Kicking Tomorrow (36 page)

“Flee compremantaly,” he said, smiling broadly, and placed a pair of eggrolls and plastic envelopes of plum sauce between them. “Onna house, you kids.”

“Hey man, cool,” Robbie said.

“Yes, Melly Chlistmas,” Ivy said, giggling.

Robbie frowned and shushed her. “Hey, that’s not funny, that’s rude.”

“What’s the point of funny if you can’t be rude?” she snapped. “God, I wish I were a child again. In another family of course. Remember when you’re a kid and you believe it when they sing about products on
TV
, that all the problems of your life can be solved? Well, the other day I was standing over the sink, and I picked up a bar of soap they used to have an ad for – where the girl says that corny line,
Mommy how come your skin’s so soft? –
and for a moment, for a split second, I felt I was six again. I went all hot and faint. I knocked one of those ridiculous little mascara brushes down the drain. God. Imagine having your life epitomized by a
TV
commercial.”

“Acid flashback, man.”

“No, ’cause I never did acid.”

“I was joking. That was a joke.”

“Then it wasn’t a good one, was it?”

They glared at one another. Robbie’s ears were humming. His throat a sluice of sadness now. What has he done? Why is he repulsed by Ivy the first time she expresses some real need? He doesn’t know. I’
m
OK
, he’s thinking,
she’s
fucked up. He wants to say he’s sorry, but he can’t bring himself to do it. The sentence is all in there, crouching in his mouth like a spring, the words all coiled together. No, he won’t.
She
never would. She’d say, If you can’t read my mood, what’s the point of explaining it to you.

“You don’t really listen to me, you know,” she said. “You don’t care what I say or what I’m going through. You and I are completely and utterly different, and you know that as well as I. Have you any idea how selfish what you did was? How was I supposed to feel if you really went and
killed
yourself? How could I have lived with that? God, you must hate me.”

Robbie’s heart must be a fleshy yo-yo, spinning up and down his throat on a catgut string, because now he’s scrambling with an apology. “I didn’t know what I – I thought I was doing it for you. I’m sorry. Maybe if we try explaining ourselves more.”

“NO
!” Ivy slamming the table. Robbie darting his eyes over to the mah-jongg players. “You haven’t listened to a thing I’ve said. If I have to explain now -”

“Then I wouldn’t understand. I know I know.
K
, forget I ever mentioned it.”

In the dead of winter in Montreal, when the streets are dark and the wind is still, the distance between the Earth and the sky appears to diminish; the night seems truly to have fallen, thin and inhospitable, and the planet they’ve paved beneath your feet is more palpably a planet, spinning alone in the refrigerated galaxy.

He walked her home, kicking meteors of spiny ice out of his way. Neither of them said a thing; they just tucked their heads into their coats. When they reached her porch, she broke the silence. She grabbed him by his shoulders. Her face was wild.

They were nose to nose. She shook him and spat out, “What are you
doing?
Don’t you understand
anything?”

“No,” Robbie said, coolly. “I guess I don’t. I never understand you cause you never tell me a damn thing.”

“What do you want to know? Why do you need everything spelled out?”

“But you never spell anything out, fuck. Pardon the language.”

