Kicking Tomorrow (14 page)

“Well, did you maybe sleep with somebody else?” Robbie asked. Casually as possible.

Ivy gave him a fox-in-the-grass look. “What’s the difference,” she said. “Maybe I’ve slept with lots of guys. Maybe not.”

“Well, have you?” Despite himself, he had let an accusatory tone into his voice. His stomach dropped.

“I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of an answer,” Ivy hissed. “If I have to tell you…”

Outside the school, as the bell rang, he stuck his neck forward to kiss her, tentatively and not a little guiltily. She grabbed him like she was saving herself from falling off a roof. She unzipped his parka while they necked, opening her dufflecoat and pressing her body to his. She clutched his hands and guided them under her shirt and urgently thrust her knee between his legs. Robbie, grabbing a breath, looked over her shoulder and saw they had attracted quite a crowd. Kids were smirking, several wiping their noses on frosty mittens. And now Ivy was biting Robbie’s neck.

“Hey,” he said. “Don’t be crazy.”

Abruptly she withdrew. “What’s wrong with crazy,” she snapped, and shot him an almighty expression. Then she pushed him off and slipped away over a snowbank to the girls’ way in.

He chased after her, calling out, “Sorry! Sorry!”

“OK,”
she said. “You want
to fuckse
with me? I’m in the art room after lunch.”

Robbie’s teacher this morning is Monsieur Nul, who throws things at the slightest provocation, whose fly is permanently, maybe deliberately, undone, and who daily exhorts the kids to excel at their studies before the Chinese and the Jews take over the world. There’s a test re: hypotenuselesses and angles of complete irrelevance, but Robbie’s stoned again, having toked up in the can on some fine Afghani smash, and is busy being
FUCK
the outlaw biker with his skull ring and oil-caked jeans, singing, under his breath,
“Getcher motor ruh-nin, headout onna highway
…” He’s slouched way down in his seat, with his blue Beatle boots propped against the back of the chair in front of him, his arms slung high up over the desk top like he’s straddling a cool chopped hog fuelled and vibrating with sheer anticipation – a Harley-Davidson ’59 DuoGlide with mile-high custom handlebars and a low-rider seat over a flaming gas tank – tearing a strip down the tarmac.…

FUCK
pulls over to prop the bike up on a hill overlooking a playground by the side of the highway. Up at a window, an imprisoned schoolboy is watching him: poor Robbie Bookbinder wishing he, too, were out here enjoying the smells of the roasted earth and the bike’s ticking hot engine.
FUCK
crooks one finger at a sullen-looking girl with a face like a fieldmouse who’s refusing to join in an organized game of volleyball.
What a bitchin’ split, ain’t
she one hot mama
. He swings her into his bucket seat and squeals off down the road. Robbie, meanwhile, has some trouble
putting his gentler ache into words. He looks on longingly and considers how edible the surfaces of her must be. Sweet and bitter berries. He passes a hand over his chest and cups an imaginary breast. Closing his eyelids, slow and contented as a lion on a sunbaked rock, and wishing, wishing he could for once be possessed of the comfort he imagines sexiness gives a girl. And when he opens them again, there’s M. Nul smiling behind his beard. And the whole class is looking too, among them the impeccably neat Nono, sporting a nifty pair of mustard double-knit slacks and a case of acne like an all-dressed pizza; Pharte, with four eyes and a spine so straight you’d think his bowels were rock hard from end to end – who plays, it is rumoured, le soccer all alone with his mother after school; and Boniface, as skinny as a praying mantis, poised above his test paper like he’s saying grace before gobbling the baby answers alive. Robbie shoots glares all around, like, what
is
this? I honestly cannot relate! What have
you
geeks got that makes you so damn superior?

At lunch he went to the neighbourhood dépanneur run by
les p’tits juifs
, which means the little Jews; they were very little, indeed, the old man and his wife – when they reached their hands over the counter for money, their tattooed wrists slipped out from their sleeves, and that made all the pepsis smirk.

