Kicking Tomorrow (25 page)

“We-ell,” she said in an amused drawl, her nose to the cloth, when he expressed his concern, “it shouldn’t come as such a surprise to you. How else could a person find the concentration to do all this detail? Heh, heh.”

Robbie discovered that, when she was stoned like this, she was kinder to him, and more wistful. “Java,” she’d say. “Can’t you just picture it?” Robbie would look up and see her smiling to herself, meticulously trailing beads of wax on the coloured cloth. A long silence. The wintry wind buffeting the windows. The concentrated silence of classrooms below, punctuated occasionally by the
shout of an irate teacher. The spinning and spitting of tires on the snow-choked streets. Robbie contentedly sketching. Then she’d murmur along some more.

“Olly said one day he’ll let me go. It’d be warm and humid. We’d just wear these cotton sarongs or something. And hike to the ocean when we felt like it. Mellow, breezy, you know? Maybe we’d eat spicy goat stew, with bamboo hearts, and tea. And the purple mountains all around. God. Can’t you just picture it? You would have your head shaved with just a plait at the back. Me, too. I could also be a boy, just about. I’d wear a Bones T-shirt.…”

Now, when he said kinder, Robbie didn’t really mean
kind
at all, since kindness requires some conscious effort, and he had come to the conclusion that Ivy was barely conscious at all, at least not of him. This was confirmed the morning he presented his Xmas gift to her: the last week of school, the cold slush had soaked through the shankless soles of his boots, and he was under a cloud; if there was one thing he hated more than studying, it was sports. He was nowhere near good enough a skater to make the school hockey team, so he was forced to play with the misfits, the leftovers and the losers. Worst of all were the chill showers, plus the smells of sweat and steam and mouldy towels and rotting wood, which he had hated and feared since he was six: boys with bellies and thighs as red and thick as boiled hams, blotchy bums. Shoving and shouting. Robbie self-conscious about being circumcised, shivering in a corner. He’d hide his underwear behind a radiator, so no one would steal it in the changing room. Then, when he pulled it out, it’d be matted with dust and spiderwebs.

Ivy hated gymnastics class equally, so
they fucksed
together, and sat in Pendeli’s.

“The whole school thing’s a joke,” Robbie said, “I’ve decided doing well isn’t so much to do with studying as using your head.”

“That’s a perilous rationalization from someone like you,” Ivy said.

“Right, sure. Ahh, look, I’d like to give you a present.”

“Over my dead body. What for?”

“Christmas of course! And because I, I…”

“No. Don’t even
think
of saying it.”

Here’s what he gave her: a new pair of gloves with the fingertips snipped so she could read at bus stops, and an anthology of Albert Camel’s poetry.

“I had to sell some of my records,” he told her proudly.

Ivy held the book at arm’s length, turned it over doubtfully. “Who’s Albert Camel?”

“One of your favourite
writers,”
Robbie answered with a trace of irritation in his voice, for he was starting to suspect that she hadn’t bought him a thing in return. “You’ve said so a hundred times. He wrote a book about a plague, you said.”

Ivy gave him a condescending look. “That’s Albert
Camus
. Thanks, anyway. Oh, hey. Look, I can see it in your face. That’s exactly the sort of pain I try to avoid at Christmas by not buying presents for anyone. You can never please people. And if you do like what you’ve been given, you can’t be sure what the person’s motive was in giving it to you. I don’t have to prove my affection for you by giving you a gift. I could give you a gift and not mean it.”

Robbie shrugged unhappily. “You mean, if I didn’t give you a gift, you would have been happier?”

“No, but I
think you
would have. Anyway, don’t worry. It’s not worth me explaining.”

“I’d like you to explain, so I can understand.”

“If I have to explain it, then you wouldn’t understand it.”