“Fuck
the language,” Ivy hissed. “You want permission from me to swear, now? You never take a chance. You never just
grab
. You’ve been well brought up, haven’t you? Well, you
bore
me. You’re a coward, always leaving it up to me. Know what I did last week? I picked up a taxi driver. Don’t even ask, it was disgusting. Yeah, yeah, I can always feel you admiring me – like a prize pig – but that’s not enough for me, for God’s sake. You think I
like
myself? I’m a real vixen, a sex-bomb baby. A double-bagger, more like. I bet you think I parade in front of my mirror every night. Ever thought maybe I don’t
want
to be sexy? I see your eyes follow every girl in the street. I know you’d love to flip through every
Bosom Buddies
magazine in every dépanneur we pass. I have to know you want to sleep with
me
. It’s like my brother – I love him, but when he talks about girls, like on the reserve in Caughnawaga, ‘they’ve got either
TB
or
VD
, one or the other, so you only fuck the ones that cough.’ Ha fucking ha. You don’t know what it’s like. To be gang-raped. By bikers. You don’t know
anything
. For all it’s worth, for all it makes a person feel
something
, you should try being fucked, for once. Hung up on a hook. Also, by the way, you should feel what it’s like to shove a dry tampon up your cunt, just hoping for blood. It was all a false alarm, by the way, you never even asked. You just don’t know what it’s like.
You
ought to be signed up for Home Ec, just once.
You
should try being Daddy’s girl, peeling his fat fingers off your thighs. Why don’t
you
surprise
me
, for once. Make me feel wanted. Here.” She grabbed Robbie’s hand and jammed it
between her legs and said in his ear, “Why don’t you ever get tough with me. C’mon, squeeze me. I can’t feel a thing.”

“It’s cold out here, that’s why,” Robbie said, helplessly.

“Don’t be a child. Let’s go upstairs and fuck.”

“Upstairs?”

“Yeah, c’mon. What d’you want, permission? What have we got to lose?”

Robbie shaking his head and making his eyes wide with incredulity as they tiptoed up the stairs, climbing up on the rubber ridge of each step to exert as little pressure as possible on the complaining wood. They pulled off their boots and placed the hard heels with infinite care on the mat. Sliding on solid-cold stockinged feet down the linoleum hallway. All the rooms dark, still smelling of reheated turkey dinner.

In the living room, the tablecloth had been folded up and laid on a chair, the tables had been put away, the fanfold wall was drawn to. Mr. Mills was snoring on the other side. Ivy guided Robbie to the couch, hands on his hips, pushing from behind; Robbie widening his windpipe and nasal passage so as not to let air out audibly. Ivy slipped away and returned after several agonizing minutes, nude, and white as a ghost, with something in her hand. She gestured at him to take his clothes off.

His parka was as loud as a chip bag in a theatre; each and every tooth of the zipper on his jeans made a sound like thick cloth tearing. Ivy laid one hand on the radiator by the couch and then took Robbie’s frozen niblet of a penis in it. As he thawed out in her grip, he couldn’t help but shoot glances at the parents’ bedroom wall, drawing his lower lip down off his tensed teeth to make a face like a person in the front seat of a roller coaster.

Putting his hands on her shoulders now, trying to relax. Ivy jumped, for his hands were cold, and she nipped him in the bud. He twiddled his naked toes to get some feeling into them, and it
occurred to him that it should not be taking so long, since his heart was pumping overtime. And his penis was in bloom, although he wouldn’t describe Ivy’s technique as consummate. She looked up at him with a very serious expression, yanking him up and down, and what’s in the other hand? Chrissake, a condom. He’d never used one of those before, except to fill with water and throw at buses. The main reason was: he was still a virgin. Oh, he’d fucked around, you know, been with all kinds of girls and done some sticky things, but he’s never actually, um…

Ivy pulled it on. For a moment that made him think of Keef, and how she was really a polluted canal. What will this be like? Will it be like taking a shower in a raincoat, as Louie Louie described it? Or making mudpies with rubber gloves, like Baimy said? He no longer cared if the parents woke up. He was going to shout with joy. He would slide back their bedroom wall and tell them all about it. Or would he, for now he heard a sound. Was it his imagination, or were Ivy’s parents being disgusting with each other in their bed? Ivy didn’t seem to have noticed, but Robbie was sure that was a man softly grunting. And that, without a doubt, was Mrs. Mills talking again. Does she
ever
stop? This was ridiculous, this was no fun. Now Robbie was perspiring. He jerked a thumb in the dark, trying to communicate his fear to Ivy, but she was squeezing him, like a shopper testing fruit for its ripeness. And now, Robbie had wilted inside his condom; it clung only half on now, and dangled down like a pom-pommed sleeping cap. Ivy gave him a ferocious look, and he sent back a miserable shrug. And somewhere outside, from several streets over, the brittle bells in the tower of St. Henri chimed, once,… just once.

