Happiness of Fish (31 page)

Diana is the most visible piece of human debris. She's sleeping on a couch. Her clothes are neatly piled on the desk next to Gerry's computer. His files and his cardboard box of old notebooks have been shoved under the desk. Only Diana's hair is visible above a nest of blankets. She seems profoundly asleep, like a hibernating animal. Gerry feels dispossessed, that she has a better claim to this space than he does.

Darren and Melanie are in what used to be Tanya's room. Their door is ajar but all that is visible of them is one of Darren's arms protruding from under the covers. There are two beer bottles on the bedside table. A tangle of clothes is visible on the narrow strip of floor he can see. He can distinguish a sweater, winter socks and a thong. It strikes him that Melanie in a thong is better than tepid, errant Darren deserves. The idea of a thong-less Melanie under the covers is disturbing. The room emits a smell of tobacco smoke from Darren's heaped clothes. Darren's still a smoker.

He could have stayed where he was after the fire. What's a little more smoke to Darren?

Gerry goes back upstairs, refills his coffee mug and resumes his prowl. The house seems smaller than it did. Part of the problem is the addition of his mother's furniture, a desk and a couple of antique chairs. The desk has taken over a piece of the hall and the chairs are backed into gaps between couches and the Christmas tree. The effect is cluttered, shop-like. Sitting in the living room for a bit, Gerry feels pushed knee-to-knee with family ghosts past and present.

The ghosts start coming alive. He hears first his and Vivian's bedroom, then the bathroom doors opening and closing, followed by plumbing noises. Viv is up. Vaguely, under his feet, he senses the gurgle of morning cartoons from the basement TV. Diana is awake and stirring.

He thinks he hears real voices join the TV squeals and sound effects. Darren and Melanie are moving as well.

In the bosom of his family, Gerry thinks, listening to the random morning noises, the ill-defined stomach rumbles of their family-ness. In the bowels of his family.

The atmosphere of the house seems to flow sluggishly this morning. Its turgid eddies bring them all together in the kitchen.

Vivian is bustling around.

“You want some toast?”

Gerry thinks that, this morning, he doesn't like the smell of toast. It's one of those love/hate smells. Sometimes it's a comfort and sometimes the essence of breakfast squalor, like itchy, airborne, atmospheric crumbs.

“No thanks, kid. I'll just get some more coffee.”

Diana is at the kitchen table now. She's eating cereal while her grandmother fries an egg.

“Do you want an egg, Diana?”

“No thank you.”

“I've got it fried. Gerry, you have it,” Vivian says and shovels the egg onto some of the toast he didn't want.

Gerry takes his orphan egg sandwich and his coffee cup and heads for the basement again. The smell of toast follows him. He passes Melanie on the stairs.

“Good morning, Gerry.” She kisses him on the cheek going by. “What's on the go, Mudder-maid?”

“Good morning, kid. Get some toast and eggs. We seem to have a special on toast and eggs this morning.”

Darren is at Gerry's desk in the basement. He's drinking pop and playing a video game on Gerry's computer. Gerry, who used to drink coffee with whisky for breakfast, cringes inwardly at the pop.

“You need a new computer, Gerry,” Darren says. “The graphics load really slow.”

“I mostly use it for word processing,” Gerry says. When I use it all.

He's tempted to ask Darren to move so he can look at his e-mail and maybe do some writing, but he can't bring himself to. He's crushed under tons of toast smell and feels a million years old. He doesn't need a computer. He should be out in the back yard, chipping mammoths
onto stone with a piece of antler.

“I don't know how you can write all that stuff you do,” Darren says. “Who's going to read it all?”

“Archaeologists,” Gerry says. He puts his sandwich and coffee mug on the washer, leans around Darren to haul out a boxful of notes and files and goes to hide in the workshop part of the basement.

