Double Talk (16 page)

Two thousand miles and five months later, in a classroom in Newfoundland, I could still feel her hair tickling my face and the kitten-like feel of her mohair cardigan as we carried on with the grinding and kissing we had begun on the dance floor. Sometimes she would let me put my hand inside her shirt. Weird was the contrast between her coarse lacy bra cup and the softness of her virgin breast; like a nun's moony face glimpsed through a metal grille. She was oddly passive, which was part of her appeal, and yet that same passivity always left me feeling disappointed. A typical Bridgetown girl, she never initiated contact. She went along with me, her responses always mechanical. It did not seem in her nature to imagine necking as anything more than a series of set plays unfolding according to a strict timetable. I wanted to be surprised — as I had been by Baldegunde, a German girl I had met at a Milltown dance the previous summer. When I kissed her, she had repeatedly sucked on my tongue, slowly drawing it into her mouth and then releasing it. I was immediately overcome by feelings of helplessness, so much so that by the time Lionel Ritchie hit the bridge in “Three Times a Lady” I ejaculated into my underpants.

In my mind, I was stretched out on a bench with Elaine, watching the paramecium-like projections swirl across the dancehall walls, when I heard Keppie's hoarse whisper. “ Check this out, man!” Like fluff through the hose of a vacuum cleaner, I whipped back across the Atlantic to find myself in anthropology class. I didn't even know what anthropology was. I was in a room full of people with strange accents and strange habits of dress. I was supposed to be taking notes. I had a boner as hard as a girder, and this guy in the desk across from me kept whispering, “Wow! Check it out, man! Check it out,” while making spastic motions with his head towards the television screen.

I looked up to see a small Yanomama man holding a long blow pipe to his lips and pressing the business end of it to the face of the Yanomama man kneeling in front of him. The narrator was droning on about complex religious rituals. The man with the pipe puffed up his cheeks and blew. The kneeling man, enveloped in a cloud of powdered bark, reeled as though he had been kicked in the head. Within minutes all the Yanomama men were staggering around under chains of mucous and garlands of snot. Their eyes shone and they grinned from within their hallucinations. They seemed to be having a ball. Students began to leave the class in large numbers.

Afterwards, Keppie caught up with me in the hallway. “Rumour has it he does that every semester to gross everyone out. He hates big classes.”

“Cool.” It felt so cool to say cool without being looked at as if I had two heads. About to introduce myself, I hesitated. All my life I had been called Baby Power, and I'd hated it. When I left Bridgetown I was determined to leave that name behind me. But it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be.

“My name's Brian,” I said, half expecting him to contradict me.

“Keppie,” he said, for the second time, and held out his hand. When I went to shake it, he readjusted his grip so that our thumbs interlocked. I felt my face get hot.

“You're from Ireland, right?”

“Ya.”

“I guess you don't know too many people around here yet?”

“Not too many, no.”

“Listen,” he said, stubbing the tiled floor with the scuffed grey toe of his boot, “I'm having a bit of a get-together this Friday night. It would be great if you could make it.”

“Sound!” I heard myself say, but that didn't sound right. No one used the word that way in Newfoundland. I should have said cool. “What should I bring?”

“Just bring some beer. I'll have some tokes. 17 Coronation Street. Around eight. Do you know how to get there?”

“By taxi?”

He laughed and walked away, his bootlaces flying.

Four days, five hours and thirty-five minutes later, I stumbled through the front door into the hallway of Keppie's parents' saltbox house, my eyebrows clogged with sleet. I looked down the hallway to see Kep standing in the kitchen, wearing an AC/DC shirt and a pair of beige leather pants that were so wide in the hips they looked like they might have once belonged to his mother. His ginger hair flared out from underneath his red baseball cap, and he was wearing orange flip-flops on his feet. He beckoned me to come through. Bending over to remove my shoes, I felt something hijack my breath. Seconds later, as I walked the plank to the kitchen, carrying a two-four of Carlsberg, I felt a woeful yearning for everything that had frustrated and bored me about Bridgetown.

