Consumption (11 page)

It was a one-mile walk to the school. For the elementary kids there was a school bus that circled through the hamlet in the morning, but the older children were supposed to walk—this was the compromise reached after a loud debate about purchasing the bus. For those of Pauloosie’s mindset, the school bus was an embarrassment: Victoria’s parents had dogsledded one hundred miles to attend a wedding once, and then come back again three days later. Emo, presumably, felt similarly, though less inclined to argue the subject. Pauloosie would have said this was because the old man’s sense of dignity would not permit it; Victoria would have said it was because he was indifferent.

The Robertson children arrived at the school a few minutes before the bell, Pauloosie still in the lead. Without a backward glance at his sisters, he disappeared in the knot of bodies streaming in the frosted-glass doors. After making his way to his locker, he stuffed in his parka—worse than an affectation in the minds of his classmates, an anachronism. When he got to home room, Mrs. Stevenson was drinking her tea and looking outside at the eastern horizon, where the sky was just starting to lighten. She saw Pauloosie slouch in and sit down. She set down her cup of tea on her desk and opened the class roll.

The girls made their way to the middle-school section. They opened their lockers, which were across the hall from each other, and did not speak. The inside of Justine’s locker was emblazoned with photos of David Lee Roth, Tiffany, Michael J. Fox, Def Leppard, Poison, Metallica, Bryan Adams, Madonna (inevitably), Olivia Newton John, ABBA, The Cars, Tom Petty, Lynyrd Skynyrd,
Huey Lewis and the News, Duran Duran, and The Eagles. These overlaid an earlier pastiche of Donna Summer, the Bee Gees, and the rest of the now-faded greats from the disco era.

Justine’s musical tastes derived from late-night radio. In the winter she could pick up faint strains of commercial stations from Winnipeg and sometimes even Chicago. There was also a program on CBC,
Brave New Waves
, that she was just starting to listen to late at night, in bed, when everyone else was asleep except Marie with her nose in a book. Usually she didn’t take immediately to the stripped-down and often British music they played, but she had the adolescent’s acute sensitivity for cool and she suspected that she was not supposed to be as enthusiastic a fan of Huey Lewis as she had allowed herself to become.

Justine’s mixed parentage precluded her from being genuinely popular. Her preoccupation with obscure music made her still more different—but gave her an aura of coolness that allowed her to exist on the margins of popularity. She was like a fourth-line centre on a good hockey team—not exactly a luminary, but something. The boys would have understood this analogy: their lockers were equally emblazoned with posters of Gretzky and Messier and Anderson and Lowe and Fuhr—whichever Oiler played the position the locker owner did.

Marie’s locker walls were bare. She hung her down-stuffed, bright red nylon coat up in it and slid her
Chronicles of Narnia
in with her schoolbooks. Her sister’s quasi-popularity did not extend to her. She was younger, and therefore less interesting absolutely, but neither did she have her sister’s self-possession, and she was not conversant in popular music. She read novels that the aging librarian passed on to her like a secret. She was too skinny, too boyish, and looked too much like a Kablunauk with her white-white-white skin under blue-black hair and sad grey eyes. In another context, she would have been considered more arresting even than her sister, but no one in the Maani Uluyuk Middle School had ever heard the word Goth. And anyway, she wanted to be unnoticed, left alone to read
her books. Which isn’t quite the same thing as saying she was glad she had no friends. But if she had to choose.

Johanna Stevenson, Pauloosie’s home-room teacher, had come to Rankin Inlet the year before, after her separation. That was a common story among the teachers and nurses here—something had to give them sufficient velocity to propel them so far.

Her friend was Penny Bleskie, who arrived a few months after Johanna, right out of university and full of enthusiasms. Johanna enjoyed her. The two of them walked to school together in the mornings from the government apartments they had been provided. That morning Penny told her more cautious friend about the dog team she had bought, the caribou-skin outerwear and the rifle she took out with her on the land, as she was learning to use the dog team. Pauloosie’s grandfather was teaching her how to handle the dogs. Johanna was tempted to mention this to the boy, as an invitation to conversation, but he had withdrawn to the back of the class, and then all the other kids filed in, and she let the moment pass, again.

