Read Online Double Talk by Patrick Warner - Free Book Online

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    I sat at the counter, sipping coffee and taking in the view from the kitchen window while he dished up the breakfast. The back garden was overgrown. Its heart was a patch of bare earth with bumps that once might have been drills. One particularly bumpy spot sported a plastic trident that still held between its tines a weather-bleached seed card. At the end of the garden was a shed with a swayback roof. Through the partially open door I could see the back wheel of a bicycle. The garden’s perimeter was marked by a wooden fence, one section of which had collapsed and was hidden by tall grass. My father would have been appalled by the neglect. Beyond the garden was a large parking lot which Wallace told me belonged to the Grace Hospital.
    Twenty minutes later we were driving together through the streets of St. John’s. My heart was pounding with excitement. Newly sprung from the purgatory of Bridgetown, I looked out on this novel world with eyes wide open. I wanted only to prolong the experience of newness. I wanted to be refreshed by it, and in return, wanted to view it uncritically, to see it only in the terms it wished to present itself, wanting to keep at bay the thing that sooner or later would stick in my craw.
    Marvellous were the cars and pick-up trucks, the makes of which eluded me. Marvellous was Wallace’s Chevrolet El Camino Conquista. There were no Chevrolets in Ireland. Until that moment, the name had existed for me only in rock ‘n’ roll songs. Marvellous were the houses — I had never before seen a wooden house except in films — marvellous their sloped roofs with dormer windows, their lack of eavestroughing, marvellous their triple and quadruple colour schemes: blood red clapboard, black door, blue window frames; mint green clapboard, cream soffits, orange window sashes. Everything was fascinatingly different. And yet, we had not driven six blocks — marvellous the concept of the city block — when I noticed that these “jellybean houses,” as Wallace called the colourful ones, were the exception. Many more were painted a monotone camouflage green or a faded maroon, and many were so rundown they looked like glorified sheds.
    I was a bit shocked, as well, at the state of the roads: potholes everywhere, which Wallace was having fun avoiding. “They’re called Dottie’s potties, after our eccentric mayor,” he said. I noticed that whole sections of footpath tilted upward or sunk into the ground. “Frost heave,” Wallace grunted when I asked him what caused it.
    There were few pedestrians about, despite the fact that it was sunny and warm. The only person I saw appeared to be dragging a dog which had decided to sit down and not get up again. Where were the crowds? Where were the high-rises, the glass skyscrapers like those I had caught sight of in Boston? Driving across Harvey Road, I had my first view of the downtown, the descending flat tar roofs of row houses stepping all the way down to the harbour.
    All the more refreshing then was the majestic façade of the Basilica of St. John the Baptist and, across the road from it, a sudden and breathtaking vista — I had no idea that I would be living so close to the ocean. Now that was exotic. Bridgetown was forty miles from the nearest salt water. My mind filled with images of childhood Sundays spent by the seaside: the sandy beach at Old Head, where I feasted on cold roast chicken and ham and watched my father battle his aversion to sand, then afterwards, obeying my mother’s stricture not to swim for an hour after eating, paddled in an Atlantic Ocean warmed by the Gulf Stream. I imagined such beaches nearby, but golden beaches where topless Canadian girls sunbathed until they turned the colour of hazelnut shells. When I shared my vision with Wallace he laughed out loud and slapped me on the knee. “All the beaches around here are shingle beaches,” he said. “Besides, the