4 On the way down to the Ship, I spot a kingfisher on the phone line in the rain.

I confess to Max that I'm upset. And I'm not sure what it is. I resent the little fights Lydia and I have. She's late or she gets angry if I peel potatoes in her sink or she says I dont instigate evenings out.

He says pa.s.sive-aggressive behaviour is insidious. He says, You two look so good together.

He remembers seeing me after we'd come back from Toronto. Asked what I was doing. And I said, Falling in love. Max: It sounded beautiful.

He says, Hank put faith in Audrey.

But Hank left in the end.

Max: And then he died. On New Year's Day.

I am drinking blackberry sodas. I am eschewing alcohol. Max asks if I've ever eaten the testes of urchins.

Max: Use scissors, cut them open, wash away the stuff, get to these orange sacs, about five to a teaspoon? Urchins are hermaphrodites. Eat the testes raw. Taste of the sea. You know that taste on the sh.o.r.e? Or when you have cod right off the water? Something that gets lost after a couple of hours. Whelks.

He pauses.

I've eaten whelks. I've eaten periwinkles steamed. I've been eating a lot of sea c.r.a.p. Milt from herring.

Alex is looking great. I tell this to Max and he raises an eye.

The truth is, Lydia loves me. When we fight, she is upset that I'm hurting her. She's angry because I'm an a.s.shole. It's true she feels she's done nothing wrong, but her anger blooms out of love. Whereas I see I've upset her, and I'm afraid of Lydia's anger, but I never blame her for the argument. I try to see where I went wrong. What I resent is that she never does this, sees where she's wrong.

5 Vinyl siding is going up in strips. Why. Why not a vat of liquid plastic that you ooze over houses. I would like that. I'm not opposed to plastic. But if it stood for what it was and did not pretend to be wood. If you could be proud to call it genuine plastic. You start from the roof with a nozzle. You mask off the windows. Ooze the hot plastic over roof and sides. Nudge it into soffits. Encase the house in plastic. It would look like snow houses. The smooth rounded surface of Gaudi architecture. This would appeal.

6 Oliver says the fights he had with Maisie eroded the beachhead of love between them. They'd apologize, but he needed good times to restore the love. Whereas Maisie became immediately in love with him again. So she could afford to fight more often than him. She was hurt, too, when he told her about the beachhead eroding. The fights never diminished her love for him.

7 Lydia has painted her cupboards a light orange. She is mixing a bowl of vegetables. She is cutting carrots. Her rings sc.r.a.pe against the stainless-steel bowl. She says she'll just be a minute. She has flour on her sleeves.

Lydia is chopping the carrot very slowly. The wind gently lifts the back end of her house, just a fraction of an inch, but it lifts and cracks. I have boots on and they stamp on the linoleum. The linoleum is too soft for my boots. The phone rings and Lydia is waiting for me to grab for it. But I dont. She is supposed to be finding the books I left here. She grabs the phone with its long cord, she needs to dip under the stretched-out cord to look on top of her fridge for the books. Her hair gets caught in the cord, and for a moment, she balances on bent knees, trying to untangle herself, and she blames me for the tangle. Oh hi, she says.Yes. Sweet on the phone.

She finds the book under a chair.

Do you have the dust jacket?

Oh, she says, covering the mouthpiece. I took it off because I didnt want to tear it.

Well, at least it's not torn.

I dont know where I put it.

8 Max serves me up borscht made with Daphne's beets. There's homemade cornbread and mint ice cream. We drive Daphne to work at emerge. Then we make our racquetball appointment. We're cramming in nights out before the baby's due. My wrist is getting stronger, I'm returning his serve.

Outside by Max's truck a drunk man asks for a ride home.

I lives in the senior citizen's home on Thorburn Road. It's way before you get to Vatcher's, he says. I'm in some pain. Pain for the past three years. I dont know what I'm doing in the home, I'm only fifty-three. My wife is on a heating pad eighteen hours a day. I try to have s.e.x but it hurts too much, but I does it for her. My G.o.d, I thought the pain would stop after what I've been drinking and I had some pills too. All kinds, but it won't go away.

Max looks over at me.

Drunk man: Everything goes right through me. Maybe you'd best take me to the hospital. That's where I'm gonna end up. Take me in to emergency. I'm real sorry about this. What's your name?

