After eight months of snow, this easy-living gold town in the province of Quebec is hopping in the evening sunshine, which is what the town is famous for among its sister townships strewn along the largest greenstone mineral belt in the world. It hops higher than Timmins to the west in stodgy Ontario, higher than Val-d'Or or Amos to the east, higher by a mile than the dreary white-collar settlements of hydro-electric engineers up north. Daffodils and tulips strut like soldiers in the garden of the white church with its leaden roof and narrow spire; dandelions as big as dollars cover the grass slope below the police station. After their winter's wait beneath the snow, the flowers are as rampant as the town. The shops for the suddenly rich or merely hopeful ― the Boutique Bebe with its pink giraffes, the pizza cafes named after lucky miners and prospectors, the Pharmacie des Croyants, which offers hypnotherapy and massage, the neon-lit bars named after Venus and Apollo, the stately whorehouses after vanished madams, the Japanese sauna house with its pagoda and plastic pebble garden, the banks of every colour and persuasion, the jewellery stores where the high-graders used to melt the miners' stolen ore and occasionally still do, the wedding shops with their virginal wax brides, the Polish delicatessen advertising "films super erotiques XXX" as if they were a culinary event, the restaurants open all hours for shift workers, even the notaries with their blackened windows ― all sparkle in the glory of the early summer, and
As Jonathan glances into shop windows or gratefully upward at the blue heaven and lets the sunlight warm his hollowed face, motorcyclists with beards and dark glasses roar up and down the street, racing their engines and flicking their leather backsides at the girls who sip their Cokes at outdoor tables on the sidewalk. In Esperance the girls stand out like parakeets. The matrons of stodgy Ontario next door may dress themselves like sofas at a funeral, but here in Esperance the hot-blooded Québécois make a carnival every day, in radiant cottons and gold bracelets that smile at you across the street.
There are no trees in Esperance. With forests all around, the townspeople see open space as an accomplishment. And there are no Indians in Esperance, or not so that you'd notice, unless like Jonathan you spot one with his wife and family, loading a pickup with a thousand dollars' worth of provisions from the
There are no vulgar emblems of wealth in the town either, if you discount the seventy-five-thousand-dollar power yachts in the parking lot beside the Chateau Babette's kitchens, or the herds of Harley-Davidson motorcycles clustered round the Bonnie and Clyde Saloon. Canadians ― French or any other sort ― don't care for display, whether of money or emotion. Fortunes are still made, of course, by those who strike it lucky. And luck is the real religion of the town. Everyone dreams of a gold mine in his garden, and a couple of the lucky ones have found just that. Those men in baseball hats and sneakers and bomber jackets who stand about talking into mobile phones: in other towns they would be drug pushers or numbers boys or pimps, but here in Esperance they are the quiet millionaires of thirty. As to the older ones, they eat their lunches out of tin boxes a mile below ground.
Jonathan devours all this in the first minutes of his arrival. In his state of bright-eyed exhaustion, he takes in everything at once, while his heart bursts with the gratitude of a voyager setting foot on the promised shore. It's beautiful. I worked for it. It's mine.
* * *
He had ridden out of the Lanyon at daybreak without looking back, and headed for Bristol for his week of lying low. He had parked his motorbike in a run-down suburb where Rooke had promised to have it stolen, he had taken a bus to Avonmouth, where he found a seamen's hostel run by two elderly Irish homosexuals who, according to Rooke, were famous for not collaborating with the police. It rained all day and night, and on the third day, while Jonathan was eating breakfast, he heard his name and description on the local radio: last seen West Cornwall area, injured right hand, ring this number. While he listened he saw the two Irishmen listening too, their eyes fixed on one another. He paid his bill and took the bus back to Bristol.
