. The beads on her braids clacking together said “typical!”

  Bailey took the tape from Wallace and put it in the machine. Aiden took pictures.

  “Smile,” he said.

  “Click!” said the camera.

  “I was telling Robbie that this is the song I want at my funeral,” said Wallace. He straightened up and adopted the Scottish Bard voice he had used to recount the MacAkern Saga. “…For truly the skirl of the pipes are the sweetest sounds to ever touch the ears of man.”

  “Not if they’re playing ‘Softening Shades,’ they’re not,” said Robbie.

  “Whist, girl!” said Wallace. “I’ll have you know that that tune was commissioned by our uncle, Lennie ‘The Smooth’ MacKay, to be written by Island composer Gilbert Arsenault, ‘Piper Gil’…”

  “…That tone-deaf sonovabitch…”

  “…for the opening of the Provincial Assembly in 1958, because Smooth Lennie knew that one man and one man only could rise to the occasion and create a work of art worthy of such an august body.”

  “Which he hated with a passion and who he wanted to get even with by making them sit through it,” said Robbie.

  Wallace turned to us and dropped his heightened tone. This story was too good not to be told straight. “Lennie hated those pricks in the Legislature, see, so he put Gil on salary for a year, composing for their grand opening the vilest, most difficult piece of shit-on-a-stick ever written. He pried some funding from Culture and Heritage to use against them, because he had it in for them too, and sure enough, getting a hundred pipers together just to learn the damn thing pretty well blew their budget and finished them off. Now, who would like to hear a recording of it?” he asked innocently.

  “Not me!” said Robbie.

  “No!” yelled Brucie.

  Wallace was well pleased. “I’d hate to have lost it. I was thinking of using it for our campaign song. Maestro?” he handed the tape to Aiden who inserted it into the machine and punched the play button.

  “Christ,” said Robbie. “Here it comes.”

  Out of the speaker came the crackling sounds of an old recording and then a noise like the tape recorder wasn’t working right. This proved merely to be the rising wheeze of the bagpipes equalizing the pressure in their plumbing as one hundred creatively-tuned and badly-maintained instruments came to life as if they preferred to be left for dead. “Leave me alone,” they seemed to snarl. After this came a short silence, broken by the thin wavering whine of one piper who couldn’t shut off his instrument completely. Then a sharp tap of a baton, followed by another real silence, into which Wallace said in a phoney whisper, “You are about to hear the live recorded performance of the world premier of the composition performed by the 1954 All Island Pipe Band under the musical directorship of Michael Beaton.”

  “Mad Mike,” said Robbie.

  And with a great squeal like a hundred slaughtered hogs, the pipes sprang into the body of the “melody,” a disjointed pile of rank offal with no point to the composition other than to annoy. It was like a swarm of giant aggressive gnats, or the collective teeth-gnashing of a talentless mob of Philistines who got their way simply by being so obnoxious they were left to do whatever they wanted. And what they wanted was to inflict pain. Pure, twisted, wrenching, annoyance. As the “tune” rose in volume, it worsened in tone. It split into two, then three, then eleven-and-a-half factions in violent argument with each other as to who could be the most irritating. They fought, they whined, and finally when even they couldn’t take any more, they collapsed into themselves, spitting and cursing vilely. Eventually, it all came to a disjointed halt, though not in any definite enough fashion to be considered resolved. It left you feeling What’s The Point Of Anything, along with an empty sense of mercy that at least it seemed to be over. Wallace said, “Again?” and Brucie punched him in the leg and yelled, “No!”

  “I’ve got to hear dat once more,” said Bailey.

  But the mosquitoes were getting fierce and I had a high tide to meet tomorrow morning early.

  “I should get home now,” I said.

  “Are you OK?” said Robbie.

  “Yeah. Sure,” I said. “See you.”

  “Play it again,” said Bailey, and as I walked away I could hear the first strains of the piece once more, followed by great bouts of booming laughter.

  The air was getting cool, but the cracked pavement on the road was still warm on my bare feet. The sunset had faded but a half-moon had risen. Off to either side of me the spiky spruce skyline showed against the bright night sky and everything smelled of spruce and salt water. I felt no effect whatsoever from the marijuana and wondered what all the fuss was about.

  Where the woods gave way to the dunes, I crossed to the camp where moonlight washed the beach in silver, casting shadows on the sand.

  I noticed footprints which weren’t mine. They came up the beach from the east, right to the tent where the person who’d made them had shuffled around, then gone back by the same way. I examined them up close, the mark of a quite heavy boot with a tread like a zig zag. The moonlight was bright enough to see all this.

