Van in Love

VAN IN LOVE

by Steve Wheeler

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Steve Wheeler

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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VAN IN LOVE

Chapter One

The clock at the Aberdeen train station moved toward the four. Van sat in the plastic chair reading the paper. He had stopped at the pub across the street for a pint before he came here. The pubs in train stations were notoriously expensive and boring.

Gloria had a few business appointments to keep while they waited so she dropped him off in the high street.

Alex and his new wife, Belinda, would arrive on the four o’clock train from London.

Van got up and walked out onto the platform. He paced the length of the station thinking about Alex’s arrival. Whatever was going to happen, would happen.

Gloria had agreed that Alex could come for a visit when he had requested it. She knew that the kids had worked on him. Maybe he had mellowed with age. Not like a fine wine, more like a fine whiskey.

At least it would be over soon, Van thought, one way or another.

Aberdeen was called the granite city because of the rock beneath it. The North Sea swept it constantly with rain and wind. There were days of warm sunshine, but they were few and far between and never without the wind. It was Van’s theory that the pubs in Aberdeen seemed more welcoming and warm because of the weather.

Van had only really seen Union Street where it met George Street and its nearby pubs on their regular visits from the northwest.

Gloria insisted on doing business in Aberdeen rather than in Glasgow even though the latter city seemed closer on a map to where they lived. She had once left him at a pub in the suburbs which contained Americans and Canadians. After that he insisted on being left in downtown Aberdeen. It wasn’t that he had anything against the North Americans, he was one himself, so was Gloria. It was that the Aberdonian accents sounded more like they belonged in the pubs.

Van watched the clock for a few seconds then turned toward the pub door. He wasn’t nervous about the visit, but it was unsettling to contemplate. He would never have done what Alex was doing, visiting the former wife who had taken half a million of his dollars, without vengeance in his heart.

Alex must have changed.

CHAPTER TWO

Van Mcfeat walked down Somerset Street to Elgin Street where he turned right. There was no use taking a taxi to the hotel. He had done it before on bad afternoons but it was nice today. A ten minute walk might do him good, though he doubted it. There wasn’t much good a brisk walk or even the weather could do for Van. He was depressed. Not so much depressed as melancholy.

It was the opposite sex which depressed him. He was on the verge of becoming abstinent. It seemed to Van that he suffered from an ailment which other men envied, but didn’t understand.

He thought of it as an ailment now, in his fortieth year. It was that he was very attractive to women, but females were the source of all of his problems. It was a classic case which demonstrated that the source of all suffering is desire. You are locked into your suffering and your pleasures are the seal. Van liked Leonard Cohen.

Van was a drummer in the house band at the Lord Elgin Hotel. He stopped at the little music shop on Elgin Street, bought a pair of drum sticks. It was more of a habit than a need. Van hadn’t broken any sticks for years. The lounge music didn’t often cause broken drum sticks. It just made him feel better to buy sticks when something was bothering him.

The wind was picking up as he made his way north on Elgin. Autumn was in full swing, winter was approaching. Yellow, red and brown leaves blew everywhere. Soon the wind would be cold and the snow would drive into his face when he walked to work. He decided that he would again use cabs to get to work when winter arrived.

Van had grown his hair since moving back to Ottawa. It was short when he arrived from Vancouver. He was confused and running from his past then.

He was tall and had inherited his father’s dark, good looks. His long eyelashes were noticed by all women, even the ones who weren’t looking.

The lounge where he played now, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club was also known as Wrinkles by the musicians. The managers, Sally and Peewee, didn’t care about his hair, they admired his uncanny ability to draw women. Sally was as sexually aggressive as any man Van knew. She was after the same women who were hanging around the band and being pursued by Peewee.

Van stopped in front of a bookstore. Pictures of mountain highways always caught his attention. He looked at the travel guide to BC which was displayed in the window. The cover was a picture of a highway winding through a spectacular pass in the Rockies. Addy and Joan came to mind. They were his parents. They died on a mountain highway in the Rockies.

