Consumption (12 page)

Then the language switched to English for the hourly news, and Victoria listened carefully as the newscaster spoke of the war in Nicaragua, and the anti-nuclear-weapons protests on Hampstead Heath, in Britain. Famine in the Ogaden. The Montreal Canadiens continued their winning ways and Reaganomics was starting to trickle down at last, the administration insisted.

When her husband spoke, she jumped.

“Oh my God,” she said, inspecting the tips of her fingers for injury.

“Are you okay?”

“I think so.”

“I thought you heard me.”

“I was listening to the radio. Was there something you wanted?”

“I just wanted to tell you about my trip.”

“Okay.”

“Well, it was interesting.”

“How?” she asked, resuming her onion chopping. “Is the hospital going to be built?”

“Well, it looks like it might, eventually.”

“So what’s new about that?”

“I think there is going to be a diamond mine built.”

“Really.” Not a question.

“Why not?”

“Who ever heard of diamonds in the Arctic?”

“Well, they found some.”

“Did they?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Up by Back River.”

“Huh.”

“George Miller wants me to help them out in Rankin.”

“How?”

“As an adviser.”

“What kind of advice do they want?”

“About local politics and whatnot.”

“Sounds like a scam.”

“Nobody’s asking me for money.”

“Who ever heard of diamonds here? Diamonds come from Africa.”

“And Siberia.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh.”

“They’ve
found
them.”

“Who’s behind this?”

“South Africans.”

“Huh.”

And that’s how they were standing—he, leaning against the hall wall; she, with her back to him, cutting onions—when Marie and Justine pounded up the steps and through the porch door.

“Hi, girls,” Robertson said. They were as surprised as Victoria had been to see him there but more welcoming. They both grinned, Marie especially, and, kicking off their boots, ran to him as he spread his arms. His daughters engulfed him, their parkas leaking melting snow on his shirt and trousers, and he squeezed them tight, enveloped in down like animated pillows.

“Okay, girls, get your homework out,” Victoria said. And the girls backed out of his arms and went to the porch to hang up their outer clothes. Then they sat down across from each other at the kitchen table and began working through their arithmetic. A minute after they had settled, the porch door opened again and Pauloosie banged his way inside, stomping the snow off his
kamiks
and swinging his caribou-skin
jumpa
over his head and onto a nail. His father and mother watched him.

“Hello,” Robertson said.

Pauloosie looked up, as if only noticing that there were others in the room.

“How have you been?” his father asked.

“Okay,” said the boy. He disappeared down the hall and then came the click of his bedroom door shutting.

“You have to straighten him out when he talks to you like that. You’re his
father,”
Victoria said. “No one ever spoke to my father like that.”

Marie and Justine looked at each other dramatically.

“Stop it, you two,” their mother said, and they dropped their heads and went back to their schoolwork.

“I won’t be raising him the way your father raised Tagak.”

“Which is how?”

“What would have happened if Tagak had mouthed off to your father, exactly?”

“It never happened.”

“I’m sure it did, when you weren’t around.”

“You seem to be quite the expert on what my family was like when you were still living in England.”

There was the faintest trace of a smirk on Justine’s lips. But Marie always looked panicked when her parents argued, and almost immediately she was on the verge of tears.

Robertson stalked out of the kitchen. Victoria’s knife stuttered its way through another—the fifteenth—onion. The girls reopened their schoolbooks. Eight multiplication exercises later, a pan of liver, bacon, and many onions fried; a brief essay on the history of the British North America Act; a long fantasy about stalking a wolverine—and then Victoria called her family to eat.

Robertson emerged silently from his office, neck straight and eyes flashing—the boy did not challenge his father again that night. They ate quickly, quietly, and the sense of imminent peril prevailed until Marie caught her father’s eye and winked at him. In a moment of inattention, he softened, his anger dissolving.

“Who taught you that?” her mother asked, detecting the sudden easing in the room and seeking to further it.

