Kicking Tomorrow (35 page)

“An all-juice day,” Robbie repeated aloud. “Now there’s one fuck of a good idea.”

The bones in a woman should be implied, thought Robbie the Famous Artist, but never pronounced. You wouldn’t say Queenie Graves was fat, but at least she wasn’t like most of the girls he knew; Rosie was as jumpy as a pinball machine about to
TILT
, Dolores was thin as a wire, Ivy was another rack of nerves, and, in a flash, he realized he was tired of all the skinny rib-caged
junkies, anorexics, stray cats, waifs, fans, and unpredictable runaways who invaded his space.

“Hey,” Queenie said, peering in. She had brought him another package, arrived Special Delivery while everyone was out. “How many books d’ya have? Ever counted ’em? Art books, right. You paintin today? Maybe I could come in and watch one day? I betcha see the world in a whole different way than other people.”

December the twentieth, and Mr. Graves was due home on Xmas Eve. Queenie had appeared at Robbie’s door three times already, clicking her dentures and apologetically demanding the rent. Soon, Robbie promised her, soon. He tried to shut the door on her face. He was afraid she’d see what a mess he’d made of the place.

The living room was a demolition zone. Those taped-up garbage bags did a feeble job of keeping the winter out. The radiators dribbled black oily water down the walls. Plaster, pencil sharpenings, flakes of white paint, pizza gunge, beer mould, and puke mould were all mashed into the carpet which, far from the Mediterranean blue that had first greeted Robbie like a holiday resort, now resembled waters that would only support the most undesirable life-forms. He’d torn up the Formica countertops in his kitchen, which were the colour of baby’s shit, intending to replace them with something more punk but had delayed the project until he finished the paint job on the walls; he had begun to paint the walls in red, white, and blue stripes, but his brush picked up dirt and hair and bugs from the floor and ended up smearing the matted muck all over. His iron pots had grown hides of rust, and his cutlery was just as foul on one end as on the other. The oven was a place so evil that even Rosie would hesitate sticking her head in it, even if she had been cured of her claustrophobia. Nor could he use his toaster;
on an impulse one morning, he had brushed in a plump cockroach he had caught crawling across the top, and fried it – now, when he switched it on for toast, a sickening, meaty smell arose from the slots.

After Queenie left, he didn’t even look into his latest care package; what was the point, health-junk probably. He took off downtown in search of meat for his intestines, leaving by the back porch. The front path could take care of itself. His junk mail too, which he left stuffed to bursting in his box. That’s how he’d avoid Queenie from now on – pretend he wasn’t there at all. Garbage he’d leave indoors, and lights he’d never use. He’d tiptoe around a lot. As for playing records, well, wouldn’t the Grissoms be relieved. And Merry Xmas to them.

The fire escape was rippled with baby icicles, as round and regular as a dog’s lips, and it was perilous. When he slid down the steps, the frozen metal shrieked against its bolts and braces, and the gums of ice peeled off. He clung tight, his ass on a cushion of snow, his fingers sticking to the rail, waiting breathlessly to see if Queenie had seen him from her kitchen window. Across the back alley, up over the back of the Parthenon Self-Serve, Eccelucci’s sumptuous dollface watched him like the Mona fucken Lisa. He slipped off down the alley.

One thing about not letting on that you’re home: you can’t turn on the taps. And Robbie was getting mighty stinky. He noticed this for himself the next day, waiting for Dad in the lobby of the CIBC building where he allegedly worked. Robbie was visiting just to say Hi, see what Xmas plans the family had this year, and to see if the old man was free for lunch, maybe. The security guard phoned upstairs, nodded, looked Robbie up and down, nodded again, hung up, and asked him to wait – Monsieur Bookbinder was in a meeting, he said.

Robbie sat on a chair and paged through a newspaper. The ink was still too fresh to hold it close to him, so he stared into thin air instead of reading it, rubbing his inflamed nostrils, chewing on his tongue, and slipped a hand inside his shirt to feel if his underarms were wet. He smelled his glistening fingers delicately. The security guard frowned.

