The Girl Who Was Saturday Night (8 page)

I felt watery all of a sudden, as if I had been turned into a puddle on the bed. It took me a few seconds to realize that they were talking about us on the radio. My body always seemed to realize it first.

“Tremblay’s luck changed the day after the 1980 referendum.”

“Yes, that’s true,” another voice said. “While he was in prison, his manager, who was also his on and off girlfriend, took whatever was left of his money. He signed these terrible contracts
that a lot of musicians signed in the sixties and seventies that saw them getting nothing for their work. Really just pennies when their songs are played on the radio.”

“What will your documentary tell us that we don’t already know?”

“I’m focusing on the entire Tremblay family. Because for a long time they sort of represented the beauty of Québécois culture—the warmness of it. And we grew up with them. When I watched the documentary as a kid, I wanted to change my last name and go and join their family. Who didn’t want to be raised by Étienne Tremblay? It just seemed so magical. He would sing to you while he scrambled up eggs in the morning.”

I recognized the voice of none other than Hugo Vaillancourt, that documentarian who had followed me down the street the other day.

“Have the Tremblays gotten it together at all? What I mean to say is, do you find this to be an optimistic documentary? Do you think that the family will sort of come out of the funk that they’ve fallen into and see brighter days?”

“Goodness no. No! We are witnessing the downfall of an era. These aren’t the right times for dreamers. The Tremblays as a family were invented by the subconscious of a people prior to the first referendum. They are a direct result of a revolutionary, surrealist, visionary zeitgeist. They are wandering around now like animals whose habitats have been destroyed.”

I switched off the radio and buried my head under a pillow. A cat peeped in the window. It had one white paw. One night it had decided to dip it into the reflection of the moon in a fountain to see what would happen.

The doorbell began buzzing. I didn’t know where Nicolas was and Loulou was too deaf to hear it. I put on a tiny orange
kimono that had seen better days and ran to get the door. When I opened it, a little old woman from one of the apartments upstairs was standing there.

“Nouschka, they’re talking about you and your family on Radio-Canada.” She said it in a very concerned way, as if it were something that I really needed to know about, as if she had smelled smoke coming from the apartment.

“
Merci, merci, merci
, Madame Choquette,” I said.

Then I slammed the door. I didn’t even get down the hallway when somebody else rang the buzzer.

“Go away!” I screamed.

I never thought that Hugo would get any funding for this documentary or that it would actually happen. Occasionally someone would say they were going to write a book or make a film about Étienne, but in the past ten years, nothing had ever come of them.

There was a pounding on the window. I pulled the curtain aside to yell at whoever was there. It was Nicolas. Instead he was ready to yell at me.

“This is so you, baby. You started this with your beauty queen stuff.”

“Oh, so what. So they’re making a documentary. How bad can it be?”

I didn’t regret the pageant because it had brought Raphaël into my store. Everything thrilling in life had its costs.

“They can edit it to make us look like total assholes. They have degrees in how to make everybody look like assholes. They’ll capture us as we really are this time. Mark my words. Mark my words, Nouschka. You do some very embarrassing stuff that you might not want documented.”

Adam’s head suddenly popped into the window frame, next to Nicolas, like someone unwanted trying to make it into a
photograph. They were both drinking coffee out of paper cups with silhouettes of bullfighters on them. It was coffee from the Portuguese place and it always made Nicolas completely insane. Coffee from there was like crack for Nicolas.

A kid we knew walked by with a boom box on his shoulder.

“Hey, are they looking for actors?”

“No, it’s a documentary,” Nicolas said, shooing the boy away. “Come on. Don’t be so stupid so early in the morning.”

“I think it’s exciting,” Adam said. “You should require it to be in black and white. It’s always more beautiful that way.”

“It’s hard enough being a goddamn criminal without a documentary crew following you around.”

“I always hear people bitching about that,” I said.

“I know, right?”

We both started laughing. The kid with the boom box met up with someone on a bench. They turned the ghetto blaster way up.

“You think I care whether anybody anywhere knows anything about me? Then you don’t know a thing about me. Look at how little I give a damn!” He started doing his crazy moves. People always gathered around to watch Nicolas dance. He suddenly got all loose and then all stiff. If you wanted to see what joy looked like, you only had to look at Nicolas dancing. He started doing a disco move, reaching his right hand down practically to his left foot and then stretching it back up into the opposite direction to the sky.

“You really shouldn’t let my brother drink espresso,” I told Adam.

“I have learned that the hard way.”

I felt less anxious all of a sudden. The worst of it was over. He had found out and here he was dancing in the street.

A
DAM LOVED THE ATTENTION WE WERE GETTING
. Adam had every intention of being on the news when he got older. He hadn’t figured out what he was going to be famous for. At one point about a year ago, when they first met, Adam and Nicolas had formed their own political party. It was called The People’s People Party. Now they crawled in the apartment window with some posters of themselves that they had made at the photocopy store and were going to put up. Nicolas had suggested that they deface them with moustaches before they put them up around town. I had finished getting dressed when they held the posters up for me to see. They had combed their hair to the side and had these fake serious looks. This amused them to no end.

“We actually look really good as politicians,” Nicolas said. “Do you think that politicians attract a lot of ladies?”

“No,” I said. “You can’t sleep with anyone or do drugs, or they do an exposé on the news.”

“That sucks. What man doesn’t like a crack pipe and a
couple underage girls after a hard day of campaigning about public schools?”

“That’s the problem with the world today,” Adam stated. “You can’t reap any rewards.”

“This is the stupidest political party ever,” I said. “You’re going to add crack and whores to civil liberties.”

“Give me liberty or give me death,” Adam said.

