Sometime near midnight I went out and got a pack of cigarettes. I lay there in the dark, puffing. Fuck me.
A couple of days later, Scarlet phoned. She wanted her cardigan back. It was in the cupboard. I smelt it under the arms. It just about killed me. It really did. Then I pulled a real boner. I agreed to meet her and give it back. In person. I should have thrown it out the window. There it is, baby, come and get it. But I was trying to make a good impression, not look like a sore loser or anything, so I agreed to meet her at Eaton’s right by the fountain. I got there early and then, just before she was supposed to come, my heart started fluttering like mad and I realized I’d made a terrible mistake. I was just about to sneak away when she turned up. She was wearing a brown khaki dress. Mitch was with her.
Unbelievable, eh? She actually brought Mitch. I gave her the sweater.
“Hello, Simon,” she said. “This is very nice of you.”
“It’s all right. I was down here anyway. Had to meet a friend.”
“I think I’m hung over. I finished up my job last night. My parents had a little party. You can imagine.”
I saw their living room full of fabulous, sophisticated movie people. Mitch there instead of me.
“I can’t stop eating. I just made Mitch buy me an ice cream cone.”
Why is she telling me these things? I wondered. Nobody could say things like that, one after the other, just by accident. It’s got to be on purpose.
Mitch was wearing a pair of leather shorts. They looked totally stupid. How could she like anybody wearing such stupid pants, I wondered. But that business about the ice cream, I made Mitch buy me an ice cream cone, like they were a steady couple or something, I just couldn’t stop hearing it. It made me ill.
“I got to get kicking,” I said.
Get kicking? Like where the fuck did that come from?
We chit-chatted for a bit longer, me feeling like my head was going to explode. And then they took off, walking real slowly, looking at this and that, no hurry at all. Unbe-fucking-lievable.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ILIKE SAYING GOODBYE to places. I would have liked to wander around our city house and say goodbye to my bedroom, goodbye to the maid’s room where I spent all those hours doing my homework, goodbye to the rec room where I listened to “Little Deuce Coup,” the kitchen where I spilt that pot of honey one night just before dinner, my mom walking around with this stuff sticking to her feet, waiting for me to own up.
I felt sort of guilty about those rooms, like I’d abandoned them and there was no one to look after them or think about them.
We had a circular staircase and for some reason, me being superstitious maybe, I never counted the stairs, I had a feeling it would be bad luck. So on the way up, I used to count until I almost got to the top and then I’d stop and sort of scramble my thoughts. But I always figured a day would come when it would be all right for me to know.
What really bugs me is I can’t remember the last time I was there. I think it was with the old man, a few days after we went clothes shopping. I had to get a sports jacket out of my cupboard and I went up the stairs into my bedroom, the whole house neat as a pin, and got the jacket, it was herringbone, and came back down the stairs, through the hall foyer, looked at myself in thehall mirror, like I always do, and then came out the front door into the sunshine and got back in the car. But I’m not sure. Maybe I went back again. Imagine me being in that house for the last time and not saying anything, not even knowing it, just walking away breezy as a summer afternoon. Not even goodbye.
First week in September, I got stuffed into boarding school. My old man got out of the bin and him and my mom moved everything up to the cottage. All the city furniture, everything. Harper went into residence at Trinity College. Everyone just gone, poof! I mean I told those people, especially my mother, that selling the house was a bad idea, it’d fuck us up, but they thought I was just being selfish and they did it anyway. And now look. Like you didn’t have to have to be Madame Rosa with her crystal ball to know that house held us all together, we were just like those fucking electrons in the physics book, you know, you take away the object they’re all flying around and they just zoom off into outer space, all lost and spinning around till they just expire.
Anyway, there I was. A boarder. Me. Quelle fucking horreur For years I’d been making fun of those guys, feeling sorry for them, those pale-skinned fuckweeds slumping across the quad. Now I was one of them.
