Excerpt

The Gift Child

Days after Graham was reported missing, Stan and I found ourselves at the Halifax cop shop. This I know because I wrote it down. That is one of the things I try to do to stay on track with this memoir. I write things down before my brain alters or deletes them.

When we arrived, teens were being given a tour of the station. They were members of a boxing club, the tour intended to keep them on the right side of the law. All were wearing track suits, one with a Canada flag. And then there was a burst of noise when a cop slapped handcuffs on their coach, and the coach, a senior with a nose broken more times than my heart, exclaimed, “You got me, copper.”

The boxers folded in two from laughter.

And the coach added, “A nice gold medal for the copper.”

I wondered if the teens had ever seen a James Cagney movie, Cagney who had specialized in sardonic gangsters, but also played a hard-luck boxer who lost his sight. As well as Tom Richards, the fictitious newspaperman who quit the business to become a vagabond.

There are days when I try to remember why we all thought it was so important — the news business — more important than sleep disorders or anniversaries. I try to remember what it was like to be that invested in a job one rung below vagabond.

In the waiting room were wickets manned by commissionaires dealing with people questioning parking tickets or reporting fender benders. One man was wearing, instead of a hat, the liner from a construction helmet.

The boxers moved to another room, taking the levity with them. We were seated next to a man who looked as if he had been on a two-week bender, a ruin of a man reeking of piss and rum, a man who decided to unload his life’s philosophy on Stan.

“If I could be born again, I’d be twenty per cent smarter or twenty per cent stupider,” he slurred to Stan, whom he recognized. “I am in a fucken no man’s land. I’m not smart enough to become a crypto billionaire — I don’t even know what the fuck it is. Do you? Does anyone in this fucken room know what crypto is? Okay. Nobody. Thought so. And I am not stupid enough to enjoy the things people like him enjoy.”

He pointed at a desk sergeant, who was biting a pen like it was corn on the cob.

“Well,” said Stan enigmatically, “don’t sell yourself short.”

“Thank you, Stan,” he slurred too sincerely, and then, like most drunks, would not let it go: “You see what I’m sayin’, doncha?”

“Of course,” agreed Stan, who was wearing his Order of Canada pin.

Leaning forward, the drunk forced his eyes to focus. “I mean, look at him!” Pointing again at the sergeant. Stan turned his head ever so slightly to look.

Stan had been invited to the station because he was the person who reported Graham missing. He had filed the report after Graham did not answer his landline at 14 Cavalier for three days straight.