So it appears I am being finally accepted as a permanent. (Lower in class are the weekenders. The lowest and most contemptible class is that of the mere visitor.) Like my fellow permanents, I have developed a complacent scorn for the spiritually impoverished inmates of the city. These are men who must daily adorn themselves with that floppily hanging wedge of decorative cloth known as a tie. These are women who daily must put uncomfortable shoes on their feet. They must all enter small, rectangular spaces known as offices and remain there however pleasant the day.
But prisoners are allowed weekend passes, and on this breezy Saturday in May as I mingle with my fellow Garibaldians, we see them, our friends and kin, furiously waving at us from aboard the ferry churning towards the dock. The vessel finally jolts to a shuddering stop and a swarm of cyclists pours over the ramp and begins pumping up the hill — young men and women in multicoloured garb that clings obscenely like an outer skin. I, in drab contrast, am in my garden grubs; a John Deere cap is perched cockily on my head. Ah, yes, I am melding into the community, and proudly wear its uniform.
Now debouch the foot passengers. Advancing towards me are Nicholas Braid, mutual-funds specialist; wife, Deborah, educator, and eight-year-old Nick, Jr., looking grumpy.
Deborah hugs me furiously. Her husband grasps my hand and Nicky stares up at me with eyes already laden with the boredom he is about to endure. No television, no computer games.
“Wasn’t easy to get away from the pits for a weekend,” says Nicholas. “Going nuts. They made me manager of a new fund. Resources, oil and minerals. Neck’s in a noose if I don’t get it up twenty points in a bull year.” His staccato half-sentences tend to lack pronouns.
“Oh, please change the subject, darling,” says Deborah. “It’s quite boring. Dad hasn’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. He saves his money under a mattress.”
“Better off leaving it there than investing so heavily in land, Arthur. It’s overpriced. Heading for the downhill run.”
“Ah, but I have made a clear profit already. Note that lines of worry have disappeared.”
I lead them to my shining carriage, all recently washed and waxed by Mop’n’Chop. But Nicholas, doubtless missing his weekend trot around the golf course, is determined to walk the three miles to the farm, and he manages to challenge his son’s virility sufficiently to force him to join him.
My daughter peers at me closely as if examining me for skin disease. “Well, your complexion is okay. And you’ve lost some excess baggage, that’s good. Still smoking, though. You haven’t had any dizzy spells?”
I explain to this keeper of my health that I am in excellent shape and will soon be subsisting on my own garden greens, and then I stumble my way onto a topic less comfortable. “And how is your mother?”
“You saw her the last time I did. So she hasn’t come out to see you once?”
“She has phoned a few times. She sounds well.”
A long, desperate silence.
“I think. . I’m going to say it — you should let her go, Dad.” “Perhaps we ought to find another topic — ”
“Stop doing it to yourself.”
“Deborah — ”
But she suddenly lets flow a torrent. “I suppose she loves you in a way. It’s a form of possession, though, isn’t it, keeping you flapping on the line. It flatters the shit out of her to have you down there kissing her boots before she kicks you in the face another time.”
“Deborah!”
“I’m sorry, the venom is leaking.” A pause. “I care for you, Dad. Really. I love you. It’s just that I wish you’d stop being such a — ” “Masochist.”
It is one of her favourite terms of loving abuse towards her father.
“Oh, my God, I’m just being rotten and cranky. It’s a beautiful day, I’m in a beautiful place, and I’m happy and you’re happy, and I’m sorry.”
“Ah, yes. Did you bring the onion sets?”
“They’re in my bag.”
“That’s all that matters.”
The weekend with my kin must draw mixed reviews. Deborah, I feel, enjoys herself, but her husband spends most of his time practising golf strokes with an imaginary club. He is disgruntled to learn I am not on-line; I have neither fax nor computer. But he makes do, spending many hours on long-distance calls to the bourses of exotic capitals of finance: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris. He is handsomely off, but has earned his money the hard way, the Canadian way, a life of unrelenting worry, fear, and pain.
Little Nick surprises himself by finding things to do: trees to be climbed, stones to be hurled into the bay, the neighbour’s stray chickens and sheep to be chased. After he is finally led exhausted to bed, his parents and I chat near the fire over our evening tea.
“How goes the work?” I ask Deborah. “With those young. . What is the acceptable term of the day? Clearly not mentally handicapped.”
“Just call them challenged, Dad. Exhausting. I can hardly wait for summer break. Two months in Europe, right, dear?”
Nicholas lifts a golf ball, sending it down the fairway of my living room. “Busman’s holiday. Tax-free.”
I regale them through the evening with tales of Garibaldi and its oddball cast of characters. As we are about to depart for bed, Nicholas asks if I’ll be handling Professor O’Donnell’s case.
“Why would you ask such a question?”
“Just that I heard your name mentioned. Happen to know one of the characters involved in the case.”
“Indeed.”
“That girl, what’s her name. . Kimberley Martin?”
“The complainant.”
“Met her fiance. Clarence de Remy Brown. Brown Group of Companies? Owns some gold mines in South America I’m thinking of taking a flyer on. Hard-nosed chap, temperamental. Brought the subject up over lunch at the club. Knows your reputation, of course. Asked me if you were taking the trial. All sort of awkward.”
“No, I shall not be involved in that case.”
Today’s visitor is our island trustee, the twitchy Kurt Zoller, who is again, for some enigmatic reason, apparelled in a life jacket. Perhaps he suffers a phobia of drowning. Mr. Zoller is enlisting support for a public meeting soon to be held for a rezoning, an expansion of Evergreen Estates.
“Fifty more lots, Mr. Bo-champ. More people, more clout. New and better roads, more tax money to pay for them. We need your voice, because a lot of people are going to be there who want to live in the past. They don’t want to enjoy all the comforts. I see a day coming when we will all have a mall, our own police office. Cablevision.”
“Ah, yes, that will be a boon. But, Mr. Zoller, I am a newcomer — it might be seen as brash of me to loudly add my voice.”
“We have to stand up to them.”
“Who?”
Though we are alone, he lowers his voice: “Margaret Blake and the eco-freaks. “This has the sound of a popular music group. “There are quite a few of them here. Most of them don’t advertise it. They look and act just like us.”
I ask Mr. Zoller how he came to be chosen to represent his fellow islanders.
“I was their unanimous choice.”
“How remarkable.”
“I won by acclamation.”
“Ah, no one was willing to run against you.”
“Exactly.”
Testing a theory that plants respond to fine music, I have set speakers out on the back deck so that my peas and carrots may enjoy Bach and Vivaldi while I hack away at the uncultured thistles with my hoe. The flowers of late May are making a vigorous show: daisies, foxgloves, lupines, purple roadside sweet peas. The song sparrows are in full-throated ease. The days are growing longer; summer waits anxiously in the wings for her grand entrance.
In response to a notice in the Island Echo (“14-foot runabout with engine and canopy that runs like new for sale at marina, just ask Emily”), I stop by the marina office. Emily is fetched from The Brig, where she has been tending bar, a woman of middle years who wears tight jeans that make a swishing sound between her bounteous thighs as she walks towards me with extended hand.