Johanna enjoyed Penny’s adventures vicariously. She felt like she was straddling two ages in her life: too young yet to be as bitter as the other divorced teachers, but just a little too old to be as reckless as Penny. She might not ever have been young enough to be quite as daring as her friend, as she remembered Penny’s account of having become entangled in her dogs’ harness, the seven of them rolling around together on the sea ice like a slapstick outtake from
Nanook of the North
. She couldn’t really see how Penny had connected with Emo, Pauloosie’s grandfather. Johanna found the old man frightening when she saw him moving through the aisles of the Northern Store. She predicted that Pauloosie would be dropping out of school any month now. Just like all the other boys here.

The bell rang and the kids in her home room dispersed. Her first class of the day was Grade Eleven language arts. They were reading Nordhoff and Hall’s
Mutiny on the Bounty
, an instance of the southern curriculum falling pretty wide of the sensibilities of these kids,
who did not quite engage with the idea of tropical oceans and Polynesian islands. She and the other English teachers had discussed this. “But is it any more familiar to the kids in Etobicoke?” she had asked. “Books take you to faraway places. That’s the point.” She read aloud to her eleventh graders and looked up as they either dozed off, nodding their heads toward their desktops, or grimaced at each other. Kids. In suburbs or little Arctic towns, wherever—how do you really get their attention? She had been reading aloud to rooms full of mostly bored kids for a decade now and had developed the ability to both disguise her own disengagement and to daydream even as she stood there, narrating Fletcher Christian’s frustration with his captain. What she daydreamed was that she was ten again, and lying on the dock at her parents’ cottage north of Toronto. Summer heat, and her whole body glowing.

At the end of the school day, Johanna looked around for Penny, but she had taken off, presumably to tend to her dogs. She walked home alone in the dark, unlocked her door, and took off her parka. She sat down at the institutional kitchen table that had come with the apartment and looked at the grading she had to do that night. Suddenly she felt so lonely. This spare and bland box she lived in had hardly been marked by her. A couple of Matisse prints on the wall and the inevitable soapstone carvings on the coffee table. She had been here eighteen months. With Penny down on the bay ice there was no one in the building she knew well enough even to visit. When she left here, she’d be forgotten in a minute, another one of the long series of Kablunauk teachers, nurses, engineers who came up here for an adventure and then returned south with stories and prominently displayed artwork of the indigenous peoples. She wished she had some wine.

Without thinking about what she was doing, she found herself picking up the phone and dialing. She listened to it ring, listened to it ring, listened to it ring. She was setting the handset back into the cradle when she heard a voice and lifted it back to her ear.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey, it’s you.”

“What did you do today?”

“I sold a new Chev truck, nine thousand dollars.”

“That’s great.”

“Yeah, I’m on a bit of a winning streak here.”

“Well, in that department anyway.”

“What about you, what did you do today?”

“Listened to Penny tell me about dogsledding.”

“With that old guy?”

“No, she’s trying to start doing it by herself.”

“How’s that going?”

“She’s got some work to do.”

“The dogs just don’t know how to take orders?”

“You don’t know the half of it. They are so ornery.”

“Mean?”

“Yeah, they can be.”

“Does she have a whip, like in the movies?”

“Yep.”

“Wow. She’s hard core.”

“I kinda see what she likes about it all, though.”

“Careful, honey.”

“You don’t like that thought?”

“Johanna of the North. Lice-ridden and flinty.”

“She goes out by herself on the sea ice every weekend. Last month she saw a bear.”

“Who feeds her dogs when she’s at school?”

“She gets up at five to go out on the ice to feed them.”

“What is it that you like about that idea?”

“I like the self-sufficiency.”

“Well, you got that in spades.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Now, anyway.”

“Doug.”

“Sorry.”

