✲

Every morning Peter drove his Ford Sedan to the heart of the capital, to the beehive of government offices.

He was very tall, prematurely bald and a snappy wearer of ties. Back in college, in Toronto, he’d been on every student committee going, and that same great sense of duty, or work ethic, kept him constantly caffeinated, prodded him to bring his work home in the evenings, stacks of paper reshuffled by the swing of his suitcase.

His suitcase saw many cities. He was much in demand as a speaker at Rotary Club dinners, and this champion of urban planning could have been a preacher, so impassioned was his every talk: Canada, land of green pastures and a future of peace.

The Aykroyds’ house stood apart from most other homes in the town, on the edge of Gatineau Park, whose new-built roads, cut from Precambrian rock, wended between the lakes and valleys, ferried visitors by the million every year, and owed their existence to Peter’s engineering. (Five years in the making, those roads, Danny’s preschool years.) Young Danny had his bedroom in the basement under the garage, waking to the engine rumble sparked by his father’s key in the ignition. It’s time, the always punctual key would inform him. Time for school. Get up. Danny gave a consenting groan, less obedient to the key than to the anticipation of warming oatmeal. So cold outside. And dark. His bleary eyes adjusting, shadows in the room turned to cowboy hats, plastic guns, comic books, model tanks – all competing for space with the biggest shadow of them all. With its Westclox clock and folders and colour pencils, the bedroom table had become homework territory, though he didn’t need to sit very long there. Probably he spent longer dressing for class in the morning than setting down right answers in the evening: fiddly pairs of socks and long johns and corduroy trousers, a thermal T-shirt underneath shirt and woolly sweater. The mitts, like the scarf coiled round his neck after breakfast, were woolly too. Mukluks encased his feet, a ski mask his face. Then he zipped up the garish snowsuit.

The light outside was weak when Danny left the house – big enough by the age of seven to fend for himself, so his parents thought – and he had brought along a torch, or perhaps a long twig, just in case. Behind the house stretched woods of pine and spruce, alive with wolves and bears. It was sleeting, the sough in the pines came clearly to him, and the pungent earth felt very near, recalling the dump trucks and the lumberjacks which his father had long supervised, and taken his son out in all weathers to see. Danny had heard the workmen and their tools before he could see them. The digging and the sawing and the motor-turning. Those sounds grown familiar soon entered his lexicon, and Danny when he set out now for school repeated them, here and there, to no one in particular, speaking in fluent spade and axe and chainsaw. Or as an engine revving.

First he skirted the woods and clambered down a steep slope of rock, and then he came to a clearing where there lay a creek, and under the narrow, wobbly plank that bridged it, waist-deep freezing water. Danny threw his knapsack across before negotiating the plank. He tried to put out of his mind the nipping memories of falling in. He stretched out his arms, for balance. Little, tottering steps.

Presently the trees thinned away and he followed a path across the highway to a neighbourhood considered bad. He was deep in thought, dominated by an incessant flow of ideas to the exclusion of everything else. Unaware of the figures that began to circle him, in an ever-decreasing circle. He was talking to his boots. Either that, or his rigid gait, or the cosseted dressiness of his clothing, had stirred up this pack of lads – and soon, through his snowsuit, Danny felt their calloused fingers jab his arms, ribs and chest. His mask they attempted to rip clean away. Holding fast to it, he fled into the school.

The plain red-brick building on the corner of Davies Street hasn’t changed much since Danny’s time. It is now a remedial learning centre for poor working-class adults, after being an elementary for mainly poor working-class children. Many of the children sounded as Irish or Scottish as their folks, McThis or O’That. Today’s pupils in this part of Gatineau (as Hull is now called) have inherited the names but lost the accents. They attend newer, gentler schools. They wouldn’t recognise a leather strap, or the spool or skipping-rope handle which in fact was a nun’s clicker, designed to quell a class. One click, open your readers. Two clicks, pick up your pens. Girls are no longer a separate species, stuck in their own rows and sergegreen tunics. Even so, the clannishness of children remains. The surveillance, the strict division of those deemed ‘in’ and ‘out’. Durable as any plain red-brick building.

So the school didn’t assimilate him, far from it. Everything reminded him of how strange he felt within its walls. The John Wayne swagger of the older boys. The incomprehensible drone of the Lord’s Prayer, like a TV’s glitchy audio. In the hubbub of the playground he felt his shyness like a deformity, like a misshapen head. The other children thought him a nerd, as Aykroyd would say years later, a geek, as he would say as well, although the kids in Hull, Quebec, would have put it differently back then. A drip, more like it, a square. A funny boy, their parents might have thought, and whether they meant funny ha ha or funny peculiar depended on their mood and perspective. Neither a friend-magnet, then, nor a teacher’s pet.

