by John Metcalf
“Thesis?”
Garry shrugged and pulled a face.
“Anyway,” he said. “Better get back to it. Don’t lose that. Stick it in my box if you don’t see me.”
David turned to the book reviews but just as he started to read, Sid, the junior jockstrap, backed into the Common Room concluding a loud conversation with a kid in the corridor. David put the magazine aside and watched him.
Cropped hair, singlet blinding, Sid sat down opposite Bardolini. His nipples poked at the cotton as if exercise had strengthened them. He put his feet on the coffee table; his white gym shoes dazzled. He always wore grey military-looking trousers, a strip of black braid down each seam. A keen disciplinarian, he smelled students’ breath when they came out of the washrooms to see if they’d been smoking. At staff meetings, he denounced laxness. He spoke much of “shaping-up” and “cutting the mustard.”
Sid looked across and nodded; David nodded back and returned to the magazine.
Sid then engaged Henry in a loud discussion on mufflers.
Henry urged the virtue of additives.
Sid had starter-motor trouble.
Henry suffered with his wiring.
David got up and went out into the corridor. He wandered along looking at the examples of student art and the House Shields celebrating the victors in basketball, football, baseball, hockey and wrestling, until he came to the rear entrance of the gymnasium. He was nominally a member of Blue House. He went down the steps and out onto the playing field.
It was bright and hot; sunlight glinted off parked cars and flashed on windows. He strolled along the side of the school towards the wire-mesh fence. Sid frightened him. The face that burned a thousand books. As a caption for a photograph in a cheap paperback biography. Hairy paper. He reached the fence and walked onto the grass. And for the judge’s summation . . . stupidity allied with enthusiasm. The field sloped towards the fence, a slope almost imperceptible but the ground at the edge of the field was still soggy from the thaw even after weeks of nearly dry weather.
And profile-journalism . . . his face conveyed that impression of baffled intelligence often seen in monkeys. But it wasn’t really funny. Sid wasn’t a joke. The earth, bare in patches near the fence, held his footprints like plasticene but didn’t stick to his shoe. Chandler could have fixed the bugger exactly . . . eyes like a gull. That sort of thing. But better.
As he neared the tree, he heard a loud cawing behind him. He smiled as he saw a rook up on the roof of the school perched sentinel on the TV aerial. Strange how big they looked even at a distance. He liked their wariness, their wildness. If they nested near houses, unlike swallows or pigeons, they remained independent. They graced inhabited areas with their presence, their gleaming blackness, but remained aloof, suspicious.
Tough, lordly birds. He liked their cawing; it was at once wild and homely, a sound which always brought a rush of feelings. As a child, he’d always associated them with the Northmen. Thistles, too. It seemed that rooks had always been there in his childhood round farms and houses, their caw-caw blending into his dreams as the light of summer evenings filtered through the curtains.
He sat down on a long root raised above the bare earth and leaned against the trunk.
From his uncle’s yard, the field sloped down to a hedge, a road, and beyond that the bottom field before the brook. Every detail incised on his memory, the grey and yellow lichened gatepost, chickweed at his feet, purple vetch thick in the hedge-bottom, and in the far field black on orange, three rooks perched on the stocked sheaves.
Like stills from a movie.
Another.
Rooks like an insane painting.
He’d been walking up a steep field. The wind was blowing from behind driving a grey drizzle. The pasture had been sown with a special fodder, long blue-green grass, and a herd of Frisians was huddled in the centre of the field in a rectangle of electric fence. He had reached the top of the field and climbed the stile and fields had sloped away in front of him, the hedges smaller and smaller, towards the village. Behind a clump of distant trees, the grey spire of the village church. The long grass was running like a sea.
Three large trees stood in the corner of the hedge and as he approached rooks had started to fly up, circling, drifting, cawing, thirty of them, forty, until they were boiling out of the treetops. The sky flung with black wings.
That moment, black birds and grey sky, and he had felt an intruder and gone back to the top of the field, skirting the rookery, trudging on through the rain half a mile out of his way.
The rook on the school roof caw-cawed again and then launched into heavy, measured flight towards the row of duplexes. It landed on the edge of a roof nearer him. Two houses further down a woman in curlers came out onto her gallery with a green garbage bag and the rook lifted away.
He looked at his watch and getting up, strolled back towards the school with its rows of glittering windows.
In the Common Room Sid was still talking to Henry. He sat down at the far end of the settee again and picked up the magazine. The shiny pages stuck to his sweaty fingers.
Henry scorned the efficacy of rust-proofing.
Sid thought it the Board’s duty to supply outlets for blockheaters. Henry swore by studded tires.
Sid would like a few more statistics about these foreign cars.
“Way to go, Howie!” shouted Sid. “Way to go!”
David looked up.
“Congratulations!” said Bardolini.
Bunceford was standing in the doorway glowing pink, beaming and nodding.
“Unexpected,” he mumbled, “had no idea.”
He mopped his brow and pate.
“Ah, come on!” said Sid. “You must of put in for it months ago.”
“What’s the occasion?” said David.
