Hellgoing Read online

  “Everyone,” she insists, flapping her hands in the wind. A particularly violent gust rocks her, for a moment, takes Ned’s smoke. He doesn’t bother to chase it.

  She wishes he would go because she’d like to be by herself when she first sees them. Once she and Ned clear the bend, beyond the harbour, the bergs stand in full view, dazzling white against two different, dazzling shades of blue. She wonders which whimsical, goofball description will work best for the article. We rounded the bend and experienced our first breathtaking view. Like massive clouds had hardened in the heavens and fallen to the sea. Awful. Jane’s mind keeps lingering on the tooth analogy — but what kind of description would that make? Like really, really big teeth.

  Then she realizes why she’s having so much trouble. It’s blasphemy, what she’s doing — her deep-mind is rebelling. She has almost fooled herself, along with everyone else, into believing the article is what she’s here for. She doesn’t want to describe them, it would be wrong to describe them. She won’t do it. This is part of the self-control she was advocating to Ned only a moment ago. Who’s them? asks Ned. Them as in: Never let them see you sweat. Never let them see you drunk. Never let them know you look at icebergs.

  She jogs a bit ahead on the narrow path. Ned calling, “Don’t fall!” as she disappears behind a dip of rock. Stands by herself gazing seaward for the time it takes him to catch up. “Jeez, Ned,” she says when he does, pretending to have been bored, unoccupied.

  They get to the top after an hour of this. Ned has no interest in going into the tower and neither does Jane, but she supposes she has to in order to make obligatory mention of it in the article.

  “Nah,” says Ned. “It’s just a gift shop and stuff about Marconi.” Jane has wandered over to the pay-telescope or whatever it’s called as Ned settles on a bench and lights his fourth smoke of the hike. She digs around in her pack for a dollar. “Of course, you’ll get a better view from the tower,” he remarks before she can place it in the slot.

  “Oh. There’s a scope up there?”

  “Up the top,” he says. “You can see the gulls landing on the bergs.”

  “You know what,” remembers Jane, “I didn’t even think to buy souvenirs yet.”

  “Do you need any money?” he calls as she darts away. The man is one exotic bird.

  Marconi is a serene-looking man, sitting in front of his wire-thing — it really is just a bundle of wires, wires for a so-called “wireless” transmission. He’s in a desolate room but a dapper hat and suit, dressed for the occasion, to change the world. Head turned slightly to glance at the camera as if to say, Oh, this? No big deal. She tries to read about him and his world-changing wire-thing. Marconi, she notes, was an “amateur” in the burgeoning world of radio communication at the turn of the last century. Of course. He was like Jane, like the glennerd, an aficionado, only with more commitment, consistency and breadth of vision. Marconi wouldn’t have wasted his time on Robo-friendz. But Jane is certain he was after the same sort of thing, up here with his bundle of wire and big crazy kite in the middle of December. The single-mindedness is what’s key, the tunnel vision — precisely what’s required and precisely what makes you seem a freak to the rest of the world. Visionaries and drinkers: obsessed with away, looking for else.

  Something to guard against, though, Jane reminds herself. Classic drunkard mentality. That appalling self-absorption — relating everything back to one’s own experience, no matter how trifling one’s own experience might be. Marconi? Oh, yeah, he’s just like me. And icebergs are my thing, by the way, I’m the only one in the world who’s ever been interested in icebergs. She recalls a humiliatingly defining moment in a restaurant, visiting with a long-lost friend to whom she’d always felt a pinch inferior. She’d been so deep into her own navel the entire time that, as the friend detailed the difficulties of married life, Jane had finally glared across the table and spoke. “I guess I’m not like you. I’m not looking to settle down.” She’d said it in a strained, defensive way, as if the woman across the table had been sitting there smirking at her, lording her wifely status. But then Jane noticed her old friend’s face, registered her sadness and then her astonishment, followed by an ironic sort of wilt to the shoulders. The blood roared into Jane’s ears and cheeks as the sheer, breathless scale of her mistake sunk in. The friend rested her face on an open hand, weary. She spoke Jane’s name as if calling from a distance. “I’m telling you my relationship is falling apart,” she said, leaning toward Jane. “We’re splitting up. It’s hard for me.”

