Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  “God, I hate you,” she said.

  He tried the leaping line of her nose, but his hand was tense. He erased, tried again. Wrong, fuck. Erased again. The pencil squirmed between his wet fingers.

  A while later he gave up, crumpled the paper. Despondently looked through the window. The afternoon was getting on. Two jets made white slices across the sky like skates on dull grey ice.

  Ivy had a small gas campstove lit, above its blue flame a pot filled with simmering beeswax. He wandered over. He made to dip his forefinger in, but she stopped him.

  “Don’t touch, you idiot. You’ll go and burn yourself and knock the thing over. Here. Let me show you something else.”

  First she opened the window. Then she speared a little ball of hash on the end of a brooch pin she had pulled from her cardigan. Slowly she heated it at the flame, and, when it was soft enough, transferred it to the bowl of a little silver pipe she pulled from her Afghan coat. Then she held the pipe over the flame, and as the drug sizzled and burnt, she sucked up great lungfuls of its acrid smoke. The room was plunged into ash-grey air, and Robbie felt zonked enough just standing next to her. This stuff was way heavier than hash – as soon as he had a real toke he felt sleepy and sick.

  “Man,” he said, sitting down on the floor. “Are you ever full of surprises.”

  “Life will be convulsive, don’t you remember? Or not at all.”

  “I think so. Yeah, right. I get it now.”

  She plops a sheaf of drawing paper on his lap, and rolls some pencils clicking across the floor. Robbie looks at them stupidly. His arms are filled with lead. Then she undresses. Just like that. And sits demurely on a chair, arms folded, legs braided. This is her torso: as light and flat as a packet of Sugar Krunchies; slight, squared-off shoulders, a flat chest, and a boxy pelvis. He picks up a pencil. It’s like balsa wood, yet it also weighs a ton. He concentrates as hard as he can, but his sketches are still shrunken and scratchy and tense, headless and footless like an ancient Roman ruin. Then, in a murky grab at inspiration, he adds a flourish from the headless neck, a quite unrelated arabesque. Fun. He draws some whirly clouds, some paisley hills. Yahoo! Pretty soon he’s doodling out of control, and signing it extravagantly before he’s even done.

  I know what you’re thinking, Ivy says, or seems to have said. She’s looking shyly over her bare shoulder. I have a body like Gumby.

  Yeah, maybe, he says, abruptly straightening his back. But no way I can concentrate on drawing now. This heavy stuff or what.

  What do you mean, maybe. Fucker. It’s opium.

  Whoa. Figures.

  She pulls him up by his hand, not a little roughly. C’mon, he distantly hears her say. Still nude, she leads him to the top of the stairs. It’s dark here, a corridor with doors to two or three other, smaller rooms: a bathroom, a locked storage space, and a cubbyhole nearly as bare as Ivy at the end. He’s sleepwalking now. The tiny cell contains a single stained glass window, a chipped porcelain chamberpot, a kneeling stool, a brass bedframe without a mattress, and a white shadow where a crucifix once hung on the wall. They think it’s locked up, Ivy’s saying, Curious… tried the door… olden days… old Grande Dame Blanchemains… incredible…

  He sniffs the cool musty air. Looks out through the window. Feels like they’re checking out an apartment. She stands with her hand on the brass bedpost, her luminous head above her naked shoulders, pale as a ghost. He laughs uncertainly and says, or hears himself say, or what did he say? He can’t remember.

  Together they watch the first-graders plop about on the ice rink below. They stand hip to hip in silence, hearing the distant shouts, the traffic on the slushy streets. Robbie rubs his forefingers and thumbs together, and the tips are numb. A gust of wind, and a veil of snow is pulled across the window from the outside, the gutter its curtain rail. He clears his throat. The dust up here is making his sinuses ooze. Like Siamese twins he and Ivy stand, the conjoined hip not like bone, but glowing coal. He wants to laugh, he wants to cry. What was that, did she pull her hip away, or was she just falling off balance, the way you will when you’re trying to hold so perfectly still? Will they get married, or are they already breaking up forever? Distantly, a ruler cracks on a desktop and a class erupts in laughter. School’s out forever. Ivy blows her bangs off her forehead. Then turns and stamps back into the art room. Robbie’s bowels are turned right upside-down now. His guts sink slowly like chilled tripe in a jar. After a while she returns fully clothed, Afghan coat and all. She holds out his khaki parka. And the next thing he knows she’s dragging him down the dark stairs like a dummy.

  “What a mess. You look like you’re in need of a haircut.”

