Albatross Read online

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Albatross

  “Fallis writes from another time, when Wodehouse and Leacock and Twain roamed the earth. May he never become extinct.”

  LINWOOD BARCLAY, New York Times bestselling author of A Noise Downstairs

  “Booklovers, rejoice and buy this book!

  In Albatross, Terry Fallis has found the antidote for what ails our sorry world. May millions of you benefit!”

  ALAN BRADLEY, New York Times bestselling author of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

  “It’s hard not to get excited about a new Terry Fallis novel, and it is equally hard not to fall in love with Adam Coryell, the big-hearted, sarcastic, fountain-pen-obsessed hero of Albatross, a young golf prodigy who just wants to write short stories. In his inimitable style, Fallis has crafted a tender, funny, and compulsively readable novel about what it means to stay true to your dreams, and to yourself. Do yourself a favour and pick up this book—you won’t put it down again until the final page has been turned.”

  AMY JONES, author of Every Little Piece of Me and We’re All in This Together

  ALSO BY TERRY FALLIS

  The Best Laid Plans

  The High Road

  Up and Down

  No Relation

  Poles Apart

  One Brother Shy

  COPYRIGHT © 2019 BY TERRY FALLIS

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request

  ISBN:  9780771050961

  Ebook ISBN  9780771050978

  Book design by Five Seventeen

  Cover art © leonardo255 / Getty Images

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v5.3.2

  a

  James Coryell Fallis

  (1929-2019)

  In memory of my father,

  who passed on to me an abiding love of language.

  “Ah! well a-day! what evil looks

  Had I from old and young!

  Instead of the cross, the Albatross

  About my neck was hung.”

  “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1834)

  Albatross: A score of three strokes under par on a hole.

  Oxford Dictionary

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Terry Fallis

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part 2

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part 3

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Acknowledgments

  “THAT, YOUNG ADAM, is an AK-47,” Bobbie said. “I’m sure you already know this, but the Kalashnikov, as it’s affectionately known, was designed in 1947. 1947! It’s older than I am!”

  I tried to ignore her little assault rifle treatise, but after years alongside Bobbie, I knew resistance was futile. Oblivious, she prattled on with her little biography of a firearm.

  “I mean, that weapon has played a defining role in so many revolutions across the last seventy-five years. It deserves credit and blame, in nearly equal measure, for most of the coups, terrorist acts, territorial skirmishes, insurgencies, and armed conflicts from one side of the globe to the other!”

  “Bobbie,” I whispered.

  “A few years ago, I read a fascinating account of the Kalashnikov’s pivotal place in world history, and…”

  “Bobbie,” I said a little louder.

  “…it would not be an exaggeration to say that governments were toppled and born, wars were won and lost, and national borders were drawn and redrawn, all on the trigger of the same gun that guy standing in front of us is holding right now.”

  “Bobbie!” I snapped in a voice that quite accurately reflected just how freaked out I was at that moment.

  “What?” She looked genuinely puzzled.

  “Bobbie, that’s all very fascinating—actually, at this precise moment, it’s really not—and I’d be pumped to learn more about this historically significant firearm were it not for the complicating fact that he’s pointing it directly at us…on purpose…with malevolent intent and little chance of missing us should he decide to squeeze off a burst.”

  Bobbie fell silent for a moment, but not nearly long enough. “But look how the sun glints off it,” she continued after a moment, shaking her head. The faraway expression on her face seemed somewhere between admiration and awe. “Quite stunning.”

  I lifted my eyes to the man standing about thirty metres away. He wore an expression that balanced rage and anxiety on a knife edge while brandishing what I now knew to be an internationally celebrated assault rifle.

  “Yeah, and look how angry he is,” I replied. “Quite frightening.”

  While his gun was pointed our way, his eyes were not. He just kept staring into the clouds.

  Bobbie ignored me and turned to scan the horizon.

  “Man, what a view from up here.”

  By this time, she seemed completely at ease. I was not. I was terrified—all-in, flat-out, and full-on. On the fear spectrum, I situated myself somewhere well past freaking and heading fast to fainting. If I knew of a stronger word than terrified, believe me, I’d be trotting it out right about now.

  “Aren’t you scared?” I asked.

  “Quite,” she replied. “But so is our friend over there.”

  I looked over at Mr. Kalashnikov, who kept his weapon trained on us while taking furtive glances into the sky and tilting his head like a dog hearing a sound we could not. Bobbie and I sat next to each other with our backs literally, and in every other sense of the word, against the wall.

  “These things are so much more effective than handcuffs,” Bobbie offered, examining the plastic tie-wrap that bound her wrists. The one that secured mine was too tight and dug into my skin. It hurt.

  “I mean, they’re strong, light, easy to carry, and just as effective as overbuilt steel cuffs against the modest power of the human forearm,” Bobbie continued. “Plus, the pièce de résistance, there’s no key to lose. Brilliant!”

