Stay cool.
Six
months later she received Richard’s first letter. It was a long, multi-paged rant that she had
trouble making sense of. It was more
like a hallucinogenic journal entry.
Several more followed. There was
no return address, he said nothing about where he was. Given the Victoria postmark on the envelopes
Carol assumed that he was somewhere on Vancouver Island. She found it all difficult to read. Skimming through the pages, she would find
herself feeling strangely moved by the dream-like weirdness of Richard’s
writings. She stuffed the letters inside
a yellow envelope. Soon, she stopped
reading them, choosing instead to just stuff them inside the envelope and
forget that they’d ever existed. Another
six months went by, and then he wrote Carol from Nicaragua, just after having
married a diplomat’s daughter. Carol’s
participation in the Peace Coalition began to intensify. She was channelling all her energy with
religious zeal into ridding the planet once and for all of the nuclear
peril. She was becoming psychically
overloaded and soon began to lose control of what she was saying. This had happened even yesterday, while the
police were loading her into the paddy wagon.
She didn’t know what she was saying, having gone on automatic pilot, and
the newspapers and local news programs had caught once again the unconscious
outpourings of Carol’s spontaneous profundity.
She wished it would stop. She
hated being out of control. Doris was right. She was needing to rest. Carol didn’t want to rest. She was afraid to? She hadn’t meant to be rude to her on the
phone. Doris was so kind and gentle that
it was at times too easy to be sharp with her, which would ravage Carol with
torments of guilt and remorse. She had
never known anyone so completely and fundamentally as good as Doris Goldberg.
It
was High Spring. The last week of
April. The trees were all ebullient with
tender golden-green leaves tender with new life, and the air was redolent with
flowers, freshly mown grass and dog shit.
She paused to pet a small Siamese cat that was crouched by the
sidewalk. She had just been to meet Glen
in the Sun Ray Café. She recalled him
now, from when she was waiting on tables there, a shy, rather pretty young man
with a gentle voice and courteous manner.
He accepted from her leaflets that still needed to be folded, along with
the full content of Richard’s journal.
She wanted him badly for a friend.
Under the lime tree in front of her house stood the journalist Derek
Merkeley, smoking a cigarette. Carol
felt at first a surge of annoyance, then curiosity, as he grinned in her
direction. He said, “This time I have
the lit-end of the cigarette.”
“I
suppose you’d like an interview.”
He
smiled, blew three smoke rings, and replied, “Nothing would please me more.”
She
looked him over. “Why don’t you come in
for a cup of tea?”
Carol
knocked lightly on Stan and Suzanne’s door.
“Are we still on for six-thirty, seven ?”
Smiling
from her side of the door Suzanne replied, “Six-thirty-eight? Six thirty-nine?”
“I’ll
be down in half an hour. Oh, and I’d
like you to meet Derek Merkeley. He’s a journalist from the Vancouver Sun, and
he just loves writing all sorts of things about me and making me famous. Shall I tell him, Suzanne, all about our
unique arrangements here in this house together?”
“Oh,
by all means.”
“Suzanne
is the common-law spouse of my ex-husband, Stan, with whom I never slept not
even once during our two years of marriage.
Now I live upstairs. We are all
the best of friends. That’s two n’s in
Suzanne with an e at the end.”
When
Suzanne closed the door Carol could hear her shrieking with laughter. “Stan, you’ll never guess what CAROL just
did.”
She
pulled out a chair for Derek.
“This
is a nice little place you have.”
“Thanks.” Carol filled the kettle with water and put it
on the tiny gas range. The phone rang.
“Hello?”
“I
would like, please, to speak to Carol Hartley-Atkinson”, said a strongly
accented man’s voice.
“This
is Carol.”
“I
am calling from Managua, Nicaragua. My
name is Manuel Ibanez. I am a colleague of Richard Bertholdt.”
“Yes.”
“I
am afraid that I have some sad news that I have to tell you.”
“Yes.”
“Richard
stepped on a landmine. Yesterday. He did not survive. It was a suicide. He left a note.”
“Yes.”
“I
am dreadfully, dreadfully sorry. He was
a very good man. An excellent
doctor. He was very heroic.”
“Do
his parents know?”
“I
have just contacted them.”
“Thank
you. Your name again, please?”
“Manuel
Ibanez. I—I am so sorrow to have to give
you this awful news. You are a good
friend of his?”
“Yes. Very good.
Thank you for calling.”
“Goodbye,
and take care.”
She
looked at Derek who sat at her table smirking.
She glared at him. Handsome,
boyish with sly green animal eyes set in a fox face beneath carefully tended
dark brown hair.
“I’m
sorry, but I cannot proceed with the interview.”
“Just
one or two questions.”
“No. I’ve just received some very upsetting news.”
“I
would like to know more about what you said last night.”
“Leave. Now.”
“Did
you really mean—“
“You
leave now. Or I will bodily remove you
from here.” Carol was trembling.
“Take
it easy”, Derek said, as though to calm an enraged rotweiller.
“Get
the fuck out of my place. Now!”
"When
can we meet again?"
“Inside
a fucking courtroom. Or in front of the
Judgment Seat of God. Out!”
“As
you wish.”
Derek
left and the kettle screamed from the stove like a soul in hell and Carol sat
on the edge of the chair, biting hard into the back of her left hand. The window was opaque with steam and Stan and
Suzanne would soon be expecting her downstairs, and all the world must know by
now how Carol’s heart was suddenly broken, smashed, shattered and scattered
across the ends of the earth with the fragments of her lover’s exploded
body. The kettle screamed and Carol
remained seated on the chair, sitting as still as a weeping stone.…
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