“You're the last one to arrive,” said Keppie. “I thought you might have changed your mind.”

“I couldn't find one of my boots. Bit of a night last night, y'know?”

Both Keppie and the very short guy standing next to him grinned and nodded their heads. “I told you this guy was right-on,” said Keppie.

“Devlin,” said the short guy, introducing himself. He held out his hand in the same way that Keppie had when we first met, palm up as if he was about to deliver a karate chop. Recognizing the move, I smoothly locked my thumb around his, firmly gripping the back of his hand and his wrist with my fingers. But then he surprised me by adding a second part to the handshake, unhooking his thumb and sliding his hand forward until he gripped my forearm and I gripped his. I was sure I had seen Roman centurions greeting this way in old Hollywood movies. “Good to meet you, man.” He spoke slowly — he seemed relaxed, though the way he paused before the word
man
made me think he was taking my measure. He tossed his Robert Plant hair to one side and reached up to tug on a few chin whiskers. He was wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with
Music from Big Pink
. I didn't catch the reference. “Wow, man, you sure like beer.”

I took his remark as a criticism, though I didn't know whether my mistake was in bringing beer or bringing too much of it. “I thought it was a party?” I said, the only thing that came into my head. At the same time, it occurred to me that being an outsider gave me license to break the rules if I wanted to.

“Never mind Devlin,” said Keppie. “He's into turnip tops and hydroponically grown weed.”

Devlin laughed and even blushed a little bit.

“And never mind Brian,” Keppie continued, “he's from Ireland.”

“Ah sure, are you from saintly old Ireland, lad,” said Devlin, in an outlandish brogue. There was that awful habit again; it was my turn to blush, though not for myself.

Just as the moment passed its best-before-date, a girl appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Excellent! Who brought all the beer?” Her voice was husky and had a kind of West Country burr to it. She was both short and heavy-set, qualities her silver ballet slippers did nothing to downplay. More successful was the tie-dyed skirt she wore low on her hips. Fringed with tiny bells, it chimed quietly when she moved. And yet, it also drew attention to the space between her satin slippers and the hem of her skirt, a space occupied by two very hairy shins. My gaze propelled upward, I noted her loose white T-shirt, under which she was obviously braless (Frau Gruber knockers). She had safety pins stuck through both ears, and her lank brown hair swept her shoulder where she stood with hands on hips and head tilted slightly to one side, taking in the scene with a bemused expression.

“You don't mind, do you?” It was Keppie, who, having taken the box of beer off my hands, now returned carrying four bottles.

“Not at all. That's why I brought them.” I was starting to get the hang of speaking in short declarative sentences. It was easier to sustain a throaty voice that way.

When Keppie handed a beer to the girl in the doorway her brown eyes twinkled, and she gently bit her bottom lip.

“Brian, meet my slutty girlfriend, Nancy Sullivan.”

“Pig,” said Nancy, then, focussing her attention on me, announced: “So this is the guy that everyone has been wondering about.”

“Hello, Nancy.”

She took my hand in her moist white hand while giving Devlin a look I couldn't decipher. “Hello to you.”

And just then another girl walked in and put her arm around Nancy's shoulder. “There you are, Vi,” said Nancy. “I was wondering where you had wandered to. This is the Irish guy Keppie keeps talking about. This is Brian. Brian, meet Violet Budd.”

Violet was looking sharp in pointy-toed white patent leather shoes with black laces, and skin-tight black drain-pipe jeans with zip insets from ankle to mid-calf. On top she wore a black fishnet vest over a black and white chequered shirt with a popped collar. Her hair — swept violently to one side — was held in place by a leopard skin banana clip. She wore masses of neon jelly bracelets on both arms, and her earrings were black plastic balls, as big as gobstoppers. Her eye makeup and lipstick were deep purple.

