Kicking Tomorrow (43 page)

“I’m not jealous,” Robbie said. “I just don’t
GIVE
a fuck.”

To add insult to injury, he learned that during his frequent absences, Mrs. Grissom had helped Rosie convalesce and they were now fast friends; the old lady had recommended that Rosie adopt Robbie’s apartment, and Queenie said that was fine if it meant Robbie never showed his face again. “One good turn deserves another,” Rosie told him. “That whole hospital experience was a trauma for Mr. and Mrs. Grissom. The nurses and staff are getting real uppity these days. Mrs. Grissom was given a form in French which she couldn’t understand ’n she couldn’t communicate Mr. Grissom’s allergy to penicillin. It was a real bad scene – they almost finished the job you started. Anyhow, now that Mr. Grissom is pretty much incapacitated, I don’t mind running errands for them. We’re a mutual appreciation society. I’m the apple of their eye.”

He goes walking on the mountain, to retrace the route he and Ivy took after blowing off class that magnificent first day of their so-called relationship. He climbs up to Lac Aux Castors, his belly bubbling with two pints of warm apple cider he lifted from Wu’s grocery, and the snow fills his sneakers. The great iron cross on the Eastern bluffs looms dark against the whale-grey afternoon. At night, it must look comforting to some people, illuminated and seen for miles, but up close by day it’s cold and utilitarian. From its base he can see the paint peeling off its steel stilts, and more than a quarter of the lightbulbs have been smashed. Arching his neck, he also sees something fluttering in the wind, hooked high up on one of the surviving bulbs; a bit of cloth perhaps, a weatherworn shopping bag. No, it’s a pair of panties. Robbie looks around him, almost as if he were the guilty one. But there’s no one around. A tidal wave of frost blows up over the crest.

He always liked to believe the legend that once upon a time Mount Royal was an active volcano. Now, skaters cut shining curves in the ice where the plateau stretches across the lake to the north. Southwards the slope jumps away steeply to where Montreal lies, belching up thick stacks of gas to scud and dissolve in the heaving air. The storm clouds suck up all the colours of the land and the sky, which become indistinguishable from one another; the glass of the skycrappers reflected grey, the snow loses its glint, the solid-state city rusts, fizzes, and crackles out. Lac Aux Castors is an abscess on the hip of this old man mountain, the chilly pollution rippling below the ice and accumulating on the shore in a pale scab of frozen sand.

He stands there and stands there. When the snow begins to fall, the skaters throw their gear in the trunks of their cars and drive away. Robbie just stands there, hearing the mountaintop bristle with speech; the naked trees seem to be mocking him, criticizing him, throwing their arms up in exasperation. The wind howls abuse, echoing all the voices of his experience and
stirring them about in his ears. The wind pushes at his back with a huge, forceful hand, actually shoving him forward. It’s as if Nature’s fed up with him; she’s been raped and beaten and ignored, and now she’s had enough. For some reason, she’s going to take it out on him first. The mountain seems to want to buck him off, for Robbie finds himself tripping and falling the way you do in a frustrating dream, and always landing on his bad hand. He’s hot and flushed as he tries to make his way home. Home? He has no home. He’s made a terrible mistake and he knows it. Can he ever make it up to Rosie now? He loses his bearings and finds himself overlooking the great Mount Royal graveyard. His teeth are clacking uncontrollably. He has a nasty tumble down the east slope, back towards Fletcher’s Field, and bashes his head on a rock. He slinks downtown on weak legs and numb feet, bent over with a morose epiphany: life giving his arse a damn good kicking.

He wandered blankly for an hour, kicking trash cans across sidewalks, throwing gritballs through apartment windows and running off, stopping occasionally to take a whiff from a bottle of airplane glue, and found himself passing by the school on Côte-des-Neiges just as a flock of girls was being released. He walked briskly on this time, looking down at slush. He heard his name called. He looked up. It was Miriam, clutching her satchel to her chest as she galumphed towards him the way thirteen-year-old girls do: shoulders chugging, ankles flying up in opposite directions, head thrust forward, and ponytails whipping about like snapped reins. She was out of breath by the time she had crossed the street.

