Detour

The posts for this trip were often typed in dark, deserted toilet cubicles or under the lonely fluroescent strip lighting that seemed to be ever-present in the rumbling campsite laundries scattered across North America. Long after everyone else had gone to bed, I would squint and blink at the screen into the small hours. Some posts were cut-and-pasted together in the homes of the people that cared for us. Others were carved out in hostel accomodation, or in the score of nameless coffee shops where we loitered with an intent unswerving.
Generally, most were scrawled by my jagged hand in notebooks gifted by friends under torchlight in a small Wal-Mart tent, or in the passenger seat of our trusty Japanese chariot whilst The King of Space worked the pedals and aped the eclectic soundtrack blasting through the speakers with a steady nod or a subtle drum upon on the solar curve of the steering wheel.
These, and a swathe of other memories are set like concrete now in the unsettling fluid rush of the intervening months between this and my last post. Until recently, I had been working in a sunless, overground bunker with a gaggle of lost souls so devoid of fire or passion that they could barely muster the righteous indignation to complain about anything other than the most trivial of matters; if they were to tackle the glaringly obvious, dim-wittedness ignorance of those in charge, they would be broken. Their indelicate fragility smashed.
All for the stuffing of an envelope.
But I work there no more. And today, on my birthday, I sit with all jobs done before I embark upon another adventure. My clothes and books are boxed up. The room in which I have been a most grateful guest of Squiggle (see sidebar) and B, rent free, for these last five months, is cleansed. The King of Space's old computer peers down at me from the top of the stairs. Somewhere across town, my father wings his way towards me this very moment to collect me so that tomorrow we might drive to Poole. The ferry awaits. France will greet us and we will drive its length to reach the rolling beauty of its nether regions. In Gascony I will live in a remote farmhouse belonging to a friend, mostly unaccompanied for the next 4 to 6 months. I will help him renovate, and occasionally work for his parents; a rose grower and a roofer. I will slow burn 400 euros in my pocket. I will to try and get a book written. I will write to my friends because I will miss them, and that will be my only means to communicate; devolution.
Back to the written word.
So, I won't be around here for a while.
If you miss me, take your own journey through this place. The road starts on the toolbar.
It grows late, and I hear a car at the end of the road.

