My Present Age (25 page)

My blood sang with adrenalin. I boogied. My shirt was a damp leech on my back. I stripped it off. I boogied. My pants chafed the
inside of my thighs, dove up my ass. I cast them off. I boogied. The ringing stopped. A poltergeist began to knock on the floor. I tried to ignore it. I pranced and whirled and shimmied in my zebra-striped apartment. Sodium vapour light blazed on my pale, quivering skin, darkness scarred me. Thud, thud, thud went his broomstick. It was the febrile pulse of a small mammal, trapped. Vague panic thickened the passages in my heart and lungs.

“Quit it!” I shouted.

Thud, thud, thud.

“Shut the fuck up!”

I boogied toward the bedroom. It followed me, bumping after my heels, knocking with a crazy, senile rage. I spun around and pranced back toward the kitchen. It came too, a cardiac murmur under the music. My heart kicked in my breast, the broomstick stuttered a millisecond later. “Shut up!”

Under the glossy green skin of the kitchen linoleum the sound was hollower. Thunk, thunk, thunk. I stood panting. Odd images formed in my mind. Ice; hot, wet membranes; snow; burning faces.

I didn’t dance, I ran back to the living room. What I’d seen scared me.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
It was louder. I saw him. Saw the mad old face frosted with white stubble tilted to his ceiling, slack, limp lips fallen back from dentures all gummy pink and white, glistening with spittle. The thin arms, brown and shrunken in saggy shirt sleeves, pistoning the broomstick up and down with crazy energy. With every blow he grunts. The shock of it jolts a cloud of dandruff out of his hair.

Craziness underneath me. Stumbling, sweating, blind rage shuffling back and forth. He’d kill me if he could.

I squatted down, rested my hands on my knees, bent forward to bounce my voice on the floorboards. “No fucking way, McMurtry!” I shouted. “No fucking way I’m giving in this time!”

I began to bang my fist on the floor. I fell into the rhythm of his knocking. It had bored into my muscles. I thought: Maybe he isn’t
the only one who thinks I’m crazy. Was it like this last time, before Toronto? Is this how it starts?

The record stopped. My fist froze above my head, sweat ran into my eyes. McMurtry struck twice, then nothing. Silence. We waited on each other.

That’s when I thought of him as a U-boat. I saw him hung down there, suspended, listening for me. A U-boat of sagging flesh, stale smells, and fragile bones was hunting me blind, hunting me with sonar, tracking me with the huge dishes of his hairy ears. Because he isn’t deaf. I’d thought he was. But he isn’t.
He just likes things loud
.

I could hear my heart drumming in the stillness. Heard the wind. Yes. Yes. He was waiting for me to make a move. I wiped my face with my hands, dried them on my thighs. Went up on tiptoe. Kill, or be killed. It was in the closet. I had to get to the closet.

I stepped. The floor creaked.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Under my feet. I jumped.

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

He did. Stillness. I took several deep breaths to collect myself. Calmness. Don’t lose your head. He strikes at noise. He tracks with his ears. Weight distribution over a large area. The principle of the snowshoe. I lowered my perspiring body full length on the cold floor. My wet flesh stuck, squeaked derisively, as I began to crawl towards the closet, sponging up a month’s dust and crud off the floor with my squashed belly. But it worked. No creaking boards, no groaning joists.

At intervals on my journey to the closet I paused, pressed my ear to the floor. The sounds I heard from below were aquatic, muffled. It was like holding my ear to an immense, spiralled conch. A great static rush in the head. When McMurtry moved I heard it as a chain reaction of rustlings, knockings, bumps. There was no doubt he was listening for me, casting back and forth for the telltale creak. I imagined him shuffling along, stopping, raising his broom to strike, hesitating, reconsidering, lowering the trembling handle.

I crawled on over the bosom of the cruel sea. My nostrils jetted along filaments of slut’s wool, my sticky palms clutched the hardwood. Couldn’t he hear my heart drumming on the floor? Couldn’t he? Why didn’t he strike?

I reached the closet, pried on the door. It swung open. I reached in, pawed through shoes, rubbers, tennis racquet. There. My fingers closed on the heavy, cold sphere, lifted it free. I rolled on my back, cradled it in the soft, yielding nest of my belly. Felt my muscles relax with relief, gratitude. Now I was armed. The hunted had become hunter.

The old shot. I’ve kept it with me more than fifteen years. It has moved whenever I have moved. Victoria always asked, “What use is it?”

