Vital Signs

by John Metcalf

  Munchy shook his head.

  “Answer me!” shouted Paul. “Can’t you see he’s bleeding? What kind of friends are you? He’s bleeding and he’s bleeding internally. What happened to him?”

  They stared at him.

  “He didn’t,” said Munchy.

  “Jesus Christ!” said Paul. “Go! Just go! Go and phone for an ambulance.”

  “No, no, no,” said the other creature, shaking his head emphatically.

  “What do you mean, no?”

  Pointing at Peter, he said,

  “Issribena.”

  Paul stared at him. The hair was bleached to a hideous chemical yellow and he was wearing a combination false-nose-and-spectacles. His T-shirt was imprinted with the word: Snout.

  “It is, Mr. Denton,” said Munchy. “That’s what it is.”

  “Is what?”

  “Issribena!” said the one on the steps.

  “What,” said Paul, “is it?”

  “Ribena,” said Munchy.

  Paul wondered if The Iron Guard had done something permanent to his head.

  He said:

  “Say that again.”

  “Ribena?” said Munchy.

  “Yes. What do you mean, ‘Ribena’?”

  “It’s black-currant juice.”

  “Ribenasafruit,” added the creature with the chemical hair.

  Paul knelt again and smeared his finger through the slimy, red-tinged spittle. He smelled it. It immediately made him feel queasy.

  He got slowly to his feet.

  The Iron Guard sounded through the padded doors like the throb of industrial machinery.

  Brushing the dust off his pants, he said,

  “Ribena, eh?”

  “It isn’t bleeding, Mr. Denton.”

  “No,” said Paul. ‘’And Ribena did this to him, did it, Munchy?”

  Munchy shook his head.

  “It didn’t?”

  “Grover put rum in it.”

  Paul nodded slowly.

  “That is Grover?”

  There didn’t seem much point in trying to talk to Grover. He was engrossed in trailing his fingertips backwards and forwards along the concrete step.

  “But you didn’t drink much of it.”

  “Well, I don’t use it, Mr. Denton. I’m not really into alcohol.”

  Paul closed his eyes.

  He breathed, consciously.

  After a few moments, he said,

  “Do you know how old Peter is?”

  Munchy nodded.

  “Speak to me, Munchy.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Tell me. In words.”

  “Peter?”

  Paul nodded.

  “Fifteen?”

  Paul nodded.

  “Well?” he said. “Do you have anything to say?”

  Grover was making automobile noises.

  Munchy snuffled.

  Paul stared at Munchy.

  Staring at Munchy, at his eczema, at his safari shirt over which he wore a broad belt in the manner of Russian peasants, at his tux pants and what looked like army boots, the words “diminished responsibility” came into Paul’s mind. Munchy was the sort of character who’d be sentenced to months of community service for drug possession and who’d genuinely find emptying bedpans a deeply meaningful learning experience; interrogating him was like wantonly tormenting the Easter Bunny.

  Munchy wiped his nose on his sleeve again.

  Paul looked down at Peter and sighed.

  He felt immensely weary.

  Above the door that led out onto the sidewalk the EXIT sign flushed the white tiles red.

  “It’s the pollen,” said Munchy.

  “What?”

  “In the season, I always suffer with it.”

  He pointed at the tip of his nose with his forefinger.

  “Or sometimes,” he added, “just with environmental dust.”

  “Munchy,” said Paul, “SHUT. UP. Do you understand?”

  Munchy nodded.

  “Right. Good. Now get hold of his other arm.”

  Munchy pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose and stooped.

  “And Munchy?”

  The glasses flashed.

  “Don’t speak to me!”

  Munchy nodded.

  “Just don’t speak to me!”

  It was drizzling, a thin mist of rain. There were few people on the streets. Paul had hoped that the torrential storm would have cooled and rinsed the air but it was still close and muggy. Peter’s head hung. His legs wambled from sidewalk to gutter; his legs buckled; his legs strayed. Most of the passing couples averted their eyes. Supporting him was like wrestling with an unstrung puppet.

