Lost Between Houses (22 page)

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning.”

“Going across?”

“Yes, sir.”

“For how long?”

“Just the day.”

“Got any ID?”

“Sure.”

He looked at my birth certificate.

“Oh, and this too,” I said. I handed him my student card.

“Why aren’t you in school today?” he asked.

It was the big one and it came screaming across the plate at a hundred miles an hour.

“A scholar’s holiday.”

“A what?”

“It’s a scholar’s holiday.” I said it more clearly, looking him right in the eye and smiling the way I imagined someone with really good marks would.

“Okay,” he said. He handed me back my stuff. I walked slowly down the gangplank and onto a street. I didn’t look around. I put my hands in my pockets, looked up and down the street like a happy tourist and headed down the road. The road arched away slightly and after a few minutes, I peeked over my shoulder. I started running down the street. I heard a car horn honk behind me. It was a yellow Cadillac. I put out my thumb. The car pulled up alongside of me. The windows whirred down. Music boomed out of the inside of the car. It was that song from the dance last summer at Hidden Valley, “She’s Gotta Move Up.”

“Where you going, kid?” the driver asked.

“Florida,” I said.

“Well, get in. I can get you started.”

We were driving through town.

“It’s a great thing you’re doing, kid,” he said. “I always wanted to do that. Just fuck off, you know. Wham! Gone!”

He drove me a few miles out to the turnpike, stopping at the foot of a huge bridge.

“Just stay on here kid, just stay on this route.” He motioned to the bridge, this great big monster with cables rising up, the cars whizzing past us. “Fifteen hundred miles down that road, you’re in Florida.”

I got out. He gave me a honk and sped off back toward town. I started across the bridge. The wind was just howling. My hair standing on end. I could lean against the wind, it was so strong. I just walked on, getting more and more excited. I stopped about halfway. I looked down. The water roaring below, so far, far below me.

I made it, I thought, I
made it!

Goodbye Mom, goodbye Dad, goodbye Upper Canada, goodbye Scarlet, goodbye Forest Hill, goodbye E.K., goodbye dormitory, goodbye Psycho, goodbye everyone. No hard feelings. Goodbye. Goodbye. Arrivederci Roma.

And then I started running along the top of the bridge toward the other side. The wind just whipping like crazy.

Except that’s not what happened. What happened was I fell asleep on the bus back to Toronto and when I woke up we were pulling into the bus station down on Dundas Street. I just about jumped out of my pants. I looked at my watch. It was only seven o’clock. The Indians got out first but I just about pushed them down the stairs to make them hurry up. I grabbed my suitcase out of the hatch and flagged a cab. Told him to go like hell. We went up around the back of Upper Canada, me wide awake now, and I jumped at Kilbarry Road. I gave him a whopping tip.

I stuck my suitcase between the hedges and the school fence and shot up the back driveway. It was still raining and there wasn’t a soul around. I went in the side door of the dormitory, up through the basement. You could smell the dust and the old
pipes down there. I opened the door to my room. E.K. rolled over and looked at me. Funny thing is, he didn’t even seem surprised.

“Jesus Christ,” he said and rolled back over.

After awhile he scratched his shoulder.

“You owe me eleven bucks.”

S
NOW FELL
. I was watching it flicker past my window. E.K. was sitting on the bed, pulling at that giant dong of his and cutting out pictures of some political guy from the newspaper and pasting them in a scrapbook.

“Hey, E.K.,” I said, “did you know his girlfriend screws around? I met this guy that’s balling her.”

“Fuck you,” he said, not even looking up.

The hall prefect came by. He had bowed legs and bad skin and for some mysterious reason he’d taken more or less an instant dislike to me. He came into the room without knocking, which was his way of showing contempt.

“Phone call,” he said, grunting like a fucking Neanderthal, and then walked out again, clomp, clomp, leaving the door open, his fucked-up legs going down the hall in jeans. (Being a prefect, he was allowed to wear jeans after class. A real incentive to excellence, that one.)

I went down the stairs and into the phone booth and pulled the door shut. There was all this handwriting and gouging in the wood from all these kids doodling away with pens or knives or fucking machetes. I picked up the phone.

