Lost Between Houses

by David Gilmour

  So I started back towards town, like I was a half-decent person, resisting temptation and everything, but then I started thinking about that French Canadian girl coming into the bathroom, me with just a towel around my waist and damn it if I didn’t turn around and head back over to her place. God, I was a mess.

  Needless to say, it didn’t go like my daydream. There were other kids there. And one of them, this local guy, was touching her all the time and not exactly going out of his way to be friendly to me. He was really built, like a weightlifter or something, and he kept jumping off the dock and strutting around with his big muscles and this thing like a fist in his bathing suit. I’m a little self-conscious about my chicken chest and being skinny so I didn’t get changed at all. I just sat in the shade with all my clothes on talking to her mother. Hard to believe an old crow like that could have such beautiful daughters, but there you go. Point is, after watching everybody else running around, I found myself feeling sort of shitty, seeing the dark-haired girl and her sister in their bathing suits and thinking I’d never be able to get girls like that. It was like I’d gone in a big circle and ended up back at square one.

  So after awhile I got up and left, but as I made my way back along the canal, the depression sort of lifted, it was a nice day again, there were boats puttering along the canal, somebody waved at me from an inboard, I waved back and by the time I got back to the main street I felt fine, thank you very much, just fine.

  When I got home I immediately called up Scarlet. She wasn’t in so I figured she must be out with some guy. I stewed about it the whole evening, called her like a dozen times until I finally got her old man. He sounded drunk. I figured he wasn’t too trustworthy, those boozers can’t remember anything, but I left a message anyway for her to call me. It was important. He didn’t even know where she was, which pissed me off. Like a great parent or what.

  She phoned just before dinner. Soon as I heard her voice I could feel my whole body relax. Still I couldn’t help myself.

  “So have you seen Mitch?” I said, right out of the blue like a fucking crazy person. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I looked a little weird.

  “No,” she said. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just wondered.”

  “Have you?” she said.

  “No, no, like I just wondered, that’s all. You know, run into him or something?”

  “No,” she said, sort of like the queen, “Mitch and I don’t travel in the same circles.”

  But you know, fucked-up as it was, I still felt better, there was something that let go of my chest.

  “So is everything okay down there?” I said. “You haven’t met anybody or anything?”

  “Who would I meet?”

  “No one. I was just curious.”

  “Have you?”

  “Hardly,” I snorted.

  We chatted a bit more and then, feeling a whole lot better, like I’d just finished some huge school project, I put down the phone. Sometimes I think if people could see into my heart, nobody would love me. Sometimes you just can’t believe how awful you are. It makes you shake your head.

  In the meantime, this great summer just kept on happening. Sometimes we’d go water-skiing with some kids across the lake. Or I’d go snorkelling in the weed beds, the sunlight all golden and religious under water. But it was jumpy down there, you kept expecting something to get you, kept snapping your head around to see if it was there.

  Sometimes, Harper and I even played golf. There was this little rinky-dink golf course on the other side of the lake, a nine-holer, and every year the old man took out a membership for us—he wanted us to be golfers just like him. On the way over I saw Donald Glendinning down on his dock. He was varnishing a canoe for his old man, paint brush in his hand, work clothes on, right in the middle of this scorcher. He was always doing stuff like that, Donald, sanding a porpoise board, scrubbing down the boathouse. I always felt kind of shallow when I was with him. Sort of expected that one day down the road I’d open the newspaper and read about him being the prime minister or something. He was just that kind of guy, a winner without being an asshole.

  I gave him a big wave.

  Anyway, I just don’t have the disposition for golf. In spite of my easygoing style, I’m quite a poor loser, and sometimes I’d get so steamed at topping a drive or missing a putt that I’d try todrown my clubs. I mean I’d been right down there by the pond, red-faced, holding a three iron under the water until it saw the error of its ways.

  Christ, it was hot there out on the links, the sun beating down. After I was done hacking and slashing I’d make a beeline for the club house, I mean like practically push people out of my way, and buy a cold orange crush. I’d take a few step backwards and throw back my head and just pour this stuff down my throat and I swear to God nothing ever tasted so good. Like I couldn’t get my breath, just panting and pouring this shit down my throat.

  One morning Harper and I were up at the top of the driveway, shooting the shit and throwing stones into the little stream that ran through our property. We were killing time.

  “Hey Harper,” I said, “How come there aren’t any fish in our stream?”

  “It’s too little.”

  “But there aren’t even any small fish.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I looked. I used to explore down there.”

  “Used to pretend you were Davy Crockett?”

  For awhile we didn’t say anything. The daisies waved in the field and way across the valley, you could see a man walking along the road. Suddenly a cloud passed over the sun and a shadow went racing across the fields.

  “It’s funny how a cloud changes everything, isn’t it?” Harper said. “It’s like suddenly there’s nothing to look forward to. Like nothing good could ever happen under a sky like that.”

  He looked up the road.

  “There he is.”

