Kicking Tomorrow (4 page)

Now his perception has become microscopic. With the hot bubbles of alcohol burping up the back of his nose and tickling his nostrils, and the sun gripping onto his shoulders for a blazing piggyback, his focus is all on the skin of his hands and feet. The land map of veins and freckles is pocked and reddened from the grit embedded there; swatches of grass are mashed into his ankles, fallen asleep from hours of sitting, and the tiny criss-crossings of his skin are like landing strips on a pinkish plain. The grit like scattered boulders. The blue veins like monster worms. And up above, his eyelids feel huge, lowering as slow and heavy as canvas awnings over the entire world. He swallows to pop the underwater pressure in his ears. More bomblets of cider explode in his nose like tiny depth-charges. Bathysphere of booze. He’s going down, safe and sound and abso-tively posi-lutely answerable to no one…

… when he eventually came down, Rosie still hadn’t returned. That was the first thought he had given her in an hour. Or two. Well, the crowd was humongous, she was bound to get lost for a while. After ten more minutes, however, he grew anxious. Maybe she didn’t like him any more; maybe she had taken off. With someone else. He twisted around and craned his neck to find her, but the crowd was too immense.

Then he caught sight of her, and she was wandering off in the wrong direction. He thought of yelling, but there was no point–the music was way too loud, and he’d be risking his life to call out in English in
dis
crowd – so he just stood and waved, like a castaway on a desert island. She drifted off aimlessly, like a boat with a luffed sail. He fired a shot into his temple and rolled his eyes. Now pepsis were shouting at him to sit down; the buffalo guys threatened to tie his shoelaces together if he didn’t.

Rosie was a bobbing pinpoint on a sea of bodies, tacking back, more or less. Veering off again. Now only ten or twenty paces away. She wore a worried expression, not much else. He shrugged and sat down. She was so close, surely he didn’t have to call out. She stepped right by.

The buffalo guys wolf-whistled. One of them, an oily polka-dot bandanna bunching up his stringy hair, stroked her hand and cooed, “Taberouette, t’es ben cute, toi. Viens faire un tour par ici.”

Rosie looked down at him angrily, whipping her hand away, and said, “Fuck off, you stupid boy. I can’t understand a thing you’re saying, but I know I don’t like it. I’m trying to find my
friend.”

“Ayy baby,” he said, “come ere an sit in my lap. Qu’est-ce qu’y a, j’fais pas ton affaire?”

The other one had a row of fleurs-de-lis tattooed across his shoulders. He grabbed her ankle. Rosie shrieked. “Ayy baby,” the animal said. “Chus pas assez grand pour toi? Viens donc ici an sit on my
face.”

Before Robbie could decide what to do, she had wrenched herself free and, kicking the guy squarely in the chest, toppled over backwards and landed with a plonk on her own towel.

“Bob!” she said with a wobbly voice, and Robbie saw in the bright sun how flecks of mascara were suspended in her tears.

“Why didn’t you shout where you
were?
I was
scared
. I couldn’t
find
you.”

“Hey,” he said, irritated. He held it against her that she should allow herself to be seen crying. Ivy never would. She wouldn’t allow you to have such a picture of her, like a drooling animal, in your memory. “Don’t cry,
K
? People’re looking. Really, Rosie, why don’t you just wear glasses. Or contacts, if you’re so vain?”

She looked at him wildly. Her lip was trembling. She rolled her gum into a hard little ball and pinned it between her front teeth. “Bob, I think I hate you. I’m being hassled by a couple of goons and you’re embarrassed cause I’m
crying?
Fuck off, you stupid jerk.”

“Uh, gee, Rosie.” He put his hand on her knee. “I’m sorry. You mix me up, that’s all.”

She brushed it away. “Yeah, isn’t that typical. I’
m
being threatened with rape, and you want to talk about
your
personal crisis. Well, take off if you can only think about yourself,
OK
?”

She turned her head in the direction of the stage. Robbie watched her with nervous interest. She was batting her soggy eyelashes and chewing her mouth. He knew she wasn’t enjoying the concert; that more than anything she wanted to talk. And sure enough: “I mix you up, do I, you poor confused thing? Here’s what you should know about me, then: I don’t wear glasses so I don’t have to
see
all the goons who want to hassle me. It’s
OK
if I only have to hear them, well, it’s
partly
OK
, but if I look them in the face I’m
DOOMED
. That’s all they want, and I won’t give them the pleasure.”