Men with suits were striding briskly in and out, the rubbers on their shoes squeaking foolishly across the marble floor. At first Robbie felt superior, just slouching there in his X-ray specs and dog collar and chain, but after three quarters of an hour Dad, apparently, was still tied up. He stood up, stuck the guard his middle finger, and strode out into the late-afternoon traffic.

The world was dark, the drizzled snow sparkling ruby-red in the brake lights of cars. He lifted a six-pack from a dépanneur and drank it sitting on a stoop overlooking the exclusive girls’ school on Côte-des-Neiges where Miriam went. He watched the girls cluster and squeal and smoke cigarettes at the bus stop. A couple of them flirted with him. When their bus drew up, he went to piss behind a snowbank. He filched an aerosol can from a hardware store – having seen photos of the graffiti that covered New York City like a cartoon fungus, he figured he could get people wondering all over Montreal, maybe in the papers too, with sober concern, What is this phenomenon, this, ah,
Hell’s Yells?

First, he ducked into an alley and leaned behind a garbage haul. He broke a glass ampule of amyl nitrate beneath his nose and inhaled the rotten apple odour with his eyes closed. When he opened them, his body was humming. The slushy snow was a laugh. His loneliness was the bestest way to be, the world fell away from him like a flimsy toy theatre.

Graffiti artists require strong fingers; in less than five minutes, his thumb is aching and sticky. The paint won’t build up satisfactorily on the drizzle-streaked walls, and he gets nabbed by
a pig. The pig’s in a holiday-bonus mood and only asks him to hand over the can, but Robbie’s in a frenzy, buzzed and dripping.

“Get away!” he blurts, “I’m improving on the cityscape, man. Who built these buildings? Who let ’em? Thirty floors of ugliness. Horror storeys, I call ’em, skycrappers. Seriously, these concrete bunkers. What does it say on it? Sir George Williams University. Chrissake, Hitler died in something that looked like this. It’s depressing. Looks like World War Three. Physical graffiti, is what it is. It affects people and they don’t even know it.”

“It’s private property, sir,” the pig says, patiently. “Now give me the paint can and go home before I book your ass.”

By the time he snuck back through his kitchen window, every little thing was driving him crazy. He had to pee badly from all that beer, and he was in an irritated snit about the whole world. He had a headache from the poppers, like someone was kicking at the back of his eyeballs. And cold, he decided, is not funny. His forehead was screaming – it was so cold outside that blood had come up on the skin of his temples. He kicked off his sneakers because he couldn’t manipulate the laces, leaving slush all over the kitchen floor. Cold made his stomach cramp too, and he was sick of being poor, and he sincerely wondered why he should be in this state of virtual eviction.

The falling dark, and a shower was just what he needed to soothe him. He put his fists up on the wall and stood there with his head under the faucet, glorying in the rush of water. Scalding, just this side of pain, thundering against his eardrums, coursing over his shoulders and streaming down his back – the waterdrops with their tadpole tails licking his ears and trickling ticklingly inside, the way they used to when Mom washed his hair, with his neck resting over the cool lip of the bathtub. He shuddered, felt like he was slipping his skin off. Like an onion in a bubbling hot soup. He was dissolving, he felt as if he could
breathe in water. He was an amorphous wriggling sensitive creature, swimming through the water mains beneath the mucky sidewalks of the city, to emerge up the drain of Ivy’s bathroom to spawn. There she’d be, scented with lavender oil, rubbery wet, her pubic hair tapered to a dripping ducktail as she showered, and wouldn’t she be surprised.

Which was when the stream went freezing cold. Out of nowhere, just like that.

IT WAS HARD FOR HIM TO SAY WHICH WAS THE GREATER
failure: his life to date, or his bid to end it. He’d slept most of the weekend down in the dungeon, but by Sunday morning Ivy’s silence was unendurable. He sat by the telephone with a palpitating heart and nerves that itched like rusting steel. When she hears what he’s done, he thought to himself (and hating himself as he dialled), how concerned she’ll be – contrite, even; she’ll see how cruel she was. His suicide attempt will be a bonding experience for them both. She’ll see how spontaneous he really is. It’ll be a lesson to her, too; she’ll see how there are limits to that convulsive business.

But all she said was, “God. You really do make all kinds of demands on me.
God!
OK, OK
. Let’s meet at Chang’s. At 9:00,
OK
?”

