Kicking Tomorrow (26 page)

“The whole family’s here, Ma. What more do you want? Merry Christmas,
OK
?”

But Mrs. Mills wasn’t listening. She was tickling Julie in the ribs. “Ayy ma pauvre minoune, would you like one of my chocolates now? Oui? Well, come and give Maman a kiss, first.” Julie squirmed, and cackled with delight. Mrs. Mills tickled her harder and Julie, her eyes rolling wildly, her teeth in a froth, tried to
squirm free. Now it was clear she was hurting. She sent her head back and bonked her mother on the nose. Mrs. Mills tossed Julie to the ground, and now the tender moment was spoiled. Mr. Mills sat and watched. Ivy sat, looking at her lap, scrunching her hair. She hadn’t spoken in an hour. She was drinking wine, nose in her book, she was in Java. Karen was changing a stinky diaper on the bed.

“French Canadians are incredible,” Mr. Mills announced pleasantly. “Did you know that 75 per cent of them have not read a book since high school, much less a French book? Statistics show they watch seven hours of
TV
a day – American sitcoms. They refuse to give up their big American cars, they holiday in Miami and Maine, and they talk about French heritage –
HA! –
the way they’re going, they’ll be calling the energy crisis theirs, and end up trying to make
Florida
independent.”

Silence around the table at that one. Ivy sipped her wine. Even Mrs. Mills was quiet.

“What
d’you
think? This language commission they’re proposing, the French language cops, it’s an inquisition, isn’t it? Don’t tell me none of those
FLQ
thugs and murderers got jobs with the party.”

No one said a word, though Robbie was wondering if he really said,
Whajew think
, or if he was only slurring his words because he was drunk. Ivy scrunched her hair, gripped her wineglass tighter. Mr. Mills moved his glass to his lips, but poured too soon and wine spilled down his chin. He took a different tack. “What’s your family doing today? Working?”

Robbie jumped. “Who, mine? Oh, no, not today. We have Xmas, sort of, Bookbindermas really. We have Easter, too, and Passover, the whole shebang. It’s just my parents feel you shouldn’t have one single religion stuffed down your throat before you’re old enough to decide.”

Ivy’s leg under the table.

“The problem with you kids, is,” Mr. Mills said, little pig tails appearing in his cheeks, twisting his chunky wine glass (the kind of goblet you get
FREE!
after purchasing ten litres of gasoline) between his thumb and forefinger, and examining it like some precious jewel, “you’re not aware of how short life is. You just screw around, devil may care, when you have no idea. You think that money grows on trees –”

“ – but,” Mrs. Mills jumped in, “you won’t shake a limb to get it! That’s not your joke, isn’t it,
chéri?”

“Yes,
chérie
, that’s my joke,” Mr. Mills said, wearily. And his stitched-on smile completely unravelled.

“Let’s dance!” Mrs. Mills exclaimed, and yanked Robbie up by the arm. She was strong, and her breath was as warm as the bottom of her stomach. The room whirled around, she was whooping. Robbie caught a glimpse of Ivy as he turned. She had snapped the stem of her wineglass in two. Her fingers were bloody, and she was licking them calmly.

A dull
POOM
from the back of the apartment. Everyone jumped. Olly leaped from his chair again, hopping over other chairs to get to the door.

By the time the whole family had stamped down the back stairs and gathered at the door of the garage, Olly had already picked John off the floor and was holding him in his arms.

“I knew I put in too much potassium permanganate,” John said, with a stupid smile. The family looked stupidly back. The skin was burnt right off John’s stupid face. The Stupid family, Robbie thought. The Stupid family have a very Merry Christmas.