“What about working at your club, then?” Robbie said, superciliously. He’d been wanting to get around to this for a long time. “All men do there is stare, and you give them lots of pleasure.”

“But standing real close and staring the customers down is, well, it’s
different –
it’s like, when they look into their drink as if
they’ve found something floating around in it, they’re just like little boys. And anyhow, the bouncers protect me in there. Out in the
REAL
world I don’t
want
to see too clearly.”

“But, Rosie, maybe if you didn’t, uh, dress the way you do, you wouldn’t attract so much, you know, attention.”

Rosie punched him in the arm and gave him a resentful glare. “You sound like a politician,” she said, her voice clogged. “What should I wear? Rusty spiky armour? Why should I change the way I
dress?
Sexy is fun, although the way most men behave, you’d think it was a
THREAT
. Why
should
I change the way I dress. Men should change their
minds
, instead, like, turn ’em in and get a new, improved model.” She blew her nose on her towel. “I’m all forlorn now, Bob. I want to leave.”

Robbie felt shitty. Truly he did. He held her arm, like a male nurse, guiding her through the crowd. On the bus he stared hard at anyone who might be curious as to why her eyes were wet. The bus passed through Westmount, only one stop to the park now. He prepared to stand up, taking her hand.

“Oh no, not me,” Rosie said. “I’m going all the way home.
Alone please.”

Robbie pulled a glum face, real hangdog, like the sun and the dope had warmed and softened it to Silly Putty. He slumped his head down between his shoulder blades He held onto her hand sorrowfully, gave it an ingratiating squeeze. At last she looked at him.

“Bob!” Squinting in disbelief, shifting her weight away to get a better look. “You look so sad. Have I really upset you? Wow. Now, that – is –
DYNAMITE!”

In the middle of Westmount Park was a brightly painted booth equipped with a sound system, known in the neighbourhood as the Kiosk. There was a concrete clearing around it, with blistered
wooden benches, provided by the municipality to keep all the trouble in one place. Across the park, past the swings and past the library on Sherbrooke Street, you could always hear the supreme heaviosity of guitar riffs, whumping out over the trees.

It was mostly Anglo-Quebeckers who gathered there, Westmount High students, famous in the city for the achievement of being perpetually stoned. (Years ago Robbie’s parents had refused to send him there for fear of Bad Influences, but look now, he thought, at least this school is still standing.) These cats liked to just hang out, revving their bikes, perching on the backs of the benches like patched-up parrots, smelling of patchouli and savage B.O. They smoked joints and grooved, sunlight flashing off the little mirrors embroidered into their Indian-cotton frog shirts. And the main thing was that to maintain your cool, you had to act unfriendly. You had to sit there looking like a Strolling Bones album cover, just being a lizard with a sewed-up mouth, sitting in twilight, in the crack between worlds, Castaneda-wise, not releasing a drop of emotion. Now Robbie wondered why he’d come. He looked around him with a sinking heart. He’d been so
up
until he saw these long faces, these indolent bystanders, these pseudo-hippies gone prematurely to seed, still waiting, he observed sourly, for another generation’s revolution, still playing someone else’s old romantic records.
The Lugs. The Head. The Yores
. He knew better. The
CIA
had defused the sixties by bombarding the hippie community with downer drugs and chemical mindfucks. If you doubt it, just look around. Like, six blocks over and a short hike up the hill Canada’s coming apart, it’s having a revolution all of its own,
and none of these turkeys even knows about it
. To Robbie, the sixties was a dirty word; he’d found out what a scam it all was – just before the fire razed his school down to several rows of seared gym lockers, he’d caught a glimpse of how it all worked – he’d been backstage. Ivy had shown him.

Brat was here, wearing a Vietnam combat jacket with the sleeves pinned up to reveal his thalidomide hands – fins really, crab claws without a shell – which he was now using to pass on a roach, with surprising dexterity, the strange economical speed of dwarfs. He was cool as all get out; he acknowledged Robbie and Rosie’s arrival by blinking slower than normal.

