The Thompson Gunner (10 page)

In the nearest building, about two floors up from mine, an office light goes out. Someone else goes home, probably later than they should.

I settle in for a night of TV. A banana, a cup of chamomile tea and a night of TV. I expect other people will have arrived for the festival by now and they'll be down in the bar getting reacquainted till all hours. Tonight, my tooth gets me out of that.

My face is feeling better. I can feel my new tooth with my tongue, and it's smooth and sure.

I think it's Wednesday, but I've lost track of TV so I spend too long ineptly channel surfing. Something goes wrong with TV when you tour, even if you're touring in your own country. Entire seasons of your favourite shows seem to vanish, to happen only in a faraway and maybe better world in the lounge room you've left behind.

Even when you think you've got everything right and you're propped up in bed on four pillows and the wide screen is right in front of you at the perfect angle, the shows you want to watch aren't there. You have dozens of channels and, when you find the one you're looking for, it's not showing the show you want to watch – the show now screening in lounge rooms across the country, including yours, including lounge rooms in the same city as your hotel.

Instead
you get a cavalcade of obscure sports and stock exchanges in which you have no interest. Darts, hurling, curling and the CAC-40. The Cac Quarante. Tubby English lads guzzle big beers and shoot for a hundred and eighty, you sit there mesmerised, quietly saying to yourself
Cac Quarante . . . Cac Quarante
. French is such a cool language even the name of their stock index sounds alluring.
Cac Quarante . . .

Imagine a Frenchman in a suit saying ‘
Cac Quarante
', an Australian in a suit saying ‘All Ords'. The latter is made even more ordinary by the comparison, the former, if whispered in your ear in the right circumstances, sounds like it could change the course of an evening. Today's share price of forty big companies turned into a thing of desire. It's a fascinating world in which, it's easy to suspect, a lot of Frenchmen get a lot more sex than they really should. Or maybe that's a myth, too.

Enough. Sleep now. Sleep and don't dream. Or dream of the Frenchman saying ‘
Cac Quarante
', though he's almost certainly trouble of the worst kind.

W
E PILED INTO
Jen's car after the Uptown Showcase – Rob Castle, me, and a couple of others. One was a visiting comedian, one a local guy I can't picture at all now and hardly
spoke to. I think he was a student.

I'd seen Jen at the festival office in the hotel when I'd dropped in the day before. The volunteers were in baggy matching T-shirts, and she was standing with them but looking more corporate and acting decisively while they held back in a clump. It turned out she was one of them, but she'd worn a leather skirt that wouldn't have worked at all with the official T-shirt, and people who didn't know better assumed she was actually on staff and kept asking her to make decisions. Which, she explained to me in the car, she was happy to do. Someone had to, and no one else seemed to be stepping forward.

Jen was a student too, but she'd been away until the weekend so she'd had no chance to volunteer formally. She'd missed all the briefings and turned up yesterday just in case an extra pair of hands was needed. Which, in her view, it wouldn't have been if the volunteers rostered to the meet-and-greet desk hadn't been introverts who felt better rearranging the plates at the other end of the room and sneaking the occasional Danish.

I
sat in the front passenger seat, the three boys squished in the back. As we'd walked towards Jen's small car, Rob Castle and I had stayed on opposite sides of the group, but even while Jen talked it was him I was listening to as he sat directly behind me and dealt with the experience of being thigh to thigh with the student, a major fan who had all his albums at home.

Sometimes you meet people, I told myself. You meet new people and you click. And gender doesn't come into play and, when you're old enough to know that, it's all good. It stays uncomplicated, you stay in contact, you've got yourself a new friend.

We stepped out into the freezing air, and it seemed several degrees colder than just minutes before when I'd left the Uptown Showcase on a post-performance high.

From the outside of the Ship and Anchor there was no sense of what you'd find inside. It was low and quiet and sealed against the cold. How do you ever know these places are there, if you don't know already? It's not like home, where all year round the crowds spill out of the Regatta and the RE, and the beer garden noise travels across the neighbourhood.

