5 We stop into Max’s on our way to the folk festival. The thing about Max’s house is that it’s so big and beautiful that he has to take every job that comes to him. He’s a slave to the house.
They are eating blue burgers – blue cheese in the ground moose meat.
Daphne tells us how important it is to stay open and be friends with new people. That it’s true that when you get to be thirty this effort diminishes, but without the effort you may as well end it. You have ended it. Max, in his undervest and smallpox vaccine scar, confesses he prefers the company of women.
Lydia: Gabe does too.
Max: Or is it the feminine side of people?
Funny, I say. It’s the male side of women I like.
6 In the novel I have the boy grow up and come to St John’s. To this city. Composed of roofs and walls and chimneys, windows, stout maple and dogberry, and the bank of hills on the other side of the harbour are streaked with pipelines to a tank farm. This is all I see, but I have to imagine it as it must have been eighty years ago. Telegraph poles. A patch of harbour with not a wave on it. I hear the long rub of tires on pavement, the motors echoing off hills and buildings. Every morning I pick a plateful of raspberries and eat them with a cup of coffee. I can smell the raspberries on my fingertips. It is very early in the morning, the hills would not photograph well, washed out by the sun. The fog always sleeps in the harbour and then the sun, when it lifts off the water, chases the white fog into the hills. As if the hills soak up the fog. The sun a bright orange cod after caplin.
You can hear the rivet shot of a hydraulic punch as workers dismantle the last stretch of wooden wharves in St John’s. These wharves were here in the twenties. Making room for Hibernia facilities and the light blue Maersk support vessels.
7 Regatta day on Quidi Vidi pond. One ticket holding up the wheel. Sometimes the water is too bright to look at.
A family of ducks in the shade under a wooden walkbridge.
I bet a quarter on the crown and anchor and win a dollar.
Four boats race at once. The coxswain holds a cord to a buoy. She also controls the rudder, on cords. Lydia’s film crew is next.
A girl in a booth displays a stuffed black fox. Samosas and puri and overboiled hot dogs in stale buns. There’s a brisk westerly. Close to thirty degrees.
I see Una with her friends. The kids have twenty dollars each: ten for gambling with, ten for eating.
Max last night, mimicking his father. I’m all right, he says, except I got the hole droppin out of me.
Lydia’s team is second in its heat.
8 I serve Lydia pasta outside at the picnic table, with home-brew. She’s wearing three shades of brown. And pink eye in both eyes. We lie in the grass. I’ve picked raspberries and I feed them to her. Lydia pretends to be a baby. A baby, she says, would not like raspberries.
No. A baby’d push the raspberries out with his tongue.
No, he’d do this.
And Lydia pushes out with her lips and tongue.
And he’d straighten his legs.
Get away from me.
There are no movies playing, and badminton is over for the summer. It seems like we can’t go out tonight, I say. And later. So, darlin, do you want to hang out together or do you want to get on?
Lydia: I want to hang out here and be your baby, baby.
In the park kids wag glowing haloes of rainbows. I ask Lydia and she says theyve been around a couple of years. How do they light? It’s fluorescent goop, she says.