Kicking Tomorrow (6 page)

When the Bookbinders bought their place, it had been a weed-rich wilderness, all rocks and spiky fern and maple trees. Hunters must once have lived or roomed in the cottage, for when Robbie had first been sent out to battle the tall grass, spent cartridges were snapped up clanging into the teeth of his mower. If he’d of known what was in Mom’s mind as far as landscaping plans, eh, he would of applied for a transfer to some other family, in an inner-city ghetto maybe. Knee-deep in bracken, eyes streaming, sneezing like a demon, he’d knotted a
Cannabis Sativa
T-shirt around his face for protection against the clouds of aphids, airborne pollens, spores disgorged from the mouths of dock and pokeweed, silky dandelion pappus, and vintage Canadian thistledown, frisking in his wake like malevolent nose-nymphs.

When the Bookbinders moved in, there had been a patch of runner beans in a corner, and that was about it – a rusty two-handled saw, some old taps on the maples blocked with hard sap. But Mom had said, “I want a proper garden,” so she marked off a bramble-choked area as big as a hockey rink with a temporary electric fence, borrowed some pigs from the neighbouring farmer, threw pignuts in there, and the undergrowth was gone in a month. But that was not all.

“Symmetry,” she said. “We need to set the axis of the garden to avoid monotony, and our new French windows want a clear view onto the lake.”

If a thing was six inches out, they had to dig it up and move it over. If a beloved plant wouldn’t take well to moving, everything else had to move. And weed-killer was an environmental no-no; it was hand-weeding all the way.

“Did serfs of old suffer like this while scything the hay?” Robbie demanded. “How come evilution hasn’t taken care of allergies? You should put in your show how pollution’s making our noses
devolve.”

“We need a tranquil space,” Mom had said absently. She stood by a heap of prunings with her hands on her hips, squinted around, and spat a mosquito from her lips. “The drama of a hidden hedgenook, Robbie. Think, the mystery.”

One year she went crazy for golden privet, the next for muted colours and variegated leaves. One year, she despised little herb gardens, the next she was growing cinnamon, allspice, pepper, castor beans, sago, and guava. By this time there was a cobbled forecourt, little statues – stone angels, stone pigs – and a summerhouse with climbing roses, clematis, and honeysuckle, and the garden had become the set for
Hello World!
You’d think the show could have afforded a gardener by then but
no
, the only thing the network was trimming were costs.

How he despises the country! While Dad lies prone indoors, watching the Olympics, Robbie lounges in a deck chair overlooking the lake –
The Sneezable Kingdom –
beside a mounting pile of soggy Kleenex. His eyes sting, he has streaming catarrh, his throat’s inflamed, the roof of his mouth itches like mad, his teeth throb. He watches a bumblebee so plump with pollen it has to drag itself across the hot stones to the shadow of his legs for relief. The great white legs of Robbie, Cruel Lord of the Bees. Mendoza there too, sweating saliva from his tongue,
plip, plip
.

Out on the glassy water a Laser’s sail luffs in the wind. Down the hill Mom’s bent over a clay urn encouraging chives to grow, her bottom raised to show off the label on her jeans to all of nature, mosquito netting wrapped over a broad-brimmed straw hat and tied with string around her neck. Humming to herself in a samba rhythm, “I’m Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, yes I’m–”

Robbie honks again with the sound of a trumpet being cleared of spittle, and she looks up – like a cow interrupted at her grazing, he observes unkindly – the mosquito net casting a soft shadow across her cheeks and nose.

