DOTTY
by Royston Tester
(Originally appeared in Grain, vol 38, no 1, 2010.
England was Linda's way of saying I don't care.
She was going out.
All out.
Barely graduating from Dunnville High, Linda Riley enjoyed the worst grades ever, so her principal Mr. Sinclair confided.
It was July, 1976 --- Montreal's Games. With her step-parents' blessing, she was off to see the world. Olympian plans for the Fall. While her closest, more accomplished, girlfriends went to Canadian universities.
Day in, day out, she listened to Abba --- and tried to erase school.
Perplexed, she tried to forget.
In her cluttered bedroom overlooking Ketland Fields, the singers choo-choo'd through 'Fernando' and 'Dancing Queen' as Linda stuffed blouses and skirts into a pink suitcase, glancing nervously at the 'List of Essentials' supplied by the United Kingdom Work-Stay Programme for Young Adults.
"You're your own man now," the principal had said, climbing into his Toyota truck alongside a brand new electric guitar --- and winking.
What happened? How could best friends deceive you like this? The bastard toadies studied, that's what --- and sent out hundreds of applications, for sure. They were not naturally bright.
It was going to be awesome, she told everyone.
They nodded charitably for the dumbass of Ketland farm.
In September, on a free afternoon, Linda met Fabrizio Benedetti.
He was reading Yacht News on the quayside, and smoking a black cigarette. He did not fit the bill of local person --- or typical visitor, or even a European. In his billowy linen pants and blazer, he looked like a fish out of water --- as much as she did, in fact.
Linda was waitressing --- labour that became her vocation --- at the Fisherman's Arms Hotel in one of Cornwall's most picturesque villages. A quaint, ivy-covered pub owned by Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose, on the Helford riverbank. Between shifts, she was a chambermaid, six days out of seven. No essays, no sneaky school friends, no barn duties.
She convinced herself this was real graduation. Beset with loneliness doused in pints of shandy, Walkers crisps --- and uncool awe.
At first, Linda thought the smoker was an Arab. His dark, liquid eyes and pointy beard. The paunch and middle-aged-lost look. Heavy jowls. He resembled a sheikh, that was it --- in carefree exile. Mr. Sinclair gone Aladdin.
This was why she cracked the smile. Memories of Dunnville's principal who regarded delinquency --- except hers --- as talent in gestation; spotlights on the horizon, so unjustly ignoring him. (He sang with Martha's Fart into his fifties).
Linda evaded the Middle Eastern man's gawking.
She sat watching late-summer hikers on the ferry boat at Helford Passage. Windswept faces. En route to Falmouth from the Lizard --- so she imagined. Though never bothered to ask. Linda was too impressed for hard facts. England and the English were enchantment itself. The British Isles a Neverland.
"Big Ben's stopped," he said, startling her. "In London."
"Big Ben?"
She thought she knew.
"The great clock at Westminster, it's not ticking at present."
"Gee, no?"
"England's lost the time!"
Linda --- her mousy hair tied back from work --- made an effort to grin. You couldn't see England getting lost for long. This cloudy island, the little she had witnessed of it, was a nifty operation, if eccentric. People were resourceful, it seemed to her.
The man offered a cigarette.
She demurred.
Then changed her mind.
Fabrizio was everything she had not envisaged in a boyfriend. Old enough to be her father, slightly tubby. A cement-factory owner from Milan, he leased a vacation property on the hill. Invited her to visit.
She took the bait.
Was this romantic? His clotted accent did make her blush, her stomach turn somersaults. Shouldn't romance be more subtle --- drawn out?
It felt so easy. His kindliness, the playful eyes. His attentiveness. Her craving the man's company --- and flabby stomach. Linda had never experienced such intimacy, wanting every last detail.
She was beguiled --- and threw herself at the Italian's mercy.
He taught her digits, tongue. A vocabulary of lovemaking beyond Linda's ken, whispered in spoonfuls.
