Going Down Slow

by John Metcalf

  “Sorry,” he said.

  Jim opened the door. Two Dominion bags full of garbage toppled in on his legs and feet.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!” said David.

  Tea leaves, melon rind, brown slimy lettuce, spaghetti, a Heinz baked beans can.

  “Hey!” said David. “He must have done that on purpose. We left them against the wall.”

  Jim did not say anything.

  A squashed container from the Nanking oozed cold plum sauce.

  “The dirty sod!” said David stepping out over the mess. “What’s he think he’s playing at?”

  Jim waggled his foot, shaking off the tea leaves. He inserted the ferrule of his umbrella and clattered the bean can across the small landing. He speared up the melon rind and dropped it down the stairwell.

  “This is it,” he said.

  “It’s like the bloody middle ages,” said David.

  They boomed down the lino-covered stairs into the lobby. Jim stopped in front of Gagnon’s apartment and rapped on the Superintendent sign.

  There was no answer.

  “Gagnon! This is Wilson from 302!”

  The usual stench hung about the apartment – cooking, catpiss, stale sweat, children, shit.

  “Smells as if he’s got a bucket of carrion simmering away on the stove,” said David.

  “Gagnon!” shouted Jim. “Come out!”

  They listened.

  Inside the apartment something fell to the floor.

  “Perhaps he’s drunk again,” said David.

  “At eight-fifteen?” said Jim.

  He smashed on the door with his umbrella handle leaving three dents in the brown paint.

  “Maudit anglais!” shouted Gagnon from within.

  “I’ll be back at four, Gagnon!” shouted Jim.

  A woman’s voice screamed something.

  “You’d better have that shit cleaned up by the time I get back! By four o’clock!”

  “Mange d’la merde, maudit krisse!” shouted Gagnon.

  “Four o’clock!” shouted Jim.

  They listened.

  As they walked away across the loud tiles, they heard the lock and chain on Gagnon’s door. He did not look out but shouted. “And you, my friend, can lick my ass!”

  “Va te faire enculer par les Grecs!” shouted Jim.

  The lobby door swung to behind them and they were out in the cutting wind.

  “We’re going to have to fix him,” said David. “Speak to the rental office woman or something.”

  “What can one expect of a people,” said Jim, “who pronounce Ulysses – ‘Youlease’?”

  The wheels of Jim’s Volkswagen were frozen fast. He set to work kicking them free while David chipped the ice off the windshield. Particles of ice flew into his cuff and up his sleeve. The wind drilled into his forehead, made his head ache.

  While the engine coughed and tried to turn, David sat motionless in the frozen car. The hairs in his nose were frozen. His hands were white, aching from holding the icy scraper. Piles were inevitable. Two more winters of sitting in frozen cars on frozen plastic and he’d have piles like a bunch of grapes.

  Jim bumped away from the curb on frozen wheels and made an illegal left turn onto Guy Street. He switched on the radio; a choir of female voices sang the COXM time and the COXM/MOLSON BREWERY weather.

  Gather up those books now and scoot right along! said the Morning Host.

  “Turn that fucking thing off,” said David.

  Jim did not reply. He drove fast and savagely east along Sherbrooke. You broke my heart. The heat was beginning to come. Tore it apart. David could not see much; the side windows were iced over. Snow melting from his shoes. Past the Holiday Inn. His feet were wet. Snow was crudding up on the windshield and the wipers were frozen to the glass. Past the A&W. GreatTAKE HOME A CHUBBY CHICKEN

  purple piles like a bunch of grapes. He sat staring at the translucent glass.

  Cold, cold and dark. Four-thirty in the morning in Montreal. I was standing on a bank of crud left by the snowplough. I was looking at an apartment building and wishing I was a janitor. Janitors wear warm sweaters with rocketing pheasants knitted into the back and every day they get to wash the plastic flowers in the foyer. And what they don’t get is four a.m. phone calls informing them of dead bodies.

  I went down the ramp at the side of the building and in through the garage. They never lock the garages. I took the elevator to the ninth, jammed the door with two paperclips, walked down to the eighth.

