Kicking Tomorrow (10 page)

That’s when Dad knocked on the door and said through it, “Robbie, are you there? I think it’s time for a, aum –”

Robbie hoped for a moment that he had come to announce a raise in his allowance, his
salary
. Though he didn’t really expect it. As Dad waited at the door like that, politely, like a nervous servant, Robbie pictured him as the scrawny, pimple-ridden teenager he had once been, fleeing Russia – or was it Poland his parents came from? Or Germany? Or was it his grandparents who did the fleeing? Robbie had never got the story down, exactly. On a black freighter anyway, or so he imagined, mastur – aum–bating furtively when he could, somewhere in the belly of the rusting hold, and then growing up to ascribe the same furtiveness to all future generations of teenagers. When it was not Robbie’s thing at all.

Then Dad barged in, just like that. He sat down at the foot of Robbie’s bed, right on the hillock where Robbie had shuffled off his pyjama bottoms under the blanket, and said, “Listen–aum – “ He gazed out of the window, unable, as per usual, to look
Robbie in the eye. Robbie figured he regretted his harsh words from the night before. “The police phoned from town. I’m sorry to – they found a pair of –”

Stinky sox, Robbie thought, grimly, remembering them now, left there on the top of the stairs like a couple of turds.

“– and, aum, ‘
S.P.E.C.T.R.E.
was here’ on the blackboard in your handwriting, I’m afraid.”

“Yeah, well I don’t see why you hafta blame
me
, exactly.”

“Look, I think, we think, Mom and I, that you’ve – how can I –? Basically, you’ve overstayed your welcome. All right? We’d like to give you a month to find a job, if you don’t mind. And a place of your own. We’re quite angry with you, I’m sorry to say.”

Robbie shrugged. “So anyway,” he said, weakly trying to change the subject, “how’s poor Grandma?”

“It’s not that we don’t – Mommy and I just think that you should – aum, I’m not good at this – it’s a question of being proactive, not reactive. One day you’ll thank – you’ll see this as a, the incentive you needed to make your, your mission statement. Right now you have to prioritize. Analyze. School’s clearly not your, aum, bag –”

“Hey. It’s not that it’s not my bag, as you so sarcastically put it –”

“No, I never – I only meant, since you didn’t mention university all summer, we assumed you weren’t interested.”

“I
am
interested. It’s just that there’s no way I’ll even be
accepted
, so what’s the point of trying. Look – after the school… well, you know, burned down,
OK
, the principal told us he understood we were too traumatized to do our final exams. Fuck – pardon me – I wasn’t traumatized. I was
counting
on a final exam. So suddenly they’re judging us on our term performance. What a drag. Plus we got an aptitude test – you wouldn’t remember – in French, of course. Double drag. How can they judge what’s good for me if I’m not allowed to talk about myself in my own freakin’
language? According to the test my
IQ
’s around 78. A retard. Now at this point in time I know I’m not exactly a Nobel prize-winning physicist, but come on. Seventy-eight! The Bureau of Educational Research, Université de Chibougamau. What do they know about young people like me in Chibougamau?”

“They have young people in Chibougamau, I’m sure of that,” Dad said. “But I don’t – aum – sorry, what
were
your results?”

“That I’m ideally suited to be an undertaker, fuck. And second, a tie between librarian and army officer. Rock star isn’t even on the list. I guess they don’t have those in Chibougamau.”

“Well, ahh,” said Dad.

“I know what you’re thinking. That I’m a complete fuckup.”

“No, that’s –”

“Your son, the burger flipper.”

“Well. As a matter of fact, Baron Bulgingburger is nothing to be ash –”

Robbie glared hard at his toes. “The Baron is
not
where it’s at,” he mumbled. “I’ll tell you that much for free.”

“Excuse me?” Dad said. “Where
what
is – aum –
at?”

Robbie rolled his eyes and scrolled his lower lip downwards to reveal his teeth, tightly packed like sardines in a can.

“Look, aum, since you and I… why don’t you take a tip from someone you admire instead, like, well, Rosie. She has a good sense of her limitations. Give yourself a realistic mandate, too. Ask yourself, What are my basic skills? What’s my performance potential? Channel your rage. One day you’ll thank us. Life is what you make it, you know. Oh, and Grandma says goodbye. She took the early bus to town.” He squeezed Robbie’s collarbone. Weird, that was the first time they’d touched since the spanking days, except those occasions when Robbie’s fingertips had brushed his big palm collecting allowance.