“
K
, then,” Robbie said, and made a scrunched-up, resentful mouth. “Sorry.” But he wasn’t. His spirits had sunk to an all-time
low. Why was it, he wondered, that when you’re with the person you love, you can so rarely manage even the simplest things? On his own, he had inspired conversations with her all the time, but those flights of giddy fancy always eluded him in real life; the rehearsed hilarity, the solemnity, and the moments of special intimate fusing never took place. And here he was again, severed from all natural experience, void of wit and energy. He barely recognized himself. She’d probably leave him now, and who could blame her? He pulled back his ears, felt the skin stretching over his face, widening his eyes like fleshy satellite dishes to pick up clues. Some distant signal of love. And only now he saw how the pupils in her eyes were constricted. And how her skin was pallid and damp. That was all he needed to know. And only now, he knew how much he hated her.

Xmas Day, and Robbie was elbow-to-elbow with her bizarro family, having a hard time dealing with what a privileged middle-class kid he was. He was casting his eyes around and going,
These are poor people
.

He hated himself for thinking it, on this day of all days, but the words came up involuntarily:
What a pathetic meal. Is this all?

The thing is, he’d never eaten in a poor family’s home before. Well, once before, when he was about eleven: a friend of a friend, at a pickup hockey game on Staynor Street, had taken him home for a Mae West and a Dr. Pepper and a
TV
dinner, and while they were watching
Dark Shadows
on a snowy
UHS
channel, the friend’s baby sister had hauled a foot-long tapeworm out of her throat, like a translucent linguine, right there on the carpet.

Anyway, now Robbie was the guest of a solemnly Christian family, whose few joys were being summed up in a prayer and a
supermarket meal. He was wondering how he was going to finish this glutinous mess – a slice of a deboned turkey sitting in a pond of just-add-water potato mash, some sugary gravy, and a bank of diced mixed vegetables that are paler than they appear in the colour supplements.

Is this all?

He knows the whole do will set the parents back enough to ensure their January Blues last at least two months, and he can see that Ivy’s elder sister, Julie, for one, is filled with simple joy and forgetting herself in all this luxury, but he can’t stop the hot, vomitty voice in the back of his head.
Is this it? If this is the best they can come up with…

He wants to slap his own face. He doesn’t want to think these thoughts. He’s not like this.

This place stinks. They’re ugly, too
.

Chrissake, stop.

The dining room was two rooms really, cut in half by a fanfold wall on a floor-rail; since this was the big Xmas meal, and ten people were eating, they’d opened up the wall, laid out tables end-to-end, and now right behind him was the parents’ bed.

Olly was there with Karen and the two kiddies. “Hi,” Robbie said, pumping Karen’s hand, “Remember me? I’m Mr. Big Balls.” She looked more surprised than shocked, but Robbie was satisfied that he’d scored as the
NEW! IMPROVED!
him he was planning to be for Ivy from now on – an armoured, insensitive Robbie, giving nothing away for free. Meanwhile he gathered that Mr. and Mrs. Mills thought Olly was in real estate. Olly had brought gifts. For Ivy,
The Trembling of a Leaf
by Somerset Maugham, and something even for Robbie – the Bones’
Cambodian Relief
charity album, autographed by Keef himself. Robbie thanked him, but avoided his eyes (so much for the
NEW! ARMOURED!
Robbie); since Olly had apparently done so much for him the last time they
had spoken (and Robbie had said so little, been so nnspecific), he was afraid just exchanging glances might have some deadly consequence. And Ivy had given Olly a present in return – a batik scarf, with intricate
kala
mask designs and
TV
sets and hockey sticks. Robbie watched as he proudly wrapped it around his neck.

Ivy’s younger brother, John, had a family method Robbie could relate to – he holed up with a coil heater in the alley garage, tinkering with a chemistry lab which he financed by holding down five paper routes – another way of keeping clear of home, and who could blame him – plus, apparently, Olly paid him for the occasional assignment. Out in the garage, John showed Robbie his latest explosives experiment, utilizing just everyday chemical products.

Julie was troubling Robbie, meanwhile; she appeared just a few degrees too full up with delight at this Xmas banquet. Her teeth were creamy, she rolled her eyes a lot, and, horror of horrors, she seemed to be flirting with him.

