Kicking Tomorrow (20 page)

“I know I know,” Robbie said. “You
wish
you lived there then. Beethoven, Caesar, Einstein, and the Pope all sitting around in cafés having incredible conversations.”

He couldn’t believe he said that – the words just slipped out like fish from a porpoise’s mouth. Weird thing was, though, while Ivy stopped, a page half-turned in her fingers, and looked at him, there was no reproach in her eyes. She looked quizzical, disbelieving, almost apologetic, like the Wizard of Oz when they pull back the curtain. For Robbie it was an obscene moment, looking back at her so naked like that. He felt he had no right to
see her from this reversed perspective. Quickly he added, “So show me more. It’s incredible. Really.”

The night swallowed them up in the basement of the old house. Finally, when his hair was in his face because his neck wouldn’t hold his head up any longer, and he was sure his eyelids would thud shut and dunk him into a bucket of sickly sleep, Ivy said, “Do you have any crank in your
Cocaine
machine? Let’s stay up all night and go to school together.”

Choppily speeding through till morning then, Robbie’s skin felt as dull and stiff as a mask of papier mâché, his stomach an acid hollow, his fingers splayed like numb antennae. And Ivy showed him how she liked to burn herself with cigarettes. She held the glowing end close to her forearm and watched as moisture began to collect in a bubble under her skin. Robbie clenched his teeth and winced.

“Chrissake!
Doesn’t it hurt?”

Later that day, the sun’s burning through the classroom window, and though it’s December it’s hot as summer in here.
FUCK
the outlaw biker’s zonked out of his tree, but he can hug the road even on the tightest turns, leaning so sharp that the chains around the heel of his boot scrape the tarmac and shoot sparks behind him. He’s got a crimson scarf tied around his neck, with batik designs on it.
Supit urang
and
kala
masks. The engine’s monster vibrations thicken his blood, and the singular concentration required to keep the hog on the road hardens his eyeballs. He’s warp-sped into a time-frame measured only in violent intentions. He shifts down to check out Soucy, a grunting porker with a neck like a stack of damp baloney: Soucy’s hair is already shaved for the abattoir of life, his flesh reddened and sweating, a pen wedged in his trotter. When he notices Robbie, he curls his blood-pudding arm around his test paper, but Robbie’s not attempting to cheat; no, to him that sausage is the sunburnt
driving arm of some long-suffering father at the wheel of his economy hatchback Nip-job, with his squealing pigletty family in the back.
FUCK
shoots him a contemptuous stare before gunning his engine down the highway and leaving them to eat his dust.

All that day at his desk in class, his skull made of foam rubber and his eyes vibrating in their sockets, Robbie catches visible echoes of his night with Ivy, seeing the jumpy, fragmented scenes like photos in a flip book so well worn that the pages are soft at the edges.
Why do you do that? Doesn’t it hurt?
His own voice loud in his ears. Drowning out the drone of the math class. And M. Nul is pointing a finger at him.

“Monsieur Bookbinder. Donnez nous une équation quelconque.”

“Oh, uh.
X
+
Y
=
Z
?”

“Bien. Merci.”

And Ivy’s lips on his eyelids as he sprawls on the beanbag chair, the moisture evaporating like his own ascendant intoxicated soul.
Doesn’t it hurt?

“Et encore, Monsieur Bookbinder.
X
= ?”

“Uh.
Y
?
Z
?”

And the class chuckling now, looking at him with expressions ranging from contempt to awe. Robbie fires rapid looks back with a metal Gatlinger face. His body is stretched out so low at his desk that he may as well be lying on the floor. The wood of his chair feels soft as it slips under his shoulder blades. The pencil in his hand is fat as a baseball bat. He shivers, wonders how Ivy’s holding out. Why is everyone staring? The class has ground to a halt. What’s going on? There’s a knuckle of chalk on his exercise book. Where did that come from? Oh, and now he feels at last the smarting pinpoint in the middle of his forehead. He reaches up to test for a lump or a wet spot. And the class erupts in guffaws. M. Nul is dusting off his fingers.

“Et une fois de plus, Monsieur Bookbinder.”

“X + Y = Z.”

Doesn’t it hurt?

Ouaf ouaf ouaf. Dumbfuck pepsis honking like seals at the aquarium circus, clapping their fins for fish. And Ivy weeping helplessly in his lap and saying,
i don’t feel a fucking thing
.

Robbie had heard that bikers were total scuzzbags, but he never really thought about the personal aspect until Ivy told him what they did to Gaston. Robbie lay late in bed and turned the image over and over in his head, like a pig on a spit: now that he was expelled from Blanchemains, the dork had been bugging the Dead Man’s Hands to make him a prospect for the club. He’d been running errands for them, stealing little things like beer and cigarettes, lining up junior dope deals around the area of the school and generally being an overeager little asshole, and the gang had tolerated him until he showed up at the clubhouse in St-Henri one morning with a Dead Man’s Hand tattoo on his arm. Big mistake. There are few things bikers hate more than an unauthorized person wearing their colours. So they pistol-whipped him and skinned the tattooed cards right off him with a red-hot switchblade, right then and there on the kitchen table.