Gerry's workshop is a workshop in name only. The furnace lives in it and, although it has a tool bench along one wall, it's too small and too warm to do anything more than pile tools, boat equipment and junk in. Today he roots around behind a pile of boat cushions and digs out a laptop computer that Vivian got when she went with the real estate company she's with now. The laptop has been redundant and replaced by a newer model for a couple of years. Gerry took it over with the idea of putting navigation software on it and taking it sailing. It turned out that the software had evolved too far for that to happen, but you could still write on the computer and save things to disk. Gerry unplugs the charger for his electric screwdriver and plugs in the laptop charger in its place. Perhaps he'll get out of the house sometime and do a little coffee-shop writing. He sometimes envies the people who click away at keyboards at back tables. They seem quicker and more efficient than his Chinese notebooks. Feeling he's done something, but not quite knowing what, he reclaims his sandwich and coffee. He sits on a tool box and finishes them, like a child eating a treat in a secret hiding place. The furnace cuts in with an asthmatic-lion purr and wraps him in white noise and warmth that is comfortingly isolating until it becomes too much and drives him back upstairs with his plate and cup.

“I'm going out,” he says, running his dishes under the tap at the kitchen sink. “I've got some last-minute shopping to do.”

Gerry's shopping stalls in the space debs' coffee shop. He's sitting with his notebook, trying to do the physics that has made him too light to stay submerged in his house, even, he suspects, in his life. He hasn't really much shopping to do.

“The statutory gifts are bought, the big items that people need,” he tells the space deb who gave him his coffee. Shopping is one of the topics the space debs are programmed for.

“Yeah, me too,” she says.

“I got Vivian a down coat she wants,” he says. He thinks he may have introduced Viv here at some point. “Boots for Melanie, that's the daughter, and a sweater for her husband. I got the granddaughter a paintbox. She ought to get something she doesn't have to follow the instructions for.”

“That's nice.”

What he doesn't say is that he's stumped on the fun gifts. He's walked the length of Water Street, looking at everything from designer jewellery to dollar-store kazoos and can't feel a spark for any of it.

I have no feel for what anyone might want, he writes in his book. I only can get what they need. I'm like somebody handing out supplies to a lifeboat crew. It's all so deadly serious
.

He's stopped in a couple of import stores where he can normally get stocking-stuffers and has picked up some cheap Indian bangles and strange little wood carvings and decorated boxes, but in their plastic bag, they feel like doomed trade goods for a tribe of clever cannibals. They'll see through their chintzy good humour and put him in the pot.

A page or two back, his notebook prophesies his cannibal musings. Idly web-searching, he had tripped over a quote from a science fiction writer called Stanislaw Lem. Gerry has never read any of Lem's work, but he wrote down the quote.

Cannibals prefer those who have no spines
.

The coffee shop is warm and steamy. He decides he'll stay there a while.

Christmas day arrives mild and drizzly, less a dawn than a gradual paling of the dark. Gerry gets up in the half light and is making coffee in the kitchen when Diana comes upstairs from the basement.

“Merry Christmas, sweetie.”

“Merry Christmas.” Diana is a quiet kid, a watcher. Gerry feels a kinship. She's carrying the gift she was allowed to open the night before, some kind of hand-size electronic game.

“Are your mom and dad awake?”

“No.”

“Well, your nan isn't either. They'll be up soon, I guess. We'll get at
the big stuff then, but why don't you check out your stocking now?”

“All right.”

Gerry takes his mug of coffee and they go into the living room. He plugs in the tree and sits in what's normally his reading chair in the corner of the room. Diana digs through her stocking.

“I got a tattoo set.” She holds up a packet of paper transfers. Gerry's pleased. It's one of his import shop specials.

“You'll be like Lydia the Tattooed Lady.”

“Who's that?”

“A lady in an old song. Lydia, oh Lydia, oh have you met Lydia? Lydia the Tattooed Lady...” Gerry waggles his fingers by his mouth, tapping an imaginary Groucho Marx cigar. She giggles.

They sit and exclaim over each new discovery in the stocking.

When it's empty, Gerry fetches a damp dishcloth and they give themselves artificial henna tattoos on the backs of their hands. Then Diana settles in the corner of the couch with her video game, and Gerry returns to the kitchen to make the dressing and get the turkey in the oven. He's just finished when Vivian comes down the hall for a coffee.

“Good morning, kid. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas. What's on your hand?”

“A tattoo. Diana and I were up early.”