Boys To Men

I open my eyes gingerly. The blank canvas of the ceiling stares back at me. I turn my head sideways and see The King of Space awakening from a black hole slumber in his sleeping bag amidst a cluster of pillowy asteroids. I cannot yet grasp the concept of his pending absence. I have become so accustomed to his ever-presence: 4 months on the road around this almighty continent with day upon day of trading seats at the wheel, tunes on the iPod and quips on the locals, and nary a cross word spoken. If that is not a sign of an unbreakable bond, I do not know what is. So many times we had been asked how we would cope with any fallout. There has been none. So my worries about broaching the subject in print became an irrelevance. He opens his eyes, crossing the event horizon, and grins. We look over to the door and see our stuff piled up and ready to go like kids eager for Disneyland. After a quick shower we step across the threshold into the hallway and I cast a quick eye back. The apartment looks tidy. The absolute least we can do for a couple who showed astonishing trust in allowing two men whom they had never met before to stay in their home in their absence. We never did have enough time with them. We never really had enough time with anyone. I close the door and descend to the lobby, forcing the keys into The Duke and The Princess’ mailbox for a later retrieval. They return home this evening. We will be long gone by then. Out in the streets, students and pensioners shuffle past in worship of their lives. They have no idea what we have been through or how much I will miss their cursory, fleeting appearance. I feel like a deserter. Patch waits with the luggage whilst I flag down a yellow cab on the high street and direct it around the corner. We cram everything in, just, and head off; the final chariot ride, out to the airport. The city fades away behind us. Only the outskirts remain. At departures we pay with the last of our dollars. Incredibly, our budgets were nigh on perfect – except for the terrifying bill that we incurred with the failure of our treacherous behaviour towards the hire car company. Had we pulled that off, we would have been home and dry, breaking even. But no. Dark figures lurk on a balance sheet somewhere in the future. ‘Your excess baggage comes to a total of $160.’ The poker face of the check-in clerk is unmoving as mine drops. ‘How would you like to pay?’ I tell him that I wouldn’t, and that I will be back shortly. He nods tiresomely. We retire to the back side of a pillar. I have to lose 10kg. The King of Space used his extensive training to cleverly wear most of his excess baggage. In direct and logical mockery of a somewhat ridiculous system, he is wearing 6 T-shirts, 2 sweatshirts, 3 pairs of pants, 4 pairs of socks and all of his underwear. He stands tall and proud like the Michelin man – all that fabric bulk accentuating the confidence of his swagger. So it is that I start rummaging through memories. First to go is the tent. I so dearly wanted to keep it; a paean to the reliance of budget camping. $30 from Wal-Mart and it was my house for so long, withstanding biting cold in New Brunswick, torrential rain in Atlanta, and searing hot temperatures in Memphis. We have been through so much together. But alas, it goes in the bin. The cargo pants I bought on recommendation from my ex-girlfriend Monkey go next. They were broken and torn anyway, too big for me. Time is running short. I ditch old t-shirts and jeans and I even throw away the laminated picture of El Ladante that graced the dashboard of the hire car. Our mascot for this trip. Perhaps it is fitting that he performs one last gesture of selflessness in the name of weight loss. Patch shakes his head sadly. Is there nothing else I can lose? No. More clothing goes. Eventually I make it down to the target weight. We are ushered through the gates. Patch strips down to the necessary layers once we are inside, sniggering at the idiocy of the system. ‘How does it make any sense that a person weighing 15 stone has the same baggage weight allowance as someone weighing 8 stone? And how does it make sense that I can do this?’ He points to the pile of smuggled clothes. We play the waiting game. The King Of Space goes for a waste dump. I check my Facebook account. Smudger pops up in the chat window and asks me when the coming home party is. He’s in far away Leeds. It won’t be far away for long. I barely have time to tell him that much before our numbers come up over the crackle of the public address system. We make for the gate and walk out onto the tarmac. I step up onto the boarding ramp. My feet leave this soil. I look back down. That’s it: over. It will be a long time before they touch it again. And they will never touch it in the same way. No return could be as eye-opening. I am lost in a daydream. I come around when I notice there is a queue building behind me. One last sniff of the air and I retreat into the body of the ‘plane. We rumble along the airstrip and the engines build up to a thundering roar. I take a deep breath and the ‘plane rockets along the runway and lifts up into the sky. Canada shrinks down into the distance beneath us until we disappear above the clouds and North America is gone. The sun beams across the cotton wool carpet. I think of all the wonderful bloggers we met. I think of Benji and Suoko in Halifax with their beautiful organic house and their concrete morality in a world of liquid values, Scott in Boston with his boisterous and welcoming heartiness, Shroom Monkey in Atlanta whom I could have treated better after I got distracted by something shiny, Mob in Midland's self aware suburban underground that was far more interesting than the overground, bubbly Yas in Phoenix with her big heart in a small apartment, Deidre: proud child of the desert in Las Cruces, Shari the earth mother in homely Puyallup, ever-mysterious Okami in Calgary, Doozy the dog loving live wire, The Duke of quick wit, Princess of analysis and the supremely enigmatic Trevor in Vancouver; All such generous people who let us have a glimpse into their lives and overwhelmed us with their hospitality and their uninhibited exposure the worlds they live in. People who went out on a limb for a man they never met. People whose lives I had never seen, whose eyes I had never met, whose stories drew me in from a computer screen far away on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. I think of Topolk in Carolina, Farrago in Chicago, The Topiary Cow in The United States Minor Outlying Islands, Singleton in Florida, Pie! in Munich, Eric in Detroit, Onkle Tom in Calgary and endearingly geeky Doug in LA: all souls whom I would love to have met -had circumstance worked her magic in our favour. I think of all the people the King of Space introduced me to: Tom and Mirta, Mart, Donna and Lisa, and Dottie and Jon. I think of all the fantastic random strangers we crossed paths with: the good old boys by the fireside in New England, Ivan and his family in Bristol, Tennessee, those crazy drinking boys on the road to Montreal, Nichola and friends in San Francisco. My mind aches. The flight is long. The movies are bad. My mind is not really on them. After a long, long time we descend through the clouds and the grey slab of London rises up through the rolling hills of England; home. Smoke flees from the tires as we touch down and the plane grinds to a halt. We wait for our baggage amongst the grim faces of English airport attendants. I fumble through quarters to find mysterious English coins for the vending machines. We emerge into the arrivals area where Space Mother and Trev greet us. I have never met them before. Space Mother is short and generously built with glasses and short blonde hair. Trev is an older Bristolian with a jewel in his ear. Space Mother asks about the trip. ‘How was it?’ To sum up a life changing four month crusade of tens of thousands of kilometres through the highs and lows of North American culture is not an easy task. But I am not put off: ‘Amazing’. She smiles. I expand as much as I can through the jetlag as we wedge ourselves into their little rover and roll out onto the M25. The lanes are narrow, the cars are fast and everything is on the wrong side of the road. The right side now. I peer over the bag squashed on my lap. Sheep graze on the grass verge beneath the end of the runway. Dirty cars and vans squeeze past at ridiculous speeds. Patch tells of his amusing meeting with the homosexual element of the pub next to our motel in San Francisco. ‘Well,’ says Space Mother philosophically ‘One up the bum, no harm done.’ A car cuts her up. ‘F*ckin idiot!’ We reach the M4 and gradually the squeeze lessens. Bristol is half an hour away. Soon I will see the friends I have missed so much. I will see Dogbowl, Motherloaf and Double G. I will see Bowser, C Unit and JayMcGee. I will see Vicks, Wally, Penny, Paul and El Ladante. A weekend's camping trip in Mumbles beckons. Keep on rolling. If I don't sleep, it isn't quite over. The grass of the tumbling fields looks greener than I remember. I smile at the beauty that dislocation reveals when one returns. The old churches dotted around the countryside bear no brown signs of historical illumination: their age is normal here. We turn onto the M32 and swing off onto the ring road. The little rover stops outside my family home and I disembark. My dad is out. I pile up my luggage at the front door. My concentration is broken by the familiar burble of Swedish metal swishing to a halt. Dad emerges with a big grin on his face. We hug and he pats me on the back. ‘How was it?’ I laugh. I’ll tell you all about it in a minute. Small talk is exchanged and then watches are checked. The King of Space has to be off. We smile at each other and hug. ‘We made it’ he says. We did. There is no one I would rather have done this with. Now our bond is unbreakable. I can feel it in my bones. This is something we will always have. We separate and he grins again and wiggles those suggestive eyebrows. ‘See you later’ he says. I watch him waving out of the back window of the rover as he turns the corner at the end of the street and vanishes. But he isn’t really gone. Dad and I turn towards the house: back at the epicentre, in the town where it all started. Where 34,000 clicks around North America, around the world of my fellow bloggers and around the world of my curiosity began all those years ago when I hovered over the ‘next blog’ button and changed my life: with a single click of the mouse.