Robbie was pretty pleased, in a way – after what the goon did to his tongue, skinning was maybe even too good for him – but Robbie lay long wondering how much it was his fault. He hated Gaston’s guts, and he was relieved that the guy would probably be too busy now licking his own wounds to come after him again, but still he couldn’t help feeling sorry. Fuck, had he known Olly would take him that seriously, maybe he’d never have said anything. He thought of other atrocities Ivy had ascribed to her incredible brother: how one time he had sold a member of the rival New Hegelians club some crystal meth, which was really
Ajax solution, and then just sat around drinking beer with the Dead Man’s Hands as the guy’s skin bubbled up. Another time, one of the old ladies had been yammering too much to customers in the strip bar where she worked, about how heavy-duty the Dead Man’s Hands were, and that had brought some heat on the club from the pigs. So Olly and the sergeant-at-arms had tied her to a chair and held her mouth open and poured boiling water into it. Chrissake! Robbie could hardly imagine. But he forced himself to, anyway.

While downstairs the family ate breakfast, he got to thinking of all the horrors in the world. All the ways of hurting a body he’d read about. Was it really necessary for him to list them? Yes! He couldn’t help himself. In Paraguay they inserted glass rods into peasants’ penises and then smashed them. The Nazis set prisoners in cement diapers and then force-fed them. Images of torture sliced his imagination into quivering slabs. And now, wriggling across the synapse between pain and pleasure, he found himself with an erection. Goading himself now. What else? He’s performing a sadistic psychic striptease, and loving it. Once he read on a Strolling Bones album jacket how the Spanish Inquisition paraded heretics around the cities, with their noses amputated and their genitals pulled off and their backs flayed open to expose their spines. To make them confess. But
really
confess. It was shocking to think that God should have made bodies so vulnerable. They have in-built thresholds of suffering, it’s true, at which point the nerves mercifully switch off, but man has made a science of prolonging pain. Couldn’t God have foreseen that? With the blanket’s cool satin border tucked under his nose, Robbie pictured himself being cowardly beyond belief in any number of gruesome predicaments, divulging war secrets before anyone could pull his toenails out, renouncing his religion and adopting anyone-you-please before they inserted the spike through his tongue, turning his family in rather than witness the
loss of his fingers one by one. Well, for his family he’d endure most things, he supposed. It was unthinkable, one way or the other. All in all, it would be safer to be on the psychos’ side; that way he could do the torturing rather than the thinking or the feeling or the fearing. Robbie the Reckless, mediaeval knight – biker of the fourteenth century – abandoned bastard child from a brutal time, weighted down with chainmail and rusted armour, sweating off a hangover inside his helmet like boiled beef in a tin. He watched himself riding, drunk as a lord, fuelled with mead and the grim elation of violent living, his cock like the saddle’s pommel in front of him. Time stripped raw by violence, violence the purpose and the reward, violence answering to no one. He lay in bed and listened to the thunder of approaching armies, the dull chink of iron, the sound of keys in bunches hanging from belts, the scrabble of hooves on rubble, him twisting in his saddle now to right his jittery horse. Then he turned on his pillow and sighed: Robbie Bookbinder of the twentieth century, safe in his bed at 218 Hillcrest Rd., Montreal, Canada, marooned in the seventies, the desert island decade, empty of convictions, void of intent, with next to no chance of torture rearing its ugly head at him to ever test his mettle.

Next morning, he found a note taped to his locker:

When he ascended he knocked, to be polite. At first there was no answer. Ear to the door he heard scuttling sounds. Things being put away. Then Ivy opened it, saw him, and rolled her eyes.

To his enormous disappointment, she was not reclining nude on the wooden floor, nor straddling the banisters in nothing but a T-shirt, nor curled up in the alcove of the stained-glass window with her dufflecoat pulled around her goose-bumpled body.

“A shipment,” she announced.

She had already opened a taped-up carton and pulled out more than a dozen boxes, each one a little larger than the size of a bar of soap. They were all wrapped in rough, turkey-red paper; on the top side, there were letters she said were Malayan, and what looked like a brand name motif – a dragon biting its own tail – and crude wax seals holding the folded paper at either end. She opened one, unfurling the protective tissue paper. When Robbie peered inside, all he could make out was solid wax. He bent forward to smell it.

“Wait,” Ivy said, pushing him back by the shoulder. She shook the box and the block of wax slid out, landing on the table with a thump. She took a knife she used for carving off flakes of wax into the melting pot, and sliced the block in two. Robbie looked. Now there were two blocks of wax. Ivy tutted, and tried another one. Same result. She tried a third, from the bottom of the carton.

From a hollow in this block’s centre, a small plastic pouch emerged, folded in four, and as it opened up on the table top like the petals of some unpleasant flower, Robbie realized what it contained, without having to pick it up.

“Oh, man,” he said. “Is there, uh – in all – ?”

“One in four, maybe.”

“But where –”

“In the mail. I also received some cloth today, and some metal stencils. Right here, c/o Lycée Blanchemains, Département des Beaux Arts, via the school’s broker. We did it again! That’s two for two.”

“We?”

“ – ”

“Oh, the Royal We.”

“Want to try some? It’s incredible. No one’s stepped on it.”

“Sure, but I – isn’t it a little early in the day? I mean, I get kinda paranoid when there’s people around.”

“God,” Ivy said. “You don’t get paranoid with
smack
. The opposite. Oh. I see.” She regarded him with her otter-brown eyes, still and cautious. “It’s
OK
. Just watch me and join in if you want.”

She held a very shallow tablespoonful above the kerosene burner. When the heroin had dissolved, she unlocked a drawer in her batik kitbox and drew out a syringe. She dipped the needle and pulled up the liquid. Then, when she slid the needle in the soft flesh between her thumb and index finger, Robbie had to look away. For her blood had momentarily blossomed in the barrel, like a crimson sea anemone in a warm lagoon, and he, the wimp, had gone faint.