Help Me, Jacques Cousteau Read online

  HELP ME, JACQUES COUSTEAU

  GIL ADAMSON

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  I

  The Lakemba

  Fear Itself

  Worse Than Taxi Driver

  Heaven Is a Place That Starts with H

  II

  Bishop and the Aunties

  Help Me, Jacques Cousteau

  Big Blue Suit

  Bigfoot

  Fish-Sitting

  Hippies

  III

  Boomerang

  The Electric Curtain

  The Funeral

  Author’s Note

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Imprint

  Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.

  TALKING HEADS

  I

  THE LAKEMBA

  ………… I SEE THE LONG, HEAVY SOFA come skating across the linoleum and I step out of its path. The sky outside the window is grey and most of the people in the lounge are green. The sofa collides with the wall, seems to consider the situation for a moment, then heads out over the floor again. My mother looks up from where she sits, her cheeks flaming red, a lamp tilting solicitously above her head.

  She sees that I’m okay and goes back to her book: The Alexandria Quartet. In her mind, a mighty library is burning. Vellum pages float out the windows and are carried on the breeze out to sea. My mother is in love with Balthazar. The lamp swings to lean over the woman next to her, as if to see what this one’s reading. I see the sofa coming again. A plastic duck on wheels drifts into its path and, with a muffled squeak, it is creamed against the wall.

  We’re on our way home from Australia on a boat called the Lakemba, and soon we will cross the equator. Sun glares on the wide deck. Wooden tanning chairs have been strapped down and the sea rises and sinks at an angle to the deck that is woozy. I sit on a plastic horse and lift my feet. I drift over the floor towards my mother. Her face comes up, flushed and young and voracious for Balthazar. “Oh Hazel, darling!” she says and extends a thin hand to me, but I drift away again, tables, chairs, other children, the eight-foot sofa, all moving in sluggish orbits.

  “Are you hot? It’s so hot,” she says, blinking.

  “Come back,” she says, and we both wait for it to happen.

  We’ve been told it can get a lot worse. But today is the fourth bad day, and anyway, I’m getting used to it. My mother’s worried about me, not having any other kids to worry about yet. But I’m all right. All I dread is going to bed — the moonless night and the wild moving wall by my bed.

  It’s night and we’re eight days away from Vancouver, the ship still lost in the dark and nothing anywhere to show us that this is not a dream. Above the upper decks, festooned with small lights and nosing into the night, are masts and antennae and other strange lines and pipes and funnels. The lights chart the shape of the boat. The white floors of the decks appear to be an empty stage with spotlights shining down. The occasional woman totters by, the occasional boy in a wrinkled white uniform. At midnight, the captain marches past with a woman clinging to each arm. He walks a perfect line, as if magnetically attached to the pitching metal floor. My mother, unable to sleep, peers from the window of our cabin and sees the threesome pass by — a man with two female flags, waving in the night wind.

  “There they are again, North!” she whispers to my father, who sleeps on. “How can they drink in this heat?” Then she comes and looks at me where I lie like a wiener in a bun, a rolled blanket on either side of the bunk and my body wedged between them.

  Nighttime is a horror to me on this ship. I am so young I forget that every day ends with me going to bed. I sleep in the top bunk. The steel feet are riveted to the floor, but not securely enough, so with every lurch of the ship, my bed leaves the wall and yawns out into the dark room. I try, absurdly, to hold on to a flat wall with my damp fingers. The bed dangles on the precipice, decides not to topple over this time, and sails back with a sharp whang against the wall. This process is repeated, unrelenting, until I fall asleep. I think about our apartment in Sydney, the houses next door, the cardboard cluster of our neighbourhood, and in my dreams, the whole earth is swaying too, all the houses knocking heads and rattling like goods on a truck.