My first day in residence, the housemaster, a French teacher named Psycho Schiller, took me aside after lunch and said in this slow, solemn voice, “We do homework on Friday nights here, Mr Albright.” He said it as if he were saying, we don’t have sex with animals here, Mr Albright. As if I’d somehow been morally at fault all these years going out and having a blast with my friends. But he was going to fix that now.
“In my house, we never lose sight of our social and academic responsiblilities,” he went on to say.
Psycho loved caning boys. I think it gave him a boner. He liked to bend them over in their pyjamas, these little kids, their parents three thousand miles away, them completely at his mercy and really give them a flailing. Make them realize their social and academic responsibilities. Firecracker Day last year he was out prowling the quad at three o’clock in the morning, waving his cane around, just hoping to catch some kid dropping a cherry bomb out the window. What a guy!
What was even worse, I had a roommate. A fucking roommate! I’d seen this guy in the hallways before and wondered to myself, who is that asshole? One day last year, right after sports, I went by the boarders’ locker-room, and for once they weren’t jamming their pricks up each other’s rear ends, they were torturing some guy, a whole lot of kids in there, chanting,
E.K.J.
Wills is an asshole.
E.K.J.
Wills is an asshole.
And throwing towels at this guy, him all hunched up in the corner, ducking and letting out these whoops, sort of digging it in a weird way, all the attention.
Well, guess what? That was my new roommate.
He wasn’t a prick really. In fact he was kind of intelligent. He just didn’t know how to behave, always making stupid faces or jokes that weren’t funny or cheering too loudly at the football game, just no feel at all for how things ought to get done.
But since he was my roommate and there was nobody else to talk to, and him being none too fussy, I yacked at him all the time, him sitting there on the edge of the bed, with his white, white skin and little handsome head, hair always perfectly combed. He also had a remarkably big dong. Like a real monster.
First time I saw it in the showers, I could hardly take my eyes off it. It was a beast.
“E.K,” I said, “how come you’ve got such a huge cock? Like did your mother take some weird drug when she was pregnant? It’s almost like another arm.”
Crack of dawn every morning, a bell went off and we hopped out of bed. Me first. I ran full speed down the hall in my towel to get to the showers. That was the only decent part of the day, standing there in the hot water, the steam rising up around me, my skin turning red like a lobster in a pot. I stayed right till the last minute, until some crater-faced prefect came in and hollered at me.
Then I had to hustle. I tore back down the hall and got dressed super fast, my shirt-tail hanging out, tie draped like a string around my neck, shirt soaked all the way through. Ran down the stairs into the quad with a whole lot of other guys, our hands in our pockets, hair wet, heading towards the dining room.
Every morning, I used to ask myself the same question: How did this happen? How the fuck did I get here? One minute I’ve got a girlfriend and a family and I live in a house and then I get on the ferris wheel and I go up in the sky and when I come down everything’s gone; house gone, parents gone, Scarlet gone and me out here in the bright morning, my hands in my pockets, fucked.
I hadn’t heard a peep from Scarlet, big surprise, eh, but by now I figured she was back i
n that girl’s school in Quebec she was always talking about. Whose daughter went there, how the prime minister came for Sports Day. She was a real piece of work, that chick. I should have figured that earlier, though,catching her necking with that guy in my basement while her boyfriend was upstairs. Like duh, what was your first clue you’re with somebody of ambiguous moral character? I should have mentioned that to old Mitch, him walking around the school like Mr Cool Balls. See how he liked that one. Like, nice girlfriend Mitch. But I knew he’d just write me off as a bad sport so I didn’t even fucking look at him in school. His friends were a different story, though. I felt completely nervous when I walked by them. You know, like they all knew, they could look right inside me and see everything I was feeling like it was a room they could hang around in any time they wanted.