“Stacey Smith,” Justine answered, for her sister.

“Who’s that?” her father asked.

“Better ask Pauloosie,” Marie said.

Pauloosie purpled.

“Pauloosie?” Victoria asked, enjoying this now.

He bent over his mashed potatoes and ate like a grain auger.

“Someone’s
a little sensitive about something,” his father observed. “Maybe we should let him alone.” And the boy looked up with relief and met Robertson’s eyes.

“Well, it isn’t like you haven’t learned a thing or two from Stacey Smith yourself,” Marie added to Justine.

“
SHUT UP!
” her sister squealed.

Teasing broke out like August rain on a peat fire. Robertson’s snoring. Victoria’s halitosis. Pauloosie’s brooding. Marie’s solitary habits. Justine’s rock-goddess aspirations. The kids threw themselves into it, drawing in their parents. They understood that they were what kept these two in the same house now; what remained of Robertson and Victoria’s love was the mutual love they felt for their children. Which was a thin substitute for passion and tenderness. But was not nothing, and was enough to still draw them together occasionally, as it did now.

When the dishes were done, Justine retreated to her bedroom. She dropped her homework on the floor and turned on her short-wave radio. It was time for the BBC World Service rebroadcast of
Top of the Pops
. It was the end of Boy George’s time, Culture Club in decline after ruling the Limey charts for six years. He didn’t sound or look like any man, singer or not—though she thought he had probably listened to a lot of Smokey Robinson. And he could not be loved, or anyway desired, at least not by her. Later, when he was a junkie, and fat, she would mourn along with everyone else. But in his first youth he had soared, and she couldn’t help but soar with him, a little way at least, as he swung into the chorus.
Brave New Waves
came on later, and the Ramones and Iggy Pop and really very little Duran Duran dominated that hour.
Twenty-, twenty-, twenty-four hours to go-oh. I wanna be sedated. Nothing to do, no where to go-oh, I wanna be sedated
.

“
JUSTINE!
”

She took off her earphones. It was Marie. She wanted to go to sleep. She was in her pyjamas, and in bed. Justine turned off the radio, and the light.

“It’s nice having Daddy home,” Marie said.

The boy cleaned his rifle again slowly, running gun oil down the barrel and sighting through it at his light. The riflings and the landings
all looked fine. He screwed the trigger assembly back onto the stock, and then the barrel and action. It moved together almost silently. He admired the burled walnut and held the rifle to his shoulder. He aimed at the light. Click. Click again.

School. In the morning—a chemistry exam. Click. Not very interesting, or important. Click. His grandfather remembered watching his own father make a bow out of
tuktu
antlers and driftwood—what he would have given to own a rifle as fine as this at Pauloosie’s age. He could probably make such a bow himself. Wouldn’t that be something? Stalk in close enough to be in arrow range. Hard to believe anyone could be good enough at that to feed a family.
Umingmak
, muskoxen, were different—they didn’t run away, but circled defensively, the calves in the centre, as if every predator were the wolf and vulnerable to their hooked horns. He’d like to hunt
umingmak
. Click. He had tasted it once. It was interesting. Not as good as
tuktu
, but what was?

“Hey.” Victoria stuck her head into Robertson’s office, hours later. He had not reappeared for the late news.

“Hey,” he said, not lifting his head from the form he was reading.

“The kids are all in bed. I’m gonna konk out too.”

“Good night.”

“Robertson?”

“Yes?” Not looking up.

“’Night.”

He undressed in the dark, hanging his shirt on the back of a chair and emptying his trouser pockets, then folding them and putting them on the chair seat, before slipping into bed. She lay motionless, facing away from him. He studied her long, grooved back and remembered again what he had felt the first time he saw it.

“Victoria,” he whispered. “Victoria?”

He couldn’t tell if she was asleep or just pretending to be. He thought she was probably awake. He was right.