Gabriel, and this is Max.

Good to meet you, Gabe. Max, good to meet you too. I'm Alphonse Tucker. See my thumb, I can't move it. Yes, in through this way.

Max idles the truck as I take Alphonse by the elbow and help him through the In Only. He knows the way. Daphne Yarn is down the hall. I nod to Alphonse. I say, He's been drinking and he says he's taken some pills.

Daphne: You got an MCP card?

No, but I'm in your computer. Alphonse Tucker.

We take chairs beside the gla.s.s wicket. Daphne says, 4 Wigmore Court?

Whatever, he says.

He searches through his pockets, pulling out pills. The pills are small and blue or large and yellow. The yellow ones are marked Dupont. He cups them, slowly, to his mouth and I put a hand to his wrist.

Now, Mr Tucker, says Daphne. You won't try that again, will you?

He clenches his fist. He will not relinquish the pills. Daphne stands, says, Put them in my pocket here and you can have them when you leave.

I'm surprised that he almost falls for this. He moves his hand over to her pocket but then retreats.

Do what you like then, she says.

He tries to swallow them again. Daphne rakes the pills from his hand.

I say, I think you'll be okay now, Alphonse.

It's good of you to do this Gabe, he says in my general direction.

Daphne asks his date of birth.

1944 That means I'm twenty-seven.

I'll see you, Phonse.

See you, my son.

I wave to Daphne.

Max and I play snooker and meet Oliver. There is no animosity in the men. Oliver says, Did you know Dali experimented with his diet he took notes to make the perfect s.h.i.t?

Max says, Do you know why s.h.i.t is tapered?

Max answers his own question: If it wasnt tapered your a.s.shole would slam shut. He laughs. We used to say that all the time when we were kids.

I go to the washroom. I pee red. Oliver is at the next urinal.

I'm peeing red!

He says, Did you have any beets today?

9 This is my last barbecue of the year. I've decided to invite both Maisie and Oliver. Oliver has brought salmon. It slips off the spatula onto the dirt path. Oliver looks at it. Then grinds the fish into the dirt with his heel.

Wilf, drunk, leans forward and slips off his chair. His head above the table, making his point, then keels over sideways onto his back, stretching his neck up, still talking, and making perfect sense. He's a man for whom liquor affects his body first.

10 I walk to Lydia's in the rain. Leaves stain the sidewalks almost like a spore print from mushrooms. The trees tight with cl.u.s.ters of dogberries. It's going to be a hard winter. The silver dollars have turned brown, and you can peel them now. Inside is rice paper. The furnace cut in this morning and I have hauled out my portable heater. I have lived ninety-five days on the heat of the sun alone.

I get a fire going using coal. A little drunk on Scotch as Lydia watches me. As if a foggy light, a heavy air, makes it hard to blink. I read aloud an interview with Gordon Lish. Lydia has made a steak in peppercorns, mustard, cream and white wine, garlic. Can you light some candles?

Me: Where will I find a match?

I dont know, you'll have to imagine where they might be. Every interaction drains me of goodness.

11 Me: I was mailing something. And I got the paper. Lydia: What were you mailing?

It was an application.

A what?

There was a job.

Great.

It's to write a book and you get to travel and interview seniors and I think you design the book too I'd love to get it, and it pays twenty-five thousand.

Wow You'll be, like, closing in on fifty thousand then.

Yeah. I'll have to find a woman who wants seventy-five thousand.

Sure.

Does that p.i.s.s you off?

I think it's kind of mean.

I think it's mean to keep mentioning fifty thousand.

It was a joke.

You keep mentioning it.

I never knew it bothered you.

I told you I didnt like it.

Well, I'll never ever mention it again.

You know, you can be spiteful.

Say it.

That's all I want to say. You should say it.

I've already said it.

You dont want to elaborate.

I think you get the picture.

Well, let's forget it.

12 I am feeling rather spiritual. That I'd like to spend more time alone. Read books I hear are good. Study and write. There is no one else I want to be with. But I could grow into being a man who can't live with a woman, no matter how accommodating the woman is. That is the worst, when you see lost men. Oliver is a little lost.