Louie Louie called out heartily.
“Ayy
, allô, white man! Taberslaque! You can see your religion in dose pant!” Big hulking Louie Louie in army surplus shit-kickers and a brown bomber jacket as buffed and battered and caked in dirt as the hide of the old bull itself. Extending a meaty fist. Yes, Louie Louie was a pepsi, the son of the janitor at Westmount High, and once assistant janitor himself, who’d been embraced by the Westmount clique by virtue of the high-quality weed he dealt; he used to store the stuff in toilet rolls, high up on a stockroom shelf where his bent old man could not reach, and open shop in the cans at lunch hour. That was before Officer Gaunt made a goodwill appearance, on tour with his lecture entitled,
Pot or Not?
and brought in his dog for an inspection of the premises. The way Louie Louie talked about it now, is papa was taken de hearly retirement, hosti.

Joggers and mothers passing by with prams looked askance at the tribe, and Robbie felt pleased to be thought of as party to trouble. Louie Louie was such a gronker, closer to seven feet than to six, his hair short as a GI’s, his eyebrows shaved off, eyes as dull as gunpowder, neck as thick and dirty as a tire; he now worked in a poultry factory at the eastern end of the city, where it was his job to chop the little beaks off newly hatched chicks to prevent them from pecking one another to death in the overcrowded cages where they were fattened for slaughter.

“I’m
also
reading
The Bible and Flying Saucers,”
Rosie announced, pulling yet another ragged paperback from her beach bag. She held it up for Brat to see, pointing to the photographs as
if teaching a baby. “It’s like, when you read Psalm 104:3,
He makes the clouds his chariot
, what do you think that
really
means, guys?”

Robbie passed buttons of mesc around, popping one right into Brat’s mouth.

“No, really,” Rosie said, accepting one with her tongue stuck out and then placing Robbie’s hands on her shoulders and making his fingers massage the muscles there. “What does it mean?”

“It means you shouldn’t believe everything you read,” said Robbie, who was reading nothing at the time. And his hands had turned to wood.

Time passed and people sat. It was incredible how the Anglo cats there could sit and sit and sit, saying zilch in
either
of Canada’s official languages, not least Robbie himself, with his
KEEF SUCKS
T-shirt proclaiming the sum total of his commitment to the maintenance of intelligent life on our fair planet.

Half an hour later he was feeling brutally nauseous, which was a welcome change in tempo, at least. By then Rosie had turned away to read the palm of some furry freak in a crushed-velvet shirt. Robbie observed them with a seasoned stoner’s intellectual disdain. These people, with their ankhs and vibes and karma and signs. This bullshit, this time-wasting, this inertia, this empty decade. The only authentic thing they’d inherited from the sixties, he thought, was a terminal case of superstitious mind-warp. The vanity, he thought, to imagine you’re part of some cosmic plan, that you can find a personal reference to yourself in any cheap paperback index of the zodiac. And still in his mind he was stuck on Ivy, Ivy again, who was addicted to reality (so she used to say), and the last he saw of her in the hot smoke: her glistening wrists, slipping from his grasp…

He went off to throw up in the bushes, returning, immensely relieved, to wash the mesc’s soapy taste down with beer…

… he hears himself say something, to no one in particular,
pigs, fuck
,

in two voices, one for each ear, out of sync like an effect on a heavy record; the one euphoric, made light with giddy foolish amusement – the source of which he can’t determine at all – the other flat and foul as death’s own burp. He’s frightened by the intensity, the sudden shift, and his skin crawls.

And in fact has anyone, may I ask, seen or heard about Ivy?

Yow! Eek!
These are Brat’s first words.
The devil’s own daughter
.

Two hours now Robbie’s pelvic bones have ground against the bench, and at last the lamplit world begins to bloom. The stained-glass park slips and slides all around them, peeling away like the acetate cells of an animated cartoon. The multicoloured leaves appear gloved in a malleable varnish, and each one has a distinct musical personality. The trees now chiming. Sucking up tones from the Earth’s core and dispersing them into the star-filled air. The chocolate-brown earth humming. And the four of them on their backs watching this verdant orchestra in its bonging bowl of midnight blue milk, speaking only in bursts.

School’s fucked
, he hears himself say.
Heh. I mean look at me. If this is the best they can do
.

A crescent moon flits by like a swallow, white as talc, leaving seventy-five powdery tattoos of itself across the stomach of the sky.