Thoughts like these kept me busy until I got into the dining hall. Now that was something else. Imagine a train station and you’ll get some idea of the noise. Like two hundred kids schnarfing their breakfast, forks and knives and spoons clanging, prefects ordering people around, teachers up at the front table, looking bored and hungover in their shitty little sports jackets with the pads on the elbows. And the noise man, the din. Just unbelievable. You’d think it was a Roman coliseum or something.
I sat near the door, right beside Arthur Deacon who was going to be a priest and some blond kid from New Zealand who had tiny deformed ears. But because I was in Grade Twelve, a senior, ha-ha, even though they turned out my lights for me at ten o’clock on Friday night, I sat near the head of the table so I got second-best choice of food right after the prefects, unlike those poor little fucks at the far end, the new kids from Grade Nine, they got the leftovers, the burnt toast, the broken eggs; God they were little, those kids, I can’t imagine how their mothers could have abandoned them in a place like that. Like leaving a kid in the forest. These little kids with rosy red cheeks looking just freaked right out. I was freaked out and I was like three years older.
But just when you’re about to go down for the count, something always seems to happen. One day I was coming out of the breakfast hall and this English teacher, Dick Ainsworth, stopped me. He was a skinny guy in a grey suit with black hair and black-rimmed glasses, he looked like a pool shark. But he was one of those teachers who gave a shit, sitting on the edge of his desk after school talking to kids, getting them all to write poetry.
So he stopped me in the hall and said, “Albright, you look like you’re going to explode this morning.”
“I’ll make it to lunch,” I said. Which he pretended to find très clever.
“You know,” he whispered, looking around like we were in danger of being overheard, “I think you’ve got brains to burn.”
Sometimes someone does that for you; you’re going down for the third time and they just reach over the side of the boat and grab you by the hair. That’s what that guy, Dick Ainsworth, did that day. It just sent me sailing, like I was some kind of romantic character in a novel and all this had a point and it was going to be okay.
But that was the exception. Most of the time it was like being in Lord of the Flies, which, no shit, we were reading in English. Wild, eh? I don’t think they even got it. You know, like the irony. They’re always talking about the irony of this or the irony of that and then it comes along, the real thing, it just about poops on their shoes, and they miss it.
Yeah, that was some schedule we were on. Eight-thirty at night, we went for announcements, a little evening ritual where they got all seventy-five homos out of their rooms, plus me and E.K. of course, and herded us down into the dormitory basement and went over all the shit that had happened that day, you know, like we beat the Scadding House soccer team, or fucking Andy Boyce finally got his tongue so far up Willie Orr’s ass that they gave him the Latin prize and a trip to New York where, no doubt, he was going to get something really big up his own ass.
“It’s a proven fact,” Psycho told us one night, “that better educated people are virgins when they marry.”
See what I mean? Like not only a great guy but an intellectual wizard as well. Up there in his robes, he looked like Mr Wilson, the fat guy in Dennis the Menace.
But then Fitz, a haunted-looking kid, came suddenly to life and whispered, “Guess who wears the pants in his family?” But the room picked that very moment to go silent, and Psycho heard it. He came slowly over to Fitz, raised his hands to free them from the gown and then, really quickly, bent over and smacked him on both cheeks, like he was clapping his hands, only rapid fire, saying, in time with each smack, “Fitzgerald, for two cents I’d cane your ass off.”
A pricksucker of the first order, our Mr Schiller. Kind of guy you go back and visit forty years later, give him a good punch in the face for old times’ sake. I know I will.
Even on Sunday they wouldn’t leave you alone. Compulsory church. Unbelievable. If you haven’t noticed, the theory of all boarding schools is to keep you so busy all day you don’t have time to abuse yourself at night. Which shows you how much they know. Not to mention the gallons of saltpetre they poured all over our food. (I have this on very reliable authority.)
When my mother was a little squirt, my age I mean, she was sent off to school in France and they stuffed that church business down her throat three times a day. So by the time she had us she said, forget it. So I was like inches from a lifetime getaway when they got me. I guess they figured if they didn’t bore me to death during the week, they’d finish me off with church.
