Kicking Tomorrow (47 page)

On a table by the microphone he laid out his things. It looked like a domestic or industrial trade show. Mom climbed the stage and introduced the afternoon’s final feature: ladies and gentlemen mesdames et messieurs the one and only
Hell’s Yells!

He plugged an Environments cassette into his tape machine and approached the microphone with deliberate slowness. As he approached, the sounds of nature were amplified louder and louder until the fields around EPX were alive with the chirruping of huge mutated insects and birds as big as cattle. Nature run riot. Some people looked at one another sceptically, some were amused. Most of the cameramen and reporters just stuffed their faces on all that free food. Robbie concentrated mightily on all
the things that had ever made him angry. He knotted his cheeks up and fired at his temples and glared at the crowd through slitted eyes. For a start, he was saying with his magnificent glare, most industrialists should be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Several people in the field seemed to understand, for they had stopped smirking. He made an animal growl; if he were prime minister he’d stir up such shit he’d end up assassinated, but the things he’d do are what should be done by any decent leader in a dirty land. He picked up an aerosol can from the table and sprayed it into the mike. A jet-stream roar went out through the
PA
, and people covered their ears. He’d made himself clear. The camera crews were wiping their hands on their pants and picking up their equipment. He pictured himself as
PM
, his snarly face on a dollar bill, a halo of nails around his head. Kill an industrialist. That’s all there was for it. Hunt an executive down and fucking drag his spine out. Throw him down a chimney. Feed him to a smelter. Fess up, who’s responsible here?

That was enough to get him going, and the crowd had pressed around the stage to get a better look, too. Cameramen were pushing children out of the way to get the perfect vantage point. He pulled the cord on a chainsaw and left it buzzing where it was. Gunned a lawnmower, too. And a hedgetrimmer. He thought of Ivy. To her, other people were always having a better time on other planets. He used to believe that was true, but now he had run out of energy to keep hating himself so much. You can threaten suicide for only so long, life is what you make it. He switched on an air-conditioner and a Mixmaster. Dinful! Plus an electric mosquito-zapper, and when insects were drawn to it they combusted in a snap and a flash that amplified unpleasantly and bounced off the walls of the EPX Chemicals Corporation. He suddenly understood how Mom, who loved nature so mightily, could find little pleasure in it, because she knew how fucked it was; when she raged at people’s indifference she raged not only
for nature’s survival, but also the survival of caring. You had to care, you
had
to be angry, or you didn’t deserve nature at all, you could just rot in hell. ’Cause Mother Nature herself is mad as hell, he thought, you better believe it. Do people really believe that Nature in her pure state is some kind of Garden of Eden? People speak with regret about the way we’ve raped her. They talk of dead lakes, but mainly in terms of us and ours.
Our
health. But in reality, she’s not some sweet defenceless thing, some easy lay. The notion of Nature as something pure, Robbie thought, is science fiction. That’s what all those National Geo shows are on
TV: SF
. Nature cares no more than the average Bingo player about being in good shape. Nature can be a fat woman too, a smoker, a couch potato, someone who farts in public; she’ll eat white bread and Cheez Whiz, and be happy as a pig in shit. ’Cause it’s perfectly natural. Nature, Robbie discovered for himself, will exist in any state – acidified, radiated, inseminated with rusting stuff and plastic junk, cold all the time, quite indifferent to our needs – and still be Nature. Now he’s trying to project the idea tele-pathically to the crowd: use your
braiins
. When you dump on her too much, she’ll get vicious, volcanic, and primordial all over again. She’ll welcome the release, the chance to punch holes in some walls; she’ll burp it all back at you without thinking, break wind in your face, slap you around with a hurricane, let too much sunshine in. She’ll be an angry god, demand the sort of respect pagans once gave her. So Robbie’s offering sacrifices: plastic wrapping, aerosol cans – the kitchen counter as the altar of modern times. He’s starting his own career of caring angrily, and not just aiming at his own temple. This is his new thing. Cranking up a portable air-raid siren now, he screamed hard. Some children clung to their mothers’ legs. At the back of the crowd, he saw the family hatchback draw up, and it was Dad at the wheel, taking a conservative look, Miriam smirking in the passenger seat. Robbie wasn’t fazed, he was too far gone, now; his nose was running, his
naked chest was slick with sweat and red with that nasty rash, he was bellowing, mostly meaningless raw-throated blue bloody baby talk, but with a nasty, tuneless refrain that came to him out of the sky:

“
STING
ing in the rain, just stinging in the
RAIN…”

The crowd applauded madly, but he was barely aware of them. Some were singing with him, some just shouting. There was a bristling garden of upraised hands, the fiddler made his fiddle cry along, and now people began lobbing their hardened maple-syrup apples at the E
PX
security guards. Robbie thought of Rosie, and how her violent caring had always embarrassed him. Caring that strangled her, made her angry and petulant – had driven him away – but now he saw that without it, you’re nothing. A couple of farmers started up their pickups and gunned their engines. Many folks were hollering now, really venting their spleen. The guards looked nervous, one pulled out his pistol, and the cameras were pointing in every direction, gobbling it all up. And if Robbie wasn’t mistaken, there was Dad, pounding his car horn.

