Barney's Version Read Online Free PDF Page B

now-discredited Eurocentric bigot, but there isn’t an overpraised “visible minority” new novelist or poet whose book he hasn’t ordered from Hatchard’s. I’ll wager he never stood for an hour contemplating Velásquez’s portrait of that royal family, 9 you know the one I mean, in the Prado, but invite him to a
vernissage
that promises a crucifix floating in piss or a harpoon sticking out of a woman’s bleeding arsehole, and he’s there with his chequebook. “Oh,” I said, determined to keep our transatlantic phone call going, “I don’t mean to pry, but I do hope you’ve spoken to your sister recently.”
    â€œWatch it. You’re beginning to sound just like Mom.”
    â€œThat’s no answer.”
    â€œThere’s no point in phoning Kate. She’s either just rushing out, or in the middle of a dinner party, and can’t talk now.”
    â€œThat doesn’t sound like Kate.”
    â€œCome on, Dad. As far as you’re concerned, she can do no wrong. She was always your favourite.”
    â€œThat’s not true,” I lied.
    â€œBut Saul phoned yesterday to ask what I thought of his latest diatribe in that neo-fascist rag he writes for. Hell, it had only arrived in that morning’s mail. He’s incredible, really. It took him fifteen minutes to bring me up to date on his imaginary health problems and work difficulties, and then to denounce me as a champagne socialist and Caroline as a penny-pincher. Who’s he living with these days, may I ask?”
    â€œHey, I see the British are up in arms, because calves are being shipped to France, where they’re confined to crates instead of being booked into the Crillon. Has Caroline joined the demos?”
    â€œYou can do better than that, Dad. But do come and see us soon,” said Mike, his voice stiffening, and I guessed that Caroline had just floated into the room, glancing pointedly at her wristwatch, unaware that I was paying for the phone call.
    â€œSure,” I said, hanging up, disgusted with myself.
    Why couldn’t I have told him how much I love him, and what pleasure he has given me over the years?
    What if this were to be our last conversation?
    â€œBut death, you know,” wrote Samuel Johnson to the Reverend Mr. Thomas Warton, “hears not supplications, nor pays any regard to the convenience of mortals.”
    And what if Miriam and I were never to be reconciled?
2
    We have all read too much in literary journals about the unjustly neglected novelist, but seldom a word about the justly neglected, the scratch players, brandishing their little distinctions,
à la
Terry McIver. A translation into Icelandic, or an appearance at a Commonwealth arts festival in Auckland (featuring a few “writers of pallor,” as the new nomenclature has it, as well as an affirmative-action
mélange
of Maori, Inuit, and Amerindian good spellers). But, after all these yearsas a flunk, my old friend and latter-day nemesis has acquired a small but vociferous following, CanLit apparatchiks to the fore. That scumbag is ubiquitous in Canada these days, pontificating on TV and radio, giving public readings everywhere.
    It was through that self-promoting bastard’s father, who is also traduced in
Of Time and Fevers
, that I met Terry in the first place. Mr. McIver, sole prop. of The Spartacus Bookshop on St. Catherine Street West, was the most admirable, if innocent, of men. A scrawny Scot, bred in the Gorbals, he was the illegitimate son of a laundry woman and a Clydeside welder who fell at the Somme. Mr. McIver would urge books on me by Howard Fast, Jack London, Émile Zola, Upton Sinclair, John Reed, Edgar Snow, and the Russian, you know, Lenin’s laureate, what’s-his-name? Anathema to Solzhenitsyn.
Come on, Barney. You know it
. There was a splendid movie made in Russia about his memoirs of childhood. Hell, it’s on the tip of my tongue.