The caplin crest and tumble on a high tide and we fill the two buckets in a minute. We watch children scooping up these frantic deaths into carts and dumping them into buckets. The rims of these buckets flicking and dying.
29 We are in a Chinese restaurant ordering won ton soup, spring rolls. Lydia puts her hand on the belly of the teapot. It’s hot, she says. The restaurant is full, bathed in yellow spotlights. Lydia admits she assumed she’d be with a social animal. Her idea of a partner.
This makes me wonder if Lydia is good for me. How her work requires her to be in the centre, where possibilities can grab her. The world notices her waiting and snaps her up to direct and act. Whereas I need the small, ignored corners of the earth, to write about them so that people won’t forget. Or even know for the first time.
There’s a woman two tables down who looks like Lydia at forty-two. I could love that look.
30 I am making lamb as the Moroccans might cook it. Lydia: Youre a good cook for a guy. But then, I’ve always gone out with good cooks. Usually, men dont waste time on salads.
She says she’s been keeping tabs on her food and noticed a bunch of bananas and a jar of caviar went missing.
Lydia, I dont know what to say. You think I’m sneaking stuff out of the house?
She looks at my heel and says it’s full of blood. The bruise in my calf has sunk to my foot. I can’t forget that she has said she’s keeping tabs.
You dont rave, do you, Gabe? Earl used to rave. But you know what? He’d shut up if you told him to.
I want to say something about the tab, but this shuts me up. Lydia convinces me to drive her to Cape Spear to see the humpbacks. Warm and sunny. The whales are heading north. They loop up their dorsal fins five times, then arc and slink up their tails and dive deep. It’s as if their size grants them a different speed dimension to work in. All the movements appear in slow motion.
One humpback heads straight for us in smooth torpedo form. The white of his flukes crimped over to the top black like a pie crust. A blast of spray from his spout. The spray drifts up and along the horizon, like an exhausted fireworks.
July
1 I grab another beer from Oliver’s fridge. Craig Regular is telling Alex that all new computers have a clipper chip installed so the CIA can backtrack into any computer and scan information stored there. His colleagues in Seattle have told him this. Also, if Quebec separates, the U.S. will invade.
Alex is wearing plastic bracelets the colour of apple juice. People won’t go for bar codes on the wrist, she says. They’ll rebel at the objectifying of the body.
Craig: But that’s not the same as a chip encoded with information. It’ll start with criminals. Then we’ll all be given a telephone number for life.
Craig is working on a science-fiction television drama on the side. He doesnt care about story or character. He’s interested in creating moments of suspense. Learning how to do that. If you can do that, he says, there’s room for you in TV. It’s important, he says, for writers to watch TV. Craig says this with utter conviction, as a point of fact. There is something women like in an opinionated Buddhist. It doesnt matter the opinion. It’s the decisiveness. Men are not as attracted to it, especially in women.
2 I’m at the Ship to join Max. Max is at the bar with Oliver. There are strong words and Oliver raises his glass of gin and tonic and pushes it into Max’s eye. Max recoils and swings. You can hear his knuckles on Oliver’s temple. He grabs Oliver in a headlock and hits him twice again with his left hand and Oliver slumps over his stool for a flash his dull face is towards me, his cheek on the stool, a string of saliva an extension of the chrome rod of the stool. Then he regains his feet and staggers past me to the door.
Max: That’s one fucked-up man.