The women teachers at Our Lady of the Annunciation – for they were all women – were short and stout, wearers of talc and corsets and tortoiseshell glasses – in a word, matronly. The same firmness of curves, slowness of movements, blackness of hair, a suspicious black that seemed almost blue: so many emblems of their authority. No malarkey would any of them take. Nor sides; they bestowed their knowledge impartially, on the earners of gold stars and red marks alike, on those who talked dialect at home and those who didn’t, on the aspiring typists and future factory hands. And on Danny. He was in a category all of his own.

A head taller than the other children when they stood alphabetically in line for class, too conspicuous, not knowing what to do with his hands or feet or gaze. He wouldn’t necessarily meet his classmates’ eyes. And that was just the half of it. His sprawling, left-handed compositions read like nothing the teacher would have seen (if the first drafts of his future screenplays are anything to go on): long but ingeniously digressive, branching out into a hundred backstories, each scene and character more inventive and more surprising than the last. This was a boy who liked nothing better than to loiter in encyclopedias, who knew the insides of atoms and the capitals of all the provinces, who sounded like he’d swallowed his father’s civil engineering manuals: ‘shale’, ‘theodolite’, ‘lateral load’. And just wait until you got him on prime numbers or the solar system, talking so fast he would have made Sergeant Bilko proud, Lucille Ball smile. You couldn’t stop him then. His boundless inquisitiveness made him exhausting to teach. I don’t know if he was oblivious to an adult’s impatience, wanting to squeeze answer after answer out of the Miss, or whether he found some questions simply irresistible. In which case he could hold them back no longer than he was able to hold his breath.

How many people live in France? How many towns are there in France? Is Paris the size of Ottawa?

He was like the air-raid siren that sat over the girls’ side of the playground (the kind that, twenty years later, Aykroyd would put in a movie atop his Bluesmobile): you never knew when he might go off. And one day Danny went further and demonstrated his own powers of disruption. Picture the following. The teacher would have been explaining something to the class in her usual roundabout way, maybe tripping over some stat or date – she must have seen an impatient look come into his face – and then stopped and said, ‘What is it?’, and other disapproving words. The rows behind him put down their pens as he said, switching to his TV detective voice, ‘All we want are the facts, ma’am.’ From anyone else, it would have seemed to her the height of impertinence. Very likely she had not gotten the joke, and was unprepared for the children’s reaction. The boys, studious a minute before, fell into a laughing match. They laughed at the top of their lungs, unthinkingly, daringly, competitively. The teacher shouted over them. That’s. Enough. Out. Of. You. Young. Man.

Had it even been a joke? Had he known what he was doing? You couldn’t be sure, coming from a nature like Danny’s. The shifting voices and odd flights of fancy, next door to the shy bookishness, made him an enigma. Deliberate or not, the scene in the classroom altered Danny, so that he came into some new knowledge of his resources, the ways of diversion, attracting the pupils’ attention to characters put on and then slipped free from. And indeed for a while, maybe a few days at a time, the boys forgot to harass him at recess or to be cold towards him. They let him be.

The teacher, in turn, thought up her own harmless subterfuge. Her breath smelled of the humbugs for which she regularly dispatched Danny to the local sweet shop, thereby buying thirty minutes or so of peace for her and the classroom. In this way, Armand Monfils, the confectioner, relieved her for half an hour in the afternoon. Her desk drawer teemed with humbugs for as long as Danny was in her lessons. (Sometimes one of the other boys would be all sweetness and light until the humbug errand was his, the thirty carefree minutes away from class were his, and Danny, mightily peeved, knew he’d remember Ricky Hollingsworth till the day he died.)

Some days, when Danny could have been away at the sweet shop, he had to remain instead on the premises. Miss Nellie Bradley, the headmistress, would want to see him. He was a regular in her office. Miss Bradley, who was the aunt of the early-grades teacher Miss Sirois, and who sometimes asked her niece about the Aykroyds’ boy and heard her answer that he was quite a handful – a pain in the neck, Miss Sirois, who had a soft heart, did not say – Miss Bradley, though not herself exactly a laid-back lady, would pull in a few colleagues and have Danny entertain them. The cigarette smoke would get so thick as to sting the boy’s myopic eyes. Ask him to do Hilly, one of the ladies would whisper, and Danny would imitate so precisely their colleague’s tone and pitch that it was as if Mrs Preslawski weren’t at that instant several classrooms down, but standing there in person.

He could be quiet as well, when the circumstances required it, so quiet you wouldn’t even know he was there, all eyes and ears. During the last hour of lessons, for example, when he feared being held back, kept from his cartoons (though they were far from his mother’s idea of a good viewing habit – he’d catch them on the sly when she wasn’t around), and also when the school’s television set rolled into class. Danny was old enough by then to know not to echo back what he heard, so that the only voice in the room came out of the screen.