  (The black backstrip sticking out at an angle on top of the fridge, the back of the three-ring binder. Black plastic. Both exercise books there. The playscript and the diagrams from the last rehearsal. Coaching times for Peter and Alice. Auditorium at lunch time.)

  The piece I carry isn’t elegant but it can gut-shoot a charging garbage truck. When I stepped out on that red carpet on the eighth if anyone had said even Boo! I’d have blown his rocks off.

  Apartment 810. The door was unlocked. I’d never seen the guy before. But someone wanted us introduced.

  He’d been about fifty-five years old, a tall flabby guy with a fine appendix scar. I could tell because he hadn’t got any clothes on. Some Boy Scout had been writing on him with an electric barbeque starter.

  In the kitchen I found an Odorama Air Freshener and gave a few squirts. Even Odorama (“a tangy blend of citrous aromas”) was better than the way he smelled.

  His wallet was in his jacket in the bedroom. His Social Insurance and driver’s licence called him Frederick Karno. I wandered out into the living room with the Odorama and looked along the bookcase.

  The History of Education in Quebec

  The Teacher and the Law

  The Lamp of Learning

  Reader’s Digest Condensed Books

  (Seven volumes)

  I checked inside the books and on every flyleaf I read: F. Karno. In a drawer in the table I found headed notepaperMerrymount High School

  Principal: F. Karno (B. Comm.).

  I looked down and studied F. Karno (B. Comm.). His dentures lay on the rug. I figured he’d died of shock. Down his chest and stomach, the Barbeque-Boy had seared the words,Vita brevis, ars longa

  The lettering was neater than could have been expected.

  I checked the time: nearly five.

  “Teacher,” I said, as I closed the door behind me, “you’re going to be late for school.”

  Mrs. Crowhurst?

  Yes?

  Andy Andrews calling. COXM’s Morning Host.

  No! No, it isn’t!

  Yes, Ma’am! Andy in person.

  Oh, I can’t believe it!

  Yes, Ma’am. And I’m calling to play the Wondermart Goodies Game.

  Oh, Mr. Andrews, I can’t believe it’s really you!

  Ready for the first question, Mrs. Crowhurst? What is the name of Canada’s biggest river?

  I always watch you in the afternoons when you’re the Spy in the Sky. I always wave, you know, when the helicopter comes over my house. From the balcony.

  Tomorrow, David promised himself, Gruppenfuhrer McPhee would get his. But for the Gruppenfuhrer it was going to be extraordinarily painful. His arms strapped to his sides with hot hard-boiled eggs nesting in his armpits, piano wire on the thumbs, possibly electrodes on his majogglers.

  “What you say?” said David.

  “I said, ‘Don’t admit anything.’ The burden’s on them.”

  David realized the car had stopped. He gathered up the sliding pile of exercise books and opened the car door.

  “Three-thirty, then,” said Jim.

  “O.K. See you.”

  “And don’t let the buggers grind you down.”

  It had stopped snowing. David stood for a moment watching the Volkswagen down the road. Piles of white exhaust hung behind it at the stop sign. Jim roared away round the corner. David turned then and crossed the road to the school.

  Rising by the side of the front steps a flagpole, the Maple Leaf snapping at the
steel sky. Every day at eight and four the flag was raised and lowered by the janitor, an insane Greek. Straight lines, acres of glass, neat brick. Merrymount High.

  David hurried round to the side entrance. He was already twelve minutes late. A dribble of kids.

  Hi, sir!

  You’re late, sir!

  You’ll get a detention, Mr. Appleby.

  Ho, bloody, ho.

  Within the glass doors,McPHEE.

  Already seen. Too late to go round the front. Suspended before getting into the classroom? Prevention of moral contamination. The little shit stood only two feet higher than the REMOVE YOUR RUBBERS sign.

  David climbed the steps towards him.

  Back turned to McPhee, he knocked the snow off his shoes against the top step.

  He still hadn’t bought rubbers. They looked so ugly. Only old people in England, eccentric people wore galoshes. They were like the Canada Tire sign; another of his symbols of foreignness.

  He pushed open the outer door.