Every Wednesday at 3-30pm, flabby "Fabby" met his sweetheart at Helford Passage. They sipped cream tea, ate scones and strawberry jam --- and climbed the valley to La Mouette, his cottage overlooking Helford river.
In French it meant 'Seagull.'
As they lay by the fire one October, he explained its provenance.
The story inhabiting one of their now frequent silences, as she pawed his silky belly.
In one of Fabrizio's countless enthusiasms, he bought Linda a work of fiction by Daphne Du Maurier, the famous local author, and a Grundig transistor radio, to keep her company after lengthy, tiring days at the hotel.
What would she do without him?
Du Maurier's novel was romantic, as far as Linda could gather. She never read books, unless Dunnville assigned one, and then she used study guides. Farm girls had no time, she explained to anyone who quizzed her. There were chores.
The tale was quite dotty, as Mrs. Ambrose liked to say of anything more complex than the 'Pub Grub' menu. It concerned a rich woman Dona and her affair with a French pirate --- whose real name was Jean Benoit Aubery, in truth an idle landowner from Brittany.
Bored pirate Jean just happened to moor his ship 'La Mouette' in one of the hidden creeks off Helford river, not far from Dona's country estate.
Big yawn. This was why Fabby purchased Frenchman's Creek.
Linda hoped he did not fancy himself a pirate. She was not into costumes --- or swords and eyepatches. She had grown up amongst cattle lowing, and roosters.
Her sex life with F.B. was too advanced as it was.
Dona, the heroine, has an unlikely, but tempestuous relationship with Jean , and disguises herself as a cabin boy to accompany him on his raid of the British vessel 'Merry Fortune.'
That was it.
Linda never finished.
She liked the gist of what she did read, and fully understood why Fabby might call his summer home Seagull. Linda was not, however, playing cabin boy.
Romance surely needed brakes.
Chuffed to the gills (another Mrs. Ambrose phrase) that his Canadian girl had begun the paperback, Fabby insisted Linda take a picnic with him along the Helford river, "to where its Oakland woods meet the sea." Du Maurier, again.
"You're kidding," Linda told him, heart racing.
One blustery Wednesday in late October, they trekked as far as Frenchman's Creek, its water the shade of gunmetal. An inlet --- with discrete, abandoned quayside.
Under swaggering trees, the couple laid a blanket, ate cucumber sandwiches and drank lemonade.
With beech leaves tumbling over the leftovers, Fabby slithered into Linda as though she were pudding.
Would Daphne or Dona do this, wondered Linda, her head knocking against a thermos flask? Make out in the pages, finished or unfinished, of Du Maurier's book, this minute squashed in Linda's anorak pocket.
Who needed a manual? They were living Creek.
The breeze chilled Linda's thighs.
Throughout October and November in the chambermaid's attic bedroom --- overlooking "dustbins" in the hotel parking lot --- she tuned quietly to BBC programming on Fabby's Grundig radio. Mao Zedong had died and Jimmy Carter won the U.S. presidential election. She fell asleep to jazz voices, the shipping forecast, and Greenwich time pips.
Linda discovered punk rock on Radio Luxembourg, an offshore pirate station with intermittent signal.
Lives beyond Daphne Du Maurier flooded in --- and out --- like tidewater.
She purchased earphones and an antenna from Barnum's Electrical Goods in Fowey. Linda raised the volume --- and aerial. Made beds like a hornet to The Clash and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
Energy careened through her bones. She folded more sheets in an hour than you could shake a stick at. (Or something like that. Mrs. Ambrose again).
Linda feasted on Fabby Benedetti.
He told her of his journey, years ago, to Viscri, Romania.
How he had met his wife Sylvie Toc near the medieval Weisskirch. August 1969. How she encouraged him to stay an entire year.
In Viscri, in the tavern, they drank too much palinka, the barman's home-brewed brandy.
A lively day. The small, whitewashed gathering place --- cobbled courtyard and wooden gate looking out to a row of beeches --- was bustling with neighbours.
It turned out the new British Prince of Wales was visiting --- guest of a local Trust.