“There are solutions, you know,” she calls up, and begins to list homeopathic cures for hay fever sufferers, like
Arsenicum album
and
Pulsatilla
, but Robbie knows all about that thank you very much; he’s already been through her catalogue of wild poisonous plants to identify the psychedelics indigenous to the Townships: out in the fields and forests around Kilborn, foraging with Mendoza, he learned about
Lycium halmifolium
the Matrimony Vine, Morning Glory, Jimsonweed, Angel’s Trumpet, and a variety of magic mushrooms with juicy names like
A. phalloides
and
G. esculaenta
, although the only thing he dared try was something called Black Henbane. The dog was smarter; he turned his nose up at that, too. Not only is it foul-smelling, but also seriously toxic, as the quantity you need to ingest for recreational
purposes is dangerously close to the quantity that soon had Robbie lying under the eaves of the boathouse with no saliva at all in his mouth, trying to retch onto the sandy ground. Finally he did upchuck, right into Kilborn Bay, neatly beside some stiff trout that had washed up on the beach. Then a motorboat zoomed by dragging three dazzling babes on water-skis, and their wake slopped the puke back onto his bare feet.

He passed part of draggy, swollen June planting marijuana seedlings among Mom’s vibernums, observing to himself that here at least was one plant to which he was not allergic. The rest of June he spent leaving taps around the house running, wearing odd socks and, one evening, forgetting to gather up a sheaf of love letters he had written to Ivy, spilled beer on, and laid out to dry on the kitchen table; the letters were drenched in a bilious mixture of hops, rage, devotion, and lust, each blotted word like a miniature Rorschach test for all the family to see. And when he came down to breakfast the next day – lunch, really – they all looked at him funny.

Thus June crawled, and July, and Robbie mourned Ivy all the while. Lingering in bed, lurking in the bath, sprawled on the lawn, he thought about that metaphor they use in those lavender-coloured booklets you suddenly find lying around the house when your sister is entering her Difficult Phase: that vaginas are like flowers. He had seen a similar thing in a book of pastel paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, a favourite of Mom’s which had been lying around the house a lot longer. Ivy’s
labia minora
were large and ruffled, as Robbie remembered them, and made him think of speeded-up films of lavish dewy flora blossoming in the space of seconds: her sex flowering beautifully into womanhood, Nature preparing her pistil for the penetration of his proud stamen.

He skulked around the house, soft and swollen as a stewed fig, sneaking looks at the thirty-five varieties of bras and nylon nighties in the weekend supplements. He thought of those devices Victorian parents once forced adolescent sons to wear – a spiked penis collar with a bell – alerting everyone to their unnatural stirrings. It made him crazy to be so muzzled up. He wanted to strip down all free and naked, to leap and frolic in open fields, his penis wagging as happy as a puppydog’s tail; he saw himself hurtling through the air like a sperm whale, leaving a trail of milk and honey on the fields below.

Which is more or less all he did through July, and all through August, too. By the end of the month, however, he’d succeeded only in magnifying his savage libido, boiling himself in his own juices, like a bug floating in a glass of brandy left out in the sun. So he tried something new. What he did he did surreptitiously–he wouldn’t give anyone the satisfaction of knowing he was doing anything
creative
with his time – from his bedroom cupboard he pulled out his easel and oils, blew the dust off his palette, loaded up with a two-four of Molson and a cassette machine, and marched out with Mendoza to Maple Point to paint.

He chose a promontory that commanded the long stretch of lake past Owl’s Head to the south, the pine-bristled Hogsback ridge rising up a mile closer, and nearer still, only there a year now, the
EPX
chemical factory. He stripped to the waist and took off his shoes and socks. Brown pine needles had made a thick soft mat on the ground, and a number of maples, leached of colour, had tumbled down the slope before him to soak and peel on the lakeshore. This spot had always been thickly camouflaged, just perfect for smoking reefer at a crouch; now the fallen trees permitted him to spread the easel’s legs several feet back from the ridge, plus his painting gear, his two-four, a blanket, the cassette player, and still designate a spot for Mendoza to slobber on.

