Fall

CANADA

Fall

Also by Colin McAdam

Some Great Thing

C
OLIN
M
C
A
DAM

             
HAMISH HAMILTON
CANADA   

HAMISH HAMILTON CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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Published in Hamish Hamilton hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2009. Simultaneously published in the United States by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 (RRD)

Copyright © Colin McAdam, 2009

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

ISBN: 978-0-670-06720-6

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American Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data available

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For Suzanne
and old friends lost

H
ALF AN HOUR
of lips and silk in the front and back and her cheeks are like peaches like peaches like peaches.

I love your hands.

I love
your
hands.

I want to pull over. You’re so beautiful I’m gonna pull over. Can we.

Now.

Can we.

Now.

I love that smile of yours you’re blushing like a hot summer peach I say.

Yousupwiseme.

Mmm.

You surprise me.

Mmm.

She says she watches me. She says I’m shaped like a V. Your shoulders and your waist.

I can do an iron cross.

o god.

Can we. Please.

Now.

I don’t know when you’re joking or not, I love your smile so much. Can we.

Here.

I don’t know, we could try back there I say and I run outside to open her door and It’s so sweet and green around here she says.

Her voice always sounds like she’s smiling and smart.

I kiss her up against the car and I feel like I’m William opening the back door for her.

Hurry up Julius it’s cold she says. Do you like my bra.

Yes!

It’s silk!

I take off my shirt and she helps and her fingers are feathers, look lick.

You’re a woman I say.

Bingo she says.

But I mean it I can’t explain it.

She smiles and shivers and says Keep me warm.

I want to ask if she’s scared because I get scared no matter what, no matter how many times I’ve done it, fifteen, but I don’t want to distract her.

I love the neighbourhood right now, we’re hugging and I’m kissing her neck.

Look out the window she’s saying. It’s so green and black.

I’m afraid the whole thing is turning to talk, lipping words where kisses and mmms should be but she kisses my scar and bites my lips and unclasps her bra and says Clasps with her tongue and her teeth and a lisp.

I need to blow my nose.

I roll her on top and stare.

School on Monday she says.

Yeah I say.

You’re shaking she says.

No.

You’re frowning she says.

No.

Boys get very serious when girls have taken their shirts off she says.

I love your smile. Fffuck. I don’t know what to say.

She unbuttons her jeans. She likes that since I said I liked it.

Do you like these.

Yes!

They’re silk!

She says she loves the backseat of the limo. I say we can roll around like we’re in a field, a big leather field, and she says You’re full of peaches and farms tonight.

I roll her underneath me and think I should undo my jeans like she did.

I’m not wearing silk tonight I say.

She makes me tell bad jokes.

I’m tired of being a stranger and telling bad jokes.

We should do everything right now I say, and then it would be over and we could do everything again, I mean it.

Mmm.

I’ve got the car from William, who doesn’t like his belly, who says whenever I borrow it, This could cost me my job, and laughs because he doesn’t want his job, the only thing he wants is girls and a place in the Indy 500, he told me. When William’s behind the wheel he’s in his own world, he says, and my dad’s in the backseat in his own world, and I think about how two people in a quiet black car can be in two big worlds, driving along, where are we.

I want to be close to you I say.

I think I hear a car she says.

I want to do everything now.

I can’t breathe like this.

No one can see in dad’s car. The windows are tinted I say. At a party I asked a marine to shoot at the windows but he wouldn’t. You can’t see in here or shoot us.

What she says. Wait, you’re heavy. There.

You don’t have to be scared I say.

I’m not scared she says. She’s looking me in the eyes and smiles. I’m modest she says. She opens her arms to show me everything.

She’s everyone’s everything and she’s here in the backseat.

I’m gonna calm down.

I sit back here with dad sometimes, he’s here in the backseat.

Don’t move I say. I wanna see.

I’ve never looked so close. No one ever lets me look that close.

Please.

Everyone I know.

Look through the window of this dark car.

You’re not really scared, are you.

Do I need to be she says.

T
HE DAYS THAT
made me, that were supposed to change me, that didn’t actually make me, are showing me now what I was. My days in the room with Julius. Years have provided some safety.

That was not a school with pipes and dons and tweeds.

It wasn’t a place where people spoke like people don’t speak.

It wasn’t in the Highlands of Scotland or the hills of New England.

It was a place of traditions but the traditions weren’t old.

Like most private schools it was part fantasy, part reality, and therefore all reality. A place where stories happened, not fables, where there was learning, not lessons, and no one came away with memories of neat moral episodes. I came away with memories.

There were too many contradictions for there to have been any sense, and my life has always been so. We were boys who wore suits, monkeys with manners. We didn’t have parents but were treated like babies. We were left on our own but had hundreds of rules to abide.

We were eighteen years old, as grown-up as we could be.

My memories are twitching like morning in the city.

“Laundry day,” said Chuck. He was standing in the hall with Ant, looking into our bedroom, where Julius was lying with a cloth over his eyes.

“Laundry day,” said Ant, echoing Chuck, and he rushed into our room, swung his laundry-filled pillowcase, and pounded Julius in the head.

Julius said, “Fuck off. I mean it.”

I had to take a test to get into St. Ebury. I was fourteen. My parents took me—just before they went away. The three of us sat across from the Head Master, who did all the interviews himself, and I noticed that he never looked at me oddly.

“Noel will have to take a test,” he said. I looked for signs.

Money was all that mattered—that’s what I’d heard about St. Ebury. Money wasn’t an issue. I looked for signs on his face to see if he was uncomfortable about my eye.

“It’s an intelligence test, essentially,” he said.

“We weren’t told,” I said, speaking for my parents.

“There’s no preparation,” the Head Master said. “No need to study. All you need is this pencil.” I was sent to an empty classroom.

Julius had a hangover.

“He’s hung,” said Chuck.

“Big night,” said Ant.

“Big hung,” said Chuck.

“He wishes,” said Ant.

“Better hung than you,” said Chuck, and Ant pounded him in the head with his laundry-filled pillowcase.

“Get the fuck out,” said Julius, his face in his pillow now.

It was Sunday and everyone had stories about the weekend.

“Ant found some of your barf on his shoes this morning,” Chuck said to Julius.

“I smelled it first,” said Ant. “Then I found it. A bit of, like, potato, caught up in the laces.”

“Fffuh,” said Julius.

“And you’re cleaning it,” said Ant.

“It’s laundry day,” said Chuck. “Clean away the weekend, man, wash it all away. I can
not
believe how Fuck In Drunk I was
last night, and there I am in the corner thinking, I
will
not get any action tonight and I look over at you two, Jules over here, Mr. Hurlius, hurling and heaving all over your shoes, and I think, Man, I
will
get action tonight because I am
not
as ugly as those two chumps.”