“Hi! Hi! Let me take you for tea, big brother.”

In the Toman café, Miriam paid, and Robbie hoovered up two slices of Black Forest cake, three Florentines, and a bowl of cappuccino.

“Yes, folks,” she announced to the old ladies at the adjacent table. “My brother, the Amazing Human Garburetor.” Robbie smiled shyly, licked chocolate from his fingers.

They sat silently for several minutes. Then he lied about gigs for the group, and a windfall lottery win, and a growing friendship with Rosie.

“She’s a nutcase on the outside,” he assured her, “but dead serious on the inside. She loves me. We love each other. So – do
you
have a boyfriend? ’Cause if you do I’ll kill him.”

“S’matter of fact, I do,” Miriam said, blushing. “Funny ’cause I wanted to ask you if I, if he, like, if he wants to go further than I want to, you know, well, should I let him?”

“What’re you
talking
about?” Robbie said. “Of
course
not.”

Miriam looked down, sucked noisily on her straw. Robbie picked up his fork and scraped a thin film of chocolate from the enamelled rim of his plate. When he put it in his mouth, all he got was a tongue-zap from the fork’s burnt prongs.

“But then maybe he won’t like me,” Miriam said, chewing on the straw.

“Miriam,”
Robbie said, getting very excited suddenly and raising his voice. One old lady looked over. He leaned across the table, nose to nose with his sister. “You gotta always remember this,
OK?
If he’s not thinking of what
you
want, first, you don’t need the stupid creep near you. Get it?”

“OK, OK
, I got it,” Miriam said, sitting back. Now the straw was just a scribble of plastic between her teeth.

“Good. Sorry if I scared you, but I’ve been
experienced.”

“Nothing scares me.”

“Well, it should. And don’t lay that sort of talk on me, it doesn’t mean a thing.”

“OK, OK
. Oh, guess what. Mom’s show got dumped. Lousy ratings. Then she got arrested again, just for a day. She went on
a march to try to close down the EPX factory, there were dozens of people, the most ever. She chained herself to the fence this time and threw the key in the snow. First they had to clip the fence then they arrested her. It was so great. By the way, Mom and Dad say you’ll never come home until you’ve well and truly left it. What does that mean, exactly, and have you left yet?”

THE ROXY WASN’T SUCH A BAD PLACE TO LIVE, EXCEPT THAT
it was dark and cold and Robbie couldn’t tell anyone he was there. He laid out blankets in one of the old dressing rooms, hid Ivy’s satchel under a cardboard box, and called the place home. After midnight, he fed like a rodent on the goodies at the candy counter. He learned to thread the projectors, too, and sat alone in the cinema, front row centre, watching
Woodstock
as often as he pleased, stuffing himself to the gills with oily popcorn.

During one unnatural thaw, the snow outdoors had melted away to reveal bedraggled red tinsel on muddy shitty lawns, but now it had frozen over again and the sidewalks were blistered with the skin of icy puddles. He went out to sit on walls and benches. On a crusade of joyless destruction, he tilted at mailboxes, spilling envelopes into the slush. How he hated the city suddenly, this environmentless place. He watched the pigeons – skyrats – and observed why their shit is so corrosive: they eat stuff even he’d turn down – there was nothing of value here for him, nothing he could save or call his own. Nature had been kicked out, exiled to the mountaintop, where she brooded acidly. He was wondering how he could ever have been so in love with the city – this giant garbage compactor, this concrete compressor of
soured desires. A truck roared by, hitting a pothole, and its rear section slammed down onto its chassis, brakes screaming. Robbie held his ears and thought of Kilborn and how pleasant it would be to bask on the terrace overlooking the lake.

