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CHAPTER 1

HARRY WAS IN HIS LITTLE HOUSE on the edge of Back Bay when at half past twelve her voice came over the radio for the first time. A voice unusual in its sound and unusual in itself, since there were no other female announcers on air. He listened to the slow, clear, almost unnatural confidence, the low-pitched sexiness, the elusive accent as she read the local news. More than curious, already in love, he walked into the station the next day at precisely the same time.

It was the beginning of June, the start of the long, golden summer of 1975 when northern light held that little radio station in the large palm of its hand. Eleanor Dew was behind the receptionist's desk and behind clever Eleanor was the studio. She looked up, surprised. Harry rarely darkened the station door except at night when he came in to do the late shift and got away with saying and playing whatever he liked. He paused beside her desk and with a broad wink asked about the new person on air.

"Hired off the street," she told him. "The parting shot of our erstwhile manager."

"Well, well, well," said Harry.

Despite the red glow of the on-air light, he then pushed through the studio door, only to be met by one of the great mysteries of life. We look so very different from the way we sound. It's a shock, similar to hearing your own voice for the first time, when you're forced to wonder how the rest of you comes across if you sound nothing like the way you think you sound. You feel dislodged from the old shoe of yourself.

Harry had pictured somebody short and compact with sun-bleached hair, fine blue eyes, great legs, a woman in her thirties. But Dido Paris was tall, big-boned, olive-skinned, younger. Glasses. Thick, dark, springy hair held back off a wide face. Faintest shadow on her upper lip. An unreasonably beautiful woman. She didn't look up, too intent on the newscast typed in capital letters on green paper, three-part greens, the paper-and-carbon combination the newsmen typed on.

He turned to check who was in the control room. Eddy at the controls and one of the newsmen standing at Eddy's shoulder. An audience, in other words.

Harry took out his lighter, flicked it, and put the flame to the top corner of the green. And still she didn't look up.

An upper lip as downy as he imagined her legs might be. And yes, when she stood up later and came around the table, her legs were visible below a loose blue skirt, and the mystery of her voice was solved. She was European. European in her straightforwardness, her appearance, her way of speaking, which was almost too calm, except when the page was alight. Then her voice caught fire. She stopped turning her long pencil end on end, pacing herself. Stopped speaking altogether. Her eyes went in two directions - one leg on shore, the other in the canoe, but the canoe was pulling away from shore and shit - she picked up her glass, poured water on the flames, and read with jolting speed, repressed panic, to the very last word at the bottom of the page.

The news clip came on, she switched off her microphone and looked up wildly at the man with the boyish gleam in his eye. But he wasn't boyish, he was balding, bespectacled, square-jawed. She noticed his cauliflower ear.

"You're Harry Boyd," she said.

And she, too, had imagined another face - a big, bushy head to go with the relaxed, late-night growl that she heard only as she fell asleep. The man who'd once been a big name in radio, she'd been told. He was shorter than she'd expected and his hands trembled.

Half an hour later, perched on Dido's desk, bumming a cigarette, Harry asked her how she'd come by her intriguing accent. She studied him, not quite willing to forgive his outrageous behaviour, until he asked if she was Greek. Then out bubbled her easy and seductive laugh.

No chance. She'd grown up in the Netherlands near the German border, the daughter of a Latin teacher who'd listened to the BBC and written questions to "London Calling" about expressions he didn't understand. Her father had a reel-to-reel tape recorder and taped programs off the radio. She learned English at school, she told Harry, but her pronunciation was terrible and so she'd asked her father to make some tapes for her, and then she practised her English listening to Margaret Leighton reading Noel Coward and to Noel Coward himself, acquiring in that way her peculiar European-English accent, which she hated. "I figured marriage to a Canadian would solve my problem, but it hasn't."

"Two minutes," said Harry, "and you're already breaking my heart."

"It didn't last," she said.

"Then we have something in common, you and I." He slipped her glasses off her face and breathed on the lenses and polished them with his handkerchief, then slid them back over her nose, saying, "And Dorothy Parker said men never make passes at girls with glasses."

"Parker?"

"Dorothy. A writerly wit who famously claimed to be "'too fucking busy and vice versa.'"

Dido was only semi-amused. To Eleanor the next day she called Harry "the loser," a put-down softened by her accent; it came out "lose-air." She said he'd taken a drag off her lit cigarette, then set it back on the ashtray. "So cheap," she said with a shake of her head and a faint, unimpressed smile.

"But not without charm," countered Eleanor. "Charm, sex, insecurity: that's what Harry has to offer."

Dido was more interested now.

"He's too old for you, Dido."

But his age was the last thing Dido minded.