  When Robbie first met Ivy’s father, it was not under the best of circumstances, mainly because Robbie was stoned again and had the roaring munchies. He sits on the carpet, noisily wolfing Cheese Puffs from the big glass bowl on the living-room coffee table, while Mr. Mills paces and quizzes him about his father’s occupation.

  “Well, my mother, she does a TV show.” Cheese Puff crumbs cling to his hair. He tries to brush them out, but his fingertips are a gooey orange and only make a worse mess. Mr. Mills meanwhile twiddles his thumbs like he’s winding up some vicious mechanism in his fists. Robbie pegs the guy for a malevolent teddy bear, with the straw emerging from his head where the little round ears were yanked too much as a baby hear, the stitches coming out of his tight little smile.

  “Like all children, I see you like junk food.”

  Robbie nods. Cheese Puff earthquake in his ears. Mrs. Mills meanwhile is sitting at the kitchen table in the adjoining room of this tiny apartment, chopping vegetables.

  “Compare at New York, Montreal is a safe city,” she’s saying. Robbie puts his hand to his chest, mouthing, me?, but she seems to be talking to herself. “Those tourist I saw, they ad nylon windbreaker from Allemagne là, with the best rainproofing. Alors les Allemands, what can you do, they are like that, an they ave cultural centres. That fellow e move so fast, e was a football player, I know, you don’t ave to tell me, I’m more intuit then you think.”

  “Did you know,” Mr. Mills says, just pleasantly chatting, “that French Canadians drink the most pop in Canada? And did you know that sugar and caffeine have a negative long-term effect on learning in children, so it’s scientifically proven that pepsis are the most stupid people from sea to shining sea?”

  Robbie wonders if this really is a test. Pulls a weak, ambiguous smile. And now the Cheese Puffs are all gone. He’s eaten the entire bowl. Ivy’s brother darts his head into the room to look, and then the sister does the same, head and shoulders only, like a Punch and Judy puppet show. At last Ivy appears, dressed for the school dance. She pulls a long face and drags him up by the hand.

  “Wow,” Robbie says in the corridor. “Do people still think that way?”

  “What do you expect? The father’s all for royal rule over the Dominion. He collects proven facts about pepsis. You’re an idiot to come here. I never asked you.”

  The stone was wearing off now. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. Terrific timing, stupid. He padded gingerly after her as she led him through the dim apartment; the Mills lived in a cramped box in St. Henri, a scoop of gravel south of the Canadian-Pacific tracks. Besides its smell of batik, the first thing he noticed was that there were rim marks all over the furniture; some fresh and sticky, some a faint outline, some buffed but still visible in pale circles where previous layers of lemon wax had been clouded over.

  He felt privileged to be there; he was hushed and appreciative, absorbing all the precious details of the Place Ivy Lived In, like it was a church or museum. There was where she bathed, there was where she curled up to read, there was where she studied, there was where she slept. He saw the place criss-crossed with trails of her gentle energy, luminous as a snail’s.

  Her bedroom was a jackdaw’s nest, a warren of lustrous stuff: a tuba with a dull skin of tarnish stood on its mouth in the corner; a futon lay in another, buried under
batik cushions; a swollen-bosomed chest of drawers sat in a third, her underwear everywhere so that Robbie didn’t know where to look. Books, magazines, and sheaves of paper spilled off bowing shelves. On a desk was a mannequin’s head with a veil and an ostrich feather, a tin of aniseed balls, a shoeboxful of cassettes, a Ouija board, and a boxed record set: the classic Strolling Bones’ live album, the famous rare R.I.P. Keef Richards limited-edition, containing the vial of Keef’s actual blood. He picked it up reverently as a CP train rumbled by Ivy’s window.

  There were four guys in the Bones: Spit Swagger, Bile, Jerusalem Slim and, of course, Keef. They had been through thick and thin since the sixties, suffering the death of only one of their founding members, whose name no one could recall. They had rats-nest hair down to their shoulders, and wore elaborate outfits like the decadents of the nineteenth century – wigs, ruffs, calf stockings, a plague of beauty spots – layered over with post-nuclear accessories like can openers, Saigon mirror sunglasses, burnt and bullet-shattered guitars, and leather jackets bristling with half-inch shells like the armour on a small herd of metallic stegosauruses. They were in Tangiers in this photo, Keef sipping mint tea and smoking a sebsi from a calabash pipe on the balcony of the Toubkal Café, and the others were striking bored and arrogant poses for the camera. Their skin was pockmarked, their legs were like stalks, and their sprayed-on satin pants threatened to come apart at the seams. They wore bored expressions with smudges for eyes; they looked as if they were all about to nod out, and probably would, as soon as the photo session was over.