Robbie sat, stunned that retribution had struck with such unequivocal suddenness; he would have preferred to tease out the
torture of the guilty secret all weekend. And the idea that he would one day thank his parents for such foul treatment didn’t make him feel any better at all.

When Dad left the room, he sat up in his bed, with his guts in a knot and his throat as tight as a collar and tie. The Generation Gap, he reflected, is a brook bordered with poison envy that old people have polluted by dumping their own crappy resentment into it. But for all his rage he was ashamed that he hadn’t beaten his parents to the punch, and been the first to think of leaving home.

See, Robbie hated Keef Richards’ guts, but at least the guy had done things his own way, leaving
his
old man in his dust. For the Strolling Bones wrote songs not just about the crimes of totalitarian regimes around the world, but of parents too: as the story goes, Mr. Richards, Sr., had spent his life’s savings so his son could attend a fancy private school that would give him a chance to rise up through Britain’s hobbling class system. But all the school had done was force him to wear a nancy little uniform, and instilled in him bourgeois attitudes that almost cut him off completely from his real brotherhood (which, he said, was the disenfranchised of England, the salt of the earth, and not a gallery of pseuds and citied intellectuals). He had deliberately failed his exams, causing his father to despair, and returned to the ranks of the honest working class, which these days, he said with stinging irony, meant you didn’t work at all. In an argument that’s become part of the Bones’ mythology, Keef put the issue of paternal devotion this way: “Da, if the only way to save me from dying was to eat a bucket of snot, would you?”

“Aww, son,” Mr. Richards had replied, “don’t go being a blithering idiot.”

“No, really, Da,” Keef had insisted. “Would you do it or no?”

Now Keef’s father was broke and wouldn’t speak to him, but Keef didn’t care because his patricidal hit songs had made him a
fucking fortune, and his old man was so deluded by middle-class aspirations that he was as good as dead, anyway. He was a rootless fool, Keef said, quoting somebody Robbie didn’t know, divorced from the full-bodied blood of the land.
All Parents Must Die
.

Mom was in her study downstairs, sheltered from the midday sun, curled up in the bay window, poised on needlepoint cushions, her ankles crossed like Copenhagen’s
Little Mermaid
. She was sifting through heaps of newspapers, clipping articles for
Hello World!
Always weeding, Robbie thought.

“
Blues
papers,” he said, leaning against the doorjamb. “What’s the point? The Generation Gap.
S.P.E.C.T.R.E.
”

Mom kept reading.

Ah ha, the ignore routine. No one in this house shouts when they get mad. Confrontation’s a thing for families without table manners. The Bookbinders just stew. He knotted his cheeks to parry and looked around, casual as someone waiting for a bus. Herds of plants were bunched on shelves, trailing onto the parquet floor. They stirred, alert to his presence. He thought of stepping forward. The floor was a maze of bunched papers, stapled notes, luxurious Italian stationery in crimson and cream, blotters and pads with suede covers and gold-thread tassels, articles clipped and sorted and stuffed into envelopes according to some secret system of hers.

Without a word still, she reached down, pulled a copy of
Rolling Stone
from the heap at her feet, and held it out between her thumb and index finger, at arm’s length, like a dead something. She never even looked up. He took it with resignation and dragged his feet into the garden, leafing through it idly, wondering what was the point of starting anything, since she had already clipped a third of it out. It was just like life in the seventies, as far as he was concerned: edited out and handed down. He felt like rolling it up and tossing it back through the window. He felt
like throwing it in the lake. He felt like toking up and throwing himself in the lake. Yes, come to think of it, he really did feel like committing suicide, throwing himself in front of Rosie’s slalom-ski, as she blindly sliced the waves. “Life is what you make it,” was one of Dad’s favourite bromides, but Robbie had sussed one thing out for sure: life ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. And another problem was, he had in fact tried suicide once, but it hadn’t exactly agreed with him. He hadn’t had the basic skills required.

That’s what he told Ivy once. Which, come to think of it, was where all the trouble began.