“Principal of Merrydale Elementary,” said Sid. “Negotiating on a separate contract now, eh Howie?”
“Well . . .” said Bunceford, “one applies – in general, you know, and – just luck this time . . .”
“No!” said Bardolini. “No surprise to see your name.”
“You deserve every inch of it,” said Sid.
David smiled and nodded at Bunceford and, glancing up at the clock above the door, went out into the corridor again. He walked along to the Office and looked on the Principal’s Notice Board. He took down the sheaf of mimeographed papers and turned them until he reached Merrymount.
Bunceford.
Transfers Brunhoff, G. Snowdon High
Renfrew, A. Windsor High
Promotion to Department Head Larkshur, R. Auto/Electric
Speers, N. English
Weinbaum, M. History
Westlake, G. Guidance
David stared at white paper, purple print.
The bell rang.
Jim’s Volkswagen was parked across the road from the school’s side entrance. As David walked down the steps, he took off his jacket and, undoing the top button of his shirt, stripped off his tie. He opened the car door and bundled the jacket and tie into the back seat.
“Well that didn’t last long,” said Jim.
“What’s this?”
“Oh, stick it in the back. It’s a Wexler test – I’m working tonight.”
David got in and slammed the door shut.
“Let’s get moving,” he said, “get some air. It’s hot as hell in here.”
“So . . .” said Jim.
“Who’s the work for? Research Associates?” said David.
“I phoned the guy this morning again and I’ve got work every night and every day if I want it. And recognition for the M.Ed.”
“How come? I thought you said they were backing off before.”
“They’ve just got a government contract testing adults – Manpower or something. Money for old rope, mate. Administering and evaluating Kuder Preference, Wexler, and Minnesota Multiphasal. More work than they can handle.”
Past a Colonel Sander’s outlet, a revolving tub on a
thirty-foot pole.
GIVE HER A NIGHT OFF. TAKE HOME A BUCKET OF CHICKEN.
“So you’re in the money,” said David.
“Minimum twenty-five bucks an hour,” said Jim.
“Jesus . . .”
“I told you, old son. I told you. A bit of paper from McGill, join a professional association, and you can print the bloody stuff.”
Past gaunt concrete boxes of an apartment building under construction.
NOW RENTING
By its side, its finished twin.
NOW OPEN FOR YOUR ADMIRATION
“So,” said Jim. “How did it go?”
“O.K.”
“Little lecture about hairy goodies, was it?”
“That sort of thing.”
Turning west on Sherbrooke.
“Lovely!” said Jim. “That’s the sort of stuff I like to hear!”
A row of gingerbread Victorian houses, the boom of a giant crane motionless above them.
“Stern exhortations!” said Jim.
TEPERMAN WRECKING
“Earnest appeals to one’s higher nature!”
Torn gaps, now asphalt car-parks.
“Gone, oh gone are the gropes of yesteryear!” cried Jim. “Eschewed is the student body! No more the naughty nookie!”
“That’s about it,” said David.
“So there you are, you see,” said Jim.
He leaned over and switched on COXM.
“Oh!” he said. “I’ve booked a U-Haul for Monday night, O.K.?”
“O.K.”
“So you’ll have to sign that lease tomorrow or Sunday.”
David nodded.
Running down the Scoreboard now . . .
“Must we suffer this?” said David.
And the temperature in Our Town – a beautiful 79 COXM degrees.
“How can they listen to that shit!” said David.
“And you can spend the year looking for another job,” said Jim.
“What?”
“Well you’re not going to get any promotion under the Board, are you?”
“I suppose not,” said David.
Past the hideous Holiday Inn.
He wondered what cynicisms were taught at McGill and the University of Montreal under the name of architecture.
“I’m going to drop you at Sherbrooke and Guy,” said Jim. “I’ve got to see someone at four.”
“O.K.”
“You going to be in at above five?”
“I expect so, yes.”
“Something I want to show you,” said Jim.
David hopped out at the lights. He thought for a moment of going back along Sherbrooke to look in the window of The Petit Musée; he’d glimpsed a Tang horse as they drove past. Mr. Klein would let him handle it, run his fingers over the soft, thick glaze. But he really couldn’t be bothered. He was already sweating. He turned west on Lincoln past La Source. He was tempted by memory of the cool dim interior – a fast beer to deal with his thirst followed by a slow double whisky. The beer like brass. Or maybe a pernod. He could taste its faint sweetness surrounding its bitter fire. Oily. But he walked on; he didn’t want to keep Susan hanging about near the phone she used in the shopping centre.
When he got home, he took off his shirt and socks and flopped down in his armchair. He didn’t feel like reading. After a while, he got up and wandered into the kitchen. He discovered a Coke in the fridge but it made him thirstier. He checked his wallet. After Susan called, he’d phone out for beer. He read the labels on some tins and packages in the cupboard.
He looked into Jim’s room; his books and clothes already packed up in cardboard boxes, corded.
The tiled floor in the bathroom was cool. He thought of having a bath. But it was too much effort. He put the plug in the washbasin and turned on the cold tap. He put his hands flat in the basin while it filled. He stood staring down at the tiny air bubbles trapped in the hairs on his wrists.