  Oh that moonlight, I thought as I crawled into the heavenly-smelling tent and arranged my sleeping bag, thinking of Claire. Everything would be all right, and if not, so what?

  And then I surprised myself by finding that my thoughts about her had become quite rude, which shocked me. It made me less worthy of her. She was a flaxen divinity, her brow a dome of heaven, her eyes dark pools, and a bosom on her that would give a gay monk a hard-on. A dead
gay monk…

  Stop it.

  Christ her bosom was lovely, though, proof that God not only exists but that He is benevolent. On one side of the equation of life was all the evil that had befallen humanity since the birth of time, but to balance all that out, on the other side was Claire’s bosom. I could imagine what it must be like unconfined by her brassiere. Oh, I could imagine that all right.

  One of the things I must do was introduce her to Melissa, who wore no bra at all, a style of dress which Claire could definitely think about imitating. Claire’s bra, in evidence under her shirt, looked to be the steel-belted official Russian Army model, constructed with suspension bridge technology from fabric of the kind used in bullet-proof police gear. It created a tragic flaw in the line of her divinity, an unnatural assault on all that was holy. One of the Things of Man, goddamn it, confining the Things which were definitely of God. Melissa, in this regard, was much more sensible and progressive, her bra-lessness, as well, supporting one plank in the platform of the Woman’s Liberation Movement of which I, for one, heartily approved. Perhaps when I introduced them to each other, Melissa could convince Claire of the oppressive male-dominated power structure which was confining her womanhood, and Claire, now liberated and grateful to me, would show me her tits…

  Stop it, I thought. Now go to sleep.

  5

  I awoke on time, crawled out of my tent, and scanned down the beach where small waves lapped against and stirred up the sea-wrack left by the departing high tide. As though on cue, better than I ever could have planned, a thin flock of sanderlings wobbled down, braked on shaky wings, alighted and started picking, running excitedly up and down the shore. I was amazed and pleased that my hypothesis seemed so easily confirmed. I noted the time and described the phenomenon briefly in my notebook. I would tell Claire first, but she wouldn’t be in today. How long, oh Lord how long?

  I hopped on my bike and pedalled to the park office in record time, said hello to Fergie, avoided saying hello to Rattray, then buried myself in my work all day for Claire’s sake, to present perhaps the preliminary paper to her tomorrow. The book that would result would be dedicated to her, and all that morning and afternoon I wrote and rewrote my notes, the workday passing quickly until it was time to leave.

  Back at my camp, I swam, ate a potato, practiced some banjolele and wrote a song about her, then played it all the way out to the road and down to MacAkerns’. Brucie was sitting on the front steps, looking across the bay and humming to himself.

  “Hi,” he said when he saw me. “Nobody’s here.”

  “You are.”

  “Nobody else.”

  “I am.”

  He blushed at being teased. “I m-mean Robbie and Wallace and M-M-Melissa and Aiden and Bailey. They aren’t here.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  “Wallace is out c-c-campaigning, Bailey and Aiden went to the library, and Robbie went to the beach with M-M-Melissa to see you.”

  “I must’ve missed them. What did they want me for?”

  “Nothing.”

  I strummed a chord on my banjolele. “Wanna jam?”

  “Yeah!”

  He sang “Deep, Deep in my Heart” and I plucked along and harmonized on the chorus in simple four-four time. About halfway through I changed to a Caribbean rhythm, and after the song ended, we did it twice more, once in each style.

  A ball of dust appeared at the far end of the road and the pickup truck came barrelling across the causeway and into the yard. Wallace sprang out, dressed in a shirt and tie which made him look like a particularly fashion-blind Jehovah’s Witness. He walked up to us just as Robbie and Melissa appeared down the trail from the beach.

  “The beach is beautiful” said Melissa. “You should check out Christian’s campground.”

  “Are you building something down on our beach, Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are?”

  “Just fixing up the campground,” I said. “I’m in love.”

  Everybody looked at me.

  “With what?” said Wallace. “A warthog?”

  “No.” I looked back at him, offended. “She’s the most beautiful woman on the face of the earth.”

  “OooooOOOOOoooooooo!” said Melissa and Brucie together.

  “Who is she?” said Robbie.

  “New girl at the office.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Perfect,” I said, stating a fact.

  “Well, maybe you should aim a bit lower,” said Wallace. “I mean, your face being the way it is.”

  “Why? What’s it like?”

