Sometime when I was four or five, I travelled with my Mother, going home to Victoria on the ferry from the mainland. I suppose it could have been after flying back from Saskatoon.
I think we’d boarded the ferry on a big tour bus. I remember the harsh metal clanks of cars moving onto ferry’s steel car deck, and the wet, cold expanse of it all. The car deck of the ferry seemed enormous to me. I barely knew what was going on. For me, the goal was just “follow Mum, stay with Mum”.
We walked up a lot of stairs to the ferry’s upper-level lounge. Mum moved with purpose. She knew where she was headed. In the ferry’s upstairs lounge, you could get a drink.
We settled in and sat down. Mum ordered a drink and then started chatting with some strange man she’d just met. I can’t remember if we were at a table or the bar. I think the bar, because I couldn’t get a good look at her new drinking buddy without looking at him past her.
I didn’t know who this strange guy was or why he and my mum were so chummy. I didn’t like him. It all felt suspicious to me, watching them talk and laugh and drink together being so friendly without my Dad around.
The man seemed thin, not very tall, with slightly greasy or shiny looking auburn-coloured hair. He was very animated, talked a lot, and laughed even more, and Mum laughed right along with him. She’d never seemed as happy as that back at home with Dad and us. I began to dislike the man even more, feeling more insecure about the whole thing.
The next thing I remember was being in a Bluebird Cab, driving home from the ferry. Mum and her new friend were both sloppily drunk by that time, laughing, slurring, and lolling around inside the car. I hated seeing it. I didn’t like it when grown-ups acted so loud and strange. But Mum didn’t seem to care about anything by that point. She’d gotten herself a bit shitfaced, and I felt unseen, little more than baggage as far as she was concerned. I hoped we’d get home soon, so that the whole episode could be over.
When we finally rolled out of the cab outside of her father’s house at Ten O’Two Cook Street, it was dark – well into the evening – maybe ten or eleven o’clock. Mum and Mr. Good-time Charlie slurred joyous goodbyes to each other like they were old buddies, not people who’d just met a few hours earlier.
I sighed in relief at the sound of the slamming cab door, and was reassured by the cool night air and relative quiet. We’d made our way back to her father’s house.
Mum was the adult I had been with, and looking back on it now with my own adult glasses on, maybe this trip was like a little holiday for her – a rare chance for he to be out on her own, away from watchful partners or her own parents. Maybe this was how she’d have been like without us, on her own. Drunk, partying, and apparently, happy.