  Back wet with sweat, Paul propped him against a hydro pole. It was not when he was moving but when he stopped that he felt the pounding of his heart, that his hot clothes clung, that the sweat seemed to start from every pore. The boy felt so thin, his chest like the carcass of a chicken; it amazed Paul that such frailty could weigh so much.

  Leaning against Peter to jam him against the pole, Paul stared across the road unseeing, his clumsy tongue touching the dry corrugations of his palate. The muscles in his shoulders ached. Pain stitched his side. He did not seem able to breathe deeply enough.

  A lot of girls in a passing car yelled cheerful obscenities.

  His eyes followed the ruby shimmer of their rear lights in the road’s wet surface.

  Stapled to the hydro pole above Peter’s head was a small poster advertising a rock group. The band’s name seemed to be:

  BUGS HARVEY OSWALD

  He changed his grip on the boy’s wrist and stooped again to take the weight.

  Lurching on, he began to set himself goals: as far as the gilt sign proclaiming Larsson Associates: Consultants in Building Design and Research; as far as the light washing the sidewalk outside the windows of the Colonnade Pizzeria; as far as the traffic lights; as far as the next hydro pole.

  And the next.

  When he reached Elgin Street, he stood propping Peter at the curb waiting for the traffic lights to change. Further up the street, someone in a white apron was carrying in the buckets of cut flowers from outside Boushey’s Fruit Market; knots of people were saying noisy goodnights outside Al’s Steak House; a couple with ice-cream cones wandered past; he realized that although it felt much later it must just be approaching midnight. He stood staring across Elgin into Minto Park, into its deepening shadows beyond the reach of the street lights.

  It was quiet in the deserted park; the surrounding maple trees seemed to soak up the noise of the traffic. The wet green benches glistened. The houses along the sides of the square looked onto the park with blank windows. Paul felt somehow secluded, embowered, as though he were in an invisible, airy, green marquee. Just before the shadowed centre of the park with its circular flowerbed, the path widened and there stood the large bronze bust. The bust sat on top of a tall concrete slab which served as a pedestal. Before lowering Peter to a sitting position on its plinth, Paul glanced up at the massive head, the epaulettes, the frogging on the military jacket. Against the bank of moonlit cloud behind, the head stared, black and dramatic.

  Peter sat slumped with his back against the slab.

  Paul rearranged the boy’s limbs.

  The drizzle had stopped; the sky was breaking up. He began to hear the short screech of nighthawks.

  He worked his shoulders about and stretched. His legs felt trembly. He thought of quenching his thirst with a quart of Boushey’s fresh-squeezed orange juice but imagined Peter’s body being discovered in his absence by a dog-walker, imagined sitting in the back of the summoned police car giving chapter and embarrassing verse.

  The cuffs of his shirt were sticking to his wris
ts.

  Beyond the central flowerbed was a drinking fountain.

  Two of the four lamps had burned out, their white globes dull and ghostly.

  Zinnias. Zinnias and taller pink flowers whose name he didn’t know.

  His footsteps echoed.

  He drank deeply at the fountain and splashed water on his face.

  He walked back slowly to the bust. Around at the front of it Peter was invisible but audible, groaning exhalations. Paul bent forward and peered at the bronze plaque bolted into the back of the pedestal.

  April 19, 1973

  The Embassy of Argentina presents this bronze to the City of Ottawa as a symbol of Canadian-Argentine Friendship

  Mayor of Ottawa

  Pierre Benoit

  Ambassador of Argentina

  Pablo Gonzalez Bergez

  Paul walked around the plinth. Peter had not moved. He leaned close to the pedestal to read the plaque above the boy’s head. It was darker on this side, the bulk of the bust and pedestal blocking most of the light from the two lamps, and he had to angle his head to make out the words.

  GENERAL JOSÉ DE SAN MARTIN

  Hero of the South-American Independence

  Born in Argentina on Feb. 25, 1778

  Died in France on Aug. 17, 1850

  He ensured Argentine Independence, crossed the Andes and liberated Chile and Peru

  Sirens.