  She actually chuckled as she said “brilliant.” I’m not kidding. With a bad man training an assault rifle on us, she chuckled. I felt like I might pass out, but Bobbie didn’t notice. She continued her enthusiastic, even fawning, dissertation on the advances in personal restraint embodied in the lowly plastic tie-wrap, but the sound of my own pounding heart nearly drowned her out. Yes, I know. I plead guilty to the charge of cliché. I’m a writer—or at least I want to be a writer—so I’m programmed to hate clichés. But sometimes they’re clichés for a reason. I had never really believed that old adage—that old cliché—that your life actually passes before your eyes in moments of dire peril, in that little space that exists between pass
ed out and passed on. But you know what? It’s true. Perfect memory fragments, intact, whole, pristine, flying at you almost faster than you can take them in. And with more detail than you’d ever recall without the catalyst of a life-threatening event. It’s true. It’s all true.

  Chapter 1

  SEPTEMBER 2013

  “WOULD YOU MIND if I measured your extremities?”

  It wasn’t the first thing she said to us, but it was within the first hour after we’d met. We were in the phys ed classroom that opened onto the gym. It was my senior year in high school in Toronto, long before I became what I was to become. But it started right there in that classroom, the first morning of the first day of my final fall term.

  My homeroom teacher was new to the school. She was dressed in blue track pants, white Nikes, and a white short-sleeved golf shirt with the words Ladies’ Golf Club of Toronto embroidered just south of her left shoulder. A whistle hung from a lanyard around her neck. She was just a clipboard shy of the complete collegiate-coach stereotype. As we filed into our all-boys phys ed class and found desks, she stood at the front, leaning against the blackboard and watching us with a bemused but warm smile. I’m not being unkind when I say you could see she was a woman, but it took more than a glance. Her grey hair was cut like mine—shortish with a side part. I’d say she was in her mid- to late fifties, and she was very solidly built. If she played rugby—and if she didn’t, she should have—she’d have anchored the scrum.

  She wrote the name Davenport on the blackboard and then moved to stand just in front of her desk.

  “Good morning, gents,” she started. “I’m Ms. Davenport. You can call me Ms. D. if you’re prone to efficiency and like to get to the point faster. But to be clear, it’s Ms., not Mrs., not Miss, and despite the temptation, not Mr. It’s Ms. Clear?”

  All twenty of us nodded at once.

  “Good.”

  She handed Mike Gleason at the front-left corner desk a piece of paper. “If you don’t mind, please write your names on this seating plan and pass it on so it’s a little easier for me to get to know you,” she directed. “Next week, you can switch around and sit where you like. By then, I’ll know you all by name, by face, by fashion sense, by haircut, by vocal stylings, and perhaps even by smell. You see, to the best of my recollection, I’m blessed with a prodigious memory. I’m not bragging. It’s just the truth.”

  She smiled and then perched on the front of her desk.

  “Anyhooo, I gather I’m your homeroom teacher. Lucky me, lucky you. We’re going to have some fun in this class, I can tell. I mean, it’s gym, right? We’ll be doing units on basic fitness, football, rugby, wrestling—and of course I mean real wrestling, not the off-the-top-rope, hit-him-with-a-folding-chair, bite-through-the-blood-pack antics we see on television, although there are times when I find that quite entertaining—gymnastics, basketball, track, badminton, and if the lawyers don’t get too antsy, trampoline.” She then leaned towards us and held a finger up. “And of course, there’ll be several health units as well, covering stuff that I suspect most of you already know. But we’re going to make sure, because the cost of not knowing some of this material is very, very high. I’m not being too cryptic here, am I, gentlemen?”

  On cue, most of us shook our heads.

  “Good.” She paused and looked up, perhaps in search of something. Finding it, she continued. “Oh, right, I’m also coaching the school golf team starting later this week, and then in October, the hockey team. So I hope to see at least some of you out after school. You know, there’s so much more to gain and glean outside of the classroom. A very smart and funny man named Mark Twain once said, ‘I never let school get in the way of my education.’ I love that, but don’t read too much into it. You need stellar marks to get into college and university, and I hope many of you will be headed down that path a year from now.”

  She fetched a stack of papers from the windowsill and started down the first column of desks, passing stapled sheets to each student along the way.

  “Okay, just to start off with a bang, I’m handing out the rather lengthy release form that absolves the school, school board, and me from liability should you sprain your ankle, break a leg, lose a kidney, suffer paraplegia, or endure any other medical misadventure on my watch.”

  She paused at the back of the room when a few of the guys with shorter attention spans started whispering.

  “Okay, stay with me, gentlemen. We’re almost there,” she said. “I know this is scintillating stuff, but do try to stay calm and focus on the task at hand.”

