Going Down Slow

by John Metcalf

  The man must have been behind him for some time. Now he was seeming to study the window display in Holt Renfrew. A tall man. A black overcoat. Surely not on Sherbrooke!

  Slowly, David mounted the steps to pavement level, casually turned and drifted two stores down where he stopped to stare unseeingly at a display of Sheffield Plate. The man strolled closer and stopped to look in the window of the Petit Musée – but without going down the steps. Six foot three, at least. A black hat. Gloves.

  Could they get prints from human flesh?

  He walked away fast to the corner of Guy and turned down past the bank and the Medical Arts building. He looked back. The man was standing on the corner. David crossed through the traffic and reached the other side. The lights changed. The man was crossing, turning down, not hurrying.

  How was it going to be? Under a car, a bus? He glanced back. Home wasn’t the answer. Perhaps – there was a faint chance – they still didn’t know where he lived. And two flights of stairs with burned out lights would be giving the bastard a gift. Gagnon wouldn’t be any help – he’d probably join in. Was it her father? Or a Muscle?

  Music.

  La Source on the corner of Lincoln. David leaped up the steps and in through the heavy wooden door. He got a place at the bar commanding the doorway.

  Under no circumstances bolt for the washroom.

  “Oh, Scotch. Ice. Water.”

  He found that he felt sick. His heart was thumping in his throat. Heart-attack symptoms in his left arm. He looked at his watch. One a.m. He could phone Jim to come and get him. If Jim was in. But he’d probably be with Lise. He rattled the plastic spear around in the ice cubes. He tried the point of the spear against the bar. No help there. He got up and went to the door and looked out. The man was nowhere in sight. But sitting in a parked car, lurking in a doorway? He’d have a cold lurk because David decided that he’d wait until the bar closed – and then, down Guy to Ste. Catherine. Lights. People. And a cab from there. A cab! Of course! Why hadn’t he thought of that? He could phone one from the bar.

  As he climbed onto his stool again he accidentally nudged the man beside him.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” said David.

  The man mopped up the spots of drink with a cardboard coaster. A small man wearing a dark suit, a pullover, a tie with a tiny knot. A nasty Follet-like moustache.

  “What part of England are you from?” said the man.

  “London,” said David promptly.

  Untrue, but it was the only English place most Canadians had heard of. If he said Southbourne, they always said, “That’s near London, isn’t it?”

  “I could tell your accent right away,” said the man.

  “This is only my second year here,” said David.

  “A bit colder than England, eh?” said the man.

  “It certainly is,” said David.

  “And hotter in the summer,” said the man.

  “It sure is,” said David, an Americanism of which he was quite proud.

  The sick feeling was going away. He emptied a pottery canoe of peanuts and sipped the scotch.

  “Yes,” said the man. “I’m very interested in England. And Peru.”

  “Oh?” said David.

  “Yes, Stonehenge. It’s one of my special interests, Stonehenge. Have you been there?”

  “Yes. I’ve been a few times. It’s very impressive.”

  “You could say that Stonehenge formed the centre of my special interests.”

  He looked at David intently and then said, “Would you like another of those? Scotch? Yes, an amazing structure.”

  How nice! Sitting talking to this nice small man. Perhaps later he’d like to share a cab? And if not, down the seven steps together and across the pavement to the safety of the cab door. I’ve much enjoyed . . . Muscle, if he was there, impotent.

  “Are you interested in the Druids?” asked David.

  “Druids!” The man laughed. “No, no, no. Not Druids.”

  He put his hand on David’s arm.

  “What interests me is the extra-terrestrial aspects.”

  “Oh,” said David.

  He started on a wicker basket of pretzels.

  “Yes,” said the man. “Take England. Just talking about England now. Stonehenge. The celebrated Uffington White Horse. Glastonbury earthworks. The Long Man of Wiltshire. Eh?”

  “Yes?”