  Rhys, too, had the drinker’s megalomania. Jean thought everyone was out to get her, men in particular. She even spent her spare time writing elaborate fictional court transcripts, fashioning herself as the eternal defendant. But it wasn’t that men were out to get her. They just had no idea about this woman — a woman of the world, of Paris cafés and London dance halls, a married and divorced woman, a woman who lived through two world wars and had two husbands arrested and jailed. What kind of woman emerges at the end of all this with an emotional skin like the membrane between shell and egg? You couldn’t blame the men—they didn’t want to hurt Jean. But who could have fathomed a creature so hurtable?

  AT FOUR IN the morning, a man out on the street is banging on somebody’s door. St. John’s is a shockingly quiet place at night, like the middle of the woods. Except for this man, a drunk of course, banging on somebody’s door on the street below. He exists, thinks Jane, like an avatar of her mind, a golem shaped from the muck of her obsessions. The Bad Drunk. The creature Jane will never be.

  He’s yelling someone’s name, it sounds like Ray! or Jay! A long a sound — maybe even just Hey! He’ll hammer a good ten or so hammers, machine-gun quick on Ray or Jay’s screen door before screaming out Ray or Jay’s name. No inkling that Ray or Jay may not be inclined to open his door to a raging drunk at four in the morning. Drunks — as innocent as lambs sometimes. We can’t afford it, Jane wants to holler down at him.

  Now the lone car starts up on the other side of town. Someone has called the cops. She grins to herself, lying there, listening to the car meander its way through the streets. No element of surprise at work here. They might as well just call to the crooks across town — from the Tim Hortons or wherever — Yeah, we hear you; now just stay put. He hears them too — the desperate man in the street. The door-banging stops all at once. Seconds before the cop car arrives. Feet against pavement, hurrying. Jane breathes relief for him.

  Ned isn’t around. She ditched Ned this evening, for Ned became a downer. She did some work on the piece after the hike, took a shower, and they met at the bar around eight. It was Friday night and she wanted to meet people. She mentioned Ned’s band, how great it would be to see them play, maybe she could plug them in the magazine. Ned responded it wouldn’t be possible — they had recently gotten back from a tour, he said, and none of them could stand to look at each other for weeks after a tour. She later learned by “tour” Ned meant a weekend stint in Cape Breton.

  But publicity, enticed Jane.

  “We’re not really into that sort of thing,” replied Ned.

  She waited for more but he just looked around the bar, scratching, sweat-moons in the armpits of his shirt.

  Jane wanted a Guinness, stood up to get it, but Ned motioned for her to sit, waving a waitress over simultaneously. Jane felt thwarted, her butt was sore from sitting. They were alone at their table, a cramped table for two, crowd roiling on either side of them. Where were all Ned’s friends?

  “My legs are killing me,” he groused.

  “What?” said Jane. “From the walk?”

  “Yeah.”

  She picked up one of his cigarettes and pointed at him with it. “You should be doing that sort of thing every day, Ned.”

  He smiled and looked away from her again. Jane felt bored. “Where does all that Guinness enter into your fitness routine?” he asked after a moment.

  Jane stretched. “The whole point of the routine is to be
able to drink the Guinness. That’s the whole point of everything, at the end of the day. This is how we orchestrate our lives.”

  “You talk about ‘everything’ a lot,” Ned said.

  “Breadth of vision,” replied Jane, thinking of Marconi. “As alcoholics, we have a responsibility to see the big picture. We have to be unflinching. We can’t afford to lie to ourselves about what it is we’re engaged in exactly.”

  Ned looked worried. His eyebrows, already joined, bunched up in the middle.

  “I mean we’re engaged in drinking, yes, on the surface.” She leaned forward. “Over-drinking. Self-medication. But we have to be precise about why that is, don’t you think? If we’re going to withdraw from the world, we’d better have damn good reasons why — if, if you accept that’s what it is we’re doing. We’d better be able to rhyme off those reasons if called upon to do so. If people accuse us of being afraid, we can explain that fear is a perfectly reasonable response to the world in which we live. The trick is, we can’t be afraid of being afraid. We can’t cower behind locked doors with our gin bottles and our arms across our eyes, if you know what I mean.”

