on TV, and then they drove me back to Ashcroft.
Most nights I made supper for Granny and myself and wheeled it in from the kitchen on the two-level gold-coloured metal tray that she kept parked by her chair in the living room. Supper was always a variation of the same thing—potted meat on toast or a boiled egg, with an apple for Granny at the end and a pear for me.
I read a lot. I smoked a great deal. I wrote letters home and waited for the mail with a fierce hopefulness. At Christmas I went to visit Mum’s sister and her family, where I saw a giant chicken out back of their house and thought I had drunk too much wineuntil I realized it was a neighbour’s amateur topiary effort.
You and I made plans to travel through Europe after your school year ended, and I counted down the days until I was able to go and pick you up from the airport in my rented blue Ford Cortina. I hadn’t been able to sleep at all the night before you arrived and left ridiculously early for Gatwick, scraping the frost from the windshield of the car in the dark with a spatula.
I was probably happier to see you walk through those arrival gates than I’ve ever been to see anyone.
I had run out of money by the time you got to England, and so we travelled through Europe on your student loan, which we then spent the next few years paying back. You wanted to visit the composers’ houses and gravesites, and so this is mainly what we did, discovering a multitude of apartments in Vienna where Mozart or Beethoven had lived, going to Wagner’s house at Tribschen, standing by the Danube where Schumann had thrown himself in to drown out the voices in his head. We slept in youth hostels, and on the train as we were travelling from place to place. Sometimes, to save on accommodations, we slept on park benches in the day. We ate bread and cheese, and gorged on hostel breakfaststhat often included cold meat and hard-boiled eggs. In France, on the way back to England, you got food poisoning and threw up continually into the flowered wastepaper basket in our rented room. You asked me to go and find you a doctor, but I told you that you’d be all right without one, because my French was so poor that I had no idea how to go about finding a doctor, or, if I did find one, how we would pay for it. I was awake all that night, worrying that you would die because I hadn’t gone in search of medical aid.
We were cavalier with our itinerary, staying only a couple of nights in most places, figuring that we’d be back to the larger cities many times in our adult lives. With the exception of Paris and Vienna, I haven’t returned to a single place we visited all those years ago.
A good friend of mine says that one should do what one most wants in the morning, because a day always gets away from you. Life is like that too, and if you don’t do things when you’re young, it gets harder and harder to do them as you accumulate responsibilities and ties. I wish I’d known that then.
13
We finally went to Paris together again the summer before you received your diagnosis. I had to go there to research my latest novel and, on a whim, I asked you to come with me. You had just arrived in Toronto and I hadn’t seen much of you. My life had become so busy that it had been hard to factor you back into it. I think you were finding this with many of your friends, that you’d been gone from the city for thirteen years, and in that time people had just got on with their lives.
The geographical space for those thirteen years between your life and mine had made us distant. I presumed our old intimacy, but I don’t think it existed in the same way. We had both turned towards the people in our lives who were present, and soyour life was largely the one you had made for yourself in Vancouver. We still talked on the phone, and I still felt that I could say anything to you and you would understand, but not having regular physical contact meant that we were not as close as we once had
Most nights I made supper for Granny and myself and wheeled it in from the kitchen on the two-level gold-coloured metal tray that she kept parked by her chair in the living room. Supper was always a variation of the same thing—potted meat on toast or a boiled egg, with an apple for Granny at the end and a pear for me.
I read a lot. I smoked a great deal. I wrote letters home and waited for the mail with a fierce hopefulness. At Christmas I went to visit Mum’s sister and her family, where I saw a giant chicken out back of their house and thought I had drunk too much wineuntil I realized it was a neighbour’s amateur topiary effort.
You and I made plans to travel through Europe after your school year ended, and I counted down the days until I was able to go and pick you up from the airport in my rented blue Ford Cortina. I hadn’t been able to sleep at all the night before you arrived and left ridiculously early for Gatwick, scraping the frost from the windshield of the car in the dark with a spatula.
I was probably happier to see you walk through those arrival gates than I’ve ever been to see anyone.
I had run out of money by the time you got to England, and so we travelled through Europe on your student loan, which we then spent the next few years paying back. You wanted to visit the composers’ houses and gravesites, and so this is mainly what we did, discovering a multitude of apartments in Vienna where Mozart or Beethoven had lived, going to Wagner’s house at Tribschen, standing by the Danube where Schumann had thrown himself in to drown out the voices in his head. We slept in youth hostels, and on the train as we were travelling from place to place. Sometimes, to save on accommodations, we slept on park benches in the day. We ate bread and cheese, and gorged on hostel breakfaststhat often included cold meat and hard-boiled eggs. In France, on the way back to England, you got food poisoning and threw up continually into the flowered wastepaper basket in our rented room. You asked me to go and find you a doctor, but I told you that you’d be all right without one, because my French was so poor that I had no idea how to go about finding a doctor, or, if I did find one, how we would pay for it. I was awake all that night, worrying that you would die because I hadn’t gone in search of medical aid.
We were cavalier with our itinerary, staying only a couple of nights in most places, figuring that we’d be back to the larger cities many times in our adult lives. With the exception of Paris and Vienna, I haven’t returned to a single place we visited all those years ago.
A good friend of mine says that one should do what one most wants in the morning, because a day always gets away from you. Life is like that too, and if you don’t do things when you’re young, it gets harder and harder to do them as you accumulate responsibilities and ties. I wish I’d known that then.
13
We finally went to Paris together again the summer before you received your diagnosis. I had to go there to research my latest novel and, on a whim, I asked you to come with me. You had just arrived in Toronto and I hadn’t seen much of you. My life had become so busy that it had been hard to factor you back into it. I think you were finding this with many of your friends, that you’d been gone from the city for thirteen years, and in that time people had just got on with their lives.
The geographical space for those thirteen years between your life and mine had made us distant. I presumed our old intimacy, but I don’t think it existed in the same way. We had both turned towards the people in our lives who were present, and soyour life was largely the one you had made for yourself in Vancouver. We still talked on the phone, and I still felt that I could say anything to you and you would understand, but not having regular physical contact meant that we were not as close as we once had
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