Two weeks after she had asked Doug to send her food, Johanna still hadn’t received his parcel and she was beginning to consider the matter as another item on the long list of ways he had let her down. Her next trip to the post office she saw the plywood crate and bit her lip. When she got it back to her apartment, there was more inside than she ever could have imagined. There was a whole prosciutto, as dark as currants, as aromatic as smoked cheese; a
whole
prosciutto. She extracted it from among layers of newspaper cushioning and laid it out on the counter.
Prosciutto di Parma
. The scent that rose from it was unlike anything she had smelled since she had come to Rankin Inlet, so many boxes of Kraft Dinner ago: it smelled of pepper and the Mediterranean Sea, and fresh nutmeg and cloves and dark wine. “We bring the worst part of what we are up here,” she had said to Penny the day before, when the younger woman had happened upon her in the Northern Store gazing at the racks and racks of fried corn-meal snacks.

There were three one-litre bottles of marc wedged into corners of the crate and wrapped in flannel sheeting. In the fourth corner was a forty-year-old bottle of Lombard balsamic vinegar. There were tins of truffles and a wheel of Asiago cheese, fresh walnuts and smoked duck and a box of Newbury Pippin apples, leaves still green on the stems, the fruit orange and red and yellow like a package of sun-melted crayons. There were wooden boxes of pine nuts and gravlax and capers and jars and jars and jars of Italian pesto. A bottle the length of her forearm and labelled in Serbo-Croatian was filled with olive oil and roasted red peppers, charred bits of skin still clinging delicately to them; there were sun-dried tomatoes and Roquefort and figs the colour of chocolate. A canvas bag full of fresh basil was miraculously unfrozen (Doug had stuffed an electric sock warmer inside the clump of basil, and then stuffed that into a thick woollen toque minutes before nailing the crate shut) and cumin and turmeric and whole nutmegs and vanilla pods and jars of chipotle peppers.

Johanna’s eyes ran steadily as she extracted these treasures in succession and laid them out on her kitchen counter. She cut open the cloth bag containing the prosciutto and then sliced off the thinnest wafer and set it atop a piece of Asiago cheese on an Alexander’s water biscuit, which she had extracted from a tin the size of her head. She bit into it and flavour washed over her like surf. She had to sit down on her kitchen floor and shut her eyes; she was afraid to swallow for long minutes. She opened her eyes and more tears ran out of them.

She had been given a ptarmigan by Penny a couple of days before and had wondered what she would ever do with it; declining the gift had not been possible. She took it out of her refrigerator now and studied it. From her plywood crate she pulled a bundle of fresh rosemary. She broke some needles off in her hands and smelled her fingertips, the scent of the rosemary oil rising in pungent waves. She liked that and so she continued, chopping the rosemary into small pieces on her cutting board. When she was done she examined the little grey-green mound she had made and, moving rather like an abstract expressionist painter, eyes not altogether focused and limbs seeming to operate according to their own ambitions and intentions, she reached into the crate again and pulled out a bulb of fennel, a glass bottle of heavy cream, and a lemon.

She cut the lemon in half and rubbed it all over the bird. Then she poured salt onto her palm and followed the contours of the bird’s flesh again. She held a pepper grinder over it and applied a third layer of flavour within and without. The dark flesh of the ptarmigan glistened. She stuffed it with bits of onion the size of cherries and rubbed the flesh with the chopped rosemary, sage, and olive oil. She pulled off a bulb from a braid of garlic and peeled cloves as big as her thumbs and pushed them inside with the onions. Finally she cut up an apple and laid the slices alongside the bird in a small roasting pan and placed it in the oven.

It was late by the time her kitchen began to smell of ptarmigan and apple and garlic. She poured herself a glass of marc and, a little
after one o’clock in the morning, extracted the roasted bird from her oven. When the lid came off the pan, the scent intoxicated her. She stood like one of the airport grandmothers clutching a new grandchild, eyelids sagging and eyes fluttering. The wild rice was ready as well.