The air was thick and warm inside. The others had their coats off as soon as we were in the door, but I kept wearing mine. I haven't hung a coat since I was eight and my mother wasn't there to remember this one.

But
Jen saw me stuck there with it still on and said ‘I will remember your coat' in an ideally maternal way that placed emphasis on each word, so I went with it then and trusted her. ‘I will remember your coat and, believe me, so will you if you get two steps out the door without it.'

I wasn't thinking that way, since it's never that cold at home. I lose umbrellas all the time. The second rain stops, they're out of my head. With a cheap umbrella that's no calamity, but the jacket I was wearing was borrowed from a friend and made from an expensive synthetic thermal fibre. She hikes in New Zealand with it, above the snowline.

Jen's coat was the real thing – ankle-length and elegant – and I looked like a tourist who didn't know much. She held my jacket at arm's length and looked at it and said ‘You are so Australian' and in that context it was clear that ‘Australian' was a kind Canadian euphemism for clueless. ‘I bet you throw the first snowball when we get to Banff.'

The Ship and Anchor had wood trim everywhere and smelled like old beer and warm damp wool. It was full of people and noise – alcohol-driven conversations shouted over the music. It was obviously the place to be on a Friday night in Calgary, if it was in fact Friday. I'd been less certain of the days ever since I'd crossed the dateline. I always make a habit on tour of knowing what's coming next, what my itinerary has for me tomorrow, since that's what I have to deal with, but it does mean your understanding of everyone else's calendar can start to drift.

The name of the day counts for less when you move on twice a week. No matter how much you like people, you can't make regular plans with them when you're on tour. Neither one of you gets to say ‘How about next Tuesday?' since you won't be there. There's just tomorrow and maybe the day after, then email and the small chance that future itineraries will collide, or that you'll be back some day.

We
sat at bench seats on either side of a long wooden table that someone called Gary had been holding for us against all odds. He was a volunteer too, a college student trying to grow his first beard, and we all squeezed in – we'd picked up a couple more people by then – and the others started talking about friends and writers and bands I didn't know.

Gary sat opposite me, picking up the conversation about writing and making a point about authenticity, saying that authentic writing from Calgary would have people not walking on the streets at times like this. They'd use the fifteen-plus walkways that go over the streets, whereas a foreigner mightn't know that, and might send their characters outside and write the story as though it was happening in a half-populated city. Which wasn't what Calgary was at all, and they'd just be exposing their lack of any real connection with the place.

‘I think a lot of what creates place gets down to detail,' he said. ‘The small details. That's where the truth is. Like, how do people get around? Which beer do they drink?'

I was a foreigner there, and nothing made it plainer than the fifteen-plus walkways. They hadn't become part of my Calgary story, and they never did. I don't understand walking fifteen feet above everything, and I find streets hard enough to navigate at the best of times. I wouldn't last one winter in Calgary.

We drank
Big Rock Traditional Ale, and Jen taught me to call it Traditional so I'd get it right when it was my turn to go to the bar.

With the movement of people around our table, I ended up opposite Rob Castle when I got back, and he said, in a lull in the music, ‘Hi, stranger. Imagine seeing you in these parts.'

After another beer or two, we all sang along to ‘Blister in the Sun', though I wouldn't normally sing a note when sitting across the table from anyone musical. I was the last to join in, but Rob Castle said, ‘C'mon, Meg, it's the Violent Femmes. It's not about singing. And it's perfect with beer.' And he nudged my leg under the table with his foot, as if he were daring me. I felt like a schoolgirl whose ponytail had just been pulled by the cute boy in the playground.

I joined in at the next chorus, as loud as the rest of them, and Jen reached over and clinked her glass against mine. I avoided Rob Castle's eyes, and told my cheeks not to go red. I took another mouthful of beer, Traditional, before the verse, and I remembered Elli at seven sitting on the floor at home with a jigsaw puzzle in front of her singing ‘Why can't I get just one fuck', and thinking that's the last of that Violent Femmes album for about ten years.