Virtually Over

I am carefully guiding the joysticks on the control pad with my thumbs. My onscreen alias is curled up in a ball, shooting through plastic piping. A giant winged beast of alien origin swoops and claws at the tubing in an effort to destroy me. I am trying to reach a distant control room to activate power on a troubled settlement. I flew here to save the local polygons from a life of subjective suffering. ‘Charge up your shot and stun it’ says The King of Space. I take his advice. He didn’t get that title for nothing, and I have faith that he has some experience of negotiation with xenomorphs. It seems to work. Patch takes a slug of juice and nods knowingly. The remains of breakfast litter the table. We have forgone the formality of formal dress. Slobbery prevails in the late morning of our last day on this great adventure. And it will not be wasted. The final hours between sunrise and sunset are being filled with the important task of heroism administered from the chariot of a borrowed sofa. We have been immersing ourselves in Metroid Prime for hours now. No point moving anywhere. We have no money to do anything. Why not indulge in some fantasy and take a virtual journey at the end of our very real expedition? I hammer the buttons mercilessly and grimace at the TV set. The flying space beast retreats. I think of the golden eagle we saw in Yosemite. We were winding the car up the hillside at the fade of day when we saw it in the road. The formidable beak tore great strips of flesh from the bones of a deer with poor road safety awareness. The eagle threw a glance sideways. Those great orange eyeballs clocked approaching cars. The eagle casually scooped up the carcass in its imposing talons and spread out its enormous wings, dropping effortlessly over the verge into the valley below. The tyres of the oncoming automobiles flanked the bloody leftovers. We flashed past and I cast my eye shoulderwards in the hope of seeing the bird rise back up in the distance and soar away into the sunset. But I saw nothing. I jam the joystick to the right and my character pops out of the tube and stands tall in robot form. The viewpoint shifts inside the helmet and I stand ready for action. I run into a room full of hostiles and start shooting. What a life that Eagle must lead; gliding high above matchbox cars tracking around the head of the valley. Perching atop great swathes of conifers, surveying breathtaking lands of which it has the freedom to roam by the currents and eddies of nature’s wind. And whilst all the other eagles swoop and dive through the trunks and branches and swaying grassland to catch their prey, this eagle just waits for the cars to hit and picks up the pieces. A noble vulture. A fast food junkie. I wonder what its doing now. I hit the pause button and put down the controller. For the sake of tradition we adjourn to the local shop and buy tins of Chef Boyardee and Green Beans; our signature dish. It was always there to sustain us when we camped out under the stars. The hob in the apartment seems like futuristic magic after the humble flickering of our rusted camp stove. The soup heats almost instantly. None of the unhurried waiting we are used to. It never bothered me to wait half an hour for the pot to bubble when we were watched over by the arriving light of long-extinguished stars in the night sky. The flicker of the camp fire and the elasticity of time all our own made it okay. After our primal hunger is sated we resume the struggle against virtual odds. I climb into my spaceship and pull up the map. Ours is packed away. I will pull it out upon our return home and retrace the steps we took. I pick a planet and zoom off into the blackness. I wish I had my own spacecraft. I would go to Titan. Then Io. Then Gliese. The day wears on. We build likenesses of ourselves on the Wii. I like the idea that some semblence of our presence will remain in this house after our passing. When The Duke and The Princess go virtual bowling, we will be hanging around in the background like Walter and The Dude, pixelated. I stare out of the window at the very last of the daylight. Its hard to capture the memory of the sun setting for the last time on this place. We have seen so many majestic sunsets. I guess it doesn’t matter if it blends in with all the others. It is more important that they are all there, lodged in the mind. The buildings around us go grey, then black with orange highlights. The man with the shopping cart scoots down the alley again, singing boisterously. The happy homeless. Or the completely bonkers. I leave the window open and pull down the blinds. I lay my head down on a pile of unfamiliar pillows and pull an unfamiliar blanket around my body. Patch snores happily across the room somewhere. I try hard to capture the memory.

Running on empty

I grab my wallet and the keys from the desk. It’s a clear day outside. The clouds are en route somewhere, too distracted to trouble us with rain. I slam the door behind us and we stride through the back alleys towards Granville Street. Rather than take the bus, for monetary reasons, we walk again. But we like to walk. We cross the great big bridge again and stare at the glass spires and the funnel shaped apartment block far below by the water. Traffic rushes past us. We both feel bone-tired. The miles are finally catching up with us. We wander almost aimlessly, here near the end.

Patch buys a t-shirt from a native Canadian shop. We peer at the Gastown timepiece pumping steam into the air above the heads of a gaggle of tourists. We climb the last of the tall towers and walk around taking in the rooftops of the city.

A man with strange contact lenses, a big build and goth hair tells a tour guide how he is a player on the LA makeup scene. Tumbledown buildings stand on tip-toes next to proud new constructs. Back down on the street, covert stickers peek out from road signs and lamp posts. We see a funny little independent shop with a selection of random soft toys and storage cans featuring whacked out kitties and strange alien shapes. We get things for Princess and The Duke. The young and the hip and the old and the hurried criss-cross each other outside the EA building by the water. We sit down, exhausted. A dandelion head fountain sprays water enthusiastically onto its concrete base. The clouds gather overhead. The day after tomorrow we leave. All this exploring and eye opening over and done with. Back into the daily grind. Back to grey old Bristol and the unsavoury prospect of trying to raise a lot of money to pay off a huge credit card bill. We pick ourselves off the slab and head back towards the bridge. We pass an open fronted barber shop with half a Cadillac for a registration desk. A metal looking man gives me a smile. We stop in at the rockingest rock shop and buy themed treats for our friends back home. Once we have left Vancouver city centre, I have one more errand to run on Granville Street. I stop and buy just enough beef jerky for C-Unit to leave me with cab fare in the morning. As the light dies in the apartment window, I spot a man loitering in the alley. He looks hopelessly bedraggled. He is thin with worn clothes and a worn face. He huddles up against a kerb in a parking space in the lot across the road. Hands fumble inside a rucksack and a spoon appears. Then a needle and a lighter. He starts cooking up. The substance slowly starts to bubble. He awkwardly drops the needle into the bowl and pulls gingerly. The syringe fills. I whisper to Patch to come and look. Just as the man is getting his poison together, his ritual is interrupted by a pristine white Lexus waiting patiently for its spot. The man shuffles across the way and carries on with his business, inspecting his leg like a surgeon. A woman alights from the vehicle and glides out of view beneath a canopy. The needle slides into the leg of the addict. He picks himself calmly off the floor from his cross-legged meditation and disappears down the alley. Night falls. We while away the restless hours with TV and Wii. I stare out and try and see the stars on this last night of our quest around North America. Melancholy rules. Fear of the future is the incumbent prince. Not knowing what we might stumble upon next was an exciting adventure. Now it is a veiled apprehension. Soon we will part company, The King of Space and I. My eyes close as I lie on the sofa and think of old friends soon to be seen and new friends soon to be left behind.