“What do you mean, ‘What do I mean’? Because it was like a TV episode, that’s why. Every cliché in the book.”
“You know. He said everything you’d expect him to say.”
David turned the paper round and started placing dots inside the rows of circles.
“No. He didn’t really mention you.”
“Well, he didn’t accuse me of breathing on the crown jewels, as it were.”
“No, all he said was ‘relationship.’ The whole thing was only about ten minutes.”
He gave the circles corkscrew tails.
“Yes, just a lot of circumlocution, that’s all.”
“It means round-about ways of saying things.”
“Sorry.”
“I’ve told you – I can’t remember exactly. Nothing much. He was just being earnest about teachers being like parents and about my future, that kind of thing. General uplifting moral advice – you know what he’s like. A sort of Polonius act.”
He started to fill in every second circle.
“Nothing much. I was there to be talked at. Nodded mostly, I suppose. Did faces.”
“Umm?”
“There wasn’t much I could say.”
“Except the little matter of the library books, sweetheart. You’re forgetting that, aren’t you?”
He started doing chain-mail on the other side of the paper.
“No, I didn’t have to say anything. I suppose he assumed it from the fact I was there.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! No, listen! It was funny.”
“Yes! Funny’s exactly the word I’d choose.”
“Well, you weren’t there, were you?”
He added swords to the stick-figures by lengthening arms and drawing cross-hilts.
“No. Of course I didn’t mean that. But really, Susan. It was. It really was. Like a scene from a Carry On film or Lucky Jim or something.”
“Well you know what he’s like – pompous dwarf.”
“O.K.”
“No. I really didn’t.”
The pencil scribbling round and round – a bird’s nest of lines.
“O.K. Suppose I had. And where would that have got us. Or more to the point, where would it have got me!”
“Charming.”
“Thank you, thank you. Very nice.”
“Jesus Christ! Clean! This is me, Dave Appleby, Susan. We’re in Montreal, right? I’m not the mother in fucking Ben Hur, you know!”
“What?”
“Just like that, eh? For Christ’s sake, Susan! Don’t be so fucking childish !”
BRRR. BRRR. BRRR.
David went down the passage and let Jim in.
“Get your things on,” said Jim.
“I’m on the phone.”
“Wait till you see what your Uncle Jim’s got outside.”
David went back and picked up the receiver.
“Look!” he said.
The dial tone hummed in his ear.
He looked at the vast white car. Whitewall tires. Glittering hubcaps. Red upholstery with sparkly lines in it. A shiny radio aerial.
“As big as the bloody Queen Elizabeth, isn’t it?”
“What’s the point of being in North America,” said Jim, “unless one enjoys vulgar gestures?”
David patted the top of the car; it was hot.
“Trunk,” said Jim, opening it up.
David looked at the spare tire inside. “Very roomy,” he said.
They sat in the front with the doors open. Jim pulled levers and
pressed switches, turned the radio on and off.
“Plenty of legroom,” said David.
“Power steering,” said Jim. “Drive with one finger.”
“How are you going to pay for it?”
“Well I’d ordered it even before there was a chance of this testing – but now.”
Poop!
He sounded the horn.
“No problem.”
He adjusted the seat again.
“What one needs,”
he said, “is style. That’s the thing. None of this threadbare graduate-student stuff. Know why?”
Gagnon was slumped on a wooden kitchen chair in a patch of shade near the front door of the building.
“Because over here, you get largely what you assume you’re going to get. And people give you what they assume you’re worth. And on what, pray, do they base their assumptions?”
He patted the wheel.
Black trousers, a stained T-shirt, and red knitted carpet slippers. The neck and shoulders of a quart bottle of Molson rose from his fat thighs.
“Not bad, eh?” said Jim. “Galaxy 500.”
“It’s very nice, Jim. Very comfortable.”
The defective boy from the Polish grocery wove into view riding against the traffic. He swerved towards the curb in front of the car, and standing on the pedals, bucked the bike up onto the pavement. He shot towards the front door of the building, leaping off backwards just before the bike struck.
“Is that for me?” called David. “Apartment 307?”
“See you later, then,” said Jim. “I’m going to check these tire pressures and then I’m going straight on to work.”
“Posh, Jim,” said David as he slammed the door.
Jim pulled away from the curb and waved.
As David was paying the delivery boy, Gagnon said,
“Hey!”
David pretended not to hear.
“Hey. That your car?”
He looked down at Gagnon’s grey brush cut, at the great slope of paunch, the distended trouser legs.
“Partly,” he said. “Half of it.”
“New, eh?” said Gagnon.
David nodded.
“Hot like hell, eh?” said Gagnon.
“Yes,” said David, nodding.
“My car’s a Buick,” said Gagnon. “Give me the money and I buy a Buick.”
“Well,” said David, shrugging, “we’re well pleased with that one.”
“Sure thing!” said Gagnon. “With a Ford you got yourself a good car.”
David hoisted the case of beer.
“How long those guys going to stay out?” said Gagnon, jerking his head at the case. “The liquor there. Five weeks now, eh?”
“About that,” said David.