  Sirens on Elgin Street.

  Ambulance.

  Silence sifting down again.

  Crunching up two tablets of Nikoban gum, Paul stood looking down at Peter. The drizzle had wet his hair and purple food dye had coloured his forehead and run in streaks down his face. Pallor and purple, he looked as if he’d been exhumed.

  Paul sat down beside him on the plinth.

  “Peter?

  “How are you feeling now? Feel a bit better?

  “Peter! Listen! Are you listening? I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’ll stay and rest here for a while and let you get sobered up a bit. If your mother saw you like this neither of us’d ever hear the end of it. Come on, now! Sit up! You’ll feel a bit better soon.

  “Okay? Peter?”

  Peter mumbled.

  “What? What was that? You’re tired! And what? You don’t feel very well. No. I can imagine. You’re a lucky boy, you know. Do you realize that? It was an amazing coincidence I happened to be in that place tonight. It was the first time I’d ever been there and I can assure you that it was also the last. That violin! Christ! It was like root-canal work. If that’s the kind of place you hang out in, it’s a wonder to me you aren’t stone deaf. But you’re lucky, Peter. It could have turned out differently. You could have hurt yourself badly on those stairs. You might have been in the hospital right now with your skull smashed. You think about that.”

  “ohhhhhhhh,” said Peter.

  “Yes,” said Paul, “you think about it.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “Norma and I—you saw Norma, didn’t you? Norma who works for me? You met her once, I think. It was pure chance that I—that we—were there. As I said before. We’d been having dinner after work with a guy who’s got some masks for sale and after dinner he wanted to go on and listen to some music—you know, visiting fireman sort of stuff—tedious really—and Norma’d heard of that place so that’s where we ended up.”

  Paul again glanced at Peter.

  “Fellow from Edmonton.”

  Peter seemed to be studying his kneecap.

  “And it was your good luck we did. End up there.

  “Even if you hadn’t hurt yourself on the stairs, the police would have picked you up. Imagine that? And Munchy and that other creep wouldn’t have been much use to you either. Christ! What a pair! One pissed and the other congenital. You ought to have a think about those beauties, Peter. Real friends wouldn’t have let you get like this. But can you imagine it? You know how she gets. Your mother down at the police station? In the middle of the night? In full flow?

  “Anyway, you’re safe. That’s the main thing. I don’t intend to go harping on about this. I just want you to think about it. That’s all. Think about what might have happened. Okay?”

  “ohhhhhhhh,” said Peter.

  “Yes,” said Paul, “well, that’s what happens when you drink Ribena.”

  He leaned back against the pedestal listening to the screech of the invisible nighthawks. The cries grew louder and then diminished, fading, grew harsher again as the birds swept and quartered the sky above.

  “It’s strange, really,” he said. “I was just thinking about it. About that club and that abominable bloody music. Know what I was thinking about? It hadn’t really occurred to me before. And perhaps it should have. But when I was your age I used to drive my parents mad with the stuff I listened to. Of course, with me it was jazz records. To hear my mother on the subject—well, you know what your grandmother’s like—you’d have thought it was Sodom and Gomorrah and the papacy rolled into one. And it didn’t help, of course, that most of them were black.

  “Oh, I’ve had some memorable fights with her in my time. She was sort of a female Archie Bunker, your grandmother. Backbone of the Ladies’ Orange Benevolent Association. A merciless church-goer. She refused to listen to the radio on Sundays till she was about sixty-five. Yes, in the days I’m talking about your grandmother was a woman of truly vile rectitude.

  “I remember one time up at the cottage—one summer—I hated it up there when I was about your age. Every day—every single day—she used to bake bread on that old wood stove. Can you imagine? In that heat? It was all just part of her summer campaign to make life unbearable and martyr herself. And piss my father off. But when I was about your age, that summer . . .

  ‘’I’d only got a few records. I can see them now. 78s, of course. And an old wind-up gramophone. Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw and Ellington and Count Basie. Buddy de Franco.

