Lost Between Houses (2 page)

By the time recess rolled around I was starving, and even though I hadn’t got around to my physics homework yet, I went over to the tuck shop and bought a chocolate donut and a thing of chocolate milk. Christ it tasted good, it made me sort of weak with pleasure. Then I got to talking to a couple of guys and then the bell rang and I ended up in physics class with nothing done. We had this chrome dome for a teacher, a big barrel-chested guy with a bald head. I threw up my arm and asked a question before he even set his books down. That works sometimes, you bombard the guy so that when he gets around to the homework, he feels like he’s already heard enough from you and asks somebody else. So he answers my question but then he says, “Since you’re so talkative this morning, Mr Albright, why don’t you take us through the first velocity problem.”

“Well, it’s not quite ready, sir,” I said.

“What isn’t?”

“That particular section.”

“You mean you haven’t done your homework.” He’s a prick too.

I saw the English guy in the hallway after lunch.

“I’m having a little party,” I said. My heart was crashing but I invited him anyway. He was very pleased. Up close he didn’t seem so spectacular though. Sort of phoney and forced, like he was copying his dad or something, like he knew it was a number that impressed people in a foreign country and so he was playing it to the hilt.

“Awfully decent of you,” he said. “A chap doesn’t want to presume.”

See what I mean? Like total bullshit, but I was afraid he’d see on my face how I was feeling so the next thing I knew I was laughing like a hyena, throwing my head around like he was
saying the funniest stuff I’d ever heard in my life. We must have made some kind of spectacle. When I walked away I felt sort of queasy, like I was made out of tinfoil. Fuck me, I thought, I got to stop doing that.

But it was a great scam, this party thing. Instant power.

Take George Hara, for example. He was in Grade Twelve, a year ahead of me. He played on the hockey team and I’d hated him ever since he said something shitty about my goaltending. (Truth is, pucks scare me.) Anyway, one afternoon last winter I was playing in a pick-up game after school and I was on George’s team, the second last guy to get picked, natch, and when one of our guys scored, I zipped around the rink hollering, “We scored! We scored!” George waited till I was in earshot and then he said, “What do you mean
we?”

See what I mean? A real asshole, but he was bigger than me, and mean in a special way—the expressionless, bony face, the lank hair—he scared me. He seemed like the kind of guy who could punch you in the mouth and not feel bad about it. Anyway, for obvious reasons, I kept a low profile on just how much I loathed him. In other words, I said terrible things
about
him, but never
to
him. With my party, I finally had some leverage. He heard me talking about it on the way to the gym, as a matter of fact I sort of raised my voice as I passed him so he couldn’t miss it. He may have been good at hockey, but he lived a hell of a long way from the school and sometimes I saw him staring at me out of the window of his dad’s car when I was talking to the girls from Bishop Strachan. Later that afternoon, right after sports, I came blasting out the side door of the school and there was George, waiting in the parking lot for his father to pick him up. He looked sort of forlorn out there, tapping his school bag with his foot, killing time, like a guy who didn’t have anything
to look forward to, and I felt a sort of wave of sympathy for him.

“Hey George!” I hollered. He stopped kicking his bag and waited for me to get there. He even stuck his hands in his pockets like he was a bit uncomfortable. I went right up to him. “Hey man, do you want to come to my party?”

And guess what he said?

I’m telling you, for awhile there, it was like being mayor of the city.

A few days later, we went to visit the old man in the Clinic. It was set in a pretty enough spot, if you like that sort of thing, about a half-hour outside the city. Me, it always makes me nervous leaving town. I always feel like I might be missing something. Call it a hole in my personality, whatever, I just don’t care for all that empty space and nobody around. Harper was supposed to come too but he pooped out at the last minute; said he had cricket practice. Right.

Anyway, this place was a grand old mansion in the country. Even the physical whereabouts seemed subdued, like somebody had told the birds to shut the fuck up, didn’t they realize the gravity of the situation, all these rich folks going nuts, trying to kill their wives and drinking antifreeze. Or freaking out about money and hitting the sauce, like my dad.

