A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [123]
“What are you thinking about?” asked Mira, leaning forward to shake his arm gently. “Where have you gone?”
“Nothing,” said Jerome. “Nowhere.” But he knew exactly where he had gone: back to the disappeared world of his childhood, the place he couldn’t stop revisiting. Quite often, in recent months, when he had been attempting to complete some ordinary task, he would visualize the long dark avenue of an airshaft he had peered down as a child. Never permitted to enter the mine itself, he had found the shaft housed in a small unlocked building just beyond the perimeter of the site. Terror-stricken and fascinated, he would slip through the door and gaze into a depth of blackness, experience the warm draft on the skin of his face, the pull of the underworld.
His father would have engineered that shaft, all other ventilation shafts, as well as the shaft that was the route to the underground. The tunnels that followed the threads of gold that branched like a central nervous system through the solid yet vulnerable rock would have been designed by him as well.
Those were the good years, years when alcohol was a companion, an equal, not a master. Everyone was young; the northern Ontario settlement was a wilderness adventure, the mine a miracle unfolding so far from the rules of ordinary life that no rigid social order was born in its wake. Uneducated immigrant miners and labourers mixed with the collection of necessary professionals assembled by the company. Bosses strolled through the underground labyrinth with the men. A pipefitter might become godfather to the son of an accountant. The doctor might serve as best man at the wedding of a sump-pump operator. Legendary parties celebrated such weddings and christenings (the dog sled delivering the whisky driven by the mine manager himself) or bloomed on nights when there might be nothing more to celebrate than a record freezing temperature or the fact that the mail had finally got through after a blizzard.
And in the midst of all this there was Jerome’s handsome, laughing father, architect of the underground: a singer, a dancer, the last man still dancing at dawn.
Jerome had but the faintest of memories concerning this period, but his mother had resurrected fragments of the narrative after his father’s death. The time his father had insisted that all the girls at the brothel attend the manager’s Christmas party, the time he had arranged for three famous rock bands to be flown in by a squadron of bush planes, the time he had offered to be Santa Claus at the school and had been so exhausted by the previous evening’s revelry he had fallen asleep under the Christmas tree. This was the carefree, madcap side of booze, a sort of good-natured jig on the part of the Grim Reaper performed in advance of sharpening up the sickle. It had infuriated Jerome that his mother took such obvious pleasure in recounting these episodes, as if his father’s intoxication was a life-enhancing achievement rather than the hot destructive windstorm that he remembered devouring everything in its path. But he loved her, and was also grateful, therefore, for these brief sessions when she was free of pain. He had kept his expression neutral, smiled or laughed on cue. He had pretended to listen with eagerness.
“What’s wrong with you today?” Mira was asking. “You’ve barely spoken since we got up.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Jerome said. He began to fish in his pocket for money to pay the bill. These coffee bars, he thought, these pretentious places. “Let’s go back,” he said to Mira. “If you want