  In case we have to abandon ship, my mother has packed an emergency kit: Band-Aids, rubbing alcohol, scissors, stomach remedies, a small mouldy package of cookies, a knife, baby aspirin, a crossword book. We are heading for the equator in a headlong rush, as if to get the suspense over with and start roasting. The engines roar and throb through the metal framework of the ship. My mother, her forehead damp with sweat, is staring at the black heaving water, the deep valley and peak, and, close in the wake of the ship, the ornamental curl of white. She is standing on the deck at sunset, without a thought in her head, the emergency kit in her limp grasp, while behind her, through the open lounge door, come the sounds and moving shadows of a movie. People wander around the deck in silence and pass on down the metal stairwells. Someone is screaming with laughter somewhere, but, to my mother, it is the caw of a bird. The purser staggers by, his sleeves rolled up.

  “Excuse me!” my mother starts, but the purser is gone into the bowl of the setting sun, a shadow-puppet jiggled before a roaring fire.

  My father has been teaching in Australia; an offer to teach one term in Canadian studies somehow stretched to two years. He’s fought his way through the halls of a high school in Sydney, pulled maps down from the ceiling and poked holes in them with a pointer, read poetry out loud, sung with the woeful choir, and exchanged blistering wisecracks with other teachers. Not being one of them, he was looked upon as a kind of intelligent ape. After all, where he comes from, water circles the drain the wrong way.

  My father has committed to memory folk songs, sayings, long heroic mining poems involving dogs and dynamite. He believes, privately, that marsupials are a perversion of nature. He listened to the red desert hulk of Ayers Rock hissing in the rain, an occurrence so rare that, when he told his colleagues about it, he was not believed. He ventured into the outback with bored guides and my mother swooning beside him in the Jeep; ate cooked snake; lay awake in the dark and heard the chuckle of night birds. He heard the low, creepy growl of the didgeridoo and the bird-like flutter of the bullroarer. He perfected his mimicry of the accent. He laughed out loud in restaurants and lunchrooms and barber shops and banks at things that no one else considered funny. He stood in the cool wind of Sydney Harbour with the gulls overhead and stared at the green streaks along the hull of the ship he must eventually board to return to Canada, and he wondered what else in his future could possibly equal this.

  We are passing over the equator. Heat stroke is epidemic on the ship. We are like John Glenn, burning through the atmosphere, falling to earth. The lights on the mast spark and flicker at night, rivets in the metal walls and flooring seem loose. No one moves on the decks anymore during the day. Cabin doors are left open, revealing the vague shapes of reclined figures within. Everywhere is the rising and subsiding buzz of the engines. The stairwells are clamorous, the lounge empty, and even the glorified mess hall unoccupied, except for a couple of drunken teens, and a dog lying flat under a table.

  Earlier in this blazing cemetery, while Dad lay dreaming, my mother rose like a sodden ghost from the bed and staggered, furious, out of the cabin.

  “Excuse me!” she said to the empty deck. “Somebody?”

  According to my mother’s telling of it, the captain was entertaining when she burst in. He had the two women there who had been engaged in a complex and private business with him since three days out. They all sat playing cards in their underclothes. My mother had her emerg
ency kit with her, and she shook it menacingly at the captain.

  “I’ve been to the purser, or bursar, or whatever you call the stupid man! And I’ve been to the engineer! They keep sending me to someone else.”

  “Madam —”

  “I have children to look after!” she said, forgetting for the moment that she had only one child.

  “Madam —” the captain said, rising and wiping his palm before offering it to my mother. She paid no attention to his hand or his grey underwear or the room she was in, but carried on as if run by batteries.

  “I’ve tried to get that idiot man in E-12 to come out and help me. I have a child who’s burning up. And now I’m forced to come here. This is the most shoddy, maddening ship I’ve ever been on!” She said this as if she had made a career of being on ships. The two women had disappeared into the murk of the huge apartment, perhaps into a closet or a bedroom or a toilet. They were just gone, as if vaporized. My mother blinked.

  “Madam,” tried the captain again, “how can I help you?”

  My mother looked at him, her face slick with sweat. “If I don’t get a fan in my cabin in four minutes I’m moving my mattress onto the deck!”