“It’s beautiful in its simplicity,” Nicolas added, nodding.

“Let’s go campaigning for our revolutionary party today!” Adam cried. “All we ever do is talk about it.”

“All right,” said Nicolas. “Let me go take a crap and then borrow a car.”

So far, their revolutionary tactics had largely been confined to soliciting sex from women who were obviously middle-class and clearly not prostitutes. Adam had been questioned by the police a couple times, but they always let him go. They could tell from his manner that he was an upper-class kid. Rich people weren’t responsible for petty crimes. They were responsible for the great crimes that took hundreds of years to commit and were, therefore, unpunishable.

Nicolas came back twenty minutes later. He was wearing a pair of giant old-lady glasses.

“These are my counter-revolutionary glasses,” he said.

“
Counter-revolutionary
means you’re against the revolution,” I said.

“Are you sure about that?”

“Look it up in the dictionary.”

“The dictionary is obsolete,” Nicolas said. “They don’t even have the definition of
cocksucker
in it. Our first act of government will be the public execution of René Simard.”

“Why? Just because you don’t like him?”

“His music ruined my childhood.”

“I thought your first act was going to be banning soccer.”

“I have to wait a while for that one. There are some soccer fans out there.”

Nicolas was mad at soccer in general because he had been kicked off the team in Grade Eight for showing up late. He was going to be an irrational dictator. He had also suggested banning fanny packs because he thought they were ugly.

We whistled when we saw the car parked outside the building. Low-lifes sometimes hung around old people for pocket money and their cars. You’d see these junkies driving old Coupe de Villes and wearing alligator shoes. Nicolas borrowed a Cadillac from an old lady he claimed was named Madame Prèsdelamort. In exchange, he would sit with her at the doctor’s office and repeat what the doctor had just said, but louder.

“You likey?” Nicolas asked.

“You look like a seventies cocaine dealer.”

“A seventies porn star. Porn stars from the seventies used to live in this area and bought a lot of the buildings. But then they got older and impotent and got laid off. So they couldn’t afford the upkeep. That’s why this whole area is actually falling into total disrepair.”

“Where do you get this stuff?” I demanded.

“A lot of Québécois do well as porn stars. It’s because we all have really big dicks.”

For some reason Adam and I laughed at that ridiculous joke. We were going to be laughing a lot that afternoon. I could feel it. I looked at my first pile of homework on the floor next to the bed, which I was supposed to finish. I had promised myself that I would be really diligent about it, unlike when I had originally
gone to school. I decided that I could put it aside just once.

We were dressed in the way that only nineteen-year-olds can dress. I had on a blue shirt that tied behind my neck and a silver skirt that stuck out like a tutu and black cowboy boots with purple stars on them. Nicolas had on a pink velour jacket over a yellow T-shirt that had a drawing of a panda bear on it and purple track pants with green stripes down the sides. Adam had red sweatpants that were cut off just below the knees and a light blue dress shirt that had been washed about two thousand times and was threadbare. Adam was also wearing his suit jacket and tie.

Nicolas got into the driver’s seat. I scooted into the middle and Adam got into the passenger seat after me. The car kept jerking wildly because Nicolas was having trouble with the enormous stick shift.

Once we got onto the road, we bounced along like crazy. The shocks in the car were terrible. All the streets in Montréal were always all broken up from potholes because of the long winters. If you were drinking coffee, it ended up going all over your lap. Children would sometimes get carsick just going three blocks. We were pleased with ourselves. We thought that we must have looked like gunmen who were riding into a town on the Western frontier with prices on our heads and there wasn’t a damn thing that anybody could do about it.

I can’t remember who suggested that we head toward our old elementary school. It had to have been Nicolas. The school was a giant brick building with gargoyles of twenties schoolchildren over all the doors. There were cages on all the windows.

We had hated school so much. Just being near it filled us with a horrible feeling. The teachers were always chastising us for not having our gym clothes or school fees. Loulou was too old to be on top of anything.

We parked right outside the schoolyard fence. It was lunch-time and the sound of children was almost as deafening as the ocean. School was out, but they all went there for day camp. They were singing their skipping-rope tunes—wee tunes of resistance that had been passed down from one class to another. They were probably singing Étienne’s skipping-rope song:

Adam reached over me to the back seat and grabbed a bullhorn from off the seat. I couldn’t even imagine where they had got it. But Nicolas and Adam were the type of boys that made friends easily and they were both thieves, so just about anything could appear in the back of the car or out of their pockets.

“Time to disseminate some knowledge,” Adam said matter-of-factly.

We opened the sunroof. Adam stood on the seat with his bullhorn.

“Your teacher cannot search your locker without a warrant. Your teachers are part of a systematized, codified attempt to lower your self-esteem.”

I was amazed that he could get these statements out without cracking up. We would never have been able to do that in a million years. Nicolas used to start laughing while ordering a loaf of pumpernickel bread because the woman who worked there had a picture of the pope on her kerchief.

“You are sheep. Your brains are being fattened for the slaughter! They are teaching you lies! Lies!”

The children all started gathering at the fence like fish trapped in a net. Their buttons were in the wrong holes and the backs of their skirts were tucked into their underwear. Children their age were in awe of teenagers. We inhabited a brief period of time during which we mocked all authority and we could get away with anything. We were screaming and yelling as we gave birth to a new generation. They hung on to the gates, staring up at us, utterly transfixed. I stood up, stepping onto Nicolas’s bent leg like it was a footstool.

“My dick, Nouschka! My dick!” he yelled.

Adam handed me the bullhorn.

“Only prisoners are forced to line up,” I cried. “You have been imprisoned without due process of a trial. You have committed no crime.”