  “Ever hear of the Nazca Lines in Peru? No, eh? You can’t see them from the ground!”

  “Really?” said David.

  “But from a plane – from a plane they stretch for miles – patterns, diagrams. Now what does that suggest?”

  “I don’t know,” said David.

  “Some so-called scholars have suggested that we’re dealing with irrigation ditches,” said the man. “Irrigation ditches. In the shape of an accurate map of the heavens!”

  “Well, that’s something I’ve never . . .”

  “And you can’t see them from the ground.”

  David looked away from the man’s eyes, and staring down into the pretzel-basket, shook his head.

  “In all these things, you see,” said the man, “the thing to keep in mind is viewed from a height.”

  David nodded slowly. He could feel his face beginning to ache into a rictus of attention.

  “Now let me ask you a question. Why do so many straight lines converge on Stonehenge?”

  David grimaced to indicate ignorance.

  “Why were the famous blue stones brought all the way to Stonehenge from the Prescelly Hills in Wales?”

  David did another face.

  “Could they have been power-centres?” said the man.

  “Power-centres?”

  “Re-fuelling points.”

  “Re-fuelling?”

  “Galactic vehicles,” said the man.

  “Flying. . . . . ?”

  “Saucers. Exactly. Exactly. You see?” said the man.

  “Well, I’d never thought of that,” said David.

  “Had you ever thought,” said the man, “that they acted as a kind of condenser for building up electromagnetic power in the same way that piezoelectricity does in twenty different classes of crystal structures?”

  “No,” said David.

  Chapter Five

  Jim had marked all his Easter exam papers on the first day of the holiday; David had left his to the last. He had set his alarm and got up at six; he had even gone out after breakfast and bought an expensive red ballpoint. In two hours he had marked thirteen papers; roughly one hundred and forty to go.

  He slashed through a few run-on sentences, spelling mistakes, and peculiarities of punctuation and then relapsed into staring out of the window.

  It was nice enough to go out for a walk. Without an overcoat.

  When they burn all the lovely golden leaves on my street in the Fall I always cry.

  LIAR he printed in the margin.

  Listlessly through the next, the pile heavy on his knee. A lad who had watched a documentary on CBC about lighthouses and found it “very illuminating.”

  Oh, God!

  The Greatness of Modern Popular Music of Today.

  Mayor Drapeau – Our Little Dynamo.

  “Oh, fucking hell!” sighed David.

  Leap screaming from the window waving genitals and manuscript.

  Plattsburg – My Utopia.

  “Fuck this for a lark!” said David. “I can’t take much more.”

  Jim grunted; he was reading the Gazette.

  David began to click the button on his pen to the tune of “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball”; pains in his chest; breathing was becoming difficult. Beside his chair sat four more fucking great bulging envelopes full.

  Was his throat becoming sore?

  Oh, for a whole class – all his classes – to do what Susan had done! The saving in time and energy! In boredom. His classes, of course, had written pages:

  “The poet uses words well. There is a good use of rhythm and rhyme (eg. ‘re
d’ and ‘head’) and subtle use of imagery, figures of speech and smilies. The poet says what he had to say well with vivid colour words.”

  Howie Bunceford, Susan’s English teacher and Head of the English Department, had been very cross when he had shown her literature paper around the Men’s Staffroom on the last day.

  “That girl,” Bunceford had declared, “is too big for her boots.”

  Ignorant.

  Lack of RESPECT.

  “She’ll get her comeuppance in the Matrics,” Bunceford had said.

  Give her zero.

  He could only remember the first four lines of the sight poem which Bunceford had set for all the grade eleven classes – he must learn the rest.

  Been in trouble before, that girl.

  Like Frances Campbell. There’s another.

  But what ripe lines they were:What is there other than colour and light?

  Spring has the brush – let her paint.

  Splashing the atmosphere azure and red:

  Out of the way! it will drip on your head!

  In response to the poem, Susan had written,

  “I don’t want to waste my time writing about bad poetry.”