He scanned the windows of high-rise apartment buildings, took some small solace from all the erotic possibilities there, like a thousand drawers of ladies’ underwear. He thought of Rosie; the way she both embraced and laughed at sex. Why hadn’t he appreciated her warmth, and her wit, when he had the chance? This regret he felt was entirely unlike the regret he once felt for losing Ivy. No suicide this time around, thank you very much; this time he would learn the lesson properly, he promised himself, he’d find strength in himself, he’d make things right. He’d improve himself. He’d win her back with tenderness and imagination. If he only knew how or where to begin.

He perused the head shops, stealing stupid little things, and prowled the warm Métro like Gollum, watching for people to drop precious items onto their seats from their pocketses. No one ever did, not after they noticed him sitting beside them.

He glowered all around. Life is what you make it, was one of Dad’s Top Forty bromides, but Robbie had sussed
that
out for what it was worth: life
can’t
be what you make it, ’cause no one lets you. All these senior citizens past their usefulness, with their blue-rinse hair and rhinestoned glasses, tutting at Robbie as if
he
looked foolish; all these other prissy people, swallowing Muzak and process cheese-food and shit
TV
; all these drones bowing down to the gods of mundanity; all these cowards and nest-builders, making like their lives were achievements of note. Mr. Mills had said that Robbie was just an angry young man. Oh, is that all? Robbie hoped that at thirty he’d be an angry
middle-aged
man. People said he wasn’t nice, but weren’t there a thousand reasons to be
not
nice? Does he have to list them? It drove him
crazy to think of the myriad petty proprieties, the routine humiliations life had
ON SPECIAL!
this and every other week. He felt unprepared to be civil at all, ever again; he’d step on people’s heels and not say sorry, he’d burp up their noses, become violent at the slightest provocation, anything to challenge this crushing routine. By being a nasty little prick, right in society’s face, he’d be doing his thing, he’d be his own foul artwork incarnate, demonstrating how trite people were to be so preoccupied with little rules, with niceness, with the seven deadly-boring sins those evangelists cling so dearly to. Envy, he’d howl, so what! Jealousy, greed, and anger, how petty! How dull! Sloth, avarice, gluttony, what puny stuff! How unexceptional, how plain, how mean. Robbie’s got way worse, if you want them, he doesn’t give a fuck – there are way more urgent matters in life than good manners.

“I am Robbie
BOOK
binder!” he shouted. People hid their noses in their bluespapers. “I am
UNLIKE
you!”

He hung out with some street kids for an afternoon, doing scams and watching them get skanked. He got friendly with a foxy fourteen-year-old in a Spandex-miniskirt and barrettes. She was pretty wild; passing by a Brinks truck outside Birks, she minced up to the armed driver and with her scabby wrists outstretched, cried out, “Hey, handcuff me!” They were chased away. Later, down by the old Windsor Station, one of the kids had a chicken seizure on the pavement with the rig still wagging from his arm. Robbie took off when he heard the sirens.

He snorted at weathered posters glued up around the city for bar bands he knew were doomed to fail. He stood in the heated doorways of pinball parlours, just as he’d seen winos do; for an hour he stood beside one, watching bow the guy passed time, like gas, smoothing down the pleats on his tuxedo dickey.

He stood outside department stores and bummed quarters. Thing was, where once he had relished appearing down and
dirty to passers-by, now he was ashamed because he had no choice. It was embarrassing to find himself at the level of all those derelicts whose panhandling he’d disdained all those years, but what could he do? Like a rubby and his bottle of bitters, he and his life were now distilled down to several small, all-consuming, animal concerns.

In Dominion Square, the black snow – and skyrat-spattered statue of Sir Wilfrid Laurier bore the inscription,

but someone had gone at it with a key or a knife so that now it read
which compose our cunt
. The flower pot at its base was filled with trash in frozen filthy water – cigarette butts, grit, bus transfers, ciggy-pack silver foil, Kentucky Fried Rat bones like Arctic mastodon remains – a record of twentieth century civilization. And here was old Joe Smolij. Robbie brushed a pillow of snow off the challenger’s seat. The chess pieces were spangled with frost.