Read Online Once We Had a Country by Robert McGill - Free Book Online Page B

gets here—”
    “Yeah, well, that’s the other thing. If he doesn’t show up next week, Pauline and I are going back to Boston.” In the mud room, she scoops up Pauline and carries her outside.
    Neither Fletcher nor Maggie looks at the other. Brid’s cigarette burns in the ashtray between them. He reaches out and mashes it.
    “Thanks for all your help there.” He speaks the words with a smile, but she can see that he’s hurt.
    “I said we should go ahead with it, didn’t I?”
    He lowers his gaze, then pushes his chair back and leaves the room. A few seconds later she hears his footsteps on the stairs. She can’t believe it. Instead of following, she snatches up a broom and dedicates herself to sweeping the kitchen.
    From the second floor there’s banging and the scraping of heavy objects. It’s too much. Finally she goes up, telling herself she has to vacuum the hall, and discovers he has shut himself in the unfinished playroom where Pauline found the dead birds. He has even taped a piece of paper to the door that reads
PLEASE STAY OUT
. Fine, then; she’ll go back downstairs and leave him to it.
    An hour passes before she hears the door open, then the sound of his footsteps. When he appears, his torso and arms are speckled with white paint and his face gives no sign of anger.
    “Come with me,” he says. “I want to show you something.”
    Upstairs, the sign has been removed from the door. The space inside is empty aside from an assortment of painting supplies, along with a card table in the middle that holds some large, angular object hidden by a bedsheet. Three of the room’s walls are still covered in green wallpaper, but the fourth is bright white.
    “Why did you paint just one wall?”
    “Close your eyes,” he says. When she does, she hears him switch off the overhead light, and then a motor grinds into life. When she looks, a beam of light is crossing the room, illuminating eddies of dust. On the newly painted wall is an image of Fletcher, supine in the outbuilding he’s taken to calling the barracks, lifting and lowering a barbell above his chest. There’s no sound except the clack of film through the projector. She remembers framing this scene through the camera’s viewfinder, yet still she isn’t quite able to accept its return in colour and big as life.
    “What do you think?” he says, arms circling her waist.“It’s your own projection room. Now we can watch everything you shoot. We’ll make you our documentarian.”
    “It’s wonderful,” she replies, and means it. But then she thinks of Brid and feels queasy. “This was supposed to be a playroom,” she points out. “Brid won’t be happy—”
    “It can be a playroom too.”
    Maggie’s eyes remain focused on the wall, watching the past version of him as he shows Pauline how to make a muscle. When the film ends, Fletcher goes to the projector and flips a switch so that it begins to run backward. He grins as, on the wall, he and Pauline start once more into their motions, now reversed.
    “I thought you were angry with me,” admits Maggie.
    He squeezes her tight. “I’m sorry things have been heavy. You’re so good to me. I don’t have the means to repay your goodness.”
    He speaks so softly and with such affection, it takes her a moment to wonder why he shouldn’t have the means. She tries to look him in the eyes, but he avoids her gaze.
    “Things are never going to work, are they?” he says. “Christ, I don’t want to be hiring Jamaicans, but what else can we do? Ask my father to fork out more cash? Maybe Brid’s right—I’m just a rich boy playing up here to avoid the war.”
    “Forget Brid,” she replies. The harshness with which she says it seems to disconcert him.
    “Oh, it’s not her fault. She comes from a really fucked-up family. That sort of thing messes with your head.”
    “You ever think—” She tries to sound lighthearted. “You ever think she has a crush on you?”
    “A crush!” he says,