“You're as big a kid as she is.”

Diana bounces into the kitchen, waving her game. “Look at the score I got.”

“Oh my, that's pretty good,” says Vivian.

There's a mumble of voices underfoot in the basement.

“Go down and see if your mom and dad are awake,” Vivian tells Diana. “We'll open our presents now.”

There is numbness in possession. Sitting in his favourite chair by the Christmas tree, Gerry feels anaesthetized by things. He's passing out the presents and feels like a sociopathic traffic light, divorced from the flow he controls.

He's wearing a breathable rain suit that Viv has given him for the boat. “You can't go wrong with extra large,” he says. “I've got room to
move. You need that on the boat.”

“I could have got yellow,” Vivian says, “but I thought the blue you could wear more. The jacket will make another windbreaker.”

Gerry thinks that if he ever falls overboard in the blue and grey suit, he'll be invisible: lots of room, waterproof, but impossible to find.

Getting loose big-time in a bruise-coloured ocean.

Vivian is wearing the down coat he got her over her flannelette snowman pyjamas. “This'll be great for showing houses in the winter. It's warm but it's light.”

“We're insulated,” Gerry says. “Thoroughly insulated.”

He feels insulated, isolated actually. A bit of old Beatles floats into his head. He thinks of the nurse selling poppies in “Penny Lane.”

Although I feel as though I'm in a play, I am anyway, he thinks.

“There's more there for the kids,” Viv prompts.

Although their big gift to the kids is the rug that lurks in the basement, Vivian has been shopping since the fall. She actually started when he left for Ottawa when his mother fell. She's got clothes and cosmetics for Melanie and a white, fur-trimmed ski-jacket for Diana. She's topped Darren up with socks and a sweater and what she still calls dress pants. Gerry is old enough and urban enough to have worn suits to work in the old days before working clothes for reporters took on the look of an upscale day-care. He still says “slacks” or even “flannels.” It seems to Gerry that every Christmas Darren is re-outfitted from scratch. He also seems to absorb the new clothes like some sort of sartorial black hole. Gerry never seems to see him in anything but black jeans and white, short-sleeve cook shirts from the defunct pizza and donair. Gerry knows Darren was outfitted last Christmas. He wonders if Melanie gave the clothes away or if Darren abandoned them somewhere when he went to Alberta. Maybe Viv should just collect them on Boxing Day for re-distribution next year.

Gerry fishes a small, soft parcel from under the tree and passes it to Darren. “Socks, Darren. It definitely feels like socks,” he says. “You can never have too many socks.”

“That's right,” Darren agrees. “Socks are great.”

They fall into a lull after the presents are open. With only the five of them and no guests, they can't sustain the avalanche momentum that has
accompanied other Christmas days. Melanie is peeling and cutting up vegetables. Darren is playing with Diana or, at least, with her new video game with her in the same room. Vivian is dressed now and is making neat piles of everybody's gifts. She feeds wrapping paper that is badly torn into the fireplace and stuffs what's re-usable into a plastic shopping bag.

“We'll find that the day after Boxing Day three years from now,” Gerry says.

“You never know,” says Vivian and keeps piling and sorting. They are like a theatre company that has enough voices for the main parts, but no chorus. The theatricality of Christmas seems overwhelmed by the scenery of the house. Gerry remembers being told that theatre extras mumble “hubbub” and “marmalade” to make the noise of a crowd or mob.

“Hubbub and marmalade,” Gerry says and skulks off to hang his new rain suit with his boat stuff and hide in the basement for a while.

With Darren and Diana occupied upstairs, he has a chance to get at his computer for a bit. He has decided he wants to put together a disk of book-bits to feed to the laptop he's incubating in the workshop. This morning there seem to be more pop-ups on the computer than he's used to. He suspects Darren of cruising for porn but decides, with Christmas charity, not to check the search history and confirm his suspicions. Instead he cruises his own files, his personal underwear drawer of fragments. He makes up website names for fragments and chapters as he takes them off the main-frame and salts them away on the disk.

“X-rated ex-wives,” he mutters to the screen. “Red-Hot Old Friends and Geriatric Love Slaves Go West of the Overpass.”