  “This is a valuable collector’s item.” Robbie said in awe. “You must be a real fan.”

  “I’m not a fan. I worship him. Look, he signed it for me.”

  “You know him? Isn’t Keef dead? My Dad says one day they’ll dig him up and think he’s evolution’s missing link. When we were kids, Dad took us to see One Million Years B.C., and he said, Hey look, Keef Richards finally found a job. Laff riot, eh, my Dad?”

  “Oh, he’s not dead,” Ivy said breathlessly. “That haemorrhage thing was just an experiment to push the limit of his existence. Now he says he knows there’s nothing after life, and that God spelled backwards is doG.”

  Robbie wasn’t so sure of that, exactly. One story he’d heard was that Keef was in such bad shape he used to blow blood through the holes in his harmonica, and things really bottomed out the day they were taping an appearance on the Sonny and Cher show; all that was required was a little lip-synching, but Keef wasn’t into moving his lips that day – they’d called a break, and then he’d almost died in the studio can, attempting to move his rock-hard bowels. Robbie hadn’t heard doG mentioned at all.

  They sat down on the bed cross-legged, knees touching. Ivy spilled a bunch of old photographs from an envelope, some of them faded grey-and-white, square, with a date stamped on the serrated border. She flipped through them quickly, tossing them down without comment. Baby Ivy in diapers. Ivy cuddling her sister. And in the more recent ones, Robbie noted sourly, Ivy with a lot of male friends, with greasy denim jackets and bunches of keys as big as fists dangling from their belts. In one picture, two of them were holding her horizontally above their heads.

  “Oh, who’s that there?” he said, real casual, and his question rang in his ears. An infected question, he knew. But still he needed to hear the answer. She lit a cigarette first.

  “My oldest brother. Who did you think?”

  “I wasn’t sure, I –”

  “Typical. You’re jealous, right?”

  “No, not exactly, I –”

  “Well, while you’re being jealous of the people in my past, you could get jealous of all the boys I haven’t met yet. There’s going to be pictures of them sooner or later. My brother’s in jail. This one’s of me when I was anorexic.”

  “Wow. Like a concentration-camp victim.”

  “That’s why I’m so fat now.”

  “You’re not fat now.”

  “In the hospital they dragged me out of bed and took off my shift. The doctor and the nurse held me up by my armpits and stood me in front of a mirror. I could see all my bones, all hung up in a bag of skin. I didn’t recognize myself at all. This is me in Grade 7. That’s when I first did acid. And this is me and my tuba teacher.”

  “He’s hugging you. Were you friends?”

  “And this is me when I ran away to Paris.”

  “Do you ever look polluted!”

  “All I did was drink anise. Want to hear my writing?”

  Robbie listened and Ivy read. She punctuated her sentences with puffs on her cigarettes, pausing when a train rumbled by, absently brushing flakes of tobacco from her pillow. And in the impossible deliciousness of the moment, Robbie wished he were a flake of tobacco on that pillow!

  “i drink myself sober tasting the tears before they are revealed how can we love a child so lost within a heart hardened to stone i hate to be held close and feel warmth yet so many have walked in and penetrated me touched my soul leaving me to bleed i put on a face and paint my lips with my own blood and go somewhere crowded to feel lonely together God Bless the miserable Bleeding Hearts of Artists les artistes qui cherchent l’angoisse they’re all you need to brighten a lousy day you don’t dream it you have to be it i have kissed farewell to my dreams and gone out to play on the tracks with the naive idiot hopefuls of the world.”

  She looked up with flushed cheeks. Scrunched her hair up, gathering it off her forehead. Rolled a fresh cigarette, while the old one still smouldered between her lips. “What do you think?” she whispered. “Is it incredible?”

  “Um, well,” Robbie said carefully. “Yes. Really incredible. But it’s like, hard to tell, such a short bit. I dunno what to – exactly. Aumm. Shouldn’t we go to the dance now?”

  It was a dance, but they didn’t dance. Ivy brooded in a corner, Robbie fretted that his evaluation had not been generous enough. He offered to buy her a Cott’s Cola for a mix; they’d been nipping from a bottle of white alcohol – the generic kind with the moose label that you could get at the Régie des Alcools – and raw, it caused him to shudder like a washing machine on the spin cycle. He went off across the crowded gym.