According to many, he worshipped the lost-world atmosphere of Viscri --- rare wild flowers, serenity --- and purchased a modest house, rumoured to be number sixty-three. (There was one road, a track, really). He encouraged outsiders to buy property.
At that very moment he was on the slopes.
You could see a group of eight men in short sleeves and khakis chinos seated on the grass, eating from hampers.
"Pay him your respects," the innkeeper told Fabrizio, coming from another table. "Our traditional way."
"Why would I do that?"
He was no royalist.
"Nobody else has the guts."
He was always egging people on.
"Do it!" Sylvie said, beaming at the intruder's plucky style. "Pay homage to a prince."
"We're blotto," Fabby reminded them.
"Better," said the man, swigging an Ursus beer and settling on their bench. "Where's that nerve of yours?" he asked. "Has Italy gelded you entirely?"
"Come," Sylvie giggled.
She hauled him to his feet.
The Viscri innkeeper, Alexandru, saddled two mares.
Amidst much catcalling, Sylvie and Fabrizio struggled onto them, riding at a gallop into open fields and up the valley side.
One of the prince's bodyguards rushed to shield the future monarch. Another pulled a revolver.
Sylvie and Fabby had the wherewithal to rein in their horses.
In a flash, they dismounted and lay face down before Charles and his companions.
A hush.
Snorting from Alexandru's mares.
Muttering from the royal entourage. Jokes about Pied Piper.
The couple rose and, quite breathlessly, delivered their welcome --- which the prince accepted, if you're to believe Fabrizio, by enquiring after the hothead pair and their families.
They were together a good twenty minutes, exchanging impressions of Viscri and Romania, before Fabrizio and Sylvie reclaimed their horses beyond the clearing.
In late November, mere weeks before Linda Riley was due to return to Canada, Fabby missed their Wednesday rendezvous.
It was 4-30pm.
By the time she walked the lane to La Mouette, all light was fading.
Linda peered through the high hedge. There was a Ferrari sports car with German licence plates parked awkwardly in the driveway.
On the terrace, Fabby was holding a woman. Caressing the side of her headscarf.
Linda turned and ran.
The following Wednesday, determined to thrash the matter out, she made her way first to Helford Passage --- and to La Mouette.
Every shutter was barred, garden furniture cleared. 'No Entry' displayed clearly on the main gate, for once bolted.
Linda did not understand what she felt --- beyond disappointment and hurt. She made excuses for his abrupt departure. Linda knew Fabby was married to Sylvie the Romanian. With three sons, Paolo, Adrian and Emil. Photos everywhere.
She believed --- and it always seemed silly from the vantage point of thirty years --- that they would wed. He divorce his wife. How naive could a Dunnville girl be? Linda dreamt she captivated him --- and the rest would fall into place.
Left alone to hotel tasks, in the remaining fortnight Linda cranked the radio. Every volt a Fabby fled. He had her address in Ontario. Telephone number. The guy would contact her. There must have been an emergency.
No-one abandons such love --- just like that.
In December, the Sex Pistols let rip on 'Today,' Bill Grundy's television show. Every staid listener was outraged. A BBC radio phone-in glutted itself with indignation. Johnny Rotten had said "Shit," and Steve Jones called Mr. Grundy a "dirty fucker."
It sounded childish to Linda Riley. Broadcasting was not half this fun in Canada.
She bought a pair of black jeans, t-shirt and a used bomber jacket in Fowey. Dolloped on black eye shadow, stuck a pin in her right nostril, and acquired a tattoo.
Linda left Canada as Abba --- and returned a Sex Pistol.
Linda would not describe Fabby and Cornwall as her one experience of romance. Not in those terms.
She never removed the seagull tattoo from her right, upper arm. Well...she tried to have it surgically struck. Dr. Bradshaw got as far as its wings. Linda told him to stop.
She would keep the torso --- get it re-inked.
The creature stood proudly beneath her shoulder like a technicolor penguin---these days a kind of sea-green and jaundice---slammed into 'Merry Fortune.'
Arms behind its back.
I don't care.