IT REALLY WAS ALL IVY’S FAULT
.

They had met only nine months before, at Collège Blanchemains, in Outremont, a dirty whale of a building dating back to Confederation, with intestinal corridors and iron teeth around the windows. Robbie’s parents sent him there to master French; without French under his belt, Dad had warned, the world of business in this province, not to mention politics, would be closed to him when he got older.
Business?
thought Robbie.
Politics?
He was horrified.
Older?

He didn’t meet Ivy Mills until December, but he already knew her name because he had stalked her all semester, often standing behind her on buses, peeking over her shoulder at the books in the crook of her arm. His nose had brushed the back of her hair. She smelled of something warm and sweet, weighed down with the mulched odour of rotting fruit. The classes were sexually segregated, if you can believe that in this day and age, but there was a co-ed cafeteria, and when he finally had the courage to set his tray down across from her, he smelled her breath and knew for sure.

“You drinking?”

Was she startled by his urbane opener? He couldn’t gauge her reaction. Fact is, his body was fighting down such a nervous riot that if she had sprouted horns and a black tongue, he couldn’t have gauged that, either. What she did was merely draw her cup close to her chest with one hand, holding her place on the page with the other, and say, “What’s it to you?”

His bowels went all soft, his stomach filled with air. His appetite evaporated up his throat. The clanking and clattering of the cafeteria with its cutlery and strings of silver Xmas tinsel whirled around his head, and the small distance between Ivy and him fell away like a yawning gorge. He managed, “You reading?”

“… Uh huh.”

“Who
are you reading, may I ask.”

“George Sand,” she said. “Says on the cover, doesn’t it.”

“He good?”

Ivy sighed and rolled her eyes. “God. She’s incredible.”

She carved up her hamburger, one-handedly, with no more apparent interest in it than in him. She ate in large mouthfuls, eyes on her plate, fork loaded and waiting for her to swallow. The buttons down the centre of her navy cardigan were mismatched, he saw, the cuffs turned inward, and there were little round holes in the front. Moths? he wondered. Reefer? Through the holes he could see her skin.
Therefore, Watson, she is not wearing a bra
. He glanced at her bosom, searching furtively for a tell-tale shadow, there where she held her cup still. He looked for the slightest tumble of wool, the shallowest valley.…

Suddenly, she was speaking to him, looking straight at him for the first time. “You want a map? You’ll need one.”

“No, I – uh.”

He asked where she lived. She told him, murmuring disinterestedly, just
Montreal
. He asked if she liked music.
Maybe
. He asked what she thought of the school.
Sucks
. So, what
was
she drinking?
Brandy
. Then she went back to her book.

He was in love. Her impossibly wide mouth, filled with crooked teeth, how beautiful. And she hadn’t told him to fuck off or anything. Even if her attitude was (as it seemed to be), No one else in this hole speaks English so you’ll have to do, that was good enough for him.

“Since you’re a reader,” Robbie ventured, unfolding a piece of paper from his pocket, “perhaps you’ll appreciate the finer points of this.” He slipped the page across the table.

And so on. Arf arf, hilarious, no? Ivy scrunched her hair. He’d used the school Gestetner, got giddy sniffing the papers as they rolled off, and then distributed them right before class, inviting entries for a French companion volume.

“I got back two measly submissions,” he told her, “both from this dork named Gaston Goupil.
Chu f—é
, which means I’m wasted, and
f—ser
. That means, for your information, to skip. School.”

“He is a dork,” Ivy said darkly. She wasn’t laughing too hard at the grammarian, either. “If I were you I’d steer clear.”

“You know Gaston?”

“We-ell.”

She offered him a sip. He took the cup and watched her over the rim, licking to savour her saliva. She pushed a plastic barrette tighter into her hair above her left ear. Her hair was coarse and untidily chopped, and she scrunched it constantly. It had no particular colour, either, as if she had tried and botched several different jobs at once: a patch of chestnut there on one side, with
a streak of sandiness, a tawny clump on the other, like a ferret or a polecat. And this impression he had of her being akin to a fox, or a marmot, or something in a field, was heightened by her brown eyes and broad cheeks, and by her nose; it was like a muzzle, a lively nose that seemed to leap forward as if it had an opinion of its own. How he wanted to reach over and stroke it!