Weird thing was, from here the factory looked beautiful: nestled in the green valley of the Hogsback, its cluster of chalk-white chimneys, pipes, catwalks, gantries, and towers of scaffolding looked as pristine and alien as the Apollo moon unit in the Sea of Tranquillity. Whatever noise Mom said the factory made was drowned out by wind and wave. A delicate ribbon of white smoke rose from a central chimney, weaving languidly through the pines, tickling the back of the Hog. Robbie thought of the Group of Seven, years before
S.P.E.C.T.R.E.
seized power, trekking out across the Canadian Shield, writing their poetry amongst the crystal streams, struggling to express the massive, unspoiled, unspeakable beauty in words. How would Robbie, in his turn, do something original for himself and
paint
this land today? How do you paint invisible poolution, chlorophenols foliage erosion inhibited nitrogen fixation by symbiotic bacteria heavy metals in the soil fecula on the beach acid loadings all over Quebec and thanks to elevated levels of mercury in the sediments, worsening breakdown in the foodchain? He stood half-naked with a hot, carrot-fat reefer fuming between his lips, toking back smoke as thick as Plasticine, and like Keef Richards bent over his guitar, bore down on the bitter pleasure of depicting the apocalypse.

Thing was, landscapes had never been his bag. He’d always preferred to get horny over nudes of the late nineteenth century. Statistics show that 99 per cent of teenagers conceal
Bosom Buddies
magazines in a drawer, but Robbie felt as much of that stewed-fig feeling coming on when he pored over nudes by Rubens and Bouguereau, sneaking them out of the parents’ library, stuffing the enormous volumes under his T-shirt as he tiptoed upstairs. Sure, these nudes were fatter than your average centrefold, but they never did anything frightening, like throw you a full frontal or pull apart the cheeks of their behinds for you to see all the bits you didn’t need to see. Art experts droned on
and on about bogus concepts like affronts to popular morality, and superb mastery of the use of perspective, and allegorized portraits, and manifestos of sacred and profane love, but they never came out and said what they obviously meant. It was obvious enough to
him
what the painters had in mind with all that elaborate drapery snaking between the ancient models’ thighs, and all the surfaces of their bodies smooth and sugary, free of bum pimples and track marks. (Although Robbie never looked at girlie magazines, well, hardly ever, whenever he did he’d always check out their arms to see if they were junkies, which he figured would explain what drove them to exhibiting themselves so crudely.)

The world in raging
Stoner Vision!
now, projected on a curved screen, like this were a scene in some lakeshore drive-in movie. A Hendrix tape unravelling Nature’s very
DNA
, as his knife-edged thrashing guitar-licks shred the air.
Third Stone from the Sun
. Robbie’s nose is thick with the sweet pungency of oil and linseed. He’s vigorously mixing earth into his paint, grass and bracken crushed between his damp palms, smutched with phthalo and burnt umber. Pure titanium white for the factory. When a bead of sweat soaks his eyebrows, he dabs at his forehead for some of that too. Mendoza’s panting. Robbie lunges with his paintbrush for the plipping tongue. Unwise. The dog snaps at him, barks, and takes off into the woods.

Ivy had a body a lot like one of Rubens’ nudes: oblong and waxy pale. With wide feet. And a belly that swelled out like a Bouguereau. And breasts as pale and delicate as bubbles of milk that looked like they’d be cool in your palms. Ivy, who hated her body, and deliberately burned her arms with cigarettes when she got too drunk.

Suddenly across the water there’s what looks like a crowd gathering. Some kind of kerfuffle. Vehicles, a dozen people
maybe, right in front of EPX. Robbie’s squinting, it’s hard for him to tell from here – in this heat the surface of the lake buzzes and blinds. He clicks the tape off with his toe, standing stock-still to get a better listen, but now his ears are trampled under wind. He shrugs and toes the tape on again.

In some of those old paintings, usually the ones featuring harems or hell or catastrophes befalling all of mankind, you could eyeball a dozen nudes at one time, the whole batch of them languishing in states of undress, some of them bound and helpless, some being ravished by Romans or devoured by monsters. You’d never find that in a magazine like
Bosom Buddies
. Robbie wonders if, while the paint was still wet and sexy on the canvas, the painters ever got it on with their models. He also wonders what it must have been like to see some of these paintings in a shop window in the days before magazines; if, in the privacy of their homes, people ever tugged off in front of them.