Aubrey McKee Read online

  Aubrey McKee

  A John Metcalf Book

  a novel by

  Alex Pugsley

  Biblioasis

  Windsor, Ontario

  Contents

  Ten Recollections of Theo Jones

  Dr. B

  A Day with Cyrus Mair

  Action Transfers

  The Pigeon Lady

  Crisis on Earth-X

  Fudge

  Wheelers

  Karin

  Gail in Winter

  The Return of Cyrus Mair

  Death by Drowning

  Tempest

  Aubrey McKee

  Copyright

  To those people I’ve met in my life, this book is most ardently dedicated.

  What follows is of my own making. Of course in all parts and ventures I am indebted to those spirits who have gone before—as well as some who move before me now—words and turns of theirs my pages will darken and light up. I am from Halifax, saltwater city, a place of silted genius, sudden women, figures floating in all waters. “People from Halifax are all famous,” my sister Faith has said. “Because everyone in Halifax knows each other’s business.” So those who follow were in our tabloids, our splash pages, and on the covers of our magazines, stories true in every detail to my remembered life. I live with each even now, very now, but as I am reminded that my stay here is only provisional, that someday I may melt into the air, I have decided to make good on a promise once made, to give expression to the lives I encountered, and to make sense of some of the mysteries that seemed to me the city’s truths. Much of this was put in motion before my own appearance and some set in play by me. For on a warm September afternoon, once upon a time, I ran away from my sister’s birthday party and met a kid named Cyrus Mair—

  Ten Recollections of Theo Jones

  In the library of my last school there was a little room that sold second-hand books. It was a pet project of one of the English profs at the university, a German dude who taught a course in Renaissance poetry. He had an office upstairs full of too many books and he used this downstairs room to sell off his doubles, his unwanteds, his overflows, as well as to share his shy love of books and book collecting. Wandering around on an afternoon, I often went in to browse and check new arrivals. The room was organized into expected divisions like British Fiction, American Fiction, Philosophy, Poetry, Drama, Sci-Fi, but on the bottom shelf of the bookcase near the cash box table was an uncared-for section labelled Antiquarian. These were very old books, falling-apart books, and I remember thinking there was something tawdry about this old German trying to fob off volumes missing pages or covers. When I got around to looking through the Antiquarian shelf, I was stunned to see that some of these books were hundreds of years old, that they were artifacts escaped from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most were published in Latin and Italian, but I was intrigued by a coverless third folio of the works of Shakespeare dated 1664. The prof wanted six hundred bucks for it and because five hundred was all I had until end-of-term, the purchase was beyond me. So I put it back on the bottom shelf. But, as I stepped outside into the November afternoon, piles of leaves orange in the sunshine, undergrads tossing Frisbees, an idle, generous idea glimmered in my brain that I might return to this bookshop when I was a millionaire, and that I would buy the folio and give it to the person who introduced me to Shakespeare, a guy who was, in a symbolic way, my first English teacher. As I walked away from that library, I thought of Theo Jones.

  ~

  The first school I went to was a private school in Halifax known variously as the brain school, the fag school, the snob school. When I arrived as a six-year-old it was newly co-ed and my class was twenty boys and four girls. Like all first classrooms, it smelled of pencil shavings, forgotten apples, leftover milk in little milk cartons, and was home to rusty scissors, the crusting rubber tip of a LePages’s school glue. Behind the school was a not-quite regulation soccer field and here the teachers and big kids were a mass of groups and games and incomprehensible enthusiasms. I had a young uncle at the school (my mother’s little brother, eight years older than me), and he allowed me into his recess soccer matches. He and his classmates ran around with their white shirttails flapping out of their regulation grey flannels, their regulation blue blazers hung up in a line on the pointy chinks of the wire-linked fence. My uncle had a rapport with Mr. Jones because Mr. Jones was the coach of the middle school boys’ soccer team. As a preschooler, I’d seen black-and-white photographs of my uncle’s championship team in the yearbook. In the back row, in the centre, surrounded by smiling kids, that was Theo Jones. With his youthful skin, short hair, dark-framed glasses, and skinny mod suit, he looked like the singer in a British Invasion band. But he was for me just another of the mysterious faculty for the older kids, a faculty of eccentric Nova Scotian indigenes—an Acadian lesbian who taught French, a PhD dropout from Dalhousie who taught Physics—and a splurge of Commonwealth types: four Australians, three Scots, but just one Englishman, which was Mr. Jones. “Wait’ll you get Theo,” my uncle said, coming off the soccer field and inflecting the name with a sarcasm beyond my understanding. “He’s a freak-master.”

