Jack of Diamonds (51 page)

On the afternoon of my birthday my mom had to go out to take care of a chore for the twins. She hadn’t been gone ten minutes when the front doorbell rang and I opened it to find both twins standing there. ‘Happy birthday!’ they chorused, then Melissa (I remembered she was the one with the mole on her neck) said, ‘Have you got a moment, Jack?’

‘Yes, of course, come in.’

‘No,’ Clarissa said, ‘we have something we’d like to give you, upstairs.’ They both smiled mysteriously.

My heart skipped a beat. Upstairs . . . did that mean what I thought it meant? I’d lusted after both of them and now they were inviting me upstairs! All I could think was, thank god for Juicy Fruit and her careful instructions. We took the clanking old lift to their penthouse apartment and on the way up I was trying desperately to appear relaxed and cool.

At the door of their apartment Clarissa produced a silk scarf. ‘We have to blindfold you, Jack,’ she said, standing on tiptoe to tie the soft fabric over my eyes. I heard the keys rattle and the lock on the front door click open and then both of them took me by the hand and drew me into the apartment. As the blindfold was removed they cried, ‘Tahdah! Happy birthday, Jack!’

Standing in the centre of a dark green carpet was Dolly and Mac’s ancient Victor gramophone with the giant lily-shaped speaker and the emblem showing the loyal little dog.

‘We’ve had it reconditioned and polished and there’s all the records to go with it,’ Melissa cried excitedly.

‘Jack, it seemed so very appropriate. This old darling is where it all started for you, isn’t it?’

It wasn’t just my hopes that deflated like a punctured bicycle tyre. Thank god they mistook my expression for stunned surprise, which of course it was. It was a lovely thought and, once I’d recovered, a truly wonderful gift.

That night my mom and I sat at the kitchen table. On it was a cake with chocolate icing identical to the one she’d baked for my eighth birthday which my drunken father had smashed to pulp and crumbs with his huge fist. The little cake was now positively overloaded with eighteen red, white and blue candles with the inscription
Happy 18th Birthday Jack.
Beside it was a small bottle of soda pop. My mom wore the same little white lace apron as she lit the candles and I blew them out in one breath, the way I’d practised but never had the chance to do all those years ago. I cut the cake and then we both had a good cry.

I put on one of Mac’s records, now mine – ‘For Me and My Girl’ – and my mom started to cry all over again.

I took her in my arms. ‘C’mon, Mom, stop your crying. Jack’s back and he loves you.’

‘Oh, Jack, I’ve missed you so much!’ she sobbed.

‘Mom, it was good I went away, I’ve learned a lot.’

‘I can see that,’ she sniffed. ‘You’ve come back a man. I can see it in your eyes and the way you walk. Oh, Jack, I’m so proud of you!’ Her eyes were filling up again.

‘No more crying, Mom, or I’ll remember my eighteenth birthday for the sobs and not the laughs.’ I pointed to the cake. ‘What happened the first time you baked that cake is long over and he’s out of our lives forever.’

‘I don’t bear him any ill will,’ she sniffed.

‘Why not? He was a drunk and a bastard who beat you up.’ I was trying not to get angry.

‘Jack, he gave me you. He could have smashed my face to a pulp, just like he did the cake, and I’d have forgiven him because he gave me a son who’s turned out beyond my dreams.’

I was suddenly embarrassed. Trying not to show it I said hastily, ‘I’m glad, Mom, but I have something to say too.’

‘Oh, please, not about your father, Jack.’

‘No, Mom, this is about you.’

‘Oh, what?’ she asked, her expression suddenly alarmed.

‘It’s what I want you to do,’ I said, smiling.

‘Oh, goodness, what is it, Jack?’

‘Mom, you’re still young and a very pretty woman and you’ve had a raw deal. What would happen if you started all over again?’

‘Started all over doing what?’

‘Well, you don’t need to be alone for the rest of your life.’

Both my mom’s hands involuntarily crept up to her face to cover her nose. ‘Jack, no one would want me,’ she said quietly.