  The room was immediately hers again, and she continued up the aisle towards the front, talking all the way. “You’re to fill out most of the form right now to spare your mom, dad, or guardian the tedium tonight, and then you’re going to take it home for parental perusal and signature, hopefully without delay, for independent legal counsel.”

  She was funny and articulate, and talked the way I thought a writer might. She also gave off a quiet confidence that instantly placed her high on my list of people I’d want around in tight situations—you know, in the midst of a bank robbery, or stranded on a desert island. I liked her.

  When she reached my desk with the form, I noticed for the first time the ink stains on the fingers of both her hands. I liked her even more. When I took the paper from her, I positioned my hands so she couldn’t miss my own nearly perpetually inky fingers. She smiled and flashed me hers.

  “A kindred spirit?” she asked with elevated eyebrows.

  I nodded, pulled that day’s fountain pen out of my pocket, and placed it on my desk.

  “Ahhh, the Pilot Custom Heritage 92,” she said. “I loves me a good Pilot piston-filler. And a fine gold nib to boot.”

  Because I’d recently perfected the art of doing two things at once, I simultaneously beamed and nodded as she moved on to the next desk. It felt good to have staked out a modest acreage of common ground with my new homeroom teacher.

  While we completed the form, Ms. Davenport sat at her desk at the front, reading. From my seat in the front row I could just make out the title of the magazine. It was the Scandinavian Journal of Kinesiology and Sports Medicine, and she seemed quite absorbed in it.

  “Mrs. D.?” said Mike Gleason from the desk beside me.

  “Ahhhhh, the fires of Hades’ furnace!” she barked.

  It was so quiet in the classroom you could hear a pen drop. Actually, I think I heard four pens fall to the floor from startled hands.

  “Um, sorry, Mrs. Davenport?” Mike stammered.

  “Ahhhhh, the curse of the minuscule memory!” she shouted, her hands reaching for the ceiling in plaintive supplication. (Yes, I guess “plaintive supplication” is a bit over the top, but I’m a writer, and even back then I wasn’t enamoured of the old less is more axiom.)

  I leaned over and whispered to Mike.

  “Oh, right. Sorry. I mean, Ms. Davenport?”

  “Much better, son,” she replied. “I knew you’d get there. Now, how can I help?”

  “Well, um, I messed up my sheet. Do you have an extra?”

  “Of course. I quite often botch the first attempt myself,” she replied, handing Mike a second form.

  Crisis averted. Pens picked up.

  By this time, the seating plan had made it back to Ms. Davenport’s desk, and she scanned it as we continued to fill in the blank spaces on the form. The next time I looked up, she was consumed in her Scandinavian journal. Now and then she’d nod, then look up and survey the room, eyeing a few of us up and down. It was a little odd. Maybe more than a little odd. Finally, she rose and, carrying the journal and seating plan with her, walked the aisles, stopping at certain desks and looking more closely at the occupants. I was one of them. By then, it was well past more than a little odd and heading fast for downright weird.

  At that moment, the bell rang, ending first period. We all instantly started packing up and hauling ourselves out of our chairs.

  “Wait! Just before you go, ge
ntlemen, and I assume that moniker is appropriate,” she started, “please guard those forms with your lives and have them signed and back to me hot-foot-tattyo, as my mother used to say. If you’re still in the dark, that phrase simply means fast. I look forward to running you off your feet this year and improving your mental and physical fitness. Now, just one more thing before you bolt with fevered anticipation for whatever class awaits you. I wonder if four of you would indulge me in the name of science,” she said while scanning the seating plan in her hand.

  “Messrs. Coryell, Atkins, Sharma, and Sinclair. Would you mind if I measured your extremities? It won’t take but a few minutes.”

  We all stopped. None of us said anything. But the four of us exchanged baffled glances before turning back to Ms. Davenport.

  “Let me reassure you. I have no nefarious intent. I’m simply examining an interesting theory outlined in this periodical, and you can help,” she said, waving the journal in the air. “Might you be able to return here after school for just a few minutes?”

  All four of us lucky winners agreed. What choice did we have?

  ALLI SAVED ME a seat beside her in Writer’s Craft, our last class of the day. If it’s not obvious by the warm and heartfelt way I just used her name, Allison and I were, in my parents’ vernacular, “an item.” We’d been together for about a year, held fast by a shared love of fountain pens and creative writing. I imagine teenage hormones may also have been a factor in our mutual attraction, but we hadn’t yet covered that unit in health class.

  “Hey,” she said as I dropped into the chair. “What are you packing today?”

  “That seems like a rather personal question,” I replied. She smiled and rolled her eyes.

  “Still the CH92,” I replied, pulling the Pilot pen from my pocket and laying it on the desk.

  “One day, I too will have a gold-nib pen.” She sighed.