“So, are you dating anyone?”

“No.”

“Would you tell me if you were?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m hoping you’ll conclude that I will pine for you until you decide to come back.”

“What if I do that and some Trixie is sharing your basement apartment?”

“Trixie will hit the road.”

“I can’t tell you how comforting that is to me.”

“For you, anything.”

“Well, on that note…”

“What do you need?”

“Good food, all of a sudden, and badly. Red peppers in oil, pesto, fresh garlic, some Camembert, cardamom, thyme… like that. I can’t eat one more can of Campbell’s soup.”

“I’ll go to David Wood’s shop.”

“That would be wonderful. I’ll pay you back.”

“Hey, I sold a truck, remember? This is on me.”

“Okay. Will you express post it?”

“You bet. You’re sure you don’t just want to move back down here?”

“I can make it if I get some decent pesto.”

“So my motivation in all this is where?”

Victoria walked home from the Northern Store with four bags of groceries pulling down on each arm. She stopped every hundred yards to rest her shoulders. She had run low on vegetable oil and tomato sauce. Normally the non-perishables came up on the barge in the
summer in a great pallet of prepaid tins and vacuum-sealed foil, but it is impossible to judge perfectly the annual requirements for everything from Band-Aids to Pop-Tarts, and every year a few things ran out. The girls had acquired the habit of cooking themselves spaghetti when they got home from school, and so the tomato sauce had run low. And what had she been thinking when she decided that five litres of cooking oil would do them. Though they wouldn’t run out of bathroom tissue until the year
2000
. Which was a comforting thought.

The front door swung open as she leaned against the handle, and she staggered in. She turned on the lights with her shoulder: three in the afternoon, the sun was setting and soon it would be dark. She lifted the grocery bags onto the kitchen table. She studied the room closely: something was odd here. She walked around her cupboards, sniffing the air and scanning the room. She scouted the hallway, eyes darting warily about, and then at the same moment as she smelled him, she saw that Robertson’s office door was ajar. He was sitting at his desk, reading from the pile of mail she had stacked there while he was away.

“I didn’t realize you were home.”

“Well,” he replied, not looking up from the letter in his hands.

“Yeah.”

She turned back to the kitchen, and despite how long things had been like this between them, she felt a sadness so familiar and worn into place as to hardly be a sensation at all, except in the way that the lungs feel air enter them or snails feel the weight of their shells.

She turned off the lights as she retreated, and then stood in the kitchen. The house, and the land all around it, was almost perfectly dark. From beneath his office door a thin bar of light shone—otherwise, nothing.

In the storeroom she picked onions out of the bin; a single fifty-pound sack had not been enough and next year she would order two. The onions were soft and mostly sprouting. They should have a cold
room for these, and the potatoes. Which wouldn’t have been a problem at all—witness the
tuktu
carcasses stacked on every visible rooftop—but what onions and potatoes actually want is a “cool” room. That would take more thinking since “cool” was about seventy or eighty degrees warmer than what prevailed outside the house. She felt the bulbs for the firmest ones and carried her selection out to the kitchen, where she began cutting them.

On the local radio phone-in show, Emeline Kowmuk was discussing how messy the streets had become. Something really had to be done. Madeleine Makigak suggested that some people could certainly start by not letting their dogs loose to tear open everyone else’s garbage bags. Georgina Kapuk suggested that some people might want to consider making some actual wooden garbage
bins
like everyone else did, and that way, if just once, someone’s dog chewed through his lead, there might not be boxes and boxes of
filthy
magazines, with pictures of she-wouldn’t-want-to-say in them, spread all over the road, for the
children
to look at. Emeline, I don’t know where those magazines came from, but they’re not really the point, are they? We’re talking about how messy the streets are, and how some people have no problem letting their dogs just
run
free, through everyone else’s private business and garbage. Emeline, what we’re talking about is the mess in our town and you’re right, it is a problem on the roads, and everywhere else too. So … on to a new subject. Has anyone noticed how high the tides have been lately?