Lost Between Houses (17 page)

I went down and got in.

“Hi,” I said. “How’s things?”

“Hello,” he said, real brightly. He was clean-shaven but looked shaky, sort of pink the way people do right after they shave.

We drove up through the city, it was Saturday morning but, really, I’d never seen the place look so barren, so pointless. It was like some awful outskirts-of-hell place.

“Sleep well?”

“Yeah. Great,” I said.

“How’s your friend?”

“Who?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten her name.”

I didn’t say anything.

“It’s the damn treatment.”

“I don’t know who you mean,” I said.

“Sure you do. Your girlfriend. The model.”

“Oh, Scarlet.”

“Yes, Scarlet.”

“She’s fine.”

“I hear she’s lovely.”

“Yes.”

“She must be going back to school soon?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” I said, sounding sort of surprised, like the thought had just occurred to me. I almost broke into a whistle to throw him off the track.

“Everything all right there?”

“Yeah sure. Why?”

“Don’t know. Just want to be sure. Want you to know that you’re free to talk to me about this stuff. Any time you like.”

“No, everything’s peachy,” I said.

Peachy?

“Look, Simon, I don’t want us to get off on the wrong foot today, all right?”

“Absolutely.”

“We’ll get this out of the way. Then we’ll have a spot of lunch.”

“Terrific.”

“You seem a little preoccupied.”

“Who? Me?”

That day was the longest day of my whole life. We went up to Beattie’s on Eglinton, a store that specialized in rich little
fucks who went to private schools. Ridley, St Andrews, T.C.S., Upper Canada, even some of those Catholic schools. I kept going into the bathroom and looking at myself in the mirror. And this same horrified face kept looking back at me.
Yep, this is really happening.

And the guy serving us. He was tall with a sort of baby lock of blond hair that fell over his forehead. He wore a grey suit with a tape measure draped over the shoulder. He wanted to know about my summer, my friends, my girlfriend. God it never stopped. I almost went insane. I had to get fitted for a jacket, for new flannels, we had to buy a whole mess of ties, a house tie, a school tie, black socks. The socks seemed especially tragic to me, harkening back to happier days when I’d jerked off into ones just like them. Now they looked up at me in a sort of accusatory fashion. Like I was going to be haunted day in and day out by Scarlet, every time I put those bloody socks on. What else? Oh, cufflinks, soccer shorts, a school sweater. On and on it went, the cash register singing away, me trying to be appreciative, trying to make the old man feel like I was glad he was there whereas in fact all I wanted to do was finish up and go hide back in my Nazi-loving bedroom. Just lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling and listen to my heart crash and wait for something to happen that I knew wasn’t going to. For Scarlet to call me; she’d made a terrible mistake, she loved only me, could I forgive her?

Like I said. Forget it.

After we were finally done, the old man turned to me. “Well, what do you think? Should we get a bite to eat?”

“You know,” I said, “I don’t feel so hot. I think I have the flu or something. I think maybe I better go back to Aunt Jean’s and just take it easy for awhile. I don’t want to be sick for school.”

“All right,” he said, sounding a bit disappointed. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

“We could pick up something to go.”

“No, I’m fine, Dad. Really. Thanks though.”

“Well, maybe today’s not the day,” he said.

“No, maybe not. But some other time, for sure.”

He dropped me off with an armful of parcels at the door. I saw my aunt on the stairs.

“Any calls for me?”

“Not a soul,” she said. “You’ve been abandoned.”

She must have been making a joke but it seemed weirdly sinister. Why would she say that today? Did she know something? I looked down at the carpet and saw the little stain. I saw that stain yesterday, I thought. And the notion of all the things that had happened between seeing that stain yesterday and seeing it today made my stomach kind of
turn.
I was so tense, everything had that look again, like it was covered in varnish or something. Shiny and way too bright. I went up to my room and shut the door.

Sometime near midnight I went out and got a pack of cigarettes. I lay there in the dark, puffing. Fuck me.