  Strange that Bunceford had been so cross. Unlike him. Unless he had perpetrated the poem?

  David had very little contact with Bunceford, for Howie, as he was called, spent the greater part of his time in the book stockroom implementing the Board’s Condition Evaluation System, counting the sets of Moonfleet and Cue for Treason, poring over Ancient Myths Retold for Modern Youth, deliberating over grubby copies of On the Edge of the Something Forest or Jungle by creepy Albert Schweitzer.

  The Board’s Condition Evaluation System required all texts to be categorized as:

  Good Condition

  Fair Condition

  To Be Replaced Within Two Years

  To Be Replaced.

  Such agonies of decision occupied Howie three periods per day. He was frequently to be seen standing motionless in the bookroom as though paralysed by his responsibility.

  He issued sporadic purple bulletins and exhortations to the Department on the subject of ink stains, obscene illustration of the text, defacement in general, and loose spines. Most of his other communications concerned the organization of the school-wide essay contest during National Fire Prevention Week and the logistics of the annual “What I Can Do To Help The Red Cross.”

  Apart from such professional concerns, Howie’s conversation was limited to the subject of his cottage on Lake Memphramagog. He was always closing the cottage, opening the cottage, repairing the cottage, putting screens on the cottage, taking them off, repointing the cottage’s fieldstone barbeque-pit, painting, sheathing or insulating the cottage.

  Against weeds and other undesirable flora, he pursued a scorched-earth policy; he harried unmercifully the local skunks, squirrels, and racoons; he waged war against the blackfly, the mosquito, and the field mouse.

  Howie was flabby and extraordinarily pink. He kept a tablet of soap and a facecloth in his locker. His handshake was flaccid. It was claimed by a group of grade eleven students to whom he taught Latin that he traditionally turned over two pages in Caesar to avoid a photo of a naked statue, thus causing a shipload of mariners on page thirteen to be strengthening the walls of the city against their approach on page sixteen. He never used the urinal while anyone else was there. He was so mild, affable and avuncular, so benign, as to seem without opinion. When he sat down he seemed to spread. He always reminded David of the expression “a sack of loose shit.”

  But, as evidenced in his poetry, there was a sterner and more anguished side to Howie’s nature. His poems had been published in the Montreal Star, local Quebec papers, the PAPT Teachers Magazine, and had twice won the jackpot on COXM’s Pinkerton’s Posy Contest.

  Susan said that he often read work-in-progress to his grade eleven classes, offering insights such as only he could give into technical aspects of composition. He was, apparently, gathering a body of work to be published under the title Impulse From A Vernal Wood.

  David delighted in each new addition to the canon and kept a file of clippings. He knew some poems by heart and recited them when drunk. His favourites were entitled Dear Old Days and The Mountain and the Cottage – A Sonnet.

  Dear Old Days had first appeared in the school newspaper, The Merrymountaineer, signed H.B. but had subsequently been published and fully acknowledged on the editorial page of the Montreal Star.

  On tiny Magog’s main street, then,

  There was a little shop, where I, aged ten,

  Would go for lemonade (the green kind’s best!) –

  And listen to Ma Cameron with zest –

  Ma Cameron! who, innocent of guile,

  Would give us sips for nothing while

  We’d hear her tales of country fun and lore

  And always – almost always! – ask for more.

  But Howie’s most magisterial work had appeared in the potato-smelling pages of the PAPT Teachers Magazine. A footnote had identified the author as “poet and teacher of English.” The Mountain and the Cottage – A Sonnet had appeared between two articles entitled Psycho-Drama and the Grade Seven Composition Programme and The Role of the Newspaper in the Classroom.

  The cottage overlooks a lake I love

  And tea, and strawberries, and records try

  To wipe away the tears of years above

  The times we live in – but I cry

  O’er fields and meadows long since past

  And lift my eyes towards the skies of silver

  And see the shadow of the old black hill where

  Nature rolls her organ boom so vast.