The boys in the school films looked and behaved nothing like him. They wore wrinkle-free plaid shirts in winter; horizontal-stripe T-shirts in summer. They bought thoughtful birthday gifts for their mothers; wrote friends in distant towns fountain pen-pal letters; watched pucks pushed and whacked across hockey rinks. Like his father and younger brother, they were invariably called Peter. He was a Danny in a world of Peters.

✲

Danny had never had a friend like him.

Theirs were the first names called when the teacher took attendance. Aykroyd. Chitovas.

He was the rare boy who would play with Danny during recess, risking the jeers of the first and second picks for ball teams, a skinny boy with small eyes and hamster cheeks, Danny called him Chich after the puppet in Chich in Cartoonerville. Modest, unpromising looks, but enveloped by the glamour which an early brush with mortal peril gave him.

Chich’s father had saved his son’s life, and those of his three daughters. Nick Chitovas went to bed one night and woke to find his firetrap of an apartment up in flames. Chich was an infant at the time, like his sisters, and remembered nothing of his father’s howls in the family’s Quebec French. Nothing of being grabbed with a sister and hurtled into the frozen street and the crowd of onlookers, his father like a man possessed, in a frenzy of urgency and heroism. Nothing of his father braving the blinding heat again and returning, long minutes later, with the other sisters. Nick Chitovas’s face, it was said throughout town and down the years, was black with soot and his hair smouldering. And with every retelling, the fire grew fiercer, the smoke blacker, the shouts and sobs louder. Nick Chitovas’s hair went from a meagre wick to a halo of dancing flame. Up to here, the tellers would say, waving their arms high above their heads. And Danny, witnessing neighbours recount the tale, was entranced by the theatrics of a good story.

Lunchtimes found Chich and Danny setting off for the woods’ edge, leaving behind the school and highway. The retreating snow smelled of humbugs as they ran along a stream, shooting baddies or lassoing Indians. Or else they retired to the woods to play hide and seek. Danny was the best hider Chich had ever known. Chich would close his eyes and count to twenty before tiptoeing among the pines and hear only a chainsaw splutter, or a dumpster’s ignition in the distance, and the next thing he knew the chainsaw was calling to him or the dumpster driving his way, louder and louder, and then nothing. Silence. Danny could do silence too, the eerie silence among the trees that canopied the forest floor. ‘Danny, where are you?’ Chich would shout and the woods echoed back, Danny, where are you?

Another game they played was cops and robbers, alternating the role of culprit. Danny loved reading or hearing or thinking about crime; the police, and the people they arrested, exercised an equal fascination on him. As far as he was concerned, being afraid of outlaws was for grown-ups. He had the softest of spots for outlaws. Perhaps he envisioned them, but this is speculation, as brethren – comrades in alienation, fellow strangers to polite society with its unfathomable and countless rules. Rules that, always changing, could get the better of anyone. Capricious. One day’s parking space was another’s traffic violation. The same beer served at 1.05 a.m. in Quebec would be bootleg in neighbouring Ontario. Danny thought a lot about such things, about right and wrong, good and bad, as policemen did. And criminals, apparently.

Let’s go see the jail, Danny said to Chich one Saturday. Probably he told him about his father’s crossing the threshold, now and then, paying Christian visits to the convicts. The convicts were housed out in the woods, not far from the Aykroyds’ home, so if one or more escaped, as happened sometimes, they might almost run into the two boys playing. The men never did remain out for long. All those bedsheets tied into a makeshift rope, for a few days, or only hours, of freedom.

The boys picked up their bikes and rode bumpily in the direction of the jail. Chich lagged behind Danny; his nerves were catching up with him.

‘Chich, we’re here!’ Danny said as he jumped off his bicycle.

‘Sacramento!’ Chich exclaimed, braking. ‘Danny, do you see them?’

‘Raccoons. Raccoons in cages, half a dozen of them,’ Greg Chitovas, now seventy and a Bell Canada retiree, told me by phone. ‘Who knows why the prisoners kept them there. For company I’d have thought.’

A man’s paunch blocked out the view. The paunch belonged to one of the guards. ‘What have we got here?’ he said unnecessarily. The boys skedaddled.

And when a colleague asked the returning guard what that had been about, the guard, with a shrug, said, ‘Nothing, just kids. Nick Chitovas’s lad and some wide-eyed pal of his.’

✲

A new toy. Danny shook it, but not roughly. He held the Magic 8 Ball as he held any book, with an abiding reverence for all that he did not know. Question after question he asked it, questions he’d intended for his father.

‘Might humans communicate with extraterrestrials?’ (‘Ask again later.’)

‘Is time travel possible?’ (‘Signs point to yes.’)

‘Do many other dimensions exist?’ (‘Better not to tell you now.’)