Boyd Coady tells me his parents live in Eastport. Theyre in their eighties with no electricity. They have an outhouse. His grandfather is still alive, at 109. He had twelve children, and only Boyd's father is still around.

Boyd: Grampa says if Dad dies, he'll have to go cut his own wood this winter.

13 For thanksgiving I'm invited to Lydia's parents'. While Lydia pours the gravy into a gla.s.s jar, her mother is plonking in three ice cubes, to help separate the fat. Her brother is sorting the coats and boots in the porch and saying, Let's get this place spotless. Lydia carries a bag of garbage out to the garage, and then returns with her boots still on. Her sister is laying plates in the oven to warm. Mr Murphy says, You want a drink, Gabriel? And he pours a generous gla.s.s of rum with orange juice. I'm putting on the cabbage. There's one two three, nine for supper. Tinker b.u.mbo is snoring on the loveseat.

Mr Murphy: It calls for salt.

Lydia: It do boy, it do.

Theyve invited me for supper but I'm brokenhearted. Too many fights with Lydia. And they love me and I love them. That's what breaks my heart. Theyre a good family and I'm losing them.

14 I look outside and focus on the twenty-two black wires strung on the telephone pole in the yard. If youre looking down Long's Hill at the burgundy and scarlet and mustard and rust of Signal Hill, then the twenty-two wires converge and disrupt the hill in a random graph of thin crescents of colour.

This pole is leaning a little, carrying the weight of electricity and communication. A thirty-foot timber cut from the Gander region. It stands just outside the rebuilt Chinese and fish-and-chips restaurants. Where they sell laminated placemats of the Great Fire of 1993. The Old Big R engulfed in Halloween nighttime flame. Fire licked in ladders up phone poles on Harvey Road, transformers exploded. In the grocery store fire burnt turkeys in freezers. And last night, on the rough parking lot that once was the grocery store, I had a fight with Lydia.We were sitting in Jethro, discussing breaking up. At one point, a point where we've all been, where you are exhausted with your predicament, willing to take any ship, I realized Jethro was sitting in the aisle for fresh fruit and frozen products.

15 We've had our last fight. It's finished. I hate her. Let me explain why I hate Lydia Murphy. Because she says that I'm mean-spirited. That I'm a p.r.i.c.k. That I dont admit the real motives for my actions. That I won't apologize. If only I'd apologize.

Nothing I do seems to make Lydia laugh. She will laugh at Max in a glowing love. Maisie laughs. Wilf will take my questions in wonder. But Lydia shuts me down. No, she'll say, that's not right. No one wants to eat that gravy with fat in it. But the truth is, only she doesnt. I try using the turkey baster (we're waiting on the gravy) and she tells me not to. I've asked her to take care of the gravy and she goes off with Wilf. Later, she yells at me, you didnt say it had to be done now.

We play 120s and she takes sixty points off my score when I went thirty for sixty. Instead of laughing at my bad luck in a good way, she's mean and punishes. When I ask about the sixty points she isnt sure.You just like being mean to me, I say. Then take it back, she says. Take it, take it. She is stern in front of the others. When I ask if saying hearts is strategic the ace of hearts becomes the ace of trump, reducing trumps by one Lydia says, automatically and impatiently, Doesnt matter. She wins, but do I care? It's not with joy.

We call a taxi to go downtown, but the cab driver says he won't take five. I'll walk, I say. And Max and Maisie and Wilf say, we'll walk too. It's only Lydia in the cab. And I see her sitting there in fury.

What's tiresome in all this is that I will explain why I was upset and it's as though I havent said a word. Lydia returns to her original argument. And, always, it's me who is wrong. I will apologize for hurting her she expresses hurt through anger.

We look at each other, bent on fury and exhausted. And resigned. There is even a touch of love, perhaps sadness, when we agree we should part ways. It's too much anger. I'd rather be on my own.

16 Thinking that when people break up, they should have to write out a statement about their feelings of what happened, what went wrong, who was at fault, and how they feel. Purely subjective. These statements should be kept together on file down at the archives for anyone to look up. Both for curiosity and for personal interest (you can look up the history of a man or woman youre interested in seeing).

17 The police invite Lydia and me to come by. We walk over to the station. The station is behind a doughnut shop, but the police, we hear, are not allowed to use that shop.