I’d forgotten how it felt. A long time since I had it in my hands. It isn’t something one takes out and fondles, although there is pleasure to be taken in its shape, its weight, its steeliness. It felt good. It felt like power.

McMurtry was about to be depth-charged.

The scenario owed a lot to the sub-hunting movies of my youth. I could remember the depth-charges, the “ashcans” thrown high into the air, rolling end over end against a sky of maritime blue, falling with a heavy splash into the sea, there to explode and rattle the teeth of the sub’s crew, flicker the lights, make the bulkheads reverberate with their crumps.

I was going to sink that old fart downstairs.

But first he had to be tracked and found. He was running on his batteries now, running silent, running deep. I wanted to lay the first one in right over his head, wallop his hull, pop his rivets, split a seam. Can-opener him.

Gingerly, I rolled over on to my side, cupped the shot in both hands, pressed my ear to the floor. Nothing. Nothing but the hum of vacancy, the hot shushing of blood rushing in my temple and jugular. I waited. My watch banged behind its glass face. Come on, move, you old son of a bitch! My heart sagged into my ribs,
swollen and heavy with anticipation. The air tasted of dust. I realized my mouth hung open, dry. I was breathing through it.

Off in the distance, a sound. Faint shuffling. He was moving! I couldn’t home in. Too indistinct. All I knew was that he was off to my right. Too chancy to unload; I wanted a direct hit. I waited, held my breath; a tear of sweat slid off my nose, splashed on the hardwood.

He coughed. Coughed again. I had him.

I stood up. Went tense. He was mine. I had him. There. Yes. Over there. Directly below the entrance to my kitchen, just left of the divider. Good.

I rolled the shot back on my fingers. Tucked it into the neck below my ear. It came back to me. You never forget.

From the hallway where I stood, across the living room to the spot I’d x’d in my mind was a fifteen-foot toss. I lifted my eyes, noted the height of the ceiling. I wanted to exploit maximum loft without hitting it. I was aiming to drop the shot in right over his head.

I’d have to dispense with the hop across the circle. The clumping would alert him. Just lean back, Ed, I said to myself. Extend the left arm, begin the put, transfer your weight from back to front leg, drive through, finish up on right leg, left cocked stylishly high, quivering. Follow the arc of the shot.

I took three deep breaths, pumped the shot with my fingers, gathered myself, let fly. “Uumph!”

Briefly the grey metal surface of the shot shone, lunar, reflecting the strong light of the street lamp outside my window. Then the small moon was gone, lost to sight as it tumbled down through shadow.

Kathunk!
It bounced.
Bunk!
Bounced again.
Bunk! Bunk!
It made a ponderous rolling sound, gave a firm thud when it came to rest against the kitchen baseboard.

A shocked silence succeeded. To McMurtry it must have sounded as if I’d let loose the pulley rope and dropped a Steinway or a safe directly above him. Had plaster come down, had a light bulb danced, had he crapped his drawers?

He roared, a wounded, strangled roar. I ran, racing after the shot, bare feet slapping on the hardwood. I veered from side to side.
Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!
The broomstick rapped in my boiling wake. I skittered hard to port, snatched up the heavy ball, broke for the living room.

The noise of the broom was sharper there.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Unload a quick one. I dipped my knees, lobbed the sphere underhand. It rose and fell in an elegant sine wave.

Kathunk! Bunk! Bunk! Bunk!

He bellowed. What? Stop? Surrender? No. No surrender. The broom had gone wild. Here, there, backward, forward. It made crazy scratching, knocking sounds that had me thinking of broken, bleeding fingernails, mashed knuckle bones, smothered screams. The noises of a man who wakes to find himself nailed in a casket. It sounded as if he was trying to break his way through the crust of the floor to get at me.

I puffed after the shot. It had rolled under the chesterfield. The knocking spattered all round me. I was shaking with fatigue, my fingers couldn’t seem to close on the shot; it squirted out of my sweaty grasp. There, I had it. McMurtry was yelling. The knocks were getting louder. My head fell forward against the arm of the chesterfield. No sleep last night. Tired. I closed my eyes. But him? What about McMurtry? I saw him. He was wearing a U-boat commander’s cap. Backwards, so that the peak wouldn’t interfere with his use of the periscope.