  “Good morning, Mr. McPhee.”

  McPhee nodded.

  “It’s a cold one today,” said David.

  Glinty eyes behind his rimless glinty glasses.

  “Had trouble starting the car,” said David.

  Gestapo dwarf.

  “The battery.”

  “Your class is waiting for you, Mr. Appleby,” said McPhee.

  He walked past McPhee, conscious of the ferrety eyes on his back, conscious that the eyes were noting the trail of ice and water melting from his shoes. Between the gleaming rows of lockers . . . he was through . . . he was safe . . . at best she hadn’t phoned at all . . . past the A.Y. Jackson in bleary reproduction . . . at worst she’d phoned but they knew they couldn’t pin it on him . . . past the Book Stockroom. . . .

  “Mr. Appleby!”

  Against the light from the glass doors McPhee was a black shape. “Don’t forget to record your late arrival in the Office!”

  Foot braced against the staffroom door to give him a start, he launched himself in an entrechat towards the men’s cloakroom. He was through. He made an Italian gesture at the mirror. He was safe. He chucked his jacket onto a peg.

  As he looked into the mirror and combed his hair, the drums pointed. The Maple Leaf fluttered against a steel sky. The Gruppenfuhrer stepped forward from the silent ranks and ripped off the Lamp of Learning Award (Bronze with Acanthus Leaves). As the assembled staff chanted You Have Broken Your Sacred Trust, Fred Karno mumbled in loco parentis and snapped the symbolic stick of chalk.

  He felt sorry for McPhee. Not possibly electrodes on his majogglers. Definitely. And up his arse as well.

  In the deserted staff common room David waltzed around the coffee tables and sang to the plastic palm tree in its tub.

  Outside the Office, he glanced at the trophy showcase crammed with gross cups and shields for Hockey, Football, Basketball, Jockstrappery in general. And the egg-cup sized thing in the back for Academic Excellence.

  “Goodmorning!” cried David.

  “You’ll be wanting the Black Book,” twinkled Miss Burgeon, the Lady Vice-Principal. Miss Burgeon did not have breasts; she had a bosom. Her dumpy body was covered by a green frock. Pinned on the bosom was a diamanté butterfly. Her glitter-framed glasses hung on chains.

  “Time in this column, name in this, and reason for lateness in this,” she said, pointing with her bright red fingernail.

  The arid old cow was probably having a rest after suspending the day’s quota of non-regulation-shade blouses, short skirts, lipsticks, all the lovely juicy-thighed girls she could get her claws into. She fluttered at her hair as he wrote.

  “How do you spell ‘diarrhea’?” said David.

  Climbing the stairs to his classroom on the second floor, he thought of the puddle of brown water where he had stood in the Office. The word rubbers was still disturbing; he couldn’t say it easily. It reminded him of the girl in the red linen blouse. Stained darker red under her arms with sweat. Ninety-five degrees that day and humid as a bathroom.

  Ramses in Canada; not Durex. He didn’t like asking for Ramses; it sounded boastful.

  The girl in the red linen blouse, a stranger, a friend of a friend, had met them at the docks. Lugging suitcases in that incredible sticky heat.

  “Just you wait till the winter comes,” she had said. “You’ll really need your rubbers then.”

  In the roaring canyon of Ste. Catherine Street, in the heat and sunlight, strangers in a strange land, Jim and he had looked at each other in wild surmise.

  He could hear the uproar from his classroom at the other end of the corridor. He tried to remember which class it was. Julius Caesar. The Grade Ten mob.

  He walked into the classroom and quieted the racket. He lifted the intercom phone from its rest, turned it upside down and replaced it; then he muffled the whole apparatus with his jacket so that the Office couldn’t call him or listen to what he was doing.

  “Your homework was to . . . ?”

  “Paraphrase ‘O pardon me’,” said Marion.

  “Yes,” said David.

  “Act III. Scene i,” said Nelson.

  “Thank you,” said David. “Yes, Charles?”

  “It’s elections, sir. Can we do them in English this morning?”

  “Elections?” said David.

  “I’ve got to run them for the King and Queen, sir. It’s official.”