  But oh! how sharp the lash that pricks my heart

  When Now and Then compare themselves for me

  As my old shades, in awful fragments, part

  And Churches, of my Mountain, say, “’Tis He!”

  ’Tis not God made my Mountain! Or my Lake!

  But Nature – whom I write for for Her Sake.

  David sighed.

  You didn’t find stuff like that every day.

  Yes, his throat was definitely sore. His bank of free Sick Days already overdrawn in bed with Susan.

  Doctor’s Certificate?

  The Advantages of Apartment Dwelling.

  Saddening.

  Saddening. The moment free choice was offered, recidivists to a man. Chronic Reader’s Digestion at sixteen, poor bastards.

  David stared out of the window.

  Oh, Constantimides, recent immigrant and novice teacher, how the heart ached for you at the year’s beginning. Amid the chatter of the Merrymount Pre-Term Orientation Programme. “Constantimides,” you said, “teacher of Physics and Office Practice.”

  “David Appleby.”

  “What,” you said, “is Office Practice?”

  The Advantages of Apartment Dwelling.

  “A four-line filler on page thirty-one,” said Jim. “Number forty-seven discovered last night. Tied up with barbed wire in the trunk of a car.”

  “Murders?”

  “What the Gazette calls ‘gangland slaying.’ Wonder what they’d think of that in Sevenoaks?”

  “Hey, Jim. I was meaning to ask you. Is it true you can hire thugs in Montreal to beat people up? Not other thugs – just ordinary people. I mean, is it a regular sort of thing?”

  “I should think so. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just something Susan was saying the other week.”

  “They traditionally use baseball bats, I believe,” said Jim.

  “Mmmmm.”

  “And a pretty safe line of work it is, too,” Jim said. “Last year in Montreal general crime solution ran at roughly 21% and crimes of violence at 17%. Which would tend to argue . . .”

  Letters fell through the flap and plopped onto the lino. Jim jumped up and went down the passage to get them. David heard him tearing a letter open.

  His peculiar horror, he decided, was not so much arms or legs but
broken teeth. A club in the mouth.

  “How about some tea?” Jim called.

  “If you’re making it.”

  As Jim filled the kettle, he was whistling. Chink of cups and saucers. He started singing. He brought the tray in and put it on the floor between them.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s up the bum of the Greater School Board and up the joint bums of Noddy and Big Ears. Up theirs, mate. Right up to the oesophagus.”

  “How’s that, then?”

  Jim tapped the letter sticking out of his shirt pocket. “Just in time to save me breaking contract.”

  “What are you talking about?” said David.

  “The OISE offer. Which is satisfying because it’s unwise to leave a mess behind you.”

  “What are you talking about? What’s oisy?”

  “I told you I was applying, didn’t I?”

  “For what?”

  “Oh, I thought I had. For the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education. It’s in Toronto.”

  “You didn’t say anything about it.”

  “I’ve been accepted to do a Ph.D. and I’ve got a grant of $4,200.”

  “No, you never said a word about it.”

  “$4,200,” said Jim. “With what I’ve got saved and if I get some consulting at Research Associates in the summer – perfect.”

  “So, you’re going away, then,” said David.

  “September,” said Jim. “August, more likely. But there’s no problem. The lease is up here and you can move to a smaller place. And if you moved near Merrymount, you wouldn’t have travelling expenses.”

  “No, I suppose not,” said David.

  “And the really good thing, you see – I’ve been accepted under Bellheimer which means I can take my pick when I’m finished.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “American. Maladjustment. Very big deal.”

  “Oh,” said David.

  “I reckon I can make $3,000 this summer if I push it at Research Associates – I’ll have my M.Ed. so they’ll have to pay me more. Then there’ll be two years pension money back from the government – that should be eight or nine hundred.”

  “Well, congratulations, Jim. I hope it goes O.K.”