  “I used to sit out there on the porch—it wasn’t screened in those days—I used to sit out there playing them over and over again. ‘Take the A Train’ and ‘Flying Home.’ And she could have killed me. When she listened to music—and she didn’t really like music—she used to listen to a dreadful unaccompanied woman called Kathleen Ferrier singing some damn thing called ‘Blow the Wind Southerly.’ A very horrible experience, my boy. And if it wasn’t that, it was the other side. ‘We’ll Lay the Keel Row.’ Which was, if possible, worse. You don’t know what suffering is.

  “But the stuff I played was like waving a red flag. Getting up late and not eating a proper breakfast and then refusing to swim and just sitting, sitting listening to that . . . to that . . . And off she’d go about vulgarity and nigger minstrels and why couldn’t I listen to something decent like John McCormack, and then I’d say that Benny Goodman was not only white but a respected classical musician and then it’d get worse and her face red with rage and it’d swell into all decency fled from modern life and girls flaunting themselves shamelessly and listening to that concatenation of black booby-faces . . . well, you can imagine what it was like. You know how easy it is to get her started. Though she’s mellow now compared with the way she used to be. All that business over Jennifer’s shorts last year. About their indecency? Remember that?

  “Anyway. What I’m getting at is that maybe when you get a bit older you forget—I don’t mean you—you, Peter—I mean one. One forgets what one was like oneself. That’s what I’m trying to say. Understand? And I’m trying to say that I don’t want to be towards you the way your grandmother was to me.

  “What?”

  “nerrrrrrrr,” said Peter again.

  “No? No you don’t want me to be?”

  “nrrrrrrrr,” said Peter.

  “Now,” said Paul, ‘’I’m not saying I could ever like the music you like because, in all honesty, I couldn’t. And I don
’t want to lie to you. But certainly I ought to be able to tolerate it. Because I don’t want something like taste in music to come between us. There’d be something . . . well . . . so petty about that, wouldn’t there?”

  Peter said nothing.

  His head was back against the pedestal and he seemed to be staring up into a maple tree. Paul got to his feet and stood looking down at him.

  “Wouldn’t there, Peter? Be something petty about that? And that’s something that, well . . . you know, as we are talking, it’s something we ought to talk about. I know it isn’t just the music. It’s everything the music stands for. I realize that. And whatever you might think, I do understand, Peter, because that’s what jazz used to stand for. For me, I mean. When I was fighting with my father and mother. It meant the same kind of thing that punk or new wave or whatever you call it means now. But I’ll tell you what I resent. What I resent is this being cast in the role of automatic enemy. I’m not Society. I’m not The Middle Class. I’m me. A person. Just like you’re a person.

  ‘’And I’ve got feelings, too.

  “Okay?”

  Paul stood looking down at Peter’s bowed head.

  “Look!” he said, beginning to pace. “We’ve been having a pretty hard time lately, haven’t we? Always arguing and squabbling about one thing or another. Getting on each other’s nerves. And it’s been making me very unhappy, Peter. But you know, for my part, I only criticize you because I want you to grow up decently and become a kind and considerate person. I don’t enjoy fighting with you. Believe me. But think of it this way. If I didn’t care about you and love you—care about what you’re going to become—and care very deeply—I wouldn’t bother with you, would I? It’d be much easier just to ignore you, let you go to hell in a handcart. It’d be a lot easier for me just to shrug my shoulders, wouldn’t it?

  “But I don’t do that, Peter.

  “And I think, really, that you know why I don’t.

  “Don’t you?”

  Paul sat down on the plinth again and turned to face Peter. Peter had not moved. Paul looked at him and then looked down at his shoes. A breath of wind shuddered the leaves in the maple trees and drops of rainwater pattered down on the concrete path.

  “I don’t know, old son. It’s a funny business—the way things work out—and I don’t make much claim to understand it. I suppose we all just blunder along doing the best we can, just hoping for the best but . . . this thing—you and me, I mean—it’s all so ridiculous.