Blood trickled out of the U-boat captain’s mouth and ears. That deep the pressure was enormous. The shock of the depth charges exploding above him shook the hull. Bolts were shearing away, snapping with a ping, steel plates were warping and buckling, the sub groaned, its steel skeleton shivered. An eardrum broke, an eyeball bulged in a socket like a grape pinched to the point of exploding
.

Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!
He was tiring too. McMurtry was tiring. The blows did not follow one another as rapidly or sharply
as before. He was straining. But this also made his pursuit of me seem more deliberate and ominous. The knocking was advancing across the floor toward me; the cold grey snout of the sub was snuffling me out.

I got slowly to my feet.

Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!
Five feet, four feet, three feet. At two, I swung my arms above my head, both hands cupping the sphere. My back arched. I popped up on my toes, stood poised, slammed the shot down in front of my feet.

Kathunk! Kathunk! Bunk! Bunk!

I listened. There was a faint sound of crumbling, crackling, the dry whisper of falling dust. Silence.

“Surrender?” I called.

No answer. I waited, felt perspiration run out of my hair, noticed my body gleam wetly in the lamplight. Would the counterattack come when I moved? I took a few steps, the floor creaked. Nothing. Had he gone deeper to avoid my barrage? Was he even now settling into the pliant ooze of the ocean floor? Had I made him run? Had I beat McMurtry?

I walked a little more, nerves filed raw, ready to jump out of my skin at the first thud. It didn’t come. I bounced my weight up and down, listened to the cheerful donkeyish heehawing of the floorboards. Still nothing. I jogged heavily to the kitchen. Silence. I did some jumping jacks.

Beaten?

The last test. I put The Who on the stereo in an attempt to raise him. Red flag for the bull. I lay down on the floor. It felt cool against my hot cheek. There was no knocking.

Had I won?

It doesn’t feel as if I have. Halfway through the first side of the The Who album, just as I began to relax and bask in the glow of my moral victory, the doorbell sounded peremptorily. New tactics. It
had to be McMurtry. The old campaigner had manoeuvred the scene of the battle on to my territory and taken away my power of retaliation.

It was a war of wills. I refused to go to the door. I simply sat and drank my rum and Coke and tried to ignore the plangent pealing of the door chimes. It was difficult. McMurtry persisted in pushing the button for a long time. I was considering hammering the plastic box that houses the chimes into splinters with my shot when he finally relented five minutes ago.

The The Who album is finished. All is quiet. Is he out there? I listen suspiciously for the small noises that would signal that McMurtry is prowling outside my door, hatching plots, brooding on rude revenge.

I can’t help myself. “Are you out there?” I call in the direction of the door. I can see a squint of light from the hallway squeezed under it. My voice sounds all wrong. I am pleading. I try to correct my tone, make my voice throb with confidence, authority. “Are you there, McMurtry?”

I take my feet off the
TV
, hunch forward in my chair, wait. I feel vague shadows gathering about my shoulders.

“If you’re out there, answer me.” Nothing. “I know you’re out there, so you may as well admit it.” Is he? “Come on, admit it.” I fall back in my chair, drain the weak mix of melted ice, Coke, and rum into my mouth. I nervously chew the shrunken ice cubes, grinding them with my molars. “I’m not fooled, you know!” I shout. “I know you’re out there!”

That he won’t answer makes me more and more uneasy. I find myself on my feet, rummaging in my records. I draw a disc out of its jacket, blow the fluff off it, place it on the turntable. I am still talking over my shoulder to the presence I feel at my door.

“You don’t scare me any more,” I say. “You can do what you want. Piss on you.” I hesitate. “McMurtry, quit fucking around, eh? Answer me!”

The record begins to play. It’s The Stones. Mick Jagger, still going strong while I’m winding down. He’s got years on me. Jesus Christ, look at him. A rocker in his forties with the hairless, scrawny body of a British punk raised on sugary, creamy tea, Eccles cakes, lemon curd, jam tarts, custards. Soft, sweet, yielding sexual foods that make the lips pout, make the skin go dead-white, make androgyny bloom. The pasty, puddinged look of English decadence. Toffee eater’s mouth, hollowed cheeks like he’s sucking on something rich.

My idol. Or should I hate the bastard? What’s he doing with that body? Lean and famished-looking as a whippet. Mick’s singing now. Can’t you see him? Wagging his little tush, flaunting and shaking his degenerate forty-year-old buns at screaming teenies. Dirty, nasty boy. Unspeakable swine, I’m dying of envy.