He felt pretty grown-up, sitting in this taxi with his luggage on his lap. It was the first time he had ever paid for one himself. He was watching the meter with an eagle eye now, too amazed at
how quickly it clicked by to enjoy the moment fully, but riding high and proud as if the cab were a royal carriage, and seeing the world renewed in the light of love. Two days after Xmas they were taking a secret holiday trip. To Montreal. It was Robbie’s idea. He was asserting himself in this relationship, now. He had sold a hundred more of his beloved records, and Ivy had borrowed money from Olly, lying to her parents that she was staying in the burbs with him. They checked into the grandest hotel they could afford – the Hotel Bonaventure, a poured-concrete mammoth of a building situated above the Bonaventure shopping mall.

They stood on street corners, making a show of being lost; holding their street maps upside-down and squinting at them and thanking people for their help in wild accents. They bought postcards with Mounties on them, fumbled with foreign currency Robbie had stolen from the parents’ dresser. They were loaded with brandy and laughing helplessly. Robbie posed for a picture outside Ben’s smoked-meat restaurant. He stood with his hands on his hips and breathed in deeply, savouring the illusion cold air has of always smelling clean, even in downtown traffic. They went to the planetarium, and the Musée des Beaux Arts, visiting sights in town they had taken for granted all their lives. They bought swimsuits for the hotel pool. Robbie was full of joy that their relationship was so rejuvenated, and at one point, when Ivy was looking the other way, he looked at the sky and winked heavenward, real chummy, like, thumbs up, man.

How humiliating to be treated like a child, at his age. Moments after they had sat down in this snooty hotel restaurant, with its suffocating drapery and undead waiters, the maître d’ smoothly inquired if Robbie was paying cash or credit. Cash, Robbie answered pleasantly, and only after the vampire asked if he’d like to pay in advance did he feel a creeping sense of indignation. He had
nicely combed his hair, parting it down the middle. Now he sat with it drawn close to his cheeks, which made the long face he pulled look even longer.

“When Hell’s Yells are a big success,” he promised Ivy, “I’m gonna stitch together a jacket of hundred-dollar bills and wear it specially for dumps like these.”

It was no fun here at all. You couldn’t shout or burp or eat sitting on the floor in front of a
TV
if you wanted. And old people were everywhere, murmuring. Even the air seemed like old air. All this formality. His shoulders felt as stiff as a coat hanger. People pay for this?

Ivy wasn’t enjoying herself either. She rolled one cigarette after another, making vertical creases between her eyebrows as if this was a punishment Robbie was imposing on her like a parent, as a prelude to a spank. She was doing her best to make him feel responsible for everything that was ugly and pretentious about the place; each time she made sneering faces at the luxury-liner decor, or shot her eyes over at some snatch of artificial conversation, it was as if she were saying he had done this to her on purpose.

It was coming over Robbie, like the first twinge of nausea, that this so-called relationship was still as delicate, as uncertain, as a hungover stomach. Maybe Ivy had been right all along; they just weren’t made for each other. He skimmed over the menu. He could make out about half of it, but just to prove to the seethingly solicitous waiter that he didn’t need help with the rest, he ordered the most expensive item:
riz de veau
.

“Fifteen bucks for rice,” he grumbled to Ivy, after the waiter had strode away. And he knew now he was competing with her to be pissed off the most, as if finding fault here was a special mark of sophistication. “What’s the point of being rich if everything you buy costs more? Life is really fucked.”

Ivy absently brushed breadcrumbs into rows on the tablecloth. She said, “ – ”

All right, so
riz de veau
turned out to be calves’ brains, which took him by surprise, but even Robbie could tell that the gazpacho was cold and the crème caramel was barely set. The espresso coffee was shitty too, served in an insultingly tiny cup with mud at the bottom, and the bill arrived much faster than any of the courses had; the
Night of the Living Dead
waiter plopped the vinyl folder on the table and gave him a look of royal disdain, as he lingered.
Braiins
, Robbie thought, and said, “I s’pose you think we’re just gonna take off, like run out on you.”

“Yes,
monsieur,”
the waiter said, bowing politely with a smile like the crease in a starched napkin.

