the 1980's

Berry's family was entirely typical of their time and place. His genetic makeup was a familiar soup, with all the British isles represented (a pound of Scots, a cup of Welsh and a dash of English). If one followed the trail of obituaries, wedding banns, birth notices and landed immigration papers, it appeared that the main branches of their family tree had stretched over to North America at some point during the early 1900s. Not early enough to claim settlerhood. Not recent enough that Berry could claim to be anything more glamourous than Canadian.

The dull, straightforward fact of his genealogy was a disappointment to Berry, who grew up in the mixed-income landscape of north Scarborough. While being a white kid of blurry British descent was by far still the norm, there was a substantial influx of more exotic backgrounds rising all around him.

The curriculum — especially in art and social studies — often encouraged the children to explore questions of ancestry and their individual uniqueness. Berry would benignly crayon a big red maple leaf onto his handmade paper flag, but watch enviously as other kids drew stripes of various colours, yellow stars or blue chakra wheels on theirs. How wholly boring and every day he would feel during these exercises meant to instil pride and a sense of being part of the great mosaic of Canada.

The exception — sixth grade. This was a big, important year in Berry's life. And, looking back on it through the lens of heritage, one of his greatest shames.

His mother had died the summer before. It had been a shocking surprise. An external interference in the usual pattern of things. She hadn't been sick. She hadn't been acting strangely. There was no reason for Berry to think that she wouldn't be there when he got back from his friend's house, where he'd spent a long summer holiday morning watching The Monkees and shooting marbles on his friend's family room carpet. He'd said goodbye to her that morning and set off on his blue bike without any foreshadowing.

She was going swimming at the community centre pool, she'd said, and then she was going to go grocery shopping at the Loblaw up the road. She had every intention of being back by the time Berry returned.

Only she wasn't. When he returned to find the door locked and the house silent, he sat on the front porch, reading The Sword in the Stone until his father arrived home.

Berry remembers his father's empty confusion at the dark interior of their house. The lack of supper smells in the kitchen. The inexplicable absence of the wife and mother who was always there, but distressingly, now wasn't.

He remembers chewing nervously on the inside of his cheek as his father went to the mustard-yellow wall-mounted phone that had a cord long enough to range the entire first floor. Not that he ranged. His father stood stock still in the kitchen and made calls. First to her friends. Then, to hospitals and the police station. I'm looking for my wife, James Ross had explained patiently over and over, providing a description of her and recounting what her plans had been that day, in so much as Berry had been able to relay them.

Worse, Berry remembers the incoming call that rang just as his father was about to dial another hospital. His father's face, at first hopeful. They had found her. Then, disbelief. They had found her at the pool. Hours and hours earlier, in fact, but with no way of identifying her as belonging to them, to their house, to their family, she had been picked up by the EMT and was waiting for identification at the Scarborough Grace Hospital. It was supposed that her belongings and identification were stowed in a locker while she swam.

In the horrible, sad days that came after this, they learned that there'd been a tiny unseen gotcha hidden away in his mother's body. It had reached her brain while she'd been doing laps in the crowded pool. It's possible that if she hadn't been in the pool at the time, she might have survived the aneurysm itself — although the damage was sure to have been severe in any case. However, as it was, she'd experienced the aneurysm while face down in the water. And that, as they so callously tend to say, was that. Fate had intervened in the life of Berry's mother and, indeed, in his own in a most unwelcome way.

A thing like that, you see, marks a person for life. An unexpected loss will germinate seeds of suspicion in those that bear it. They will never quite trust that things are what they seem after that. They lose confidence in what appears to be true. And, especially in those early dark days after a loss, might vigorously aspire to alternative truths.

This is why, that following fall, when his Social Studies teachers brought out the blank flags and asked the children to explore their uniqueness in the medium of pencil crayon and paper for the umpteenth time, Berry decided to be someone different.

He used his red pencil crayon to draw the bold red cross of the Knights Templar Flag rather than the usual maple leaf. He explained, when the teacher asked (which of course she did — suspiciously and in front of the entire class), that after his mother's untimely death, certain papers had been discovered. He made vague insinuations to a vault but could have been referring to their unfinished basement. He looked the teacher in the eye and said with unembellished pride that his mother, it turned out, was the direct descendant of King Arthur himself. He and his father would, he added stupidly, most likely be summoned to court for recognition later that year. Maybe around Christmas time.

There was a heavy pause in the classroom while classmates and teachers absorbed Berry's whopping fib.

He stood his ground. He went to the board and posted his Templar flag beside the others. His teacher pursed her lips but reminded herself that this boy had just lost a parent. She allowed the flag.

The embarrassment that adult Berry feels when this memory floats to the surface, as it sometimes does, isn't about the Templar flag. It was understandable that a ten-year-old boy, obsessed with books about Knights, dragon slayings and beautiful Queens, should fantasize that he was somehow connected to that glittering historical legend. No, it's not the fantasy itself of which he was ashamed.

It was that he'd invoked his mother's death in the telling of the fib. He'd used it as the critical plot point for his wild fabrication.

In the moment that he said it, it had felt like an honouring of her passing. She was royalty, in this version of events — not just a Canadian woman who had fatally aspirated the heavily chlorinated water of a public pool. But after the incredulous laughter had faded and the tears had smarted his eyes and the teacher had taken pity on him and allowed the Templar flag to hang — that's when he'd started a slow spiralling down into a deep pool of shame and regret that he would carry for the remainder of his life. Sometimes quite close to the surface. Sometimes well buried. But always there.