Sister Crazy. Emma Richler

      Dad just spoke.

      ‘What?’ I say. ‘Sorry, what?’

      ‘We are not going to any other shops. Just the chemist. I’ll stay in the car. You have ten minutes.’

      I start singing in my head, the tune from the Sturges film Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. O-KAAAY … co – RAAL! O-KAAAY … co – RAAAAL! I almost sing it aloud. I want to, because it might make my dad laugh, but I worry that for once it won’t, that he won’t join in and I’ll feel bad, worse than I do already. The song rises, then dies in my chest and I miss my chance and that’s the hell of this thing, this sissy, crackpot, sneaky disease which is not okay, like consumption with its angry, show-off blood on wads of linen.

      ‘Jem?’

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘Did you hear what I said?’

      I can see Dad’s eyes looking at me in the rearview mirror. He has wild brows and his eyes are narrowed, weather-beaten lines running from the corners toward his temples. He is a handsome man in an unruly way and he has a gunslinger’s gaze. This comes from years of squinting into a high sun and into duststorms and sharp night winds. It comes from a perpetual state of wariness and the need to see around things and be ready at all times. Anything can happen but you must stay cool. You have to master the distant look and know how to forage the horizon for looming dangers such as wild beasts, Apaches, and other gunslingers with sharp, squinty vision who might be on your trail.

      When my dad talks to me, the little muscles around his eyes bunch up, giving him that gunslinger look. I have the distinct sensation he is not having a good time having to make words, having to speak at all. It’s the way he is and you have to get used to it. His vision is acute, he is the only one in the family who doesn’t need glasses.

      ‘We are not going to any other shops – just the chemist.’

      ‘Right.’ My dad looks at the road now.

      I practise a gunslinger squint. I can see my reflection in the window, which I keep closed due to air conditioning, and my face is dappled with tree leaves and other passing things, but I can see my eyes. I look silly, because a gunfighter cannot wear glasses and look cool. A good cowboy does not wear specs. I think about those crazy glasses you have to look through at the optician’s, your chin resting in a cup. They are like the periscope sights that a U-boat commander needs to spot enemy vessels. The optician slips different lenses into the apparatus with maddening speed and he keeps saying in bored tones, ‘Better or worse? Better or worse?’ until I want to scream and I am so confused and pressured by him, I stumble out with eyeglasses of magnifying strength. I can spot spiders several paving stones away, but people look spooky. No one should have to see in such gory detail.

      Better or worse? I asked myself each time I was put on a new medication. New medications and higher and higher doses. Better or worse? I asked myself, my heart thudding, hallucinating kaleidoscopic visions, sweating through the chic French pyjamas I wore because I felt so cold, soaking my white linen sheets, bringing towels back to bed, scared and ashamed after vomiting into the toilet on the hour through the night. This is a good medication. In small doses it is not always therapeutic. It is definitely helping you and I think you should not keep going on and off it, says the doctor. It is working.

      Okay. Cool.

      Dad is looking at me again in the mirror. Now what? Nothing. He looks at me this way because he is not all that wild about me right now, the crazy, drugged-up daughter, and also because he is a cowboy and that is the way they look at people. I used to be a cowboy, too. Dad and me in the Wild West, stalking the main street, bringing home the vittles for Maw, not before sliding onto bar stools, our packages falling around our feet.

      ‘What’ll it be?’

      ‘Mâcon-Villages,’ I say.

      My dad nods and gestures with his eyes for me to repeat this to the barman. My dad does not like to speak French unless it is strictly called for.

      ‘A glass of Mâcon blanc, please,’ I say.

      My dad drinks single malt. Doubles with a splash on the side. He hunkers down over his drink and lights a thin cigar. Thin but not skinny. His eyes slide slowly to one side or upward as he checks out the crowd, but his head hardly moves except for a slight raising of the chin, the better to draw on his cigar. We do not say much.

      I know some things my dad does not know. Or care about. For instance, all Scotch malt whisky is produced in a pot still, a distillation of barley. Starch in barley is converted to sugar by virtue of a controlled germination, a process arrested in a peat kiln. Now you have malt. Malt is ground into grist and mixed with hot water in a mash tun, and the sweet liquid, the wort, is drawn off into a fermenting vat. This is now the wash. The wash is distilled into low wines and these are redistilled into raw whisky, the middle distillate with the foreshots and feints removed. It becomes Scotch when it has aged in oak for a minimum of three years. Unblended and the product of a single distillery, it is a single malt. These are the basics.

      My dad favours Highland malt although he wouldn’t care to say why. He could not even tell you he specifically likes Speyside whisky. He would not want to discuss it much less hear about why it is different from Islay malt. Okay.

      Something else I want to tell my dad. When the whisky is maturing for eight, twelve, fifteen, seventeen, twenty-one years, what this really means is the liquid is concentrating, breathing in the sea and the river and the heather and iodine and breathing out water, esters and alcohol into the atmosphere. In Cognac, the French call this evaporation la part des anges. The angels’ share. I love this idea. I also think it is only fair, because they must have to share a lot of worse things in the thinning ozone and I hope there are a lot of angels gathering over the Highlands, especially Speyside, over Islay and the Orkney Islands and Campbeltown and the Lowlands. I know they have cousins hovering over Cognac and Ténarèze in Armagnac and the Vallée d’Auge, where calvados is made, even wherever the marc is distilled in the wine regions, Champagne and Burgundy. In Cognac, the wine warehouse where old cognac is stored is called le paradis. A lot of angels lurk there and I wish them well.

      My dad tips back the last sip of malt. He is ready to go, although I have not finished my drink. That’s okay. I have all my life to drink at my leisure and right now I am with my dad and these are good times and I want to stick with him, go when he goes, go where he goes. At heart, I am not the Doc at all, I am Joey and he is Shane and he is definitely the man to follow.

      ‘Let’s go. Finished?’

      No. ‘Yup,’ I say, rising quickly. We saunter out.

      I remember another time, another bar. Dad has Mum on one arm and me on the other. It is late and we are having a nightcap at the Ritz. I like this word ‘nightcap’, putting a cap on the night, tipping your brim at the daytime. There goes another day. Let’s call it a day.

      Dad is a bit sloshed and it makes him merry and a bit unpredictable. I sense high jinks. A couple is leaving the Ritz bar as we approach it and they want to greet my dad but he has no time for them, he does not like these people. They begin to say something and there is a look that comes over them. Appeasement, ingratiation. My dad barks at them, ‘Ruff!’ Just like a dog. His hair musses even more. Mum and I fight to quell hilarity. What my dad has done is the equivalent of reaching for his six-shooter, of fluttering his trigger fingers over the holster at his hip. He is a cowboy, don’t they know that? We leave them in our wake, frozen with their mouths agape.

      It is great being with my dad. These are good times I am looking back on. I wonder if they will come again soon. Some days, I doubt it. I just don’t see it. Like today, on the way to find