A couple of days later, Scarlet phoned. She wanted her cardigan back. It was in the cupboard. I smelt it under the arms. It just about killed me. It really did. Then I pulled a real boner. I agreed to meet her and give it back. In person. I should have thrown it out the window. There it is, baby, come and get it. But I was trying to make a good impression, not look like a sore loser or anything, so I agreed to meet her at Eaton’s right by the fountain. I got there early and then, just before she was supposed to come, my heart started fluttering like mad and I realized I’d made a terrible mistake. I was just about to sneak away when she turned up. She was wearing a brown khaki dress. Mitch was with her.

Unbelievable, eh? She actually brought Mitch. I gave her the sweater.

“Hello, Simon,” she said. “This is very nice of you.”

“It’s all right. I was down here anyway. Had to meet a friend.”

“I think I’m hung over. I finished up my job last night. My parents had a little party. You can imagine.”

I saw their living room full of fabulous, sophisticated movie people. Mitch there instead of me.

“I can’t stop eating. I just made Mitch buy me an ice cream cone.”

Why is she telling me these things? I wondered. Nobody could say things like that, one after the other, just by accident. It’s got to be on purpose.

Mitch was wearing a pair of leather shorts. They looked totally stupid. How could she like anybody wearing such stupid pants, I wondered. But that business about the ice cream,
I made Mitch buy me an ice cream cone,
like they were a steady couple or something, I just couldn’t stop hearing it. It made me ill.

“I got to get kicking,” I said.

Get kicking? Like where the fuck did
that
come from?

We chit-chatted for a bit longer, me feeling like my head was going to explode. And then they took off, walking real slowly, looking at this and that, no hurry at all. Unbe-fucking-lievable.

I
LIKE SAYING GOODBYE
to places. I would have liked to wander around our city house and say goodbye to my bedroom, goodbye to the maid’s room where I spent all those hours doing my homework, goodbye to the rec room where I listened to “Little Deuce Coup,” the kitchen where I spilt that pot of honey one night just before dinner, my mom walking around with this stuff sticking to her feet, waiting for me to own up.

I felt sort of guilty about those rooms, like I’d abandoned them and there was no one to look after them or think about them.

We had a circular staircase and for some reason, me being superstitious maybe, I never counted the stairs, I had a feeling it would be bad luck. So on the way up, I used to count until I almost got to the top and then I’d stop and sort of scramble my thoughts. But I always figured a day would come when it would be all right for me to know.

What really bugs me is I can’t remember the last time I was there. I think it was with the old man, a few days after we went clothes shopping. I had to get a sports jacket out of my cupboard and I went up the stairs into my bedroom, the whole house neat as a pin, and got the jacket, it was herringbone, and came back down the stairs, through the hall foyer, looked at myself in the
hall mirror, like I always do, and then came out the front door into the sunshine and got back in the car. But I’m not sure. Maybe I went back again. Imagine me being in that house for the last time and not saying anything, not even knowing it, just walking away breezy as a summer afternoon. Not even goodbye.

First week in September, I got stuffed into boarding school. My old man got out of the bin and him and my mom moved everything up to the cottage. All the city furniture, everything. Harper went into residence at Trinity College. Everyone just gone, poof! I mean I told those people, especially my mother, that selling the house was a bad idea, it’d fuck us up, but they thought I was just being selfish and they did it anyway. And now look. Like you didn’t have to have to be Madame Rosa with her crystal ball to know that house held us all together, we were just like those fucking electrons in the physics book, you know, you take away the object they’re all flying around and they just zoom off into outer space, all lost and spinning around till they just expire.

Anyway, there I was. A boarder. Me.
Quelle fucking horreur
For years I’d been making fun of those guys, feeling sorry for them, those pale-skinned fuckweeds slumping across the quad. Now I was one of them.

My first day in residence, the housemaster, a French teacher named Psycho Schiller, took me aside after lunch and said in this slow, solemn voice, “We do
homework
on Friday nights here, Mr Albright.” He said it as if he were saying, we don’t have sex with animals here, Mr Albright. As if I’d somehow been morally at fault all these years going out and having a blast with my friends. But he was going to fix that now.

“In
my
house, we never lose sight of our social and academic responsiblilities,” he went on to say.

Psycho loved caning boys. I think it gave him a boner. He liked to bend them over in their pyjamas, these little kids, their parents three thousand miles away, them completely at his mercy and really give them a flailing. Make them realize their
social and academic responsibilities.
Firecracker Day last year he was out prowling the quad at three o’clock in the morning, waving his cane around, just hoping to catch some kid dropping a cherry bomb out the window. What a guy!

