A Year Less a Day. James Hawkins
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to say? “Sorry, Jordan, but we simply can’t afford for you to have cancer right now.”
“I’m sure it will be OK,” she adds, still praying for a misdiagnosis or a spontaneous remission. It could happen, she tries convincing herself, and now, more than ever, wants that to be the case as she comforts him—a man about to be overtaken by mortality who finally seems to care.
Not that he hadn’t been a good husband, in his own way, for seven years. And if he had found more enjoyment in the pages of Hustler and Playboy she would accept her share of the blame. The bigger she had grown, the more he turned to the stack of magazines by the bed.
“Look at this,” he’d say, pointing enthusiastically to a couple of stick insects with digitally enhanced pudenda in some impossibly contorted pose. “We should try that.”
Jordan had usually ended up seeking satisfaction from the image on his own, while Ruth had shuffled, embarrassed, to hide out in the kitchen.
A new world had opened up to Jordan when they had subscribed to the Internet, and his interest in Ruth had flagged entirely as he surfed porn sites and dating agencies.
“I can’t sleep,” he’d complain to Ruth as she crashed after an exhausting day. “I think I’ll send some emails,” he’d add, stealing quietly out of the bedroom and softly closing the door.
Ruth caught him eventually, the morning he fell asleep at the monitor with his hand in his pants and a live sex show streaming across the screen. She had promptly stopped the monthly cheques.
“Sorry Jordan, we can’t afford it,” she had explained when his screen died.
“You can’t do that. We need it for business,” he had insisted. “Everybody’s on the Net now.”
But Ruth knew which bodies on the Net he was most interested in, and held firm. “We managed all right before.”
Ruth weeps quietly as she continues holding Jordan in the kitchen. “It’s not going to happen,” she whispers in his ear. “You’re going to be all right.”
“But what about you, Ruth? I worry about you.”
Ruth collapses to the floor, sobbing uncontrollably, unable to deal with the knowledge that her dying husband is burdened by a future that he will not be party to. But her grief is deeper. For the first time in her life someone actually cares. No one has ever cared before. Not even her parents. On the contrary, apart from fleeting satisfaction at the moment of her conception, neither her mother nor her father had taken any pleasure in their daughter.
To her father, Ruth does not exist and has never existed. The few minutes it took to inseminate her mother, a seventeen-year-old devotee of the Fab Four, when she was high on their music and pot, is a distant hazy memory in his mind.
“I’m one of the Beatles, luv,” he had claimed to the young Canadian woman, and had the Liverpudlian accent and a guitar case to prove it.
“He’s a famous English musician,” Ruth’s spaced-out mother confessed to ten-year-old Ruth one night—but when wasn’t she spaced-out? In fact, had she not been high the night of the Beatles concert, she probably wouldn’t have splayed herself to a complete stranger in the middle of “Hard Day’s Night” when he was supposedly banging away on his guitar with his cohorts on stage.
“It was dark in his dressing room,” her mother had continued to the confused ten-year-old who was demanding to know why all the other girls in her class had fathers. “But there was a star on the door and he definitely said his name was George.”
To the tormented offspring of a single mother in a rural Canadian community in the sixties, the probability, however bizarre, that her surname was Harrison was gold. Armed with the first bit of good news in her short life, Ruth had gone to school the next day full of vengeful thoughts. “You can’t play with us, you haven’t got a dad,” the other kids had frequently taunted, but it wasn’t them talking, it was their mothers, well aware that Ruth’s mother had a certain reputation.
Word spread and, despite the scoffing of a jealous few, was widely believed. That April day in 1975, and only that day, Ruth had shone in the glow of her supposed father. But, by the following morning, a dark cloud had descended and left her in a deeper gloom than she could ever have imagined.
“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” chanted the entire school, fuelled by the scornful skepticism of their parents, and then they had thrown rocks at her—schoolyard gravel in truth, but the cuts went much deeper than the scratches bathed and tended by the school secretary.
“Double home burger with super-size fries,” yells Cindy through the intercom, and Ruth drags herself up and pulls herself together.
“What are we going to do, Jordan?” she asks, not expecting a resolution.
“We’ll just have to carry on,” he replies, offering none.
It’s only eleven-thirty, but lunches have started and Ruth will be trapped in the kitchen until three. The café is starting to fill with regulars, but there is an interloper. Detective Sergeant Mike Phillips of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is new to the area, though he has quickly sniffed out a coffee shop. Tom, with his roll of fake fifties bulging in his jacket, has a nose for the law and has eyed the newcomer guardedly from the moment he entered, but he’s trapped as Phillips sits directly across from him and starts a conversation.
“It’s still raining,” says Phillips.
“Vancouver,” says Tom in explanation, then he downs half his coffee.
“I’m from Toronto,” says Phillips and is mentally preparing a potted biography when Tom drains his cup and slides out.
“See ya,” says Tom. “Gotta check on my investments.”
“Weird,” mutters Phillips as he sits back with his Caffe Americano and looks forward to an upcoming visit to England.
chapter three
“Detective Inspector David Bliss,” cries a London Guildhall usher, running down a list on a clipboard.
“That’s you, Dad,” says Samantha Bliss as she prepares to help her father to his feet. “Can you manage,” she asks, “or should I come with you?”
“I can manage, luv,” Bliss says, though he wobbles alarmingly as he tries to rise from the deeply-cushioned chair. Bliss’s prospective son-in-law, D.C.I. Peter Bryan, steps in and steadies him. “I’ve got you, Dave.”
Daphne Lovelace, a sparky and spry septuagenarian who has lied about her years so often she’s forgotten her true age, holds out a pair of crutches to her old friend, saying, “You really ought to be in a wheel-chair, Dave.”
“I’ll be fine, Daphne. You and Sam should go on in. The show will be starting in a minute. I guess Sergeant Phillips isn’t going to make it.”
“We’ll be in the middle of the front row,” says Samantha proudly as she gives her father’s tie a final tweak; then she takes Daphne’s arm and leads her toward the Grand Reception Hall with Peter Bryan at her side. Bliss barely controls a laugh at the sight of Daphne’s giant polka-dot hat as the crowd parts to let it through. “Made it myself, ’specially for the occasion,” Daphne had beamed when she arrived, but Bliss felt that the word constructed or erected would be a more accurate description of the process.
Bliss takes a final look around the Guildhall’s opulent foyer and is disappointed that RCMP Sergeant Phillips is not amongst the fast-thinning crowd. Then he takes up his crutches and slowly heads for the antechamber where the Commissioner, dignitaries, and the other award recipients are assembling for their grand entrance to the award ceremony.
“Hey, Dave,” calls a cheery Canadian voice as Bliss nears the small side door.
Bliss spins and winces as his injured leg scrapes the ground, then he beams