  Jane waited for Ned to say something and stop looking worried. She added, “I think about this stuff a lot,” almost by way of apology. “I’m thinking of writing a book or doing a blog or something.”

  “Who would wanna read a book like that?” Ned asked in a naked sort of way.

  “You know, Ned,” said Jane, stretching again. “I think I’ll get going.”

  He nodded, pinched his eyebrows together some more, and stood up to walk her to the hotel. Jane waved him back down. Had to use both hands, stand there pushing air for five minutes at least.

  “I THOUGHT,” HE says, “you’d like to see an iceberg.”

  She sits up, adrift in the king-size bed, says nothing, then forces a yawn into the receiver just to let him know it’s kind of early to be calling. “I’ve already seen the icebergs,” she says in a voice like she’s packing, or blowing languidly on her nails. “I’ve pretty much got everything I need.”

  “No but my brother can take us,” says Ned. “He’s got a boat.”

  “Can take us where?” asks Jane, stiffening for some reason.

  “Out to see the icebergs.”

  “To? He can take us to them?”

  “To,” says Ned. “Right to ’em.”

  “When?”

  “Day after tomorrow.”

  “Oh, Ned, I leave tomorrow morning.”

  “I know,” says Ned. “But that’s the only day he can do it.”

  “Why?” says Jane.

  “Why?” Ned repeats, stymied. “I don’t know, you’ll have to ask him.”

  “I can pay him,” says Jane.

  “No, no, no, no,” goes Ned, all east coast hospitality again.

  “No, but, like, to go today or tomorrow, if it’s a matter of money or something, I’ll just pay him.”

  “It’s not that,” says Ned. “He’s just busy doing something. It has to be day after tomorrow.”

  “Well, shit,” says Jane.

  “Can’t you get your ticket changed?”

  Jane hasn’t thought of that. It would have to be on her own dime. Then there’s the extra night at the Delta.

  “I guess I could,” she says. “It might be pricey. I may have to take you up on that offer to sleep on your couch.”

  “Good-good,” says Ned.

  She packs her bags, tucks away her laptop and bids a fond farewell to the hotel room, which she leaves a bedlam of newspapers and empty Evian bottles. She’s been careful to dispose of her liquor empties when out and about, however, dropping them — wrapped up in plastic bags or newspapers — into the first garbage can she comes across on her way to get coffee. So the worst the chambermaids can say of Jane is that she hasn’t caught the recycling bug.

  They drink three bottles of wine over dinner before Ned starts rooting around under the sink for his harder stuff. This is the nicest time they’ve had together so far — it’s because they’re not in public, they can let their hair down and drink as much and as fast as they are inclined. They sit at the kitchen table all night, pouring and talking. They are kitchen-table drunks by nature, Jane realizes — the two of them, for all their combined bar-hopping. This is what they do. This here, as Ned would say.

  The drunker Jane gets, the more she remembers the dream — floating out amongst the icebergs in the cool, clear water. She’s fearless of a hangover, the dream fortifies and reassures her, tells her everything will be cool, clear sailing from here on out. Ice clinks into her glass and she touches it, imagines reaching out, wobbling to keep balance in Ned’s brother’s boat — she’s been picturing a dory, which is probably ridiculous — hand stretching toward the monolith of ice. She fishes the ice cube from her drink, cups it in her palm, holds it to her face, then eyes. Against her eyes, it starts to melt in earnest.

  Jean’s problem? Jean Rhys? She expected such comfort from people, men.

  Jane bursts out laughing, pops the lessened ice cube in her mouth.

  “What’s that?” asks Ned as if she’s said something, smiling at her.

  Jane shakes her head. She’s embarrassed, ashamed, though she’s always instructing herself never to feel this, about anything.

  “The symbolism,” she laughs. “I just realized how obvious it is.”

  Ned smiles and pats her hand like grandpa. It’s that stage of drunkenness where you either accept that you understand nothing, or assume that you understand everything. He heads to the cupboard for a bag of Cheetos. Jane crunches more ice, something draining out of her. She feels panic at its going away. She’s read that Freud treated people with recurring dreams — good and bad. He made them talk and talk about the dream until finally the patient understood precisely what was going on in his or her own head. The moment they did, the dream would depart. Freud drew back the curtain. He was like Toto, the yappy little rat who took the magic out of Oz.