  Now the fan rattles away, freshly bolted to the metal wall. I stand at my mother’s side, blocking the breeze, and poke her in the ear. She brushes me away. I lean over and stare with one of my eyes into the dark brown pool of one of hers.

  “You’re sweaty,” I say and she groans. She is lying on the unmade bed, one leg hanging off, when my father appears at the door with the doctor. As it turns out, my mother has dysentery and is running a temperature of 104.

  “Oh,” she says, “that’s why I’m seeing those things,” gesturing at nothing.

  It’s Christmas dinner on the equator, and we’re sliding down the leeward side in a luxuriant easing of heat. We’re heading north, heading home, in a happy rocking nausea, and all day the smells issuing from the kitchen have been assailing my parents with memories. For my part, I have never seen snow. I learned to speak the language in Sydney, Australia. Now, inexplicably, all of my friends have developed Canadian accents. They say “Hi” instead of “G’day.” My father asks me what I want for Christmas, which is strange, because it’s not like he can go out and buy it. I ask for a beach ball.

  In my future there is no beach ball. Instead, there is a plastic sheet that you use like a toboggan. And a torturous, unbending snowsuit — a whole world of children waddling around in torturous, unbending snowsuits. A world of sleds and snow and slush and ice-balls down the back of my neck and soggy knees and the maddening zzt-zzt of nylon snow pants; the throttle of wool scarves, yanked tight by my mother and impossible to claw open; the stink of cloakrooms; the multicoloured Popsicle look of cold feet and the shrieking pangs while they thaw; the blue-grey, motionless mornings when the backyard is erased by snow, the backyard where airborne debris lands, punctures the lunar surface, sinks out of sight. I will not get a beach ball.

  My mother is feeling better now, hiding in the cabin in case a bursar or purser should walk past, or in case the captain in his nocturnal wanderings should pass by with his women. But there is no one on the decks except the long, flat dog that slinks under tanning chairs and licks the painted metal floor for crumbs and spilled sweet drinks. I follow him and pat the stiff hair on his back and he ignores me. Together we cover the ship in a thorough and efficient manner, checking all corners and speeding past certain doorways where, perhaps, there is an angry kicked shoe or a flung book.

  In this way I see people I have never seen before. Women with brown legs snapping their bathing suits beside the tiny, boxy swimming pool. Small men sweating in rooms that clang with pipes and meters and valves. Kitchen boys who steal above to stand on deck and let the cool air rush through their clothes, to smoke and talk together and flick the glowing butts out into the ocean.

  I follow my dog until Mum arrives, furious with panic, having searched and searched and fled in her mind from the certainty that I had slipped under a guardrail and drowned. On wobbly legs she carries me down to dinner, where we sit with strangers, our waterglasses illustrating the concept of level, gravy searching the perimeter of our plates for a way out. Outside, the lifeboats rock in their steel hammocks, the canvas tarps that cover them undulating in the cooling breeze. The Lakemba chugs onwards into the sparkling Pacific.

  Three years later, in the early hours of the morning, this ship will sink whole into the ocean, and these lifeboats will groan under the weight of panicking, sun-sick passengers. My mother will not be there to use her emergency kit containing scissors, cookies, baby aspirin. My father will be driving through the snow to work, singing out loud in his frost-dull car, perhaps wondering what the weather is like in Sydney, in the harbour, where the ships stand high in the water and the cranes swing all day and all night, carrying things away.

  As for me, I will be enrolled in school and pondering daily a way to get sick or go truant or just get kicked out. A dog will be my only entertainment. I will be throwing biscuits out into the snow for the dog and locking him out and laughing when he comes back and hangs his head and drools the gummy pieces on the step, abusing me till I let him in again, wagging and snapping and soaking the floor with snow.