‘What, because of your nose?’

‘Well . . . yes, that and . . .’

‘Mom, stop!’ I interjected. ‘I want you to go into hospital.’

‘What on earth for?’ she asked, genuinely amazed.

‘Mom, I contacted the surgeon and the hospital – you know, Dr Freeman, who did the first operation to your nose. I’ve paid him for the two operations you’re going to need. The first one will be as soon as you can make it, and the second one in about three months.’

‘Jack, how could you do that? You came back from those awful prairies with nothing.’ Then almost as quickly she said, ‘I can’t accept. My nose doesn’t matter, nobody is going to want me.’

‘Mom, will you do it for me? The money has been paid.’

‘Jack, you shouldn’t have. My life’s over, my nose doesn’t matter. Who cares what I look like?’

I knew that bastard who I no longer recognised as my father had damaged her self-esteem, but now I saw just how much harm he’d done. She had only hung in for me; everything she’d done had been for me. ‘Mom, everything we’ve achieved was because of you – not Miss Mony, Mrs Hodgson, Miss Frostbite, Miss Bates – it was all
you
! They all played a part but you were always there, always fighting to keep us going. If you hadn’t been with me every inch of the way I’d just be another slum kid on the bones of my ass. If you hadn’t believed in me, worked your guts out cleaning offices at night, getting chilblains, getting off one section short to save a few cents on the fare, I wouldn’t have had any of the breaks. Now it’s your turn, and there’s one tiny thing I can do for you.
Please,
Mom, let me do this for you!’ I begged, close to tears.

‘What about the twins? They need me here,’ she said, still stalling, putting herself last once again.

‘I’ve spoken to them and they’re delighted for you. Mac’s coming over to fill in while you’re in hospital.’

‘Oh, Jack, I love you so much,’ she gulped.

Then I held her in my arms and she wept and wept and wept for all the years of struggle and hardship and pain and humiliation. Finally she stopped and I got up from the chair and found the record I wanted and wound up the ancient gramophone and put it on. It was the very first thing I ever learned to play on my father’s belated birthday gift, imitating the music coming through the ceiling. The first time I ever played it was to her, waiting up for her to return from work and preparing her chilblain water: ‘Daisy Bell’, or ‘A Bicycle Built for Two’. She’d sat in the kitchen soaking her feet in the hot pail and I’d played it. When I’d reached the end of what was probably an excruciatingly bad effort, she clapped her hands and said, ‘Oh, Jack, didn’t I say you have a real talent for music?’

CHAPTER TWELVE

I GUESS EVERYONE HAS
a different war. My combat experience was ten minutes of abject terror. I received a medal for being there and another, thoroughly undeserved, for bravery, which entitled me to call myself a veteran.

At the time I had no idea that my combat experience was entirely the result of incompetence, although the events leading up to it should have given me sufficient warning that the guys in gold braid with red stripes down the sides of their pants were, generally speaking, by no means as smart as the uniforms they wore.

If the men recruited to fight were over the age of fifty-five rather than the men in charge, wars would last no more than a few days. Instead we let these old men, resplendent in braid and brass, send the next generation off to die while they study battlefield maps I’m reasonably sure some of them couldn’t even orient so they were the right side up.

Canada only sent volunteers overseas to fight, boys like me who couldn’t wait to shoulder a rifle, but the old men in charge were well aware that in times of war young guys virtually line up to die. They also know that war is an opportunity for them to gain more braid and glory for themselves. As far as Canada’s top brass went, I feel sure I could count those generals who died in combat on the fingers of one hand and still be guilty of overestimating.

I had been one of those misty-eyed kids, my appetite for war boosted by a boyhood diet of adventure storybooks, but it took just ten minutes of actual combat to disabuse me of the notion that war was glorious, or an adventure that would prove an exciting interlude in an otherwise predictable and almost certainly dull life to follow.