  ~

  I had to wait seven years to get Theo Jones. Because of family finances and my own personal delinquency, I switched in and out of three other institutions before returning to the brain school. But come eighth grade, or Middle Four as it was called, I was sitting at a desk, waiting with my pubescent classmates for the first English class of the year to begin. It was a square room, with high windows along one wall, small student desks facing the bigger teacher’s desk—a desk exactly normal except for the somewhat curious piece of homemade sculpture behind the teacher’s chair. Which was: a pinned-up scholar’s gown topped by a cow’s skull. To me, the installation was gothic, corvine, purposely theatrical, though my memory might have been influenced by what happened next, which was Mr. Jones’s English-accented voice floating into the class as he walked down the hall. “Now my charms are all o’erthrown,” he recited. “And what strength I have’s mine own.” And on, the entire epilogue from The Tempest, the first text of the year, committed to memory and performed for us as he walked in with a manic, gleeful smile—a smile which, even then, seemed slightly inappropriate. He was a sudden and nervous laugher.

  ~

  Much was committed to memory. Each Thursday afternoon, when English class was held in the wall-to-wall carpeted audiovisual room and called Drama, a student would be marked on his or her memorized recitation. “Little Gidding,” “Kubla Khan,” “Upon Julia’s Clothes,” “The Tyger”—all of these are in my brain today because of Mr. Jones. Drama class was itself memorable, not only because of a dance made locally famous by Sarah Lorcan—Lorcan’s pork and beans dance—but because Andrew Pulsifer, a shy, goofy-toothed student, refused to “sell his chair” to anyone else. For a full twenty-two minutes we sat hopeful, restless, listless, and finally gloomily resigned as this kid, Andrew Pulsifer, his forefinger twitching at his lower lip, stared at the floor, terrified, unable and unwilling to comply with Mr. Jones’s suggestions. Andrew Pulsifer! A stutterer who had only one close friend in class, Ewan Gruber, with whom he devised a race of Zulus they cartooned on scribblers at lunch hour. Andrew really only talked with Ewan, only lost his stutter with Ewan. With everyone else, teachers especially, he was dumbfounded with stage fright. “Andrew,” Mr. Jones said. “Just say, ‘Anybody want to buy a chair?’” Silence. “Andrew? Did you hear me?” Andrew staring at the floor. “Andrew!” And so on. We all recognized a battle of wills. By the end of the class, Andrew endured only to autistically thwart Mr. Jones’s wishes. We, of course, hated Andrew Pulsifer for r
uining a class that was on its way to real entertainment—one that had started with the pork and beans dance!—and we would forever begrudge him for not even trying (“Remember Andrew and the chair?”). But after that class we all wondered at Mr. Jones. He was vexed. He was intense.

  ~

  By this time the school’s dress code had relaxed into hippie outfits. The regulation blue blazers and tunics had given way to tie-dyed shirts, corduroy bell-bottoms, overalls. Mr. Jones now had wavy growing-out hair, frizzy sideburns, turtleneck sweaters, jeans, Chelsea boots. His face was still youthful, but puffy, as if he’d been out drinking with Van Morrison the night before. He looked a bit like Van Morrison, actually, or—as my uncle’s class liked to pass him off as—Tom Jones’s brother. For a while, teenage girls would surprise him, singing choruses from “What’s New Pussycat?” before running down the stairs, ponytails flouncing, their voices vanishing in a Doppler effect of dwindling giggles. In class, his mind was keen with rhyme royals and anapests, sonnets and sestinas, and after school he could be found alone at that teacher’s desk, writing poetry of his own. One winter afternoon, I find him like this, staring out the windows at the darkening sky, underneath his gown and skull. He is working, he tells me, on a long poem. “Miranda,” it’s called. He keeps his drafts and fragments in a wooden box on his desk. The box, as I contemplate it now, seems like a piece of his own personality, so confidential it is, so worn with care. “I’ve been working on it for eight years,” he adds. I nod appropriately but privately I think: Eight years? To a thirteen-year-old it’s more than half a lifetime. On one poem? A poem was homework you did between TV shows. What was it doing taking eight years? I walked away reverential, astonished at Mr. Jones’s conception of his own poetry, yet to my young mind there was something odd and flawed about the enterprise. I didn’t understand Mr. Jones. He was a swaggerer. I had seen him roughhousing with the soccer team and his movements, the way he tried to swipe the ball away from you, his body language suggested that sooner or later we would all relate to him as if he really were a lead singer or rock star. He bugged me.