  When he returned she was gone. He looked around, searching the strobe-lit crowd on the dance floor. Under the basketball hoop on the other side of the gym he made out Gaston Goupil’s friends, lined up against the wall like they’d been hung there to dry. And two of them at least had dressed formally for the dance: they were wearing black sleeveless jean jackets with aces and eights – Dead Man’s Hands’ colours – all over them. King Dork himself wasn’t there, Robbie noticed, drinking his fizzy teen drink and watching the couples slowdance to “Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus” as tentatively, feet as uncertain, as old people.

  Eventually Ivy reappeared, looking dishevelled, her hair raked upwards like wet fur.

  “What happened, what happened?” he said.

  “Ask me no questions.…” she spat.

  After the dance, one sullen hour later, they held hands at the bus stop, still saying nothing. The cold air stuck Robbie’s nostrils together. Ivy’s snout was running, pumping out steam. They had to wait a long time for the Westmount bus; all the other kids were going the other way, and soon Van Home was desolate and silent – only laughter somewhere in the neighbourhood, clattering over the hardened streets. Robbie stamped his feet to bring back the circulation. Ivy bent over double with her Afghan coat hanging open, frozen to the bus stop like an Arctic fox in a trap. Now that laughter came unexpectedly around a corner, coming hard with the clink of heavy keychains and the crunch of hobnailed boots on ice: Gaston et Co., beers in hand, smiling way too congenially. Robbie put a pistol to his head and fired.

  “Enwoye donc, mon hostie d’chienne de bloke.”

  “Let’s go,” Ivy said quickly. She pulled Robbie’s arm and tried to walk away, but the pepsis sandwiched them, slapping their backs like good old friends, and hauled them into the alley behind the school. As they faced off u
nder a lamp post, Robbie thought of the way the Montreal Star would interpret this situation; they’d call it a political confrontation, one in which the angry French Canadians, who have been exploited by the maudit anglais for centuries, are finally bucking the yoke and turning on their oppressors. This conflict may appear to be about some bum weed or a girl, but it is really a microcosm of the healthy secessionist struggle.

  “Hé, mon p’tit gars. Fa frette dewowr, hein?”

  “Hey, man,” Robbie said, super-diplomatic at this street corner summit meeting, and putting on his quackingest joual accent. “Ça va tu ben, Gaston? Ain’t it past your bedtime, guy?”

  Gaston looked at his friends, and jerked a thumb in Robbie’s direction. “Qu’y v’en manger une bonne.” Then he hugged Ivy hard. In return she shoved his nose with the base of her mittened palm. “Ayoi!” he said, holding his nose. “Maudite marde.”

  That made his friends guffaw. Robbie laughed too. He was thinking, Well, that’s that, and not looking out when a fist knocked his face sideways. Actually, he saw the fist before it hit, just for a second. He thought about how to stop it: he could duck, or he could put his free arm up to protect himself, or he could hack his assailant’s arm sideways, just like in those kung fu flicks where Bruce Lee goes chop chop in slow-mo. Or he could get smacked in the face, which is what he did. His front teeth stung and his nose throbbed – a stabbing pain that made him aware of just how thinly the flesh is laid over the skull, of how the head’s a lump of bone. He put his hand to his mouth to check for blood, but he was wearing mitts just like Ivy, and all he got was a mouthful of bland wool. Distantly, he heard her hiss, “God, just fuck off va te faire foutre OK?”

  Someone gripped Robbie by the back of the neck. He was bent over and squeezed tight, his head against a studded belt. A bunch of keys hanging from the belt scraped against the bridge of his nose as he was hustled forward in a swirl of clothing and buffeting bodies and hissing from Ivy and a couple more ayois. They marched him further down the alley into the shadows. He tried to wrench free, but he couldn’t make the slightest move, appalled at his own weakness. He was bent so low he feared he’d fall on his face. The heaps of snow and ice that zoomed by below him were a dark Alpine landscape as seen from a small, pitching aircraft. He saw the glistening of trickled ice on an iron drainpipe ahead of him. Chrissake. He clamped his mouth shut, tucked his chin to his chest. He was yanked back up by his long hair. Gaston held his jaw, pushed his face against the icy pipe and said hotly in his ear, “Lèche ça, mon chum.” Robbie could turn his head only a fraction. He rolled his eyes to find Ivy. His head was swivelled back and the nostrils of his bruising nose were squeezed together. When he opened his mouth to breathe, his head was shoved forward again. His teeth banged against the metal and his tongue, his tongue stuck fast.