Speaking of my mom, she called me all the time and I was a total prick to her. I’d let my voice go all low and flat and not say fuck-all, you know, just one-word answers and I knew it was making her sick with guilt but I just couldn’t help myself. I really couldn’t. Once I even told her I was going to kill myself, which was kind of a shitty thing to say. But I wanted to punish somebody for putting me here.
I didn’t hear much from Harper but I can’t blame him. We were pretty sick of each other, that happened every summer, and this being his first year in college, he had lots of stuff on the go. Frat parties and getting wrecked. Still it’s funny sometimes how everyone vanishes at once, like turning on the light in the basement and all the bugs vamoose.
One night he called me from his room in residence. “Did you ever hear from that cunt, Scarlet?”
“Nope.”
“That’s a surprise.”
“Yeah really.”
“Something wrong with that bitch. Apart from having a fucked-up name.”
Perceptive guy, eh? Like really putting his finger on things.
“Still thinking about her all the time?” he asked, biting into an apple. Harper had a sort of irritating habit of asking personal questions if he was getting bored with the conversation. You know, to heat things up. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that it might make somebody uncomfortable.
“Nah,” I said. “Fuck it.” Which was not entirely the truth. Just hearing her name still gave me a jolt, like my whole body was suddenly under assault, heart pounding, sweaty underarms, and this funny sensation as if somebody had cracked an egg on my head and it was dripping down my face. Maybe it was mybrains. ‘Cause I should have known better. I mean I knew she was a fucking monster but I still thought about her all the time.
One afternoon, I was down in Forest Hill Village and I ran into that skinny girl in the red sweater, Rachel, Scarlet’s pal from the Ex. I was extremely uptight, I mean I thought I was going to faint. It was like Scarlet was eavesdropping or something and I wanted her to hear that I was cool as a cuke. Next thing I knew we were having hamburgers at Fran’s. I took her to the same exact booth I used to sit in with Scarlet. It was a mistake though. Soon as I sat down that Beatles song, “It’s Only Love,” came on over the sound system and before too long the whole thing turned into a fucking nightmare. Rachel started in with a story about her parents and how they should have got divorced but they didn’t on account of her dad going to Minneapolis and getting in a car accident. I mean if there�
��s anything worse than somebody who tells you everything that happened in some movie, like everything, it’s someone who tells you a whole lot of stories about people you don’t know. Anyway I was feeling mighty lonely sitting there listening to her go on. What’s worse, she was one of those chicks that puts a curly-cue at the end of her sentences, like she’s asking a question. Like, are you telling me something, baby, or are you asking me?
“So what happened with Scarlet?’ she said finally. And right away I felt some fucking claw was locked on the back of my neck.
“We broke up.”
“Yeah, I heard,” she said. “I had a boyfriend like that once. You know everything was great but then we broke up. I think I threatened him? Some men don’t like strong girls. They want to wear the pants in the family?”
I must have got a sour look on my face because she suddenly switched gears.
“I’m worried about Scarlet. Like just a few nights before she went back to school? She called me up and asked if she could stay overnight. Except she wasn’t really going to stay overnight? She just wanted to tell her parents she was? It gave me a bad feeling.”
“Yeah?” I said, my appetite dead as a fucking doornail, the hamburger tasting like sawdust in my mouth.
“I have a feeling she was going to spend it at Mitch’s house? I had a boyfriend like that, he just wanted to do it all the time, like sometimes I’d just have to say, like, will you leave me alone …”
“You know what?” I said after a moment, just as soon as I could get my burger back on the plate, “I have to get back to the boarding house. I forgot. I’m on duty.”
Just what I’d be on duty for is something she was too dumb to ask, but I hotfooted it back to the school, everything going really fast. Fortunately, it being Sunday, E.K. was out, and I just threw myself on the bed and stared at the ceiling, my head going like a frog in an egg beater.
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