“If I stand on my tiptoes, I can almost see your room,” she said.

The anaconda wrapped himself around my chest.

“Scarlet?”

“If you don’t want to talk to me, that’s fine.”

“Well, whe …, where are you?”

“I’m just down the street. At Bishop Strachan.”

I opened my mouth but nothing came out. My jaw just hung there like a busted lantern.

“I got expelled,” she said. “I got caught smoking pot with a nun. Actually she was just a big lesbo from Los Angeles.”

“Am I on the radio or something?”

“So now we’re both in captivity,” she said.

There was a bit of a pause while I picked at the wood with my fingernail, making a white groove.

“So I guess you heard,” she said.

“What?”

“I broke up with Mitch.”

“I never see Mitch. I couldn’t pick Mitch out of a police line-up.”

I heard another voice, an older woman’s, at her end of the line. Scarlet put her hand over the mouthpiece and then in a moment she came back on.

“I gotta go,” she said. “Don’t think too shitty things about me, all right? Like you don’t know the whole story.”

She waited a second.

“All right, Simon?”

“All right.”

“And don’t tell anyone I called.”

I went back up to my room.

“Guess who that was?” I said to E.K. I was pretty goosed up. In fact when I looked out the window, I noticed that everything seemed covered in a sort of magical glaze.

“Santa Claus,” he said, snapping off a piece of Scotch tape and laying it carefully over something in his scrapbook.

I put my feet up on the desk. I put my arms behind my head.

“I wonder what she wants,” I said out loud, not that I expected E.K. to pick up the ball. Since my trip to Texas, he’d been strangely uncurious about the comings and goings of my life. Odd that within a couple of months this guy, who was generally perceived as a cretin’s cretin, was treating me almost like an equal, sometimes like an out-and-out nuisance. Which happens sometimes when people get to know me.

But later that night, just as I was getting into bed, some of the steam wore off and I thought to myself, something’s wrong here, something is definitely wrong. It was like my subconscious was trying to tell me something but it wasn’t quite loud enough, particularly with E.K. telling me about how he and his sister used to take all their clothes off and play perverto-man with the flashlight and stuff I’d rather not know about. But when something’s bugging you, there’s usually a pretty good reason for it, unless you’re just nuts, and so once E.K shut up, which was after lights out, I started going over the conversation with Scarlet piece by piece. And after awhile it began to assume a “sinister character,” if I might use an expression from my English class. Especially that
don’t tell anyone.
When people tell you stuff other people aren’t supposed to know, it’s usually time to start sleeping with a revolver.

I was thinking to myself, fuck, maybe I sounded too friendly. Maybe I should have told her to fuck off. But then she might have. I started thinking about a whole lot of stuff, her kissing that prefect in my basement, giving me the axe only when she had Mitch back in the bag; and now telling me not to tell anyone she called. It was all sort of
sneaky.
Like she liked it that way. Preferred
it that way. Take away the sneakiness and she’s not so interested any more. There are some real shitty people on earth and it occurred to me that my former girlfriend, Scarlet Duke, might just be one of them.

But then I realized I didn’t give a shit about any of that. I got all warm and sleepy and I thought, oh well, everything must be okay, otherwise I wouldn’t feel so good, so cosy all tucked up here in my bed and falling asleep.

Next day I got out of bed with an unusual sensation. I had something to look forward to. I saw Mitch in the hallway just before prayers. He was hanging out with his gang of coolies, same bunch of war criminals as always. Normally I kind of slunk past these guys, hoping nobody would say anything to me. I usually had a little something prepared, some quick retort. That was the thing with those guys: if they weren’t quite sure what you were going to come back with, they tended to leave you alone. But today I didn’t find my heart speeding up when I got near them. In fact I felt a kind of weird kinship for old Mitch. It even felt a bit like affection; but I’m not stupid, I knew what it was. Now that he’d been kicked on his can, he didn’t have it over me any more. I even had a terrible temptation to go over and say, “I heard from our little friend last night,” just so him and his buddies would know. But I had a feeling that might be a little premature and I didn’t want to look like an asshole twice. Moreover old Mitch didn’t look exactly heartbroken. In fact he looked as if everything was hunky-dory. I wondered if he even knew he’d been broken up with. Hard to tell with a guy like Mitch. They’re sort of like poodles, those guys. It doesn’t take much to get them to wag their tails.