Mind you, the eagerness of young Canadians to be slaughtered in the name of king and country may well have been the result of the decade or so of poverty preceding the war. The Depression had been well named, not only for the collapse of the New York stock exchange in 1929 but for its effects on communities worldwide. By the time war broke out in Europe, many young Canadian lives had been blighted by poverty and shame. Joining up meant three square meals a day, free clothes and accommodation, equality in the barracks where you were given a purpose and were no longer ashamed of being useless and unwanted in a crippled society. What’s more, a dollar or so a day was thrown in for good measure.

Anyhow, there I was three days after my eighteenth birthday, lining up with thirty or so other guys at the Fort York Armoury on Fleet Street for a medical examination. Passed fit we were given a train ticket to London, Ontario, for two months of basic training. I was young, didn’t smoke or drink, and fortunately wasn’t carrying any excess weight on my big frame, but piano playing isn’t the best fitness training and I struggled for the first few weeks until I got fit. This, of course, delighted the NCOs responsible for training, who seemed to take particular pleasure in their assigned task of breaking us down and forming us into a cohesive unit.

I learned much later that this is done using essentially the same techniques as brainwashing: fear, tension, physical exhaustion and a total lack of privacy. I found this last aspect the most difficult. I’d always been a loner and now I lived in a barrack room with twenty other guys farting, snoring and yelling out in their sleep on their unscreened beds. Showering en masse was hard to endure, but easily the most difficult was being forced to defecate in a line of toilets in full view of all the other recruits. This was intended to desensitise us, working on the premise perhaps that those who shit together kill together. I don’t know about you, but crapping in public seemed to me a strange way to bond.

Basic training is designed to make you a part of a unit and at the same time set you apart from those outside this peculiar experience. Put crudely, it is supposed to teach you how to kill ‘the enemy’ with impunity, and the enemy are those you are taught to regard as different from you.

Not that I resisted – there wasn’t any point – it was just that I was incompetent at most army tasks apart from drill. ‘Square bashing’ came easily because I had a better sense of rhythm than many of the other guys, but in most other tasks I was pretty pathetic.

I missed being able to play the piano every day, and felt almost as if I was missing a limb. I began, for the first time, to realise how one-dimensional my life had become: without a keyboard I amounted to very little. Being a loner didn’t help, and being intelligent made matters even worse so that I soon learned to conceal this aspect as I had done at school in Cabbagetown. If I knew the answer I kept my big trap shut. Besides, it’s not much use knowing all the theory if you can’t put it into practice.

Most young guys my age had practical experience and could do mechanical stuff – like taking a machine-gun apart and putting it together again – that left me completely mystified. I was good at the spit ’n’ polish aspect of army life because I’d had to take good care of the stuff we got from Mrs Sopworth, but that was nothing special, because most of the guys came from similar backgrounds.

I confess, while I hadn’t been conscious of it at the time, I had become accustomed to being respected for my playing. Now I was a nonentity, or even worse, an incompetent. Life in the barrack room was like being a kid of seven back in the Cabbagetown schoolyard where you were required to show you couldn’t be pushed around. Pecking orders needed to be established, and while I was big I wasn’t aggressive; in fact, I was pure marshmallow. In the army there’s nothing more pathetic than a big guy who doesn’t know how to defend himself. As a consequence I took three or four good lickings before I started to get the hang of things. The fifth guy who decided to take me apart to cement his place in the pecking order faced a Jack who was now both fit and strong. A lucky right to the jaw dropped him to the floor unconscious, and when he took several minutes to come around it caused a degree of panic in the barrack room, not least in me.

The tale of the five-minute knockout became vastly exaggerated in the retelling, finally reaching the ears of Sergeant Major Mark O’Brien, who called me out on parade. A huge man, standing stiffly to attention with his drill stick jammed under his arm and his nose almost touching my own, he shouted at me loudly enough for the entire company to hear. ‘Private Spayd, now you’ll be listening to me! While I’m not a man to stop a certain amount of horseplay, I’ll not be having you throwing yer weight around! So, I’m warning you, Private Spayd, if I hear of another incident I’ll put you on a charge that will keep you so busy you won’t have the fuckin’ energy to pick yer nose for a week! Do you understand me?’