Record Contract

I sit on the bench in the entrance hall to the apartment building and peer lazily over my shoulder at the envelopes haphazardly stuffed into the narrow brass mail slots behind my head. A free paper hangs precariously off the wooden slats. Steve Coogan is on the cover; some article about Sexy Jesus. The clouds seem to be in no hurry to make their way across the crate paper sky that lies beyond the flower bushes lining the pathway. I am waiting for the last of my literal conquests; the charismatic, imaginative and articulate Trevor Record (see Everything I Say And Do Is Right on my sidebar). A man walks past and I go to rise from my seat to open the door; I cannot wait upstairs in the apartment for Trevor to buzz because the intercom links to Mike’s phone, which will cause endless confusion. Therefore, I must sit as a sentry at the gate and observe. But the man is not Trevor, so I sit back down. I am looking for a slightly less pencilled figure than the avatar that used to adorn Trevor’s blog. It was a picture fit for revolution; a red background with a bold black outline of a proud white face. A few cars flit past, but no sign of the man. This will be the last rush of blogger-meet anticipation that I feel flowing through my veins on this trip. No more after this. No more looking at the pieces of the unfinished puzzle to take a guess at the whole picture. I will have to go Cold Turkey. The flowers shudder in the breeze. A bicycle slides into frame. It is equipped with a baggage rack. The pedals are turned by a young man with a dark mop of almost unkempt hair. He hops off and stalks towards me. A friendly stalk. Keen eyes reach out from beneath the fringe. His face is pale but far from lifeless. Only the ends of his thin lips turn up in a smile as I approach the door and hold it open. ‘Hey Trevor’. ‘Hey Toast’. We shake hands almost cautiously. I feel like Martin Blank meeting Grocer, but without the animosity. Every blogger has some kind of aura about them. To say that Trevor is no exception is a massive understatement. He has more of a reputational precedent, for me, than any other blogger I have met so far. Others have painted him as a real character in their meets with him; a live wire with a short attention span; a faintly manic lover of the ladies. I have only his posts to go on. And his posts are usually stories or abstract musings on circumstance and space and time and art. The stories he tells are always so imaginative. He approaches characters and narrative from angles others do not see. Some time ago, he entered a regular writing competition hosted by another blogger. He had never entered before. The rules of this competition stated that one should write a story based upon a picture; a sink full of washing up in this case. He won outright. His story stood alone from all the others. I cannot really remember what others wrote, but I remember Trevor’s story was about the world just stopping one day; People not bothering to get up, machines not bothering to work. Everything grinding to a halt; a perfect literal accompaniment to an abandoned, dirty basin. I can imagine Trevor not really having to think to hard for the inspiration. ‘You find the apartment without any trouble?’ I ask. He rolls up the sleeve on his right arm and points proudly with the back of his hand; the address across his knuckles in marker pen. We ascend the stairs and push through the door into the apartment. We shoot the breeze about politics and Trevor’s return to college. He sits in a chair against a wall. He speaks with an incisive, even tone. The voice, and the knowledge, I had imagined. But the laugh I had not. When it comes, it is almost as if it escapes from him. His speech is so articulate and subconsciously crafted that the laugh seems to be the diametric opposite of that; raw and uncontrolled. ‘So you guys like to smoke?’ We head back downstairs to the car park and hang out by the bins again, sitting cross-legged in a small circle by the trash. We crane our necks upwards occasionally to see people walking past in the sun-drenched alleyway in between pulls on the pipe and discussion. Trevor tells us that you are highly unlikely to get busted here. People frown more upon cigarette smoking. A man walks past and looks at us completely indifferently. We head back inside for a while. Trevor suggests we go for noodles at a place he knows. Patch decides to stay in – he is worried about money. And completely battered. He has the look of a man terrified of fumbling some basic human interaction and being dragged away by the thought police for unwanted penetrations. I feel disconcertingly spritely. Good weed; high with no paranoia. Maybe Trevor is protecting me subconsciously. We decide to head out across the bridge. I tell Trevor about Benji and how he said I should submit my Vegas stuff to a magazine. I tell him that I am nervous about it being rejected ‘…because you are terrified that it means you are just mediocre’. I look him in the eyes and nod. He says he feels the same way. We talk about the story he wrote. I ask him if he has anything of his own to submit. ‘I’ve got some things’ he says pensively, looking away into the distance. We seem so alike. The sun balms us with an ideal temperature. The breeze is subtle enough not to disturb our correspondence. We walk in silence for a while. ‘You close to your family?’ asks Trevor. Yes and No, I tell him. Sometimes I don’t quite feel like the direct product of my mother and father. It makes me feel that I am not as close to them as I ought to be. I feel closer to my friends a lot of the time. He nods in agreement and understanding. Barely an hour in and we are already in deep, but not too deep for me. The sky moves at our pace. We reach Ezogiku - the noodle place - and Trevor orders his usual from the waitress who knows him. We talk of many things – most of which I cannot remember. I ask him about his technique, where he gets his ideas. He makes notes of when things come to him. Sometimes he just writes straight off the bat and holds onto whatever it is for a while. He tells me I am a good writer and I feel humbled hearing such things from him. We talk of brothers and sisters and the future in space as people all around us click-clack away with their chopsticks amongst the sizzle and steam gushing from the kitchen. The food is excellent. I raise the subject of Henry Darger, whom Trevor made me aware of through comments on my blog. ‘It’s amazing to think that he spent years in obscurity painting this masterpiece undiscovered’ enthuses Trevor as he shakes his head in amused disbelief. He scoops up another mouthful from his bowl. I tell him that I would never have found out about solar sails if it were not for him. We laugh about how our maths got confused when we were trying to work out how to get to Gliese 581. We agree that one day it will happen. They’ll throw up a massive space galleon that’ll go through a few generations before anyone finds anything. We finish up and wander back towards the house. The weather is still apt. The city slides past us. I shout up to Patch on the top floor, hoping my voice catches the breeze and blows in through the window. His head appears and he grins. The keys dive out of the sun. I catch them like an outfielder and struggle with the back door. We flop onto the sofa and play some video games for a while and shoot the breeze. Trevor has never really put a lot of time into them. He’s more of a reader and thinker. Patch whips me at Mariokart. Trevor and I head out again later, leaving Patch to do some surfing and watch Legally Blonde The Musical: The Search For Elle Woods. Night has fallen. Trevor takes me to a restaurant that feels up-class: Maurya Indian Cuisine. Smart and stiff waiting staff glide between tables and swish past light-saber light fixtures that glow on the walls above the well-dressed Vancouverite diners that line them. We look refreshingly casual. A plant does a poor job of creating a divide between us on the table. Trevor is looking forward to going back to college. He was stuck in a rut at his old job. He’s made some collateral adjustments to go back and get some more learning done. The food is wonderful. I tell Trevor that I will submit stuff. ‘Don’t you find that sometimes you are terrified that you might just be doing something ordinary?’ I laugh. Yes I do. A desperation to say or do something relevant often overtakes me. I tell him that a lot of my friends went to university and got degrees and are pursuing responsible and rewarding careers. I never did that; just jobs straight out of school. Sometimes I feel that maybe I am trying to catch up, or compensate, by throwing myself into writing or performing. He nods over his plate. Trevor keeps me up to date with The Athabasca Nemesis Gauntlet; a ‘gentleman’s contest’ between himself and Blake McStravick. It is a year long battle of wits that is soon to be over – on December 15th. ‘The competition is based on who has the most marbles at the end. I lost my marbles when we were walking down a street one day. We managed to pick up most of them, but not all of them, so I'm probably losing due to this spillage. I have won slightly more competitions, but Blake has yet to have such a misfortune come upon him. Perhaps he thinks he has the advantage, being such that he has not lost his marbles. But in the words of Jeffrey Lewis, it's the ones who've crack that the light shines through’. The waiter scoops up our detritus with a deft hand and casts a quick, appraising glance at us; maybe guessing how we know each other. I have faith that his guess would be wrong. ‘We could be brothers’ says Trevor. Yes we could. We are, in a way. I feel a kinship with him. We are walking a similar path, I think; we are both looking for something we can’t quite put our fingers on. Feeling around in the dark for an unfamiliar texture. After we eat, we walk back to the apartment. The day’s end. Orange light shines in pools in the back alley behind the apartment. ‘If you submit something’, I say to Trevor ‘so will I’. He swings his leg over the frame of his old bicycle. ‘I don’t want another competition’ he says hesitantly. ‘Not a competition. Just a mutual attempt at doing something we both want to do’. He smiles. ‘Okay’. We shake hands. ‘Good to meet you, Toast’. ‘You too, Trevor’. And then he is gone – pedalling off into the darkness; a brother in arms. Our paths through the jungle have finally over-lapped. And then under-lapped in the blink of an eye. I hope his course goes well and he keeps putting dents in paper. He is a fine storyteller. Once he has disappeared around the corner, I let out a long sigh and look to the stars. They are hidden by the glow of the city. That’s it. No more meetings on this soil. My heart feels heavier than my head as I yell at the open window and wait for Patch to appear.