Harry was forty-two. Winds of ill repute had blown him back up on these shores - a man with a nearly forgotten reputation for brilliance, one of those lucky luckless people who finds his element early on and then makes the mistake of leaving it - radio for a television talk show, where he'd bombed. In short order, he was fired, his personal life fell apart, rumours rose up and settled down. A year ago an old boss stumbled across him sleeping in a hotel lobby in Toronto and pulled a few strings to get him a night shift in the Northern Service, the very place where he'd started out fifteen years ago. At square one again, but with a difference. Now he was an old fish in a small pond.

And yet it suited him - the place, the hours, the relative obscurity.

Stories about him circulated: how he had numerous exwives, and a tremendous tolerance for liquor, and some dark deed in his past - some disgrace. Professional, certainly. Sexual? No one was quite sure. His cauliflower ear suggested a life touched by violence. His trembling hands sent granules of instant coffee scattering in all directions. "Harry's been here," they would say in the morning, surveying the little table that held mugs, spoons, the electric kettle, the big jar of Maxwell House.

In that first conversation Harry asked Dido about her husband, tell me all about him, and she jested that she'd married almost the first person who asked her, a fellow student at McGill, but when he brought her from Montreal through the gates of his rich Halifax neighbourhood, she saw his father in the driveway. "And we just looked at each other," she said, turning the oversized man's watch on her wrist in what Harry would come to understand was a yearning, nervous habit. "We just looked." Harry saw them, a man and woman unable to take their eyes off each other, and the picture cut into his heart.

After a moment Dido shrugged, but her face still ran with longing and regret. The situation became impossible, she admitted. She escaped the triangle by coming north.

"And your father-in-law let you go?"

She gestured towards the entrance of the station. "I half expect him to come through that door."

* * *

The radio station occupied a quiet corner a block away from main street. It had been an electrical supplies store once, Top Electric, and was that size. A one-storey shoebox in a town that had sprung up in the 1930s on the gold-rich shores of Great Slave Lake, an inland sea one-third the size of troubled Ireland.

Entering, the first person you saw was Eleanor Dew, who managed to be pretty even though no part of her was pretty. She had rather bulging eyes and a chin that blended into her throat, yet she gave off an idea of Blondness, a sort of radiance that came from having her feet on the ground and her head in heaven. At thirty-six she was almost the oldest person in the station and a poet at heart, reading Milton between phone calls - the community announcements coming in, the complaints and song requests, the mixture of personal and business calls for the six announcer-operators or the two newsmen or the station manager, who had run off with a waitress a week ago.

Her desk stood next to a plate-glass window that overlooked the dusty street leading up to the Gold Range, also known as the Strange Range, and to Franklin Avenue, the main street with two stoplights. Turn left on Franklin Avenue and you passed on one side MacLeod's Hardware and the Hudson's Bay Store and on the other side the Capitol Theatre with its third-run movies and fifth-rate popcorn machine. Continue on in the same direction through the newest part of New Town, and then angle left, and eventually you came around to Cominco, one of the two operating gold mines that gave the town its initial reason for being. If, instead, you turned right on Franklin Avenue you passed the Yellowknife Inn on one side and the post office on the other, you passed the public library and the clothing store known as Eve of the Arctic. Proceed in a down-sloping northerly direction and you reached the oldest part of Old Town, an array of little houses and shacks and log cabins and privies, of Quonset huts and trailers and motley businesses, all of which seemed perfectly at ease on this rocky peninsula under the enormous sky. Well, they weren't competing with it. Yellowknife had only one high-rise and it wasn't on main street, it was a lonely apartment building in the southeastern part of town.

A rudimentary place of ten thousand people named after an indigenous tribe that used knives made of copper, and in many ways it was a white blot on the native landscape. But it was as far north as most southerners had ever come. It was north of the sixtieth parallel and shared in the romance of the North, emanating not mystery but uniqueness and not right away. It had no breathtaking scenery. No mountains, no glaciers, in the winter not even that much snow. But after a while it grew on them, on some of them at least, on the ones who would never forget, who would think back on their lives and say, My time there was the most vivid time in my life.

Only two stoplights, perhaps, but such a traffic in voices. That summer a small but steady parade of poets came through town, unconnected to the parade of experts addressing Judge Berger at his inquiry into what would be, if it went ahead, the largest single development project ever undertaken in the Western world, a gas pipeline running across the top of the Arctic and down the eight-hundred-mile-length of the Mackenzie River. Politics overshadowed poetry, as it always does. The poets came one at a time throughout the summer, a modest incursion and the first of its kind, organized by a local poetry lover and financed by the national council for the arts. The pipeline experts came in droves, it seemed, gathering at the gleaming white Explorer Hotel that dominated the road on the way to the airport. It was a time when Yellowknife was on the map, when the North was on everyone's minds, when the latest scheme to extract its riches had gained so much ground that this summer of 1975 took on the mythical quality of a cloudless summer before the outbreak of war, or before the onset of the kind of restlessness, social, spiritual, that remakes the world.