  It was the mailman. A white car came around the corner from the junction road and slowed down. The guy stuck hisarm out the window with a bunch of letters and a newspaper. I took the hand-off. It was right there on top, a rich looking envelope with the school crest on it. I tore it open on the spot, bits of paper flying in the wind. My eyes shot to the stamp at the bottom of the page, “Promoted to Grade Twelve,” and I let out a great big yelp.

  English 75, Math 62, History 66, Science 62, Latin 80. Physics 51 (I must have aced the exam!).

  Harper shook my hand and gave me a little pat on the back, which was quite demonstrative for him, especially since his report card hadn’t come. And then we beat it on back to the house.

  I’ve got one special memory of that summer at the cottage. I was sitting on the porch. It was still morning, you could see the dew on the grass and beyond it the lake all blue and sparkly, it was just another of those weird snapshots burnt into my brain and I knew, I just knew I was happy. Like I caught myself being it.

  A few minutes later, Harper came downstairs and out on to the patio. He was telling me what he did the night before, met some guys in town and went to the Tastee Freeze where he ran into Annie Kincaid.

  “She told me she met a guy she was really nuts about,” he said. He gave a sort of unhappy laugh. “So guess I should oubliez-la.”

  One night I was in the kitchen gabbing away to my mother. I was telling her about that time I pretended I was a pearl diver. I must have been about eleven or twelve and I drove the boat into the middle of the fucking bay and tied an anchor around my waist and jumped over the side. I went down all right, pronto, right to the bottom but when I swam back up there wasn’t enough rope, I was three feet short of the surface. I kicked like ason of a bitch, the anchor lifted off the bottom, just enough for me to get a breath and then it pulled me down again.

  So there I was, acting out the story in the kitchen when I noticed she’d gone sort of pale; in fact she was starting to look distinctly pissed off and I was getting sorry I’d even brought it up when the phone rang. It was Scarlet. />
  “I got a job,” she said. “At the Exhibition. I’m going to be a still-life model. You pretend you’re a statue. People try to make you laugh. I’ve done it before. It’s extremely glamorous.”

  I didn’t say anything about it but that word glamorous set me off. Sometimes I had these twisto fantasies about Scarlet, about her cheating on me. They came to me in the stupidest places, at the top of the stairs or looking under the sink, or cutting an orange in half. Like imagining that I turned up unexpectedly at her apartment, real late, and caught her necking with some guy in a car, right out front. It was a green car and they were really going at it. I couldn’t see who it was though. His face was in shadow. But it was enough to make me grind my teeth and start talking to myself, just like a mental patient, practising the speech I was going to give her when I caught her. Sometimes I think God’s talking to me, you know, like warning me, showing me glimpses of the future. Or maybe the future’s already happened and we’re all just catching up to it and for some reason I get these special peeks. Other times I think I’m just plain jackrabbit crazy, only a few screw-turns away from being one of those guys shouting at traffic in the morning.

  “You don’t sound very excited about my new job,” she said.

  “I am. I’m just tired of being stuck up here.”

  Which was a funny thing to say since I’d never thought that for a second.

  “You should get a job down here. Then we could hang out all the time.”

  “That’d be great.”

  “Maybe I could ask my father. He’s got connections. He might get you a job in a theatre.”

  “Like as an actor?”

  “No, as an usher.”

  “I don’t know if I’d want to be an usher.”

  “Why not? You’d get to see all the movies free.”

  “Yeah. The same one over and over again.”

  “Well, like no job is perfect. Mine isn’t either. It gets pretty boring sometimes.”

  “That’s not how you make it sound.”

  “Well, I wanted it to sound great, you know. Make all my friends jealous.”

  “I don’t think I’d make anybody real jealous working in a movie theatre. Wearing those stupid little blue jackets. Look like a fucking bellhop.”

  “It’s just an idea.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  That night when I went to bed, I thought about Scarlet. I always did, just after I got curled up and closed my eyes. Sometimes she was in her bra and panties, sometimes she was asleep with her hand over her face, other times she’d be sitting on the bed looking at me. Or sometimes she was sitting in front of that mirror, naked.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ONE AFTERNOON near the end of July I was out in the garage murdering deer flies when I noticed dust floating over the road, just where it met the main highway. A moment later, a blue Morris came bouncing down the driveway. It came to a stop, a big cloud of gold whirling overtop, the sun shining off the windshield. Still holding the fly swatter I came out of the garage. The door opened. The old man got out. My stomach just sank, like somebody dropped a lead pipe into a river. All things considered, it was just about the worst thing that could have happened, this bomb going off right in the middle of my summer holiday.

  But there he was, standing in the driveway, looking pretty good, I have to say, sort of fresh, pants flapping in the wind, hand cocked in a wave. He was happy to be back, you could tell. He must have missed us.