Drizzle Lmizzle

I hold the plastic bag with the book in it over my head and splash through the downpour towards the shelter of the overhang by the payphone. A man with his nose absent due to what could only have been a monstrous coke habit asks me for change. Sorry. No can do. I dial Doozy’s number for the third time in as many half-hours. Frantic, I am desperate for her to pick up. We were supposed to be at her apartment ages ago. But the busses are not running in our favour because it’s a Sunday. We have to walk. And I need to let her know. Where is she? ‘Hello, this is the Operator.’ I sigh in relief. ‘Yeah I’m trying to reach Doozy’. She laughs. The penny drops. She’s been downstairs with Steve waiting for us. She forgot to take her phone. I apologise and tell her we’ll be there shortly. She laughs and says that’s fine. I hoof it back to the apartment and tell Patch. He throws on some clothes. By the time we get back outside the rain has stopped. We splosh through puddles on our way across the Granville bridge. Cars and busses and runners rush past us. I see concrete blocks stacked up like Duplo bricks at the cement works far below. The monolithic glass of residential towers with roof gardens and sunflowers on their balconies watch over the harbour. We find the right turn we need. Just before we take a left we see a billboard of the Jonas Brothers and give it a kick for good measure. Starbuck’s have a shop front in the bowels of the block we are aiming for. There is a posh computer plinth outside with a touch screen that finds the people one wants. I am part way through negotiating with it when I notice Patch is already inside. Doozy and Steve are waving at me through the open glass door. I wave back sheepishly.

Doozy (AKA Lmizzle) is smaller than I thought she would be. But she is as vibrant in energy as I expected – despite her cold. Her dark hair falls to her shoulders and her square black spectacles sit atop a little nose and an endearingly dangerous grin: geek chic in full effect. Not dissimilar to Steve. He is enviously well-groomed with his neat beard, short cropped hair, South American good looks and eyewear that complements Doozy’s. He has exceptionally good teeth. They bounce off each other on the journey skywards in the elevator.

We emerge in the corridor of a high numbered floor. Doozy swings open the door to the apartment. It is one of many, many nooks and crannies that make up the living space of this spire, and that of all the other spires out beyond the balcony. Winston and Zelda bound across the floor in a riot of excitable scratching and scraping to get at us. Doozy laughs as they leap into our laps. Winston and Zelda roll over and over each other, snorting in fuzzy canine pleasure.

Cartoons are on the TV. We get the tour of the cosy little broom cupboard. We all talk fast, in a blur. Doozy and Steve spark off each other so quickly it’s hard to keep up sometimes. I give Lauren the NASCAR romance novel I bought as a present. She looks confused but amused. She used to write of her stepdad sitting around the house in his underwear watching NASCAR with her mom in his lap – a sight Doozy never relished. Perhaps, I thought, a novelisation of the tyre smoking drama of the racetrack might go some way to disassociating those horrific memories from the might of V8 heaven. She gives me a book about the best way of being Canadian. It will go nicely with the book of Canadian phrases and sayings she sent me by way of Squiggle (see sidebar) when he visited her. ‘He dropped off the radar right after he left Vancouver’ she says. ‘What happened to him?’ I explain that he was in the process of buying a house and he has been so busy with his job that he has scarcely had time to do anything but eat sleep and work, unfortunately. Steve takes me out onto the balcony and points out where all the building work has been going on across the glassy grey skyline.