Harry went to a few of the literary readings at the public library. He went with Eleanor, who wrote poetry for her own pleasure, until he lost patience with what he called the empty wordplay. How can a poem last, he cried, if it doesn't touch your heart? You might remember the poet, he declared, but you won't remember the poem. To underscore his point he typed out verses from a poem he admired and taped them to the wall in the one and only announce booth, where their message about death and its haunting aftermath was like a skull sitting on the console. The poem was by Alden Nowlan, who came from Harry's part of southern New Brunswick, and it described the foolish time in the poet's life when he worked alone at night in a radio station and couldn't believe anyone was listening, for "it seemed I was talking / only to myself in a room no bigger / than an ordinary bathroom." Then one day he had to cover a fatal collision between a car and a train, and Nowlan the broadcaster turned into Nowlan the appalled listener. "Inside the wreckage" of the car, three young men were dead, but the car radio was still playing and "nobody could get at it" to turn it off. Across the top margin Harry scrawled, Do you ever wonder where your voice goes?

The more personal question he avoided asking himself. How had he ended up back here, where he'd started, in the little rabbit warren of rooms known as CFYK? Sitting in the announce booth, feeling his own life collide with itself.

Eleanor was the station's gatekeeper. From her desk she controlled access to a single hallway that led like a short main street directly through the guts of the station to an exit that tumbled you back out into the northern summer - to a garbage bin full to overflowing with tape so edited, so beknuckled and thickened with white splicing tape as to be deemed unsalvageable, finally, by the head technician in his basement lair. Crusty Andrew McNab presided over the station's nether region of workbenches, labelled shelves, crowded corners, and his own tidy desk. For seventeen years he'd practised frugality and extravagant disdain, fathead being his favourite term for anyone conceited enough to go on air.

Andrew's wasn't the only lair. The newsroom, just large enough for two newsmen and two desks and one editing machine, was another. Its firmly closed door lay directly in the line of fire between Eleanor's desk and the front door of the station through which the town's characters liked to come. Mrs. Dargabble, for instance, with her lofty, loquacious, regular plea for classical music. I don't expect opera, but a little Mozart from time to time? Eleanor couldn't have agreed more. She wrote down the request, then tossed it sadly into the wastebasket as soon as the poor woman turned her back, since there was no hope, she knew. No hope for Mozart in Yellowknife.

Until Harry Boyd passed by one day recently and rumbled at the hefty, flapping, fragile woman, "Do you like Lucia Popp?"

"She sings the Queen of the Night," said the startled Mrs. Dargabble.

"Tonight I'll play her for you. Turn on your radio at midnight."

"You marvellous man. You understand."

By now Harry was haunting the station at all hours and it was obvious to everyone why. He wanted to be around Dido Paris.

"How will I recognize him?" Harry had asked her, his voice a-growl with mock irony and serious intent. "This fancy man of yours. Your father-in-law."

She had a long, slow smile. "You're a romantic, Harry."

"I'm not ashamed of it."

He saw her face give way once again to such tender sadness that his lonely insides twisted and tightened. But then he took heart. "You like older men."

Dido leaned back and laughed at him. "Harry, you're so transparent."

He wasn't ashamed of that either. He recognized in Dido a deep streak of melancholy that he happened to share, and he was fascinated, not least by a childhood he guessed was partly to blame. Holland after the war. Not Holland, she corrected. The Netherlands. She told him her mother sewed warm winter pants for her from old army uniforms and she had to wear pyjamas underneath, otherwise the khaki chafed her thighs and made them bleed. At the look on his face, she smiled and touched his arm. It wasn't so bad, she said. In a way, I didn't mind. And you won't believe how much I miss what I ate then, chocolate sprinkles on bread, we put the butter on top of the sprinkles to keep them in place, and speculaas - you know? the Dutch windmill cookie? - between two slices of buttered bread. I bicycled to school and took that for my lunch. Her voice had a buoyant, velvety sound. Sensual, but not so sensual it lost energy or authority. Had her father been her teacher? he wanted to know. Not officially, she said, and she grew pensive again. Her father had died quite recently, in March, still listening to the BBC. At the time of his death she'd been here, substitute teaching Math and French at the local high school, a job that merely met her need to be as far away as possible from her romantic entanglements. After her father's death she felt impelled to rethink her life. In a first step, she came to the station offering to volunteer. "And the rest is history," said Harry.

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Excerpted from "Late Nights on Air"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Elizabeth Hay.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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