“It was tough enough growing up with a cop,” Bobbi said. Her father had retired a few months earlier from the Richmond RCMP detachment. “I thought dating one would be easier, but …” She shrugged.
I looked at her. Her eyes were dry and slightly bloodshot, and the corners of her mouth drooped. When she put her heart into it, she had a megawatt smile, but I’d seen far too little of it lately. Now I knew why. “Does Greg know?” I asked.
“I think so,” she said. “I’m not sure. We’re having a late dinner to work it out.”
“I’m really sorry, Bobbi,” I said. “If there’s anything I can do to, you know, well, help …”
She stared at me in mock horror, as if my offer of aid in matters of the heart was akin to Willy Picton offering to cook barbecue. Then she smiled, releasing a couple of kilowatts. “It’s no big deal, Tom. Win some, lose some. Thanks for caring, though.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, thinking that maybe it was a bigger deal than she let on.
We got to work. Half an hour later, Mary-Alice arrived.
Mary-Alice was younger than me by slightly less than two years, but had always treated me as though I were her slightly slow younger brother. She had become a partner in January, buying fifteen percent and taking over the marketing and administrative aspects of the business, leaving Bobbi and me free to concentrate on the photographic and creative end of things. I was still the majority shareholder — Bobbi owned twenty-five percent — and remained more or less in charge, but I had gone along with Mary-Alice’s proposal to relocate to Granville Island. Digital photography was putting a lot of traditional commercial photographers out of business, or at least forcing them to adapt. The new digs, which along with a studio space and a small darkroom, included a gallery and retail area, would allow us to tap the consumer and tourist trade, while still maintaining our commercial business. Bobbi was dead keen, as was D. Wayne Fowler, our lab guy, who was equally at home with traditional and digital photography, not to mention the computers, and was a fair hand with a camera himself. As I said, I wasn’t sure …
Especially considering the amount of junk we had accumulated over the years. A good deal of it went down the freight elevator and straight into the rented Dumpster or recycling bins, and we’d actually managed to get a few bucks for the old Wing-Lynch film and transparency processor, as well as for some of the redundant darkroom equipment, which had already been carted away by the buyers, but there was nevertheless a daunting amount of photographic and office equipment, furniture, file and storage cabinets, and miscellaneous bits and pieces to pack up before Saturday. By two o’clock, despite the best efforts of the four of us, we seemed hardly to have made a dent, so we took a break.
“Whose bright idea was this, anyway?” Mary-Alice wondered aloud as she collapsed onto the sofa in my office and raked webs of dust out of her pale blonde hair.
“YOURS!” Bobbi, Wayne, and I shouted in unison.
“Why the hell didn’t you try to talk me out of it?”
“We did,” I said. Wayne handed out cans of Coke.
“You should’ve tried harder,” Mary-Alice said, nodding thanks. “You could have at least told me how much rubbish you had hidden away.”
“I didn’t realize myself how much there was,” I said.
“I hope everything f-fits in the n-new place,” Wayne said.
We put in another couple of hours, then ordered pizza, courtesy of Ms. Anna Waverley. Mary-Alice had given me a hard time about accepting a cash client, but I told her we did a fair amount of cash business and, yes, we declared it. I wasn’t sure she believed me. Any more than she believed me when I told her I would try my best to talk Jeanie Stone out of doing a pin-up calendar. Mary-Alice subscribed to the philosophy that the customer — or the boss — was never right.
Bobbi hung around the studio with me for a while after Mary-Alice and Wayne left. The place looked as though a herd of hyperactive rhinos had stampeded through it — and back again. Bodger wouldn’t come out from under the sofa, even for Bobbi.
“You still think this was a good idea?” I asked her.
“I’ll miss this place,” she said. “But, yeah, I think the move is a good thing. We were getting in a rut.”
“I liked my rut,” I said. “It was familiar, comfortable. It took me a long time to break it in.” Truth be told, though, I had been feeling a vague sense of discontent of late, as if things weren’t turning out quite the way I’d expected them to when I’d started the business. Nothing I could put my finger on, just a nebulous feeling that a change was in order — just not this one.
“What’s the news from Hilly?” Bobbi asked.
“I got a postcard yesterday,” I said. Hilly — short for Hillary — was my soon-to-turn fifteen-year-old daughter. She’d been in Australia since the fall, with her mother and her stepfather Jack, the Fat Food King of Southern Ontario. She liked it Down Under well enough, but was eager to get back home to Toronto and her friends. “She says hi.”
“Say hi back.”
“Will do,” I said.
After a short silence, she said, “How’s Reeny doing?”
“All right,” I replied. “I guess.”
“She’s still in France, then?”
“Germany,” I said.
Irene “Reeny” Lindsey was an actress I’d been seeing since the previous September. Except that I hadn’t been seeing much of her in recent months. Reeny was the co-star of Star Crossed, a syndicated sword-and-sex sci-fi series in which she played Virgin, a time-travelling bounty hunter who’d come to present-day Earth with her companion and senior bounty hunter, Star, to track down evil shape-shifting alien outlaws and bring them to justice, generally shedding most of their clothing along the way. It was almost painfully cheesy, but it had earned Reeny and her co-star Richenda “Ricky” Rice a huge cult following, not to mention quite a few dollars. The third season was being shot in Germany.
“Uh, look at the time,” I said. “You’d better saddle up.”
“Right,” Bobbi said.
I helped her lug her gear down to the van, although she didn’t really need my help, then went back upstairs, got a Granville Island Lager out of the film fridge, another thing digital photography had made more or less obsolete, and put my feet up to await the arrival of Jeanie Stone. I hoped she wouldn’t be too put off by the mess — and that she brought more beer.
chapter two
I was dreaming of Reeny when the telephone rang. In that weird way of dreams, the ringing was integrated into my dream, interrupting our lovemaking on the roof deck of my house, which became Pendragon, the old sailboat Reeny had lived on until it had burned to the waterline the year before. Linda, my former spouse, said, “Aren’t you going to answer it?” as she sat naked on the ironing board in the kitchen of our first apartment, clipping her toenails. “No,” I replied, bailing the water from the bilge of my house with a cowboy hat. The ringing continued, so I tumbled out of bed and stumbled down the hall into