He hung up with an awful sense of disintegrating resolve. He had miscalculated somewhere. All he had for certain, now, was a killing headache and cheesecloth for brains. With slow, sickening cognizance he saw that he might have damaged his brain. His stomach felt exhausted, and his head was sizzling with the residue of all that codeine. It was weird; all those happy drugs he had
come through safely in his life, and now, an overdose of fucken aspirin has him toxically wasted. Obliviated. Of course, he might be suffering from the longer-term consequence of the acid, the hash, the beer, the brandy, the speed, the champagne,
and
the aspirin he’s done non-stop since the Bones’ show, but what did it matter now? He almost wished he’d gone through with killing himself properly. Now at least he could tell Ivy what
thinking
felt like: like pulling the soggiest blackened leaves from a week-old bag of spinach.

You could call human beings juicy radiators sometimes, he thought that night as, balanced precariously on a squeaky ledge of snow by the bus stop, he hugged Ivy hard; she was ribby, tepid, a wrought-iron rad. He hugged her, with passion, but was surprised to find himself remembering how much bigger, how much softer an embrace Rosie had given him – more mature, more comforting – and just thinking about her now, with her perfume and her plummy warm lips and the fresh shape of her tongue, the tongue of someone new, gave this bony hug the lie of a weirdly formal occasion.

Ivy pointed with a mittened hand to the restaurant at the corner of Girouard Park. Inside Chang’s Mountain Jewel Palace, strings of gold and silver announced Glad Tidings, but no one was eating there. The staff were clustered around a booth in the back, playing a vigorous game of mah-jongg. Robbie and Ivy sat down, and were soon warming their hands around an aluminum-teapot.

“It’s not even Chinese tea,” Robbie said. “Look. A Tetley tea bag.”

“I wish I was in Jamaica,” Ivy said. “I can picture it now. A ridge of hot white sand, you go over the top and then there’s the sea, blue as a jewel. Ganja in cone spliffs. And a bassy sound system from out of the mountains of Maroon County.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not.”

Ivy looked at him. “Don’t make it worse,” she said tersely. “You started this. I suppose you want to talk about yourself, now. That’s the problem with this relationship – we don’t have one, we only talk about it.”

An explosion of laughter at the mah-jongg game. Robbie looked over, searching for something, anything, to look at. Ivy took his hands across the table and squeezed.

“Hey,” she said.

Robbie flinched. His body was pulsing erratically, idling on an arrhythmic heart, fuelled with hatred and shame.

“Your family,” he pronounced, “it’s jinxed, you know. It’s sad to see. And I just hate your father.”

She whipped her hands back, narrowed her eyes. She was hissing, her nostrils flared.

“You
hate my father? You’re so insensitive sometimes I ought to stick a fork in you. It’d let some air out. God, what have you got to be mad at? How do you think I feel?”

“Why don’t you move out then?”

“It’s not that. I just need to have my own space.”

“That’s what I
said.”

Robbie shunting his shoes under the table and picking at a cuticle and thinking I’m right I’m right I’m right. She never listens, she drags me down, she doesn’t understand me. She’s incapable of expressing herself. I just want to go home. I love my family. And I want to phone Rosie.

Ivy sighed, drew a deep breath, said, “Actually, I’m psyching myself up for it, but I need a job, obviously. I’m thinking I could be a nude model at the art school at the Musée des Beaux Arts.”

Robbie’s blood going thin at that one. “A nude model? That’s nice. Maybe you’ll meet somebody.”

“Maybe I’ll meet somebody? God. Listen to you. You’re already jealous and I haven’t met him yet.”

Robbie’s throat is tight; it’s like a boa constrictor crushing his heart. He’s thinking, vertiginously, We could break up tonight and I don’t care a bit. Merry Xmas, Happy fucken New Year. He wants to spurt the venom all over Ivy’s face. He thinks, she drove me to madness, she made me damage myself. She’s heartless. There are nicer people in the world. She’s only being nice now because she regrets what she did. Well, I never liked her in the first place. I had a crush, that’s all. The chase was fun, but now it’s over. Ivy was staring at him, but he wasn’t going to be fazed – he stared back, unflinching. A waiter came around.