If I remember with snapshot precision how Violet looked that evening, it is only because she reminded me so many times afterwards. These details and much more she drew from her photographic memory, imprinting her recall on mine. How else could I have known that she had partially straightened her curly brown hair that night in an effort to achieve a side-parted, upswept Bananarama hairdo? “My hair, oh-my-God, what a disaster it was,” she would always say. Her eyes were either hazel or green, depending on the light and what she was wearing. That night they were green. When she looked at me, I felt myself slip a little way into them. She had a slight gap between her two front teeth, which humanized her otherwise orthodontic flawlessness. Violet would have you believe it bothered me that she was a little bit older: it didn't. She would also have you believe it was love at first sight: it wasn't. I remember liking her accent and being impressed with what sounded to me like perfect elocution.

In truth, my first and only strong impression of Violet was that she had style. And real style, I knew even then, was more than skin deep.

We had only just said hello when Keppie pulled a small tin from his pocket: “Draw anyone?”

“I could use one,” I said. I was lying. As soon as I heard the call, anxiety cracked like a bullwhip, and I cringed inside. I had only just begun to tune in to the local frequency and it was about to change. I had no choice but to go along because the alternative was to spend the rest of the night trying to get on their wavelength, laughing at jokes I didn't find funny and telling stories that fell flat.

“This way,” said Keppie, holding open a door that led to a set of basement steps. Violet, Nancy and Devlin filed past.

“After you,” said Keppie.

I let the others get ahead a few steps. “Hang on a sec,” I said, reaching into my shirt pocket and pulling out a small tin-foil packet. “This is for you.”

“What is it?”

“It's just some speed,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could.

Keppie looked at me in amazement.“ Yes, b'y. Should I take it tonight?”

“I wouldn't if you want to get some sleep later. It's heavy gear and there's only enough there for one person.”

“Right on.”

By the time I made it down the basement steps Devlin, Violet and Nancy were already seated on plastic milk crates. Nancy sat across from me with her legs spread wide apart under her Indian cotton skirt. Violet sat side-saddle, with her legs crossed. We all watched Keppie, who was arranging his paraphernalia as though setting up a tiny altar: ZigZag papers, Zippo lighter, a single match and a tiny zip-lock bag of weed. He tipped out the contents of the baggie and began painstakingly to remove twigs and seeds. He then pulled two skins from the ZigZag packet, tearing a tiny triangle from each corner of the non-adhesive side. Sprinkling each paper with weed, he rolled quickly, wetting the gummed edge with a slight flick of his tongue, before tamping the loose weed down inside each joint with the bulb end of the matchstick. The fastidiousness with which he set about the job made me feel nervous. It was clear to me that these people were serious potheads.

“Recognize this, Nance?” he said, as he twisted one joint and then began to push the whole thing in and out through the whistle-hole of his lips until it was wetted along its full length.

“You wish,” said Nancy.

Just as Keppie flipped his Zippo lighter, another pair of legs pounded down the basement steps. “Don't forget about me, b'ys.”

Both Devlin and Nancy rolled their eyes.

God sent me Bill Cheeseman. If the image I was trying to project of myself that night was of a fatally cool, slightly world-weary hipster, my inner self-image was closer to that incarnated by the big-boned guy who took a seat on the only unoccupied milk crate. In his white sneakers, white socks, black slacks, white shirt and maroon bowtie, jacket with a green felt body and white leatherette sleeves — one of which bore a darts league logo — he was a bundle of nervous energy.

“Cool threads, Bill,” said Devlin.

Bill turned his head sharply in Devlin's direction, his lip curling in mock disgust. He then broke into a goofy grin — horse teeth bared, his eyes all buggy. “I'm on my way to do a night shift at the Kenmount. But I didn't want to miss ol' Keppie's party. The Kepster! The Kepperman! The Kepatola!”

Keppie tried to keep a straight face: “Bill, b'y, I see you're your usual hyper self. You need to experience the fine medicinal effects of this here mundungus.”