Mr. Mills sat at the head of the table, carving the turkey with frightening enthusiasm. Mrs. Mills was flushed with merry energy, intoxicating herself with her own chitchat. “So this
Cuckoo
movie, how fun it was!” she called out from the kitchen in her bleating voice, a voice that rode hysteria bareback, always threatening to break, “It remind me of birds, how cruel to putting them in cages, like those hostage in Amsterdam,
hein?
Are you kids see the big Stroll and Bone show next week?”

Robbie’s mouth was stopped up with a lump of hardened potato powder. He tried to swallow. His cutlery felt heavy in his hands. He thought of how dwarf stars are so dense, that a teaspoon of their magma weighs a million tons. Mrs. Mills bent down to pull a dish from the oven.

Mr. Mills found his opening. “You are idiots,” he said, his smug smile wet with wine, “lining up all night just for a rock show.”

“AYOI!”
Mrs. Mills screamed. She dropped the dish full of pudding, buttered glass scattering around the floor, and vigorously shook her fingers in the air.

“Hey, hey, let me do it, Ma!” Olly said, leaping out of his chair. “Sit down,
OK
. Maybe you’ve had a little – “

“I am
NOT DRUNK
,” Mrs. Mills shouted gutturally, her face as red as her fingers, “so
SHUT UP.”
Then she turned pleasantly to Robbie, awaiting his answer, and placed a spoonful of glass-spiked pudding on his plate.

“Well, um,” Robbie said. Now the potato was lodged in his throat, and squeezing down like a croquet ball in an ostrich’s neck. He avoided Julie’s lopsided, attentive, admiring face. “I think it’s interesting to see the city come alive – delivery trucks, workers coming into the greasy spoon for their coffees and dogs
and westerns.…”

“We had once a dog,” Mrs. Mills started, “a chi –”

“That’s my point,” Mr. Mills said quickly. “If you found the same time and energy – kids today are all over the place, like an old woman’s piss. What have you got to be angry with? When I was your age I worked at that greasy spoon. Every morning I had to haul buckets of chicken, giblets, legs, livers, breasts, into that same kitchen –”

“Oh,
chéri”
Mrs. Mills butted in. “Not buckets, you telled me – pails.”

“What,
chérie?”

“Not buckets –
pails
of chicken. That’s what you telled me.”

“Buckets, pails, what’s the –”

“Oh there’s a big difference. They’re not the same.”

“OK
,
pails
, if it means so much to you.”

Robbie dug a trench in his muddy turkey. Ivy nudged him with her knee below the table.

“Well, it does. I think a person must speak properly well.”

“Yes, of course, ma bonne femme, but I –”

“If you don’t have command of the good English, how can you earn respect? You said that to me much times.”

And Robbie thinking, This is not a well family. How could a person as imaginative and beautiful as Ivy have sprung from the loins of these Nazi humanoids from outer space. I must
rescue
her from all this.

“You should call them pails,” Mrs. Mills warbled.

While the family bowed their heads to say closing Grace, Robbie looked around: a set of Coronation plates up on the wall, a stumpy Eskimo sculpture on the coffee table, a set of Russian doll-eggs, set along the mantlepiece in diminishing size, and unbelievably (but
someone
must be buying these things, so you have to believe it) a portrait of a weeping clown on black velvet. There were dozens of Hallmark cards with doe-eyed angels, pussycats playing with Xmas baubles, and gauzy portraits of the baby Jesus. Plus a plastic light-up Santa Claus face and a scrawny aluminum tree on top of the
TV
set. It was all enough to make you very sad. And, Robbie thought to himself, What have they received that they’ve got to be so truly thankful for?

As soon as the prayer was over, John climbed out of his chair. He left the room without a word; off to the lab.

“I’m so anger with him,” Mrs. Mills said to Olly.

“Aw, relax, Ma,” Olly said, good-naturedly, little Cissy bouncing on his lap. “Give the kid a break. Give him time.”

“Time. I’m run out of time. I’ve waited long enough for the respect. I want it now.”