As usual, Mother went in to see him first. I waited outside in the hall. I was watching this old Cleopatra clanking around the halls in her jewellery and smoking a cigarette in a long black holder. She was pretty friendly actually. Very chatty. Probably a drunk, I figured, and her kids stuck her here because she was just too much to have around. I mean fifteen minutes was fine but I can’t imagine having that coming at you in the kitchen at eight o’clock in the morning. I mean that’s the thing about
crazy people: they’ve got so much energy, they’re always up to something, projects, realignments, that kind of thing. She didn’t dawdle either, this one, told me she had to speak to a doctor about something going on in France.

Ten minutes went by; not a sound from my dad’s room, not a peep, I didn’t know what they were doing in there but I started to get self-conscious, the nurses looking at me as they went by. So I went wandering around the halls. There was lots of sunlight streaming in, canned music, all very
up.
But when I turned the corner, I heard a groan coming from behind a door, a really awful, end-of-the-world groan, like only a crazy person who didn’t care what anybody thought of them would make. It was so raw, like watching an animal being born and it scared the bejesus out of me. I hurried back to my dad’s room. I didn’t wait, nothing, I just burst in the door.

My mother was sitting on the bed, holding his hand, and I heard him say, “I just don’t have the confidence any more.” Then he saw me standing there and this expression of impatience and irritation came over his face. He just closed right up.

“Just a minute,” he said, like I was a moron, like I’d turned up at a wedding with jam and cat hair all over my face. “Your mother will be right there.”

I went back out into the hall, considerably offended. When I get pissed off like that, I get this sensation in my body, a sort of metallic hollowness, and I can’t get rid of it unless I complain about it to the person who made me feel like that. But with my dad—he was from the old school, in case I haven’t mentioned it—he didn’t figure it was my place to talk back. So you never really got to have it out with him. It just left you sick with rage and planning to stick him with a pitchfork.

I glared at a nurse who looked at me. Even my posture
changed. I leaned against the wall and crossed my arms. It felt sort of familiar. Then I remembered why. It was the way I stood in the hall when I got kicked out of class for being an asshole. Same exact way.

“Oh yeah,
that’s
what he’s like,” I thought to myself. “For a second there, I thought I actually missed him.”

A few minutes later my mother fluttered out, all anxious and smiley and trying to make everything all right.

“He’s not feeling well,” she said. I snorted. I shouldn’t have but I did. It was partly to punish her for not taking my side, for not getting it. I went right in.

My father was lying in bed in blue pyjamas. His face was grey, his hands folded across his chest like a stiff. Naturally he said nothing about kicking me out a moment earlier. ‘Sorry’ would have done the trick, I would have melted with surprise; I would have melted with gratitude, too, because it would have freed me from feeling like I had a belt around my chest.

He asked me about school, about a test I’d knocked out of the park the week before, math no less.

“There was this isosceles triangle problem but there was a mistake in it. Like in the typing. So instead of solving it, I proved that you
couldn’t
solve it.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “That’s good. That’s very good.”

He wasn’t listening to a fucking word I said, a dummy could see that, and I got instantly pissed off at myself for letting him play me like a sucker again, me coming up there thinking he’d be glad to see me and all. But no, he was just putting up with me, as usual.

“It’s been nice to see you,” I said.

We shook hands. I went back out into the hall. My mother was out there, smoking a cigarette.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

I laughed.

“Don’t be like that,” she snapped. “It’s so unattractive.”

I waited a couple of beats. I could feel my face distorting. Like the muscles were moving it as if they had a mind of their own.

“Yeah, well don’t feel compelled to bring me next time,” I said.

I called up a whole mess of people that night. Part of me was ready for them to say, “A party? At your place? Now why the
fuck
would I go to a party at your place?” But it didn’t go like that, not at all. My mother was right. People like being invited places, even by an asshole, not that I was one, but if they’ve got a choice, they’d rather not go than not be invited. It sort of gained momentum, this ringing people up, and by the end I was really speedy, like it was a race or something. I had so much juice I even called up a few people I hadn’t intended to invite. What the hell, I thought, it’s a party, but really it was just an excuse to
keep at it.
I kept making the same joke over and over, like it just occurred to me.