He passes me his spy scope so I can take a look at what is going on in the various apartments in the distance. I peer into the viewfinder and see a man at his minimalist desk in his minimalist lounge clattering away on his keyboard. I wonder what he is writing. We close the door on the dogs and make our way back down in the lift to the ground floor. Doozy and Steve have armed us with umbrellas. Our first stop is at a trendy restaurant for breakfast. Modern art adorns the walls and I eat posh granola. Steve talks effusively. He is a journalist. Steve muses on what their kids might look like. We chatter away about out trip over our food. Most of the talk is of movies and TV shows we all like. Clone High is recommended. Mike has a copy on his shelf. Doozy pushes her food around the plate. She’s liking the change away from non-profit. She used to write about her old job back in Banff a lot, but she got axed from there when someone read her writing and blew the whistle. Getting fired for blogging. Sweet rebellion. We talk of other bloggers and how she met them. Okami used to work in the same faculty as her. They didn’t really speak much until Okami started leaving cryptic, knowing comments on Doozy’s old blog. The penny dropped in the end and they became friends. But, alas, they have drifted apart. She asks me about the meetings and how they have gone. I tell that they have gone well without exception – mainly because I have had an idea of what to expect beforehand in most cases. The only example of an unexpected meeting was Scott (see Hard To Want on the sidebar) who was anything but the straight arrow I had pictured. He was a fine surprise. We finish up our food and walk out into the rain. The pathway takes us past spraypaint of the highest quality.

We dip down an alley and see a photo shoot going on amongst the puddles. Patch gropes a few sexy looking walls. They lead us towards Gastown – the place where the very earliest roots of Vancouver were put down. Doozy’s conversation runs almost exactly as her blog does. There are the same patterns of slang and exclamation. I get the impression that she rarely has to stop mid sentence when she writes to think about what she will say next. I had always thought her writing was conversational. I am glad to see that borne out as we chuckle our way around puddles and lampposts, waving our umbrellas about under the clouds. Steve is almost stately in the way he articulates without fault and gesticulates with the tip of his umbrella. ‘This is the library’ he says with a proud sweep of the handle. ‘I’m a member. I can get you inside’ he intones with self-effacing grandeur.

They shot ‘The Sixth Day’ here. A lot of shooting gets done in Vancouver. On the main street of Gastown we see a lot of shops with Native Canadian sculptures and artefacts in them. Doozy explains that the settlers and the locals have a much less tumultuous history than they do across the border in the USA. The evidence is right there behind the windows staring out prominently into the street. We see the old steam clock, which is now electric. It looks like something Doc Brown might build. People mill about and peer through the foggy glass to look at the inner workings. We wander off to the statue of Gassy Jack. He was the first settler of the site. Back in the day ‘Gassy’ referred to one who might talk a lot. We amble along further and cross a street. It is as if we have crossed an invisible barrier of some kind.

The plush shops and antiquated buildings are gone, replaced with dilapidated brick husks. The people are no longer the diverse hip urbanites on the other side of the road. They are the torn and threadbare figures at the ripped edges of the city centre. They moan and stagger in zombie clusters, but none of them trouble us for change as they shuffle past. Maybe they have given up on that. Doozy and Steve raise sad, knowing eyebrows as we wait at the crossing for the lights to change. It is an alternative dimension. The side of Vancouver they don’t tell you about when you read the top ten lists of the best places in the world to live: Hastings. The first I saw of it was when I read Doozy’s blog entry some time ago; She explained how the scenery and people change so suddenly. Her photos were incredible. She tells me that when the Olympics come to town, the homeless of Hastings will be herded out of town for temporary re-housing. It would not look good for the tourists. They’ll probably be moved back in when everyone goes home. We cross another street and suddenly we are somewhere else again: a Chinese temple garden. Leafy, serene and austere – a far cry from the squalor we left behind mere footsteps ago.

Vancouver seems to be a city of extremes. We head to a comic book convention at the VAG. There are a lot of manga comics with dramatic phallic covers. Nobody buys them. It’s hard to buy cartoon cocks with a straight face. We don’t stay long, adjourning to a café over the road for more banter. An SUV rolls past with a camera mount on the hood and a unit crew following behind. We chatter for a long time. The talk flows easily. No awkward moments. Just a steady flow of shared interest. It’s getting late. We head back towards the apartment for a while to see the dogs before heading out again. At the street corner where the Jonas Brothers lurk on the walls we say goodbye. ‘I think I’ll start reading you blog’ says Steve as he shakes my hand. I hug Doozy and wish her well. Steve puts his arm around her and they disappear off down a side street. I watch them go with a grin. Patch and I walk back across the bridge towards the apartment. Only a few more days now. All these wonderful interactions soon to come to an end. I am scared and sad. The white lines will run out. What lies beyond is an indistinct haze, signposted vaguely. The lights over the water flicker invitingly as night falls and the sky bleeds pink and orange and blue as we walk on towards our final days off Granville.