Later that night, when I was back in my room for study period, I heard the phone ring at the far end of the building and I thought,
that’s for me. I mean I wasn’t hoping it was, I just
knew.
And sure enough, a few seconds later I heard footsteps coming along the hall and there was Mr Crater Face standing in the doorway.

“It’s me again,” she said. “Did you know it was me?”

“Course.”

“I had a dream about you last night. I dreamt you took some girl back to my parents’ apartment over on Chaplin. It made me really jealous. Why do you suppose I’d have a dream like that?”

“I have no idea.”

“Do you ever have dreams like that?”

“Not that I remember.”

“You’re not hexing me are you? One of the girls here said you probably put a hex on me.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Well, I wasn’t very considerate, was I?”

“Oh hell, that’s all over, Scarlet. People fall in love, they break up, big deal. Happens to everybody.”

“You sound so blasé. Do you have a girlfriend? No, don’t tell me. It’ll just make me jealous. Don’t you think it’s strange though, me having that dream?”

I was cutting a groove in the counter with my nail again, brushing away the guck so you could see the clean white wood underneath.

“I’ve heard of stranger things.”

She took a deep breath.

“I had to get him back, you know. I had to,” she said. “A guy like you, you’re probably above that stuff. But I’m not. I just had to
know
I could get him back. For awhile there, it was like he had like all the secrets to the universe.”

“Mitch? Mitch can hardly find his way to the tuck shop.”

“But you know what I mean. I mean I bet you wanted to
get even with Daphne Gunn. I bet if she’d given you a chance to, you know, even when you were with me, you would have taken it.”

“Did you ever tell him, by the way?”

“About what?”

“About my aunt’s house.”

“I did, actually.”

I suddenly remembered what Rachel had said about Scarlet staying out all night.

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” I said.

“It did to me,” she said. “It was my first time.”

“I thought you were with that folksinger.”

“I told you. He just got it in part of the way. It didn’t really count.”

There was a silence.

“All the girls masturbate here,” she said. “It’s like a chicken coop at night.”

“Jesus, Scarlet. No wonder you got expelled.”

“Believe me, if you got expelled for that, there’d be nobody in the school. Do they put that saltpetre in your food?”

“Yeah. Tons of it.”

“Doesn’t do me any good,” she said. “I must be oversexed or something.”

“Oh really?”

“Sometimes I think the police are just going to come and take me away. Don’t you think it’s funny the way we can talk? You know, so easy. There must be a thread there or something.”

“I don’t know, Scarlet. Maybe.”

“My father always said I should marry you. Right from the first time he met you. Shit,” she said suddenly, whispering, “I have to go. Fuck. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

On Thursday night, my mother came down to the city and took me out to dinner. That was pretty unusual, going out on a week-night. She must have cleared it with Psycho, who was always sucking up to parents. All that pip, pip, pseudo-British stuff. (Now I knew what
pseudo
meant, I used it like every third word.)

We went to our favourite restaurant, that French joint. I was sort of excited, to tell you the truth. I had a feeling something was up, that there was something good in it for me. (Sometimes you can just feel your luck changing. Like opening a window in a stuffy room.) But I also had a feeling it would piss her off if she knew that, so I kept my cards pretty close to my chest. Finally she came out with it. Very understated, of course, but the fact was this; she couldn’t stand living up north with the old man and she was splitting for awhile. Going to go down to stay with her old friend Aunt Marnie who had an apartment in Palm Beach.

“Are you going to get a divorce?” I asked.

“For God’s sake, Simon, don’t be such an alarmist.”

When my mother was feeling guilty sometimes, she went on the attack. I didn’t want her getting all jumpy like that so I said, “You know, ever since I was twelve I wanted you guys to split up.”

That slowed her down a little bit. She lit a cigarette and very delicately nicked a trace of tobacco off her tongue.