Next up, with people in the mood for singing along, there was a song that's either called ‘The Saskatchewan Pirate Song', or at least referred to that way. It's as funny
and rollicking as it should be, and all the others could sing along with it as well. Jen leaned forward during the second verse and explained something about the improbability of sea-going piracy in Saskatchewan. I didn't catch it all, but I picked up the sense of it and already knew from the map that oceans weren't an option there.

In the bathroom shortly after that I sat in a cubicle, drunker with the brightness of the light in there, thinking more about Elli and the Violent Femmes. I felt a nausea that I put down to jet lag, but a deep head-swirling nausea that made me cry into my hands even though I didn't feel particularly sick. I didn't want this, I didn't want to think about it, I didn't want to be reminded. Outside the cubicle door, girls were talking, planning their lives in the coming days and weeks, and discussing the boys they were with, all of whom it seemed had had too much to drink and were creating a very poor impression.

I washed my face, and drank no more.

In the street perhaps an hour afterwards, we walked and talked and the group reshaped itself in a way that put me next to Rob Castle. The temperature was close to freezing then. It must have been. I had my hands in my pockets, since I don't have gloves, and only my face was exposed and it felt like it was stiffening up.

We walked along streets I hadn't been on before, past closed cafes and offices and a cowboy-themed bar where the doors would swing open for a second or two and whooping and hollering and crowd noise would surge, and then be clipped off as they closed again. A hum still passed through,
but as an indistinct mixture of music and people, and easily drowned out by the occasional passing car and even the wind when it gusted.

We stopped to look in through the high windows and I could see girls dancing on tables in cowboy hats, but I got no clear sense of whether they were staff or patrons.

We turned away and started walking again, and I said something I forget now and Rob Castle said ‘You crazy thing' and he messed up my hair with his hand.

I was feeling very tired, physically still not myself in this new place, and I felt tears well up, out of nowhere. Maybe it was just the cold dry air on my eyes, but his gesture seemed way out of line, and great, and perfectly friendly, and almost unbearably intimate. His hand settled on my shoulder for a second, then moved away. The others were two steps ahead of us down the street by then, beyond the windows of this crazy place, breathing vapour, smacking their gloved hands together, heading for the traffic lights.

And I said, because it seemed the moment for it, ‘Your music, it's so sad, some of it.'

And he said, ‘Well, I guess it is. I don't know that I mean it to be, always, but I pick up my guitar and ideas come along and I guess they become what they become. And I'm not very metaphorical. I want to get to the heart of it. So they're simple songs. I'm surprised how sad some of them become.' We walked a bit further and he looked down the street and into the far distance and he said, ‘Maybe that's just in us, that capacity.'

And the guy on the door at the cowboy place called out ‘Hey, aren't you Rob Castle?' even though we were five steps past him by then, and onto something else.

I
called him in his room, but at a time that turned out to be three-fifteen a.m. I thought my head had just hit the pillow, but that my eyes had snapped open because I suddenly had one more thing to say. He answered with a sleepy edgy voice, like someone expecting bad news, or a fire. And that's when I woke up enough to look at the clock, so the first thing I said was ‘Oh my god, it's three-fifteen, three-fifteen a.m. in Calgary'.

And Rob Castle said, the edge gone from his voice and an amused kind of warmth in its place, ‘Meg, I was missing you. Meg the talking clock . . .'

I told him I was sorry, terribly sorry, even saying the word ‘terribly' though I never would usually.

‘Oh, no, it's not very rock of me,' he said, still with the warmth and one of those fuzzy not-quite-woken voices. ‘I was just three hours into this deep deep sleep, and I was hoping you'd call and update me on the party situation.'

Here he was, my new best friend with his Dr Seuss references, his capacity for sad sad songs and his shy-boy charm, and I was calling him at three-fifteen a.m. and there was no fire, no news of any kind, no party I knew of where people more rock than either of us weren't giving up on this night just yet. I was stuck between things to say. I wanted to talk, I realised, but I didn't know how to put that. Suddenly, I was less sorry, less tired, and wanting to talk to Rob Castle. Wanting him to be a little more rock, and to wake up.