There are winter days in Montreal so cold you can crack the air over your knee. Robbie frequently split at lunch hour, insulating himself as he did now, by chug-a-lugging three or four stubbies of Champlain porter as he circled the block, duh-dumming heavy nose guitar solos under his visible breath, knapsack clinking in rhythm with his step. When this time the bell finally rang, he was affectionately writing Ivy’s name across a snowbank in hot, steaming pee.

The art room was six storeys up, in the old building’s attic. He pushed through the clot of students, raced up the twisting
stairwell, and hid in an upstairs can. Well, what was the point of sitting at his desk, now? His fingers were so numb he could barely fish out his little hardened weenie (Ivy’s name being so short he’d returned with a still chilled and swollen bladder), let alone hold a pen in class. He snuck up two more flights to the uppermost landing. From so high the clatter of the classrooms sounded remote. His rock ’n’ roll heels were loud on the creaking wooden floor, and left coins of slush behind him. He crouched, listening to doors close, one by one. He felt like a lurking young ghost, a poltergeist from some earlier century’s educational system; the victim of one brutal thrashing too many, doomed to wail over an eternally stinging bottom.

The attic door was locked. He knocked and waited. Ivy opened it a crack.

“Come into my parlour,” she whispered.

“Too much,” Robbie whispered back.

“I’m wasting my time in English class, so they let me. Like I said, being smart is an incredible excuse to be bad.”

“Far
out
. I’m gonna tell ’em as far as English, eh, tests and that equal a ditto waste for me, too.”

She locked the door. “Come see.”

She had spread a large sheet of cloth over a table and, copying from a book, was well into an intricate design; an interlacing of tendrils and bunches of fruit and flowers – mango, pomegranate, banana, hibiscus – populated by a variety of beasts.

“It’s batik,” she said. “Lookit. In Indonesia they use metal printing blocks, but if you’re a purist, like me, you use this.”

She held up a wooden-handled tool with a small copper vessel at the end, pointed like the nib of a busted fountain pen. The vessel was hinged with a simple copper tab and filled with molten wax. Ivy demonstrated, pulling back the tab with her thumb and drawing the vessel carefully across a length of half-finished cloth; she left a shimmering snail’s trail of wax that
dulled as it sank in and dried. “Then you dunk it in the dye. Colour by colour. The dark colours, like indigo, they go on last. Finally you boil off the wax. Up comes the pattern, like magic.”

“Like an Easter egg,” Robbie said. “Far-out smell. First thing I noticed about you.”

Ivy frowned at her design. “Beeswax and paraffin, from Sumatra. It’s imported specially. There’s a company.… Look how when you crack the wax like this the dye seeps in and makes a marbly effect. This is
supit urang
, which is pincers of the lobster. See. Here’s a peacock. Here’s a phoenix – “

“You should add a
TV
set, and some hockey sticks. That would make it a truly Canadian work of art.”

“ – and a
kala
mask. It’s supposed to look like a lion.” She stopped to glare at him. “You’re right, I’m useless. I bet you could do a better job.”

He hooked his chin over her shoulder. “No,” he said. “It’s really well done.”

“God,” she said, shrugging him off. “I hate when people watch me. So
quit
. Lookit, there’s paper and pencils in the drawers over there. Why don’t you do something for yourself?”

“
K
, I’ll draw you.”

“I’ll kill if you try.”

He laid out several sheets and sharpened a pencil. While she worked he sat poised, looking her over, following the curves of her, weighing the air around her.

“God, I hate you,” she said.

He tried the leaping line of her nose, but his hand was tense. He erased, tried again.
Wrong, fuck
. Erased again. The pencil squirmed between his wet fingers.

A while later he gave up, crumpled the paper. Despondently looked through the window. The afternoon was getting on. Two jets made white slices across the sky like skates on dull grey ice.

Ivy had a small gas campstove lit, above its blue flame a pot filled with simmering beeswax. He wandered over. He made to dip his forefinger in, but she stopped him.

“Don’t touch, you idiot. You’ll go and burn yourself and knock the thing over. Here. Let me show you something else.”