Addy and Joan had come from Scotland when Van was still an infant, the youngest of their three children. The others, Brendan and Silk, were little kids, off on a great adventure. Addy and Joan had spent some years with New Agers where they grew giant vegetables in sand, where Ian Anderson was starting a fish farm. They saw Canada as a good alternative to Britain, a place of better opportunities for their children. As soon as they arrived in Montreal from Glasgow, the family took a train to Newfoundland. It was from St. John’s that they began their journey across Canada.

Addy and Joan led a charmed life in some ways. Van didn’t remember their first years in Newfoundland because he was so young. From what others recounted and what he saw of his parents later, Van understood that Addy and Joan somehow always managed to find work to survive.

His earliest clear memories were of waking up on the floor in the back of the van with his brother and sister. Van’s parents slept in the fold down beds Addy had built into the van. At that point, the family was travelling to Nova Scotia where they lived in the Annapolis Valley for a few years.

The first schools in Van’s life were a succession of teachers, friends, parents, and playing a lot. It was an interesting, if not an educational time. Van figured that he learned more at home from Joan and Addy than he did in school. The music held it all together.

Addy and Joan always supplemented their jobs with the music lessons they gave. Van knew that Joan’s insistence on her children learning the fundamentals of music had something to do with his attraction to the drums. They played old folk songs and sea shanties on a variety of instruments. They performed in legions halls, community centres and bars. At first, they were poorly paid and played often just for the fun of it. Later, when they got to be better known, they made good money in bars and taverns.

Addy was a good carpenter to begin with. He had his joiner papers from Britain, preferred small private contracts to the big construction jobs which were paid by the hour. He made more money on the big union jobs, but Addy often came home to their rented house shaking his head. The big jobs were wasteful and ripoffs for the poor suckers who would be buying the new homes or apartments they were building. Addy would take their money and do the work, the corruption surprising him at times, but he didn’t like it. They bought Addy’s body, but not his mind.

Addy helped a lot of old and vulnerable people with his carpentry skills. Sometimes, Joan would have to reprimand him, remind him, that he had a family of his own to care for. He would bring home good pay cheques for a while after that. When Joan wasn’t looking after the kids, she had some secretarial skills she’d use to make money.

The fellow workers who did visit the bars on the weekends when they were playing, nodded their heads as if they’d known all along that Addy and Joan were talented old hippies from a bygone era.

Addy always had long hair and a beard, but his natural Scottish personality enabled him to get along with the most macho of the macho men on his jobs. All of the ultra macho men who bothered to stop by to see Addy play, looked surprised and admiring. Van remembered big, tough looking men gulping their quarts, staying quiet, hypnotized, when Addy sang or got into one of his weekend afternoon at the pub jams on his acoustic guitar.

Joan accompanied Addy on her guitar and she sang. The old songs of Scotland were popular with the Maritime crowds. She looked pretty and wild on the weekends in the pub, but she fooled them all when she went to work.

Joan was regarded as a good, straight, hardworking, conscientious mother of three in all of her jobs. All of which she was, but underneath was the rebellion and distrust of the system which she took for granted. Joan was an old hippie with a Merry Prankster sort of attitude. She, like Addy, was a flower child at heart. If they really wanted to know who she was, if they bothered to look deeply enough, she was there.

Van’s family moved on through New Brunswick to Quebec City which Addy and Joan loved but where they couldn’t make money except by busking. They viewed busking as an honourable activity but didn’t see it as a very good way to provide for their kids.

The separatists in the province had a grip on power. There was nothing anyone could do to make money without speaking French. The famous sign law was a constant source of irritation to Addy who knew people from all over the world.

He declared, many times, that this was the only place in the world where it was illegal to put up an English sign. Addy had travelled in the military and the merchant marine before he met Joan and he thought that the sign law was unproductive to the point of stupidity. How was any government, especially the one in Quebec, supposed to control the thinking of the people with such a silly law? The separatists themselves went on and on about freedom and then tried to enforce a law like this. It was sheer lunacy to Addy. To him, it was Monty Python in French.

Joan accepted the natural dumbness of governments and zealots of all types. Van inherited his passivity from Joan. She had endless conversations with Jehovah’s Witnesses who always ended up leaving her a Watchtower tract