When the 8 Ball’s answers didn’t satisfy, he took his questions to the family bookcase, or to the bookshelves in the old clapboard farmhouse in Frontenac County, where the Aykroyds spent their summers. Hours of sunlight to read by. He read the contents of his ancestor’s shelves. Books that were alphabetised, or otherwise kept tidy, by his father who liked to quote his Latin primer: a place for everything, and everything in its place. Venerable-looking books like The History of Spiritualism by Arthur Conan Doyle, handed down from his father’s grandfather, and stacks of back copies of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.

He learned about ectoplasm, a kind of gelatinous and whitish substance, so these books and quarterlies stated, used by spirits to materialise their likeness. Ectoplasm is exuded through a medium’s nose, mouth, ears or belly button during a séance. It can be handled, smelled, occasionally photographed for posterity. The light of day causes this transient substance to vanish. When Danny asked his father whether he had ever seen ectoplasm or perhaps even touched it, his father, every inch a believer, replied with regret in the negative.

The original owner of these books, Samuel Aykroyd, had been a dentist at the close of the nineteenth century, a time when the trade’s tools were like so many instruments of torture, and pain relief nonexistent. Whether Dr Aykroyd ever practised what he read about mesmerism remains an open question. Perhaps he didn’t hypnotise his patients. Perhaps he didn’t swing the gold fob of his pocket watch before their eyes. Whatever was his professional interest in these theories, they persuaded his family to mingle their Christianity with spiritualism.

✲

Peter Aykroyd told Danny and his brother about a Sunday evening long ago, when several cars had driven up to the family’s farmhouse. Big Dodges and the like. This would have been in the year 1929. Seven-year-old Peter, crouching in the bushes, observed the visitors from a distance. They were sitters, his grandfather told Peter afterwards, and the word would give them a special dignity in the young boy’s mind. From behind the bushes he crept inside the cellar at the back of the parlour. He had never known the household in such a state of animation. The men and women were walking in now. From where they came, he didn’t know – the big town to the south, Kingston, or somewhere in that neck of the woods; children, in any case, didn’t ask a lot of questions back then. The women smelled of perfume and mink coats. His grandfather opened the door to the parlour and let the group ceremoniously file in.

The parlour had a square wooden table in its centre and an old stone fireplace, and shelves of his grandfather’s books. Through the cellar door he heard the sitters pull out their chairs and take their places around the table, the drapes being drawn, and the medium demand who was there that day from the great beyond. He heard the curious noise eight or more adults make when they hold hands and breathe in harmony.

Before long, someone came through from the other side. All Peter could say for sure was that the voice groaned so low and deep it wasn’t a voice. In any case, not a human voice. One of the medium’s spirit guides was communicating through him: a Chinese fellow by the name of Lee Long who’d lived during the Ming dynasty, or Blue Light, a prince, or so the sitters believed, from Ancient Egypt, or perhaps the Native American called Broken Arrow – whoever it was spoke up and invited questions from the darkened room. One of the sitters asked about a departed relative, and Lee Long – or Blue Light or Broken Arrow – said the beloved was in a better place, and when this response induced a gasp of joy, and relief, from across the table, the spirit proceeded to share memories that the sitter recognised.

Sometimes a séance would turn up nothing, Peter conceded to Danny and his brother; no usable information from the dead would be forthcoming, which the sitters attributed to a negative, or worse, a sceptical thought crossing one or more of the minds present around the table. Danny felt he’d be incapable of any such thought. He couldn’t get the medium’s many voices out of his head.

✲

Danny ought to see a professional person. That would have been the advice of the headmistress. Most parents of the period wouldn’t have heard of a shrink for their child. But Peter and Lorraine Aykroyd were not most parents. Both widely read, university educated, with a high regard for science. And Peter, back in his National Film Board days, had worked on documentaries commissioned by the country’s mental health association.

It was at a child guidance clinic – a common euphemism then for child psychiatry – that Mrs Aykroyd set out her son’s difficulties as best she could. They had worsened in the past year, she told the psychologist, ever since her son had entered sixth grade and Mrs Marier’s class. This teacher wasn’t tyrannical, but she wasn’t understanding either, always ready with a frown, and teacher and pupil had never gotten along. She was a strict and mean lady with an angry wart right between the eyes (this description would have been Danny’s). At first only a few heated words, her punishment would swiftly make itself felt: a rap of her ringed fingers, or of a ruler, to the boy’s temples. Every other peep out of him seemed to merit the strap (which never missed – Mrs Marier hadn’t made the teachers’ bowling league team for nothing), until he had ended up dreading school altogether, he who had aced most classes outside of sports. Indeed, thought the psychologist, who would have seen the boy’s academic reports, Danny Aykroyd was very much his high-achieving parents’ son.