“Hi Leonard,” I’d say, “not that I expect anybody to come, but I’m having a little party,” and then I’d laugh like I’d never said it before. Which was fine until I accidentally called him back.

“You already said that,” he said.

Most guys would have let it go but not Leonard. He was a little bit
exact
for my comfort.

I saved the girls for the end. I called up Susan Fairley first, she had a fierce crush on me, a one-way crush I might add, but I knew she’d come. I called Adrienne Mustard, the doctor’s
daughter, and told her to bring Mary-Anne Parker. Then the Bishop Strachan girls, Jane Martin and Rodent and Jamie Porter, who would let you do a lot if you could just get her alone. And that went so well, I started to call the tougher cases, those pretty Catholic girls, Pamela Mathews and Anna Christie and Cynthia Macdonald, who was so beautiful she scared me. Somebody asked me if they should tell Daphne Gunn and I said sure, why not.

On the night of the party, Friday, I came home right after school. My mother had done everything, natch. She was whirling around the house like it was
her
party.

“I’ve got the potato chips, pretzels, Coke, orange pop, dip, I know you don’t like it but some kids do.”

“What are the green things?” I asked.

“Don’t be negative. They’re pickles. You don’t have to eat them.”

“I can smell them from here.”

“Then go stand somewhere else. Gosh, I forgot the party hats.”

My face nearly fell off.

“I’m kidding,” she said softly, like it offended her I could even think that.

“You better relax, Simon,” my brother said. “This is supposed to be a party.”

I went upstairs and left her to it. I took a shower, dried my hair under her hairnet, something that made it just right. Sort of puffy but in a natural way. I mean no one was going to mistake me for Troy Donahue but I knew that going in. I put on a pair of crisp black slacks, a shirt and a blue sweater. Brought out my eyes, my mother always said. I put on the old man’s deodorant,
Old Spice, but I already had my shirt on, so I had to undo a couple of buttons and squeeze it in there. I was worried about wrecking my hair by moving around too much. I brushed my teeth, gargled till I gagged.

“Jesus, Simon,” Harper said through the bathroom door, “What the fuck’s going on in there?”

I heard my mother yell from downstairs where she was not minding her own business.

“Harper. Language.”

“Oh yeah,” he said over the balcony, “like he’s never heard those words before.”

“That’s not the point,” she said. Not mad or anything. Just sure.

He let it go, which was good because he had about one more smart-ass remark left before she got pissed off.

A couple of pals turned up before the official beginning. They were all dressed up, you could smell them, soap and deodorant and shampoo. We were all pretty excited and being around each other, what with a whole party ahead of us, it was intoxicating. But right through this, like out of nowhere, I had the weirdest thought, the kind that makes you think you belong in a booby hatch. I imagined my mother walking into my bedroom, all drained of colour, and saying, “Something terrible has happened to your father, you have to cancel the party.”

I dream this shit up just to torture myself. Sometimes I think it’s because I’ve got bad, black flecks in my blood and every so often they pass through my brain. I read a story once about a guy whose wife was having a baby. He was right there in the delivery room with her, and all he could think of was the Nazis throwing babies into ovens. And I remember thinking, that’s fucked up,
boy, that’s really fucked up. There’s a million other things that guy ought to be thinking about. So there I was, the party’s just starting and I’m thinking about Nazis and babies and my dad dying. Fortunately some more people turned up at the door.

My mother disappeared like she’d promised and left me with the whole downstairs.

Around nine-thirty I looked around and I realized that even if nobody else came, I was still home free. There must have been a vacuum that Friday night, and everybody decided to do one thing, like those lemmings all deciding every ten years or so to throw themselves off a cliff. People hung around in the kitchen, in the living room, even in the foyer. They went to the fridge, they took stuff, they acted like they’d been there a hundred times before. It was great. In fact, I had to flush a couple of them out of the basement. They were getting ready for something serious down there.