The first excruciating week of this fresh new year has come and gone, and tomorrow it’s back to school.

As if the caf wasn’t dreary enough to start with, with its industrial toilet-orange paint; every day, Robbie also has to sit through lunch hour, stoned out of his brain in his
TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL
T-shirt, watching the pepsis play Ping-Pong with animal concentration on their faces, and wondering why Ivy hasn’t shown the whole first week of school. Pharte meanwhile has started piano over the holidays, it seems, for he is picking out some Favourite Melodies for the Beginner, stabbing at the keys with two fingers like he’s crushing bugs:
The Godfather
theme; “Chopsticks”; “Moonlight Sonata.” Robbie is feeling homicidal; only his drugs prevent him from getting up and wasting the nerd. From inside his head, the world sounds like a party balloon does when you put it to your ear and bonk it.

In class, Robbie orchestrated a pretty funny joke: he had all the kids put on their winter gear and sit nonchalantly at their desks with their pens in their mittens and their glasses on the outside of their balaclavas, and he opened all the windows to let the worst storm of the winter in. By the time M. Nul entered, there was a heap of snow on the teacher’s desk, papers were blowing all over, and everyone’s breath was visible. Thing was, M. Nul didn’t find it funny, for some unknown reason, and Robbie was out on his ear (three scumbags stooled on him at once).

He didn’t exactly vandalize, but he did take out his frustration on things: Tuesday, he kicked his locker so hard the door refused to close afterwards; Wednesday, he watched a stray ember from a joint he was smoking tumble into the crease of one of the foam lounge chairs, and more or less deliberately allowed it to smoulder there; Thursday, he mistakenly broke a window with a grit-packed snowball, plus he spilled some 7-Up onto the blackboard eraser – just to see what would happen – and sort of accidentally turned it to rock; Friday, he misjudged his own strength and broke the fire alarm glass with his elbow, which
emptied the school out onto the sidewalk. The director, M. Boutaric, called him to his office a second time, even though Robbie was the picture of innocence, and gave him a month’s worth of detentions topped off with the threat of expulsion if he didn’t reform. Which didn’t mean a whole lot to him anyhow. His mind was a heavy-duty organ grinder, full of spiked tunes, winding round and round and round.
All teachers must die
.

Gaston, of course, had already been expelled, but he still haunted the area – there were at least three other schools in Outremont besides Blanchemains, and he sold
ash
and
hacid
to kids when the Dead Man’s Hands weren’t in sight. He looked like a real Cro-Magnon now, his face erupting with boils and scabby acne, his hair matted like horns; a grinning, smelly trafficker in souls. Worst of all, his elevated, if still inferior, status as a Devil’s Disciple had invested him with a cranked-up arrogance, and Robbie had to be as nice as could be. Except one time when he risked, “Gee, Gaston, do you keep your mouth open like that to catch your dinner? It’s January, dude, didn’tcha know – blackfly season’s not till May.” That’s when Gaston pulled a knife and pressed it to Robbie’s stomach and breathed in his face,

“Ayy, parle français, maudit bloke,” and punched him in the breadbasket. Robbie didn’t fight back. Curiously, he felt sorry for Gaston – vaguely sorry – for if Ivy had in fact put him through the wringer as Rosie described, then in the most unexpected of ways, he and Robbie were buddies of a sort. And so, when a lousy seedy twiggy joint Robbie bought from him snapped like a firecracker under his nose, he didn’t even ask for a refund.

Monday morning, by which time his memories of Ivy had already shrivelled in his guts like a bitter gallstone, and all the blacker because it was his birthday the next day, he found a note in his locker:

He spent the rest of the morning in a state of loose-bowelled consternation. He asked permission to pee, and toked up in the can. Now the desks in the classroom are bobbing about like a flotilla of life rafts. And here’s what the teacher sounds like in his ears:
moombamoombaoom
.