A STEWARDESS NUDGED HIM, AND HE AWOKE TO A HOT OK
meal, smelling of soggy sneakers. He looked at the limp selection, presented with such gusto in individual plastic envelopes, and was struck by a burlesque echo of the adolescent’s sinking heart on being presented with life’s agenda: What you see is what you get, boyo, and lots of luck to you.

He was flying to Ottawa, joining Mom for a rally, to help kick off a commission studying, among other things, the behaviour of the
EPX
Chemicals Corporation on Kilborn Bay. An environmental group had invited him. Well, they’d invited Mom, and when she got there she’d called to suggest he come along. The
EPX
party had gotten a ton of coverage on
TV
, and he’d bought a heap of bluespapers to see how he featured. Poolution was clearly in vogue, a hot topic, and everyone had found an angle:
THE ‘DINFUL’ SPRING
, said the
Star –
and it felt great to be quoted like that; there was a crowd shot in
Allô Police
, and he could just see the spikes of his hair poking up over the shoulder of a cop, with a list of the important people who’d been arrested for trespassing, and although he wasn’t mentioned by name, he was definitely one of them; even the
National Investigator
had an article about him – about the Loch Ness Monster’s cousin, really,
being attracted by the noise to the surface of Kilborn Lake – with him saying, “It was farm out!”

A couple of papers were critical of the mess left behind all over the field after the event, even though it was mostly the media who had done it in the first place, but Robbie thought that was cool; it was a lot like the garbage you see at the end of
Woodstock
, and it made him feel he had been a part of something, at last.

The plane touched down. Having worked so hard for the past two weeks, and partied with the locals all night, then drunk as much in-flight liquor as the stewardess would give him, he was numb and giddy and savouring the euphoria of inebriate travelling. All those stories he had read of Keef’s twenty-four-hour binges, that tailspin lifestyle he had envied so, this is what it was like; once you’re over the hump of the first night, anything is possible. As he strode through the doors three teenage girls were squealing. One of them wore a wedding dress and a chainmail coat, another a tie-dye T-shirt and a green Mohawk, the third an industrial jumpsuit with glowing liquid phosphorescent bangles on her wrists and ankles. He smiled and waved, really getting into this. But the girls passed right by him, clutching one another and suppressing groans as if they badly needed to pee.

Across the hall now, he saw an entourage, a ragged, spangled rock group hauling luggage and loudly looking for the bar. They were wrapped up in scarves, dark glasses, dusters, and heavy campaign coats. One of them yawned, slipping out a great green tongue from his grey face: the weariness of a man in the saddle way too long. These dusty, aging ghosts of groove, Robbie thought. These skeletal freaks. This cool clique. Vampires eternally wandering the earth, shuffling through airports, thriving on spectral neon light, using people up, cursed by the reputation of their youth. Their clothes had that faded lustre of the 70s pop-aristocracy – Moroccan, Victorian, psychedelic. What a
crippling, lingering hangover, Robbie thought. Figures from the Invisible Decade. The Great Hangover. These wealthy misfits with their utter disregard for anything. Across the way, Spit Swagger and Bile were putting their booted feet on the glass tabletops of the airport lounge, throwing lit cigarettes at one another, roaring over dried-out in-jokes, showing tombstone teeth, carrying casual to an extreme, and Jerusalem Slim was flirting with the waitress by pulling on her apron strings. This strangely knotted family tree of drug dealers, assistants, hip travelling maids, hangers-on with trans-European accents, amanuenses, biographers, reporters, and an exclusive, groovy old fraternity of chums that Keef must need at least as badly as they need him.

Then Robbie noticed a woman with them – a girl, really – in black lace and velvet, sorting out her belongings on the floor. She was transferring a jumble of books and tasseled, mirrored clothes into a flat cardboard box the airline had provided for her. She was just dumping the books – beautiful ones with satin moiré end-sheets, and fringed suede pagemarkers – in with everything else. She’d dragged a black broad-brimmed hat over her face. When she stood up again their eyes met at last, and Robbie’s heart clambered up his throat.

She looked startled, too. She stood up, blew her bangs off her eyes. Robbie hesitated, pulled a tight smile, took a step in her direction, his heart pumped up with air. Bile looked around in mid-grin, Spit Swagger, too. Keef gripped the girl’s arm in skeletal knuckles, but she wrenched herself free and stumbled forward over her baggage. Robbie stopped dead. He thought, –

Then turned on his heel, just like that. Abandoning himself. To his better instincts. And passed through the automatic doors into the fresh air and sunshine.