I Saw Three Ships. Bill Richardson
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told at that first meeting – I anticipated an awkward reunion, and I wasn’t wrong. There was a lot of unproductive coughing, embarrassed looking away. One by one they stepped outside for a smoke and didn’t come back. As I spent time with those who remained, I was struck by how the class of ’96 found something to say to more recent graduates. They matched, somehow; their edges were cut to fit. They made plausible claims to kinship.
Unwholesome Christmas stories require unwholesome magi, more stumbling than steady, and my trio of fools emerged in the imperfect persons of Bonnie (Nicola Harwood) and Philip (Davie Denman) and his not entirely loveable, nickname-averse boyfriend, Gary. I was embarrassed, a mite, at an absence of invention, at the degree to which their preoccupations and peccadilloes were my own: aimless adults in late middle age, childless, but clinging to a kind of childhood through their absorption in the lives and requirements of their geriatric parents – their mothers, more exactly. To any reader who wonders if I harbour unresolved daddy issues, I say: I totally understand why you might think so. Vehicular mishaps (road and air!), cardiac collapse, aneurysms, desertion, transmigration into the body of a wolf: apparently I’ll resort to anything, no matter how gothic or cheap or convenient, just to excise the paterfamilias so the story can carry on with whatever its business. For the record, no matter how dastardly, bastardly, and cardboard one-dimensional my fictional fathers, Stan Richardson (1926–2014) was a mensch. What’s tested here is something less Freudian than writerly, and I wouldn’t dispute a simple diagnosis of laziness, my barnacled familiar and long-time bane.
I was interested to see that the stories – incidentally, not deliberately or analytically – compose a casual, informal portrait of the evolving West End; also that they’re an unintended Journal of the Plague Years. Vancouver is a port city, and ports are where epidemics traditionally find their first foothold. I’ve never known a time when the news here wasn’t dominated by the fretful reporting of one plague or another. The AIDS pandemic, as eventually we came to call it, was the most tragic and affecting; also, galvanizing. Latterly, the opioid epidemic has cut a horrible swath. Not all our plagues have mortal consequences or play out epidemiologically. Anyone who was here in the mid-nineties will remember the Leaky Condo Plague. Everywhere were residential buildings draped in blue plastic shrouds, carping tarps flapping in the wind like flags signalling shoddy construction, absence of accountability, homeowners on the line, financial ruin. We’ve endured, or haven’t, the concomitant plagues of speculation, of construction cranes, of displacement. Real estate provokes fever wherever you go, but in few places on the planet does it leech so maniacal, so sweaty a febrility as in Vancouver. (At this moment of writing, I should say, a “correction” is brewing in the market that, by the time of publication, might have become a wholesale bust. Whatever. Ongoing volatility is as safe a prediction as predictions can be.) Scarce accommodation, unaffordable accommodation, the chaos, the disruption of gentrification, the spawning of class divisions, the uncertainty, the suspicion, the envy, the fear, the guilt, the gloating: no one can find its trace elements in blood or saliva or semen, but real estate, broadly speaking, is its own pathology, its own infection. It’s too big for one metaphor. It’s a mighty ark. There’s not enough room to accommodate everyone who wants to clamber on. Tickets are pricey. Lifeboats are few. Who’s out there in the frothy wake, drowning, not waving? That would be the homeless, who are legion, and homelessness is our most visible, shameful, needless plague.
But enough, already. Too much, already. Story collections shouldn’t need forewords to sustain them. Typically, me, I never read them; forewords, I mean. The only reason I hope anyone has had the patience to have endured this far is so she/he/they will know how truly thankful I am to Talonbooks, a venerable Vancouver publisher, for giving these stories a second chance at life. To Kevin and Vicki Williams, to andrea bennett, both for her editorial and graphic acumen, to Charles “Eagle Eye” Simard, and to all and sundry at the house, my gratitude. I acknowledge my late agent, Esther Poundcake (?–2018) who never did anything during our years together to get me a big advance or tout my name in London or Frankfurt but was one hell of a poodle. I loved her and I miss her and I will fulfill the promise I made during her last hours on Earth, when she was unable to rise from the floor and the vet was on her way, that I would allocate her 15 percent cut of whatever the proceeds from sales to the purchase of meat.
There are some beautiful words in this book and they’re all Walt Whitman’s. The epigraph and envoi, as well as the quotations that appear in “Everybody Knows a Turkey” and in “Snow on Snow on Snow on Snow,” are from a 1915 edition of Leaves of Grass (London: George G. Harrap and Co.). Thanks to Holmfield and Crystal City and the dish pit at Whole Foods, Robson, and most especially to William Joel Ze’ev Pechet, who knows all the reasons why. I neither applied for nor received grants from publicly funded agencies during the writing of this book, so, like, you know, relax. Finally, I salute Charles Campbell and John Burns (The Georgia Straight); Mary Aikins (Reader’s Digest); and Sheila Peacock and Sheryl MacKay (CBC Radio) for taking in the hideous, squalling babies I abandoned on their various stoops. Here they are, all grown up. These are those who survived.
—B.R.
December 18, 2018
I Saw THREE SHIPS
SINCE WE’VE NO PLACE TO GO
On Christmas Eve –
Dishes done, stocking hung, spiced wine mulling. Kitchen-counter radio tuned to the all-carol station. Sing, Bing, sing.
Rosellen’s ready. Set to go. As soon as J.C. deigns to appear, they’ll begin. It’s hard to say when that might be; consistency has never been the cornerstone of his charm. Rosellen doesn’t mind, just as long as he turns up before eleven. That’s when “quiet time” starts at the Santa Maria. It’s right there, in black and white, written in the agreement everyone signs but nobody reads when they move in; all anyone cares about is whether they get their damage deposit back with interest. Also, whether pythons count as pets.
Quiet time is from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Repsect your neighbours.
Rosellen’s knack for flagging typographic missteps revealed itself in the earliest days of her literacy. It was a savant’s gift, freakish, lavishly praised by her convent school English teachers, nuns who encouraged her to repay her debt to God – how else to explain it? – by taking up a career as a proofreader or copy editor.
Rosellen’s demurral confounded them, as though she’d been blessed with perfect pitch but had no interest in pursuing a musical vocation. A holy waste. Rosellen shrugged off the righteous inquiries of whoever the Sister – Sola or Perduta or Abbandonata – when they pressed her on this stubborn impiety. She delighted in error’s detection, but didn’t give a good goddamn about its correction. Digging for the taproot of this obstinacy would take her into sulphurous substrata, deeper than she cared to go. Some cans of wroms were best left unopened. Repsect your neighbours. Rosellen honed in on “repsect” right away, wondered if she ought to have the page redrafted. Might some tenant – disgruntled, litigious – be able to make legal hay from so slight a cock-up? Rosellen embarked on a study, a rogue experiment undertaken with no protocol or control or hypothesis in mind, just a hunch about human fallibility that it would please her to prove. She opted to look away, to respect repsect. She allowed the error its life, left it unexpurgated, free to range, to spread its blameful stain on page, on time, on space.
Over the ensuing years – December 1984 through December 2018 – Rosellen knowingly, flagrantly presented this flawed document to hundreds of incoming Santa Maria novices. She watched them inscribe their names – sometimes ploddingly, sometimes with a flourish – then appended her own witnessing signature in the adjacent space. Not once in all that time did anyone arch a critical brow, tsk tsk, or otherwise call out repsect.
Rosellen allows that it might not speak well of her, the surge of stupid glee