The hotel’s rooftop swimming pool was the best place in the world to air your head out after a nightmare like that, and even better because Robbie and Ivy were the only ones there. They swam out through a tunnel and emerged beneath the night sky in an emerald pool sliced with underwater scimitars of light. The surface steamed thickly, as if it were boiling and evaporating into space, and the sides of the pool were piled high with snow. Craning their necks, Robbie and Ivy could see the tops of Montreal’s skyscrapers illuminated, and the aerial beam atop Place Ville-Marie stirring up drifts in the refrigerated heavens. To the south,
FARINE RED ROSES FLOUR
blinked on and off in red neon, and that was the factory you drove past on your way to Kilborn and the Eastern Townships.

“Later, I’ll read from my diary,” Ivy said to him, nose to his nose. She was panting as she paddled, blinking water from her eyelashes, her otter eyes all icy and dark.

Robbie now with the curious sensation of swimming with an erection, like a rudder below him. Rolling over, and his swimming trunks looked like a shark’s fin slicing the surface. He lay still in the mist and watched the stars twinkle above him. By narrowing his eyes to eclipse his peripheral vision, he could feel as if he were
floating alone in ripply space, unravelling time, erasing memory, expanding in all directions at once, convulsing ecstatically.

“I wonder what that calf’s last thoughts were,” he said, still feeling queasy.

They swam back to the changing area and, shivering, hugged. He grasped Ivy’s wet rubber body and was seized with panic; this was all too beautiful, he feared, surely it couldn’t last. He held her tenderly, taking care not to squeeze her breasts too hard, or crush her thigh, lest her precious flesh be accelerated on its road to softening and decay. Desperately, he thought that if he held her gently like this, for as long as possible, maybe time would cease for them both. But then Ivy wriggled free.

He changed and waited for her where they had hugged. After ten minutes he went back to the pool and asked the attendant if he had seen anyone. The attendant shrugged. Robbie went down the hall to the women’s locker room. No answer. He pushed the door open cautiously and peeked in. No one there. There was Ivy’s gym bag, there were her clothes and shoes, but there were no other signs, not even wet foot marks on the floor.

He felt sick. Had she been kidnapped? Had she gone off with someone else?
Downtown, for a straight fast fuck
. She was capable of it, but in her
swimsuit?
Was it a game, then? Where could she be hiding? He went down to the hotel room, but she wasn’t there. He sat on the bed, and despondently watched
TV
. And Mom was on, of course. A rerun: about the way dry cleaners routinely pump masses of chloroethylenes into the atmosphere; the piece started off breezily – Paris runways, flashbulbs popping, Eurobeat music, women shopping and wearing the new styles – just to suck you in, but ended sneakily with a shot of a toxic cloud. Rain fell; women got drenched, their clothes went to the cleaners, and then Mom laid on the fact that these and other emissions contribute to the contaminated atmospheric sink, and may soon add up to cleaning bills no one can afford to pay.

A knock on the door. Robbie looked through the peephole and there, in the convex distortion of the lens, was Ivy in her swimsuit. He opened the door. She was dry, and in a fury.

“You want to know what happened, I suppose. Well, I pushed the wrong door up there. I locked myself in the stairwell. I banged, but you never came. So I went down the stairs, fifteen flights, opened another door at the bottom, and I was right in
the middle of the Bonaventure mall.”

“You were right in the middle of the Bonaventure mall?” Robbie repeated incredulously. “Crack me up!”

“God. It’s not a bit funny, you know. It’s still late-night shopping down there. People are bringing back all the stupid Christmas gifts they’ve had dumped on them by their relatives. The place is packed.”

“Were you embarrassed?” Robbie said with a snorting laugh. “Even must’ve been.”

“You know me. I walked through the crowd with my head up. Maybe people thought I was a promotional gimmick for a travel agency, I didn’t care. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is I was walking along and I bumped into the father.”

“Fucksake!”

“He was returning presents. His arms were full of them, he almost didn’t see me. Now he’s in the lobby settling our bill. I
told
you no good comes of giving Christmas presents.
God.”