  FEAR ITSELF

  ………… MY UNCLE CASTOR IS RICH. He lives in a very large stone house that stands by itself near the lake and is surrounded by tall spruce trees full of crows. He has a fondness for animals, and over the years he has acquired dogs, cats, pigeons, geese, a rabbit, and a horse. All his animals are pure white. His main irritation now is that he has acquired a second rabbit. He stands in the middle of the lawn and looks at this new rabbit, points at it and says, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” It is mud brown. It is also a very happy rabbit, apparently, and it spreads out on the grass, with its hind legs stretched back, and goes to sleep. My uncle storms away.

  We have come to visit in the summer, bringing news about other members of the family, fighting all the way about whether Dad should turn the car around and avoid this year’s travesty. As usual, we arrive smiling, the adults tense and towering around me. I ignore them and run across an endless lawn, hop across the stony beach, and leap into the lake.

  Just after Aunt Netty left him, Castor had voiced his opinion that dogs are better than family. I think he meant that a dog will love you under any circumstances, no matter how much of a bastard you are. My uncle does not make it easy for anyone to love him. As children, Castor, my father, and the third brother, Bishop, were sent off to boarding school together. Once there, Castor was free to exercise his power; he was larger, more forceful than the other boys, and he had a knack for not getting caught. My father found cover in the library and studied geology, weather patterns, natural disasters. Bishop, armed with a mute hostility to everything expected of him, finally escaped Castor by joining the cadets and, later, the navy. In that school, at that age, my father says, Castor was fear itself. And now, alone in this house, with Netty gone, he’s worse.

  There is a blow-up at night. I wake up to the sound of shouting and I blink at the dark light bulb on my ceiling. I can hear waves in the lake too and, closer to the house, something moving out on the lawn, perhaps a dog, nose down, hunting. I jump at the sound of a door slamming, and a moment later I hear my mother laughing. It’s a laugh of exasperation.

  In the morning, there is a game, to cheer everyone up. We stand on the concrete pier as Castor takes the cat, the dog, and the goose out in the rowboat. He tows the horse behind by a halter. The object of the game is to see which animal reaches land first. My mother makes vague objections, but she’s just as curious as the rest of us. We watch as Castor lets all the animals go at once. Of course, it’s the cat that wins, clinging to Castor at first, biting and scratching him until he is compelled to fling it violently into the water. Droop-eared and furious, it tries to get back into the boat until shoved away with an oar. All this time wasted on fighting the inevitable, and the cat still makes
it back to shore first. It humps past us up the concrete steps, looking half its usual size, and streaks across the lawn to lie under a bush and hate us.

  My mother takes me to the back of the house, where the garden is full-blown and wild and gone to seed. It has been that way since Netty left, “fed to the teeth with his nonsense,” as my mother puts it. Still the roses and the vines seem to keep to the dark line of the soil, never crossing over to the lawn, and everywhere there is the hum of insects. We sit and eat lemon cake that my mother has baked. She sits cross-legged with me in silence. We put a piece of cake on the grass and watch as ants cover it. My mother and I share a fondness for watching insects from a safe distance.

  Days and nights drift into each other, punctuated by dinner, lunch, trips to town. Sometimes I hear fights at night, sometimes either my father or Castor roaring with laughter. One evening after dinner I get into my bathing suit and Castor and I go to the pool, which is big and concrete and shaped like an eight. There are leaves on the surface and the bottom is black with debris, but the water is clear enough. It is getting quite dark, so my uncle disappears into the pump room, and after a second the lights in the sides of the pool snap on. There is a loud hum. He comes out again, fighting his way through the bushes, cursing.

  “Hope there isn’t a short circuit,” he says and I pause on the pulpy diving board and look at him. I back away, wondering out loud if we should poke the surface of the water with a stick or a rubber boot first.

  “Only way to tell,” my uncle says, smiling, “is to jump in.” I realize I’ve made a crucial error by getting up on the board first, and start to quail. But Castor gives me that look, the black eyeball, and I run and jump, no hesitation. Up into the night air, then down and under the bright, glittering water, my arms ahead of me like a blind person. There’s no shock, not that I can tell, so I open my eyes. I can see all the hairs on my arm. I watch them wave back and forth as the bulk of Castor hits the surface after me.