First she opened the window. Then she speared a little ball of hash on the end of a brooch pin she had pulled from her cardigan. Slowly she heated it at the flame, and, when it was soft enough, transferred it to the bowl of a little silver pipe she pulled from her Afghan coat. Then she held the pipe over the flame, and as the drug sizzled and burnt, she sucked up great lungfuls of its acrid smoke. The room was plunged into ash-grey air, and Robbie felt zonked enough just standing next to her. This stuff was way heavier than hash – as soon as he had a real toke he felt sleepy and sick.

“Man,” he said, sitting down on the floor. “Are you ever full of surprises.”

“Life will be convulsive
, don’t you remember?
Or not at all.”

“I think so. Yeah, right. I get it now.”

She plops a sheaf of drawing paper on his lap, and rolls some pencils clicking across the floor. Robbie looks at them stupidly. His arms are filled with lead. Then she undresses. Just like that. And sits demurely on a chair, arms folded, legs braided. This is her torso: as light and flat as a packet of Sugar Krunchies; slight, squared-off shoulders, a flat chest, and a boxy pelvis. He picks up a pencil. It’s like balsa wood, yet it also weighs a ton. He concentrates as hard as he can, but his sketches are still shrunken and scratchy and tense, headless and footless like an ancient Roman ruin. Then, in a murky grab at inspiration, he adds a flourish from the headless neck, a quite unrelated arabesque.
Fun
. He draws some whirly clouds, some paisley hills.
Yahoo!
Pretty soon he’s doodling out of control, and signing it extravagantly before he’s even done.

I know what you’re thinking
, Ivy says, or seems to have said. She’s looking shyly over her bare shoulder.
I have a body like Gumby
.

Yeah, maybe
, he says, abruptly straightening his back.
But no way I can concentrate on drawing now. This heavy stuff or what
.

What do you mean, maybe. Fucker. It’s opium
.

Whoa. Figures
.

She pulls him up by his hand, not a little roughly.
C’mon
, he distantly hears her say. Still nude, she leads him to the top of the stairs. It’s dark here, a corridor with doors to two or three other, smaller rooms: a bathroom, a locked storage space, and a cubbyhole nearly as bare as Ivy at the end. He’s sleepwalking now. The tiny cell contains a single stained glass window, a chipped porcelain chamberpot, a kneeling stool, a brass bedframe without a mattress, and a white shadow where a crucifix once hung on the wall.
They think it’s locked up
, Ivy’s saying,
Curious… tried the door… olden days… old Grande Dame Blanchemains… incredible…

He sniffs the cool musty air. Looks out through the window. Feels like they’re checking out an apartment. She stands with her hand on the brass bedpost, her luminous head above her naked shoulders, pale as a ghost. He laughs uncertainly and says, or hears himself say, or what did he say? He can’t remember.

Together they watch the first-graders plop about on the ice rink below. They stand hip to hip in silence, hearing the distant shouts, the traffic on the slushy streets. Robbie rubs his forefingers and thumbs together, and the tips are numb. A gust of wind, and a veil of snow is pulled across the window from the outside, the gutter its curtain rail. He clears his throat. The dust up here is making his sinuses ooze. Like Siamese twins he and Ivy stand, the conjoined hip not like bone, but glowing coal. He wants to laugh, he wants to cry. What was that, did she pull her hip away, or was she just falling off balance, the way you will when you’re trying to hold so perfectly still? Will they get married, or are they
already breaking up forever? Distantly, a ruler cracks on a desktop and a class erupts in laughter.
School’s out forever
. Ivy blows her bangs off her forehead. Then turns and stamps back into the art room. Robbie’s bowels are turned right upside-down now. His guts sink slowly like chilled tripe in a jar. After a while she returns fully clothed, Afghan coat and all. She holds out his khaki parka. And the next thing he knows she’s dragging him down the dark stairs like a dummy.

“What a mess. You look like you’re in need of a haircut.”

When Robbie first met Ivy’s father, it was not under the best of circumstances, mainly because Robbie was stoned again and had the roaring munchies. He sits on the carpet, noisily wolfing Cheese Puffs from the big glass bowl on the living-room coffee table, while Mr. Mills paces and quizzes him about his father’s occupation.