  ~

  His handwriting was like the handwriting of genius. Quick italic printing with delicate flourishes on the stems of the h’s and d’s. One year, instead of being typed, all the poems in the yearbook (including one of my uncle’s) were handwritten by Mr. Jones and photographically reproduced page by page. His remarks on report cards seemed poems in themselves. I still have a report card from that winter term. The French teacher: “Bien! Mais Aubrey doit travailler un peut plus.” The Physics teacher: “Acts up in class.” And Mr. Jones, the English teacher, in his fluid, precise calligraphy: “A vivid mind slowly coming to grips with itself—Theo.” I was so gladdened. It meant much—that he would think to communicate that to me—even though, as I knew, I was not one of his favourites. He noticed me, liked me, was kind to me, but I was not one of the inner cabal as Jim and Jack Von Maltzahn were, as Sarah Lorcan was. These students converged in the school’s drama club and, under Mr. Jones’s direction, presented plays—Arsenic and Old Lace, Our Town, Under Milk Wood. Play readings and weekend rehearsals were at Mr. Jones’s flat, the top half of a Victorian clapboard house six blocks from the school. There, he and the kids would rehearse and eat hot dogs. That year Sarah Lorcan was cast as Gwendolen Fairfax in The Importance of Being Earnest. She was a modest kid, an ash-blonde of demure looks and storybook smiles. How can I say this next part? For a kid, the world seems full of too many people and not enough stories. Mr. Jones’s world was full of stories and poems and he looked to you, as he looked to me that day after school, with one of his smiles, to see how many stories and poems you knew and if, possibly, you might come to know others together. That almost says it right. I could say he believed in the wizardry and collaboration of literature, but that sounds different from what it was. Anyway. What exactly happened next no one knows, except, perhaps the feature players themselves. But on a Monday morning in March, two weeks before Earnest was supposed to open, the school got a call from Dr. Lorcan, an orthopedic surgeon in the city. He wanted to discuss Mr. Jones’s rehearsals. It seems Mr. Jones had invited Dr. Lorcan’s daughter to what she’d understood to be a group rehearsal but which was, in Mr. Jones’s mind at least, an opportunity for something more intimate. Before noon that same Monday, the entire school knew about it, talked about it, joked about it. It was a gasper. “You hear about Mr. Jones? He chased Sarah around his apartment. She had to fight him off.” Another girl, Didi Fitzpatrick, came forward with a story of her own. So did a girl on the volleyball team. There seemed to be a girl in every grade. Mr. Jones disappeared from school that Wednesday afternoon. For the next week, English class became a reading period invigilated by a depressed gym teacher in a red Adidas tracksuit, who frowned into a crossword puzzle book. Another week went by. Then a mimeographed memo was tacked up on the empty bulletin board beside the doors to the audiovisual room. “A Celebration of Mr. Jones,” it read, and detailed the order of events for Mr. Jones’s retirement service.

  ~

  What a strange assembly it was. The senior class boycotted the event. So did the class above mine. But I sat on the carpet in the same spot where, just two months before, I’d watched Andrew Pulsifer refuse to sell his chair. This time I listened as Mr. Dodds, the Irish headmaster, a portly smiler and a fake, improvised unbearably garrulous remarks about Mr. Jones’s legacy at the school. Mr. Jones sat—fidgeting, exasperated, tortured. “Oh no, Mr. Dodds,” said Mr. Jones, his voice becoming complicated with grown-up emotions. “No, no,” he said, standing up and waving his hands to stop the proceedings. “I’m not going to do this. Not this.” And he left the room, his once tremendous laugh strained, weakened, not equal to the situation. It was horrible.