What was even worse, I had a roommate. A fucking roommate! I’d seen this guy in the hallways before and wondered to myself, who is
that
asshole? One day last year, right after sports, I went by the boarders’ locker-room, and for once they weren’t jamming their pricks up each other’s rear ends, they were torturing some guy, a whole lot of kids in there, chanting,

E.K.J.

Wills is an asshole.

E.K.J.

Wills is an asshole.

And throwing towels at this guy, him all hunched up in the corner, ducking and letting out these whoops, sort of digging it in a weird way, all the attention.

Well, guess what? That was my new roommate.

He wasn’t a prick really. In fact he was kind of intelligent. He just didn’t know how to behave, always making stupid faces or jokes that weren’t funny or cheering too loudly at the football game, just no feel at all for how things ought to get done.

But since he was my roommate and there was nobody else to talk to, and him being none too fussy, I yacked at him all the time, him sitting there on the edge of the bed, with his white, white skin and little handsome head, hair always perfectly combed. He also had a remarkably big dong. Like a real monster.

First time I saw it in the showers, I could hardly take my eyes off it. It was a beast.

“E.K,” I said, “how come you’ve got such a huge cock? Like did your mother take some weird drug when she was pregnant? It’s almost like another arm.”

Crack of dawn every morning, a bell went off and we hopped out of bed. Me first. I ran full speed down the hall in my towel to get to the showers. That was the only decent part of the day, standing there in the hot water, the steam rising up around me, my skin turning red like a lobster in a pot. I stayed right till the last minute, until some crater-faced prefect came in and hollered at me.

Then I had to hustle. I tore back down the hall and got dressed super fast, my shirt-tail hanging out, tie draped like a string around my neck, shirt soaked all the way through. Ran down the stairs into the quad with a whole lot of other guys, our hands in our pockets, hair wet, heading towards the dining room.

Every morning, I used to ask myself the same question: How did this happen? How the fuck did I get here? One minute I’ve got a girlfriend and a family and I live in a house and then I get on the ferris wheel and I go up in the sky and when I come down everything’s gone; house gone, parents gone, Scarlet gone and me out here in the bright morning, my hands in my pockets, fucked.

I hadn’t heard a peep from Scarlet, big surprise, eh, but by now I figured she was back in that girl’s school in Quebec she was always talking about. Whose daughter went there, how the prime minister came for Sports Day. She was a real piece of work, that chick. I should have figured that earlier, though,
catching her necking with that guy in my basement while her boyfriend was upstairs. Like duh, what was your first clue you’re with somebody of ambiguous moral character? I should have mentioned that to old Mitch, him walking around the school like Mr Cool Balls. See how he liked that one. Like, nice girlfriend Mitch. But I knew he’d just write me off as a bad sport so I didn’t even fucking look at him in school. His friends were a different story, though. I felt completely nervous when I walked by them. You know, like they all knew, they could look right inside me and see everything I was feeling like it was a room they could hang around in any time they wanted.

Thoughts like these kept me busy until I got into the dining hall. Now that was something else. Imagine a train station and you’ll get some idea of the noise. Like two hundred kids schnarfing their breakfast, forks and knives and spoons clanging, prefects ordering people around, teachers up at the front table, looking bored and hungover in their shitty little sports jackets with the pads on the elbows. And the noise man, the din. Just unbelievable. You’d think it was a Roman coliseum or something.

I sat near the door, right beside Arthur Deacon who was going to be a priest and some blond kid from New Zealand who had tiny deformed ears. But because I was in Grade Twelve, a senior, ha-ha, even though they turned out my lights for me at ten o’clock on
Friday
night, I sat near the head of the table so I got second-best choice of food right after the prefects, unlike those poor little fucks at the far end, the new kids from Grade Nine, they got the leftovers, the burnt toast, the broken eggs; God they were little, those kids, I can’t imagine how their mothers could have abandoned them in a place like that. Like leaving a kid in the forest. These little kids with rosy red cheeks looking just freaked right out. I was freaked out and I was like three years older.