  Ned turns, sees her face. “No!” he says, putting the Cheetos aside. He goes to her, stands her up. “No!” he says again, her head between his big musician’s hands.

  THEY’LL SET OFF after lunch. Meanwhile, he’s said she will need clothes even warmer than what she wished she had put on for Signal Hill. The wind off the water and all that. Fortunately, they won’t have to putt-putt too far out into the open ocean, as the twins are situated just at the lip of the narrows. Still, Ned said, it will be “cold enough.” And no doubt the wind will be good.

  She rises early, Ned still asleep in his room. She insisted on the couch after the head-in-hands thing. Her mood is bereft. The day is blinding. She needs fresh air, cleansing wind. Coffee. Not to be in Ned’s house, ashtrays on every surface.

  More than anything, she wants to feel good, anticipatory. Today’s the day we go and see the icebergs.

  The only place she knows to go for clothes is downtown, but the only stores she can find are meant for suckers from away, like her. One of the stores has a poster of the movie in its window, claims to have been the “out-fitter.” Nobody dresses like that, she remembers, and she thinks about Ned in his brown Doc Martens, the locals in their Gore-Tex. She’s even passed a few goths on Duckworth Street. Still, some of the sweaters are gorgeous. One-­hundred percent virgin wool, and upwards of two hundred dollars. She wants one. She treats herself. This is to go and see the icebergs in.

  The young cashier rings it up. Jane can see holes in her face from which jewellery has been removed.

  “You’re the lady from the magazine,” the hole-faced girl accuses, folding the massive sweater into an ungainly woolen lump.

  Jane stares at her. “Yes.”

  “Dad was saying you’re looking to go out on the boat.”

  “Dad?” says Jane, jaw to floor. “Ned?”

  The kid laughs. “Oh, God help us, no. Ned’s my uncle.”

  “Oh!” says Jane, and they laugh together at the misunderstanding, though Jane doesn’t know why.


  “We hoped you would come out to supper,” remarks the girl. She’s sixteen at the most, with an easy, middle-aged way to her, leaning on the counter like a seen-it-all waitress with varicose veins — for whom talking to strangers has long ago lost its sense of adventure.

  “I’d be happy to come to supper,” says Jane. Native hospitality at last, and just in time to save the article.

  The kid frowns a stagey sort of frown, poking out her lower lip. “Well, Ned said you couldn’t. He said you were busy.”

  Jane blinks. “I’m the farthest thing from busy.”

  “Oh,” says the kid, sounding almost disappointed. “We were all set to give you shit. Say you want a last-minute boat ride and won’t even come to supper.”

  “But I want to come to supper,” Jane insists.

  “When? I’ll call mum.”

  “Well, how about after the boat ride? I know your dad is busy these next couple of days, so whenever is good for him.”

  The kid straightens her back, turns from middle-aged waitress into impudent youngster with a twist of her mouth. “Dad’s not busy,” she scoffs. “It’s off-season.”

  “Oh.” Jane pauses, the hangover-brain grinding to life. “What business is your father in?”

  The kid gapes. Leans forward a little with her body. Enunciates word for word. “He gives people rides. In his boat.”

  SHE DRIFTS INTO the street, wanting sunglasses to fend off the bright of the sidewalk. Meanders to the end of the block and turns down toward Water Street as per the girl — Raylene’s — instructions. The sign is big, hand-painted. An obtrusive sandwich-sign, meant to impede pedestrian traffic. “Dave’s Charters.” Inside is Dave, sitting behind his counter, cap pushed back on his head, and idly surfing the internet. Raylene’s father. Brother of Ned. As tall as Ned is burly, but with the same bunching eyebrows.

  He jumps up at the sound of the door — someone has stationed a too-large set of wind-chimes above it. They jangle around like the sound of madness. “Hi,” Jane shouts above the chimes.

  “Ah,” says Dave. “It’s she-who-wouldn’t-come-to-supper.” He stands, semi smiles. All Ned’s family behave as if they’ve known her forever, and furthermore do not approve.