The Man From Uncle

I hold the receiver close against my ear. The busses crackle against the wires as they whirr past and people talk excitedly by the stop on the pavement. The dial tone cuts out and Doozy (see Doozy on my sidebar) picks up the phone. She doesn’t sound like I thought she would. I had her down as an MTV voice. She’s wackier. Less rehearsed. Excellent. She couldn’t get the phone yesterday because she was at her desk. She was waiting for me to call back. She is happy for us to meet tomorrow. I bid her good day and click the phone down into the holder with a smile. I have been looking forward to this. A queen of the surreal. Fellow donkey hater and finder of all things random. And lover of pugs. A Canadian cool kid. Probably the second blog I ever read after the Duke’s. They once were tight, but no more. I never will find out how they spark off each other. And that was something I had always wondered about. I relinquish the phone to a hippie. ‘I won’t be long’ he says. I crouch down by the wall and eye the hairdressers a few doors down for a cut. The hippie slopes off. ‘Thanks, man’. I punch in the numbers for Trevor Record – founder of The Angel’s League of Broken Hearts and Whiskey Bottles, and founding competitor in the ongoing titanic duel of The Athabasca Nemesis Gauntlet. A man of great words; a man of whom other bloggers speak with wry smiles and knowing nods. ‘You’ll see’ they say cryptically when I ask what he’s like. Trevor writes like no one else. His musings make me wonder if he is not of this Earth, but rather more a being imported into a human body and mind through some intergalactic administration error. He picks up the phone as a young girl walks past with a wakeboard under her arm. ‘So you like to partake in a bit of smoking eh? Ha ha ha!’ he chuckles. ‘I’ll see you Monday then!’ This is all going rather well. Third time lucky? I dial the numbers. A voicemail. Risu (see ? on my sidebar) is unavailable. Ah well. I’ll send her an email. There’s still time. I flick the pages of my journal over with a pen to find Great Uncle Sid’s number. My only relative in this country. Sid has seen it all. When he lived on a sheep farm in Meekathara as a boy, his father bought home a lump of gold after a healthy day’s prospecting. Sid used it as a football. He carried it with him when the family took the long, long boat ride to England before the war. A boat ride that almost cost them their lives when a storm hit The Cape. The Captain wanted to abandon but my Great Nan refused and demanded that they ride out the 6 hour nightmare with good solid prayer. It worked. They made it to England. And she made it to a mighty 106 years old. The golden ball got lost when a V1 rocket destroyed their house during the war. Sid almost took a bullet jumping on a boat at Dunkirk. Then he moved to Canada to make his fortune. I had only seen him once as a small boy. I do not remember. But, at the ripe old age of 91, he shuffled back into my life in a riot of Technicolor regret. He should have come over sooner. Why did he abandon his family? These things happen, I told him. I’ll come and see you. I’ll be out that way soon. The phone rings and rings. ‘Hello?’ says a voice. It’s me – Toast. ‘Geoff?’ he says faintly. No, I say; it’s Toast: Son of Geoff. ‘Oh!!! Toast!!! You made it then!!!’ He tells me to come over after 1. Get the sky train. I nod and hang up. I rut with the back door lock. Upstairs, Patch is staring at the computer screen. He looks stern. His square jaw is locked in a focused, distant grimace. ‘What’s wrong?’ The hire company have billed his card $1150.

F*ck. We forgot to report them lost.

For all our planning and deviousness, in the end we were undone by our own appetites. Time flies when you are having fun. ‘You’d better check yours’. My heart sinks. I daren’t even think about it. Not now. These are our last days on the road. Not the time to clog the last absorbent pores of the sponge with the tacky, unsavoury matter of coin. ‘Coming to see Sid?’ I say. Patch picks up the Wii remote, thwacks an imaginary ball and shakes his head. ‘I can’t really afford to’. I nod grimly, and then wish him a good day’s Tennis, Golf and Karting. I go and wait back at the bus stop by the payphone. Goddamn it. Cars rush past. I stare at them ambivalently. The bus glides to a halt and I clamber on. ‘Downtown please’. The bus whisks me over the bridge back into the throbbing heart of the city. The Duke told me that Vancouver has the most densely populated centre of all the west Canadian cities. So many people everywhere. Not the ghost of central LA. All kinds of people mingle here. Mostly skater kids. There is an event going on. They olly onto benches whilst a DJ pumps out tunes.



A guy with a megaphone shouts above the noise. Piercings, eyeliner and tattoos dominate. I edge through the crowd aimlessly. There is an information booth. The gentleman behind the desk prints a route for me. I need to get out to Scott Rd Station if I want to make it to Delta. I thank him and head along a narrow walkway between shops and a building site. The skytrain station is quiet. I find the right train eventually and it rolls out of town until the tall buildings fall away to reveal mountains across the river above the rooftops. The journey is just about long enough for me to think too much. We curve gently upwards and ride over a fresh suspension bridge that is white grey with clean unspoilt lines. I get off at Scott Rd. The connecting bus has gone. I call Sid. He will come and meet me. I kick cans around the kerb and sit next to discarded magazines and bottle tops. I look anxiously around trying to spot him in the car park on the other side of the flyover. Sid is my Colonel Kurtz at the end of the river; the man to whom I have developed an unbreakable attachment that went AWOL from the family. But I am no Willard. I do not want him dead. Only his regret. I see him walking slowly, evenly and deliberately in the distance. He wears a white shirt, brown trousers and big glasses. Those vintage eyes scan around but don’t see me. I rush up the stairs of the flyover and descend the other side before he gets a chance to move away. I walk up behind him. ‘Sid!!’ He doesn’t hear me from 20 paces. The kids lounging on the wall look over. ‘Sid!’ He turns gradually and flashes that battlement smile. ‘Toast! Good to see you!’ We shake hands. He leads me to his car, talking of how he only just remembered I have no car. We get in his G5 and he fires it up. The car park exit goes past my window. ‘How do I get out of here?’ he says. I point him in the right direction after a wobbly circuit of the oval. Out on the streets he drives well for a man of 92. ‘You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t talk’ he says. ‘I’m old. I need to concentrate’. I nod. He points out all the docklands of the Delta and elaborates effusively upon their history as we trundle along the narrow road. He asks how the trip has been and I tell him all about the many places we have been as his house draws in closer. He laughs and smiles as I regale him with our adventures. He looks well. We swing off the road and onto a driveway next to a black Pontiac. A large white SUV is parked outside the garage. Sid picks his way carefully up the steps and we go through the front door into a large spacious lounge. I meet my cousin Debbie for the first time. She looks like Jane Fonda. She has a welcome but distracted air about her. A woman with a lot going on. It soon becomes apparent that she runs the house. Husband Ernie is in construction. He’s out on the job at the moment. Sid leads us down to the ground floor and out onto the patio so I can admire his garden. And what a garden it is. So many plants: baskets of purple flowers and pots of green leaves lining the walkways that weave through the garden to the fence down beyond. Sid shows me the ornate bridge he built with his own hands only a few years back.