  “King and Queen?” said David.

  “The Winter Carnival. I’m Grade Ten Rep on the Social Committee, sir.”

  “Social Committee,” said David.

  “O.K.? O.K. sir?”

  “And this is official is it?”

  “It’s on the Bulletin, sir.”

  He’d forgotten again to pick up a copy from the counter in the Office. He took the Bulletin that Olsen offered and looked over the smudgy purple print. Basketball. Detentions. Winter Carnival Elections. He nodded and pushed back his chair. He propped himself in the corner against the window ledge.

  Winter Carnival Elections. Suspensions for Gum Chewing. Play Rehearsal. Tunics to Bisect the Knee.

  He looked up, gazing at the boy’s back; he did not listen as the boy talked. “Chuck” Olsen. His jacket a green, blue and black tartan. Electing the King and Queen. Charles Olsen in his tartan jacket who had visited Expo 67 thirty-four times and had his “passport” stamped at every pavilion.

  He heard the word “freshette.”

  The radiator was getting too hot against his legs. He turned round and stood gazing out of the window, his fingers slipping over the smooth red tile of the sill, across the slight roughness of the join, across to the next tile.

  Directly below him in the yard, Miss Graves was blowing a whistle and waving her arms. She was wearing a pleated tunic, sturdy knockers, suet thighs. The track-suited chorus line facing her was shaking green powder-puff things to left and right.

  And presumably chanting.

  The whiteness of their breath hung in the air.

  Give us an M!

  O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,

  Give us an E!

  That I am meek and gentle with these butchers . . .

  Give us an R!

  A long blast on the whistle and the chorines dropped on one knee, left arms outstretched, the green powder-puffs susurrating.

  YEA, MERRYMOUNT!

  Peep!

  Peep!

  Peep!

  The girls, one after another, were jumping up into the air. Why, he wondered, were they not in the gym, why were they jumping about outside? The carnival, perhaps. Perhaps the gymnasium was being readied for this bloody carnival thing.

  Did Miss Graves not feel the cold?

  Could we – well, could we try . . . ?

  Try what?

  You’ll think me . . . well . . .

  No. Not at all.

  It’s always been a desire of mine . . .

  You need feel no shame, Miss Graves.

  Well, if you lay on you
r back – yes, like that. And I stood over here – and with a backward somersault and knees bend . . . .

  Miss Graves! There are limits.

  Must I plead with you, Mr. Appleby?

  The landing, Miss Graves! Consider the effects of an ill-judged landing.

  “Can you do what?”

  “Go to the other homerooms.”

  “That’s official, too, is it?”

  “It’s on the Bulletin, sir.”

  “Right. The rest of you, Caesar. Act III Scene i.”

  David sat down at his desk and while the kids found the right place in the book stared at the framed coloured photographs of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.

  “Peter. Let’s make up for lost time. ‘Thou bleeding piece of earth.’ Let’s start there.”

  “I forgot my book in my locker, sir.”

  “Mary?”

  “He’s bleeding where they stabbed him.”

  “Yes, but ‘earth’? Umm?”

  Norovicki’s face disappearing behind a large pink bubble which he deflated and engulfed again.

  “Yes, Marjorie?”

  “He’s lying in such a lot of blood it looks like the earth is bleeding.”

  David shook his head.

  “Support the Work of the Red Cross,” said a poster at the back of the room.

  “Yes, Ronnie?”

  “Why couldn’t he say what he meant, sir? I mean, if he’s so good how come you can’t understand him?”

  Chapter Two

  Susan’s teddy blouse white against the dark heap of the navy-blue tunic crumpled on the floor; her black bra abandoned over the chairback. The blankets were rucked at the bed’s foot, the loose sheet covering her legs. The glow of the single-bar electric fire turned the room into a cave. She gathered her long black hair from the pillow, swept it back gold bracelets jingling.

  “I don’t know about lions,” she said. “They’re a bit English.”

  “You’ve got to have lions. Couchant.”

  “Trees are good, though,” she said. “On both sides of the drive.”

  “Poplars,” said David.

  “Maples.”

  “‘My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun.’”