  ~

  And so the brain school, the fag school, the snob school lost an English teacher. We were confused and slightly panicked, and in our panic we allowed Mr. Jones to become a joke. We were cruel. “Never guess who I saw at the movie.” “Who?” “Theo.” “Who was he there with?” “By himself.” “Oh Theo. Poor Theo. What a Theo.” The very name became a quip, a punchline, and Mr. Jones a bozo. A few years later, I went to a public high school and became a dope dealer. I was a stoner kid with a pencil case full of joints I sold three for five. The summer of Grade 11, me and another kid are drifting through the old campus of Dalhousie University when we see a sign, Auditions Today, on a chair bracing open a door. For a laugh, as a joke, because we’re high, we descend into a basement room. Mr. Jones and a gypsy woman in a head scarf are behind a makeshift table holding tryouts for a Shakespeare play. We ask if we can audition and, appropriately, zingingly, I recite “Kubla Khan” as if I am a hallucinating weirdo. That night, a woman calls my house and leaves a message. I am invited for a call-back. But I do not go and I never call back. My mother, however, a professional acting type herself, sneaks out one rainy October to see the closing night of Pier One Theatre’s production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. “Uneven,” is her one word review, adding later that Mr. Jones was “most impressive.” He both directed and starred in the show and I imagined him as Prospero, his sideburns immense, his hair powdered white, in the wings watching with excited eyes that first storm scene, Ariel flaming amazement, the fly loft full of thunderclaps. “What cares these roarers for the name of king?”

  ~

  “It’s a shame,” my mother would say afterwards whenever Mr. Jones’s name was mentioned. “A tragedy in a way. He really was a fine English teacher.” In the next years, Theo Jones fell away from the life of the city. There were rumours he was supply teaching in Cape Breton, that he’d returned to England, to Leeds or Yorkshire or someplace, that he’d there procured a manual labour job or some gig as a groundskeeper. One night, when my family is watching a favourite British TV show, The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin, we see Leonard Rossiter in disguise as a sewer worker. In one long, soundless sequence, he filtrates a sewer for dead rats. “Look,” I say to my fami
ly. “It’s Theo.” And we laugh, for the guy does look like Theo, in the exaggerated wig and fake teeth, and it seems condign to our minds that an Englishman in a torpor would derelict into a job as a rat catcher.

  ~

  Halifax is a city of bars—taverns, clubs, cabarets. The taverns close near midnight, the clubs at one. But last call in the cabarets isn’t till three-thirty so the university kids, the secretaries, the sailors on shore leave, the divorcées, the Caper Bretoners in town for the weekend, and anyone who doesn’t want to go home is pulled, like ions in a tractor beam, to the big cabaret on the side of Citadel Hill, to a pleasure dome called The Palace, a live-music venue and last-chance saloon. “Two people enter,” as one of my sisters jokes, “one couple leaves.” The last year I live in Halifax, the winter I decide to leave the city for good, I arrive at the Palace much more drunk than sober. I am twenty-two years old and grief-struck by the recent death of a friend. So I stare at the giant video screens on the walls. I am watching the music video for The Police’s “Wrapped Around Your Finger,” sort of trying to figure out how Sting can be dancing in slow motion in a maze of tall candlesticks while his lips are in sync with the song, which is not in slow motion, when I become aware of someone beside me also watching Sting. It’s Theo Jones, holding a beer to his chest, and swaying slightly. He is past forty now, but looks roughly as he once did, though puffier and shorter. “Mr. Jones,” I say, companionably, raising my beer toward him. But my gesture of respect and goodwill does nothing. Theo Jones only stares at me with a mean, contemptuous smile, as if he has heard all the things we have said about him, as if he has heard all the jokes. He stares at me as if to say, “You don’t fool me, McKee, you smug little punk, smoking your drugs and mocking your betters, but when it gets rough you’ll retreat into the coze and comfort of your South End family.” And I was ashamed. Because in my heart I knew he was right.