There is a gazebo too. Such determination to overcome the inevitable slowing bought on by old father time. Debbie looks out over the water. Sid leads me further down the path to a small urn with a candle alight beneath its heart. A faded black and white picture of a lady sticks to the chipped ceramic. ‘That’s Muriel’ he says, his eyes hard. ‘The flame never goes out’. I lean in close and look at the woman he lost whom I never knew. The leaves and bushes rustle against the clear sky. A train rolls by on the railway tracks somewhere below. We walk back up the path and take a few steps up to the gazebo by the back door. Debbie is relaxing. She sits on the swing chair and basks in rejuvenation; a busy day for her. Megan swings with her legs. She is a 17 year old mobile keypad veteran with ten thousand texts under her belt, and a bunch of horse riding rosettes to boot. Debbie says that they take her all over to compete in events. They have use of a nearby stable. Megan studied in London, Tokyo and Paris. ‘What did you think of London’ I ask. The tapping of the buttons stops for a moment and she looks up. ‘Dirty’. I laugh. It is. ‘Do you remember when we went to London?’ Sid chimes in. Debbie says that they once got a free ride on a London Bus. They charmed the conductors to take them to the end of the line. Sid chuckles. Ernie arrives. He’s like Desperate Dan or Paul Bunyan played by John Wayne. He thuds into a chair tired but content: a man who makes you feel comfortable with few words. Debbie tells me Ernie travelled all over on road trips when he was younger. I look over expectantly. ‘Long time ago’ he says with a wistful smile. He leaves it at that, so I am left to my imagination. Megan’s telephone makes itself heard. Sid says he’s taking me out for lunch as he walks towards the toilet. He’ll be back in a minute after he has checked his ‘numbers’ – Sid is diabetic. Debbie leans in close. ‘So how was the drive?’. I look bemused. ‘Well I was expecting worse.’ I thought he was quite good. ‘Megan won’t go in the car with him’. Sid returns and we head out. The McDonalds and KFCs of Delta slide by in the creeping evening shadows. We pull up at The ABC Country Restaurant. It’s in the shop front of a light industrial complex. A paean to times gone by with its old fashioned napkins and dark wooden furniture that looks too new to conjure up real association with the past. But it does. Maybe an austerity is bestowed upon this place by the inimitable atmosphere of mature folk sharing their years with their offspring. The delicate guitar chords of ‘In My Life’ drift softly above the clink and dink of distant glasses. Out beyond the windows cars rush by in a twilight strobe. I lean on the wall of our cubicle. Sid looks at me with his head cocked and keen eyes. ‘So you’ve enjoyed your trip. How was Oregon?’ I tell him that it was wonderful. That Crater Lake was spectacular. He laughs. I say that I can’t believe it will all be over soon. I spin a fork in my hand and look out into the fading blue sky.I tell him that I can imagine being on the road for ever. Just keep going. Suck up as much as I can. Sid nods in understanding. He has been to so many places himself; all over the North America when he had his own business. But the good times passed and he lost a lot of money. ‘I wish I could still go travelling. I want to come to England again next year. But the health insurance premiums are huge’. He looks past my shoulder. ‘When we came to London years ago my friend and I decided to get a car and drive to Wales. I can’t remember where we went now, but we just picked roads at random’. He tells me about a girl he knew before the war. Before Muriel. They were friends. But he had to leave to join up. When he came back after years on the front he went to her house to look for her but she had gone away. He had thoughts that he might see her again one day. Maybe when he came to England to see my father. Her name was Anne. I tell him I am still looking for a girl. The right girl. Or maybe I am waiting to be found. The food arrives and we eat slowly between stories. Sid leans across the table with a twinkle in his eye. ‘I used to go to this McDonalds restaurant down the road. Same time every day. I would buy a paper and eat my breakfast. I noticed this woman eating there. Always on her own, she was. One day she came over and asked if I minded her sitting next to me. ‘Go right ahead’ I said. Anyway, we got talking and before long we became friends. One day she stopped coming in. She didn’t come in for weeks. No word of warning. I asked the staff if they had seen her but they didn’t know anything. There was another McDonalds across the street. I went over and looked for her after about a month and sure enough, there she was. I never went back again’. I put the steak hanging from the edge of my fork out of its misery. Sid says that he is too old for love. She was too young for him anyway: 53. What’s he going to do with her? ‘I’m in my ‘90’s for god’s sake!’ I tell him that there are pills you can buy. He looks sceptical. He just wants a companion. Sid tells more stories that I have heard before, but the edges are smudged. I can see that he tells them because he has to remember. And I listen because I love to hear them, and because I want mine to be heard when I start racking up his numbers. But I can see that it is getting harder for him. He picks up the bill. I thank him. We head out into the early dark of the evening. Back at the house Debbie and Ernie are downstairs in the studious basement lounge watching NCIS on the TV. It’s about a serial killer who used to be a man: just got back from Bangkok. I snort. That’s where all the sex changes are done, right? Sid shows me the doll’s house he built for Megan.

It’s a work of art over three meticulously crafted storeys. Every light has its own switch. She doesn’t use it anymore. Megan is out in her car collecting a friend. Ernie is relaxing in the recliner with a beer. Debbie sits in quiet contemplation. Megan and her friend arrive. Debbie offers me a lift home. She whispers that Sid can't drive at night. It's too dangerous. He totters out to the front step to watch us go. I tell him that I will try and see him again before I leave. He waves lightly and smiles that toothy smile as we roll out of the driveway. Lights streak by the tinted windows on the highway. Saturday night rush hour. The mountains are black stencils against the deep blue sky. Megan and her friend gossip in the back seats. ‘How was the meal?’ says Debbie. I tell her it was good. I always love to see Sid. He seems to doing well for his age. ‘Did he tell you about Mary?’ I shake my head. ‘She’s this woman that he keeps talking about who he knew before the war. Some girl he dated before he packed out for the service. He only mentioned her in recent years. Next thing I know he’s booked a ticket for England.’ I tell her that he referred to her as Anne. She smiles thinly and hardens her frown as she looks out at the busy road. I say that it must be hard to hear that because of Muriel. ‘When mum died, dad took it remarkably well. He threw himself into all these things he builds.’ I say that it was probably his way of coping with things. We arrive at the apartment. Debbie and I hug awkwardly across the handbrake. It feels strange but good. We are related after all. I’m glad we met. I wave goodbye to Megan and her friend and head out round the back to wiggle my key in the lock. Eventually I get in. I climb the stairs and swing open the apartment door. Patch frantically waves the Wii remote in his T-Shirt and boxer shorts with his legs bare. His eyes are locked on the screen. Total focus. ‘How is Sid?’.