  We went inside. The old lady didn’t look at all surprised. She must have been expecting him. But it worried me she hadn’t said anything. Like maybe it was a surprise. Guess who’s back for the rest of the summer? I sat around for awhile in the living room, waiting for the verdict. I couldn’t very well come out and ask, like, are you here for long? Besides you could see he was making an effort. You know, to be interested, ask questions, even listenall the way through the answers. I made them short, just in case. In spite of myself, I got sort of excited and started offering up a whole lot of stuff, I mean it’s more effort to hold yourself in than it is to talk, at least for me it is, so after awhile I was on the edge of the couch, just chatting away a mile a minute. Him nodding like he’s giving it real thought. Me rising up for more of it just like a seal after a fish.

  “So tell your father about your report card,” Mother said, like it was some kind of rare document. But I got to hand it to her. Even when we were little punks she made a fuss over everything we did. Even the littlest, shittiest drawings ended up on the fridge like they were Picassos. After awhile those retardo doodlings started to look interesting even to me. Until I went to the art teacher, a sullen weasel named Vernon Mould, and asked him if I could get in the art programme, and he looked at my little trees going straight into the ground and my psycho school house and said that in his opinion, the art group was pretty much full up.

  I went and got the report card off the fridge and showed it to the old man.

  “Say, that’s pretty good,” he said, holding it at arm’s length.

  Even though I knew it was bullshit, I still couldn’t help feeling good. It’s your parents, right? They got you by the balls.

  “Particularly the physics,” Harper came in with. “Talk about clearing the centrefield fence.”

  “I passed,” I said. “That’s all that counts.”

  “A squeaker, if you ask me.”

  “Well nobody’s asking you.”

  “Harper,” Mom said.

  “I’m just saying like maybe we shouldn’t plan on sending him to MIT.”

  “We couldn’t afford to, anyway,” said the old man.

  “All right boys,” my mother said, “I want to talk to your father for a bit.”

  I followed Harper onto the driveway.

  “What the fuck gives?” he whispered.

  “I dunno.”

  “They didn’t let him out, did they?”

  “Well he’s here.”

  “Fuck,” he said. “Did he bring a whole lot of stuff with him?”

  We went over to the Morris, and looked in the back window. There was just a small overnight bag there.

  “What do you think?” I looked at Harper.

  “Looking pretty good,” he said. “If they’d sprung him, he’d have more shit with him.”

  “Keep your fingers crossed.”

  So I went back to creaming deer flies, slapping them down off the glass with the fly swatter, giving them the coup de grâce with my foot. Crunch. A highly satisfying activity.

  After awhile I heard the screen door open behind me. I had a feeling it was the old man but I didn’t turn around. I wanted him to watch me for awhile, showing off, I suppose, although come to think of it, it’s a pretty weird thing to want to be good at. Killing deer flies. Anyway, finally I turned around.

  “Those flies can give you a hell of a bite,” he said. “You should put on a shirt. And for God’s sake, make sure you don’t bust the window.”

  “I won’t,” I said. “I’m very careful.”

  “Does your mother pay you to do that?”

  “No. I do it for the sheer pleasure. It’s very satisfying.”

  “Well, as long as you don’t break the damn glass.”

  He looked around the garage, not seeing anything, then put his hands on his hips.

  “I think I’m going to go for a bit of a troll.”

  I sort of sank.

  “It’s a good day for it,” I said.

  “Not too windy?”

  “Nope.” Like I was the expert. Trolling being for me about as excruciating an activity as a human being ever devised. But he was waiting for something, I could tell. “Where you planning on going?”

  “Over by the portage, I think.”

  “That’s the deepest part of the lake.”

  “That a fact?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “Thought I might gas her up too. Get an ice cream cone.”

  “I think there’s plenty of gas in her right
now.”

  He nodded like that didn’t matter. “Listen,” he said, “there’s something I want to talk to you about. Why don’t you come along? Get some fresh air.”

  Last time he took me somewhere, it was for a little chat about the birds and the bees, this after I’d been dry-docking girls for at least a year. I had to sit there thinking up questions about lesbians so he wouldn’t be embarrassed. It just wasn’t natural for the old man and me to talk about anything important, my mom did all that stuff, and I didn’t like the sound of this. I had a feeling the Clinic shrink had put him up to it. The new improved Dad. It was like a brand new pair of pants he was wearing that didn’t go with the rest of him.

  The weird thing is that even though he made me nervous (I was scared of him, I admit it), sometimes I also felt protective, like I was the only one in the house who understood him. Knewwhat he wanted in spite of what he was saying. It was like he was trapped in this old-fashioned sort of British personality—he’d gone to school in England when he was a kid—and sometimes he struck me like an animal stuck in a box, going over and over the same actions to try and get out, even though they didn’t work the first time or the hundredth time. So, sometimes, I bent over backwards not to make him feel bad.

  Anyway, we set off down through the yellow fields. We found the old road at the bottom and worked our way along it, the old man looking down, thinking of things to say. I think just the effort made it harder, like when you’re trying so hard to listen you can’t hear a goddamn thing. But he had a nice smile on his face, it was like he was willing the whole thing to go well.