  But nobody wanted to be the first to say. They glanced at each other and I put my fingers to my lip, felt the bump there, and wondered again how bad it looked.

  “Here,” said Melissa, rummaging in her handbag. She found a small mirror and handed it to me.

  After the first day it had not given me any discomfort, so I’d assumed that it looked all right, but this was the first time I’d actually seen my face since my fall off the truck, and it was deeply shocking. One large black eye like a Dalmatian puppy was paired on the other side of my nose with a sad-sack purple line like a football player, and around this and over most of the rest of the face was an asymmetrical bruise of greenish-yellow. The bridge of my nose was raised in a lopsided lump, my lip was swollen slightly, and my jaw was scuffed. The new shape of my lip created an indentation in the corner of my mouth that caught and held a collection of small bubbles of spittle. The sunburn on my forehead had furred up with dead skin around the edges, and near the tip of my nose, in an independent attempt at ugliness unrelated to the abuse that the sunburn and ball-hitch had inflicted, a large pimple had started, a distraction which I now realized one eye was constantly being drawn to, making me vaguely cross-eyed. I adjusted my expression to the rakish face I had used when I had met Claire and what looked back at me was a zombie’s idiot younger brother.

  “Can’t see why she wouldn’t fall for you,” said Wallace. “Unless she’s blind. She isn’t blind, is she?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re fucked. Or, more to the point, not fucked.”

  “Wallace!” said Robbie

  “Sorry,” said Wallace. “I’m sure she’s very important to you. And you never know, that look of yours worked for Quasimodo. Or not. I can’t remember. Robbie? Did Quasimodo ever get laid?”

  “No, Wallace. Quasimodo never got laid.”

  “Well then, Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are, you are shit out of luck.”

  “I have some makeup if you want,” said Melissa.

  “That’s all right,” I said. Though it wasn’t. I was in shock.

  “I’ll give you some before you go,” she said.

  “Could I have some scotch?” I said.

  “What did I tell you?” said Wallace. “A hound for the liquor. And as it so happens…” He walked back to the truck, dropped the tailgate, dragged out two crates stacked on top of each other and carried them back towards us, setting them down on the porch. He took a bottle out of the crate, unscrewed the cap, and handed it to me. “Remember now,” he said. “No swilling.”

  “Where’d you get those?” said Robbie.

  “Dunbar,” said Wallace.

  “I thought Dunbar hated your guts.”

  “Not really. Smooth Lennie screwed him over once, so he hated the whole family for a while just by association, but I made up to him and we’re all the best of friends now.”

  “You and Dunbar?” said Robbie.

  “Politics makes strange bedfellows.”

  “You slept with Dunbar?”

  “A manner of speaking, Robbie.”

  I took a sip, then another. It didn’t seem as bad as two nights ago. The trick was to administer it in small doses.

  Bailey’s van appeared in the distance, roared down the causeway and wobbled into th
e yard where it came to a halt and backfired. Bailey and Aiden got out and came toward us.

  “How did da canvassing go, mon?” said Bailey.

  “We are sipping the fruits of that adventure right now,” said Wallace, toasting him as he approached.

  “What’s all this?”

  “I got Dunbar’s vote, and two cases of scotch as a campaign contribution.”

  “No shit?” said Bailey. He took the bottle from me and took a belt. “Just what the doctor called for.” He handed the bottle back and took from my other hand the mirror, peered into it, then removed his tam and ran his hand over his skull, which was hanging with short dreadlocks in little knots like baby fingers. “Time to re-enter Babylon. My hair will be shorn like Samson, and then I will be weak enough for the fight. Ha!”

  Aiden said, “That’s brilliant, Bailey.”

  “Why don’t you just marry him and get it over with?” said Melissa.

  Bailey put down the mirror, took another belt of scotch, and clapped his hands once. “Campaign Mode!”

  “Wait!” said Aiden, “I’ll take some before-and-after shots,” and started taking his camera out of its case.

  “What’s c-campaign mode?” said Brucie.

  “It’s where Bailey transforms himself from a clown into a horse’s ass,” said Melissa, and she rummaged in her handbag and took out a small set of folding scissors.

  “Off they go, Melissa,” said Bailey, pointing at his head and dropping his Caribbean accent. He sat down on the porch as Aiden snapped some photos. “And this will also mean there will be no more marijuana for the duration. For me, I mean. You can all do whatever you want, of course.”

  “Oh, I plan to,” said Melissa, crosslegged behind him as she snipped, and with the first dropping dreadlock, Bailey’s back stiffened and his eye cleared and steadied.