by William Bell
Also by
WILLIAM BELL
Crabbe
Absolutely Invincible
Death Wind
Five Days of the Ghost
Forbidden City
No Signature
Speak to the Earth
Zack
Stones
Alma
Just Some Stuff I Wrote
The Blue Helmet
Only in the Movies
Fanatics
COPYRIGHT © 2014 WILLIAM BELL
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bell, William, 1945-, author
Julian / William Bell.
ISBN 978-0-385-68205-3 (bound) ISBN 978-0-385-68206-0 (epub)
I. Title.
PS8553.E4568J84 2014 jc813′.54 C2014-903131-9
C2014-903132-7
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Jacket design: Leah Springate
Jacket image: © sparth/Getty Images
“Which Way Does the River Run?” lyrics copyright © Lennie Gallant (www.lenniegallant.com), used with permission.
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House company
www.randomhouse.ca
v3.1
For Jia Han
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One: There must be a River
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Part Two: Life in the First Person
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Part Three: Marika
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Part Four: Ninon
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Epilogue: L’isle-Sur-La-Sorgue
Chapter Thirty-four
Acknowledgments
PART ONE
THERE MUST BE A RIVER
ONE
IT WAS ONE OF THOSE March days when all four seasons took turns playing hide-and-seek in the streets. Rain, sleet and snow rode across the city on blustery winds, and sunlight appeared only briefly through gaps in the roiling clouds.
A strange day, threatening or promising, Aidan couldn’t decide. Maybe both, he thought, watching the buildings on University Avenue slide past the school bus window under a grey sky. Unpredictable? Definitely. He had awakened that morning with traces of an unfamiliar mood in a corner of his mind, like the residue of a dream. He couldn’t shake the almost overwhelming feeling that something was going to happen, that his life was about to be altered.
By the time the bus drew up to the curb in front of the Ontario Art Gallery—joining a half-dozen others—the winds had calmed and a chilly drizzle had given way to snow. Around him, Aidan’s grade ten classmates jumped from their seats, pulled backpacks from overhead racks and surged noisily toward the bus doors. Aidan waited until the tide of bodies had cleared, then stepped down from the bus, keeping apart from the boisterous throng on the sidewalk. Tall and fit, his team jacket tight across his shoulders, he could easily have passed for a young man four or five years older. He stood alone at the curb, still lost in the mood that had been with him since the day began.
He gazed across Dundas Street toward a row of old houses converted into boutiques and cafés, his attention seized by the falling snow. It seemed as if a hush had fallen over the city. As in a photograph or a painting, the space between the sky and the street was filled with white flakes that magically appeared out of the low clouds, thickened, then descended lazily through the still air to crumble and melt and disappear the moment they touched the ground.
A hand on his shoulder broke Aidan’s concentration. A passing streetcar clanged its bell, rumbling along rails shiny with moisture. Cars and taxicabs hissed by. Snowmelt dripped from branches and overhead wires onto the pedestrians hustling along the sidewalk.
He turned to see his art teacher smiling up at him.
“Van Gogh awaits,” she said. “It’s not hockey, but you might find it interesting.”
Ms. Sayers began to herd her students through the gallery doors into a lobby already packed with teens from other schools. Aidan hung back. A flash of colour had caught his eye—a sky-blue beret worn by a girl whose thick auburn hair was gathered at the back of her neck with a scrunchie. She was wearing a roomy camo jacket, cargo pants and military-style boots, and she was leaning against the gallery wall, her eyes on the crowd. Suddenly she slipped through the doors and blended with the mob.
Aidan followed. While he and his classmates checked their coats and backpacks, Sayers picked up their tickets at the reception desk and handed them around, reminding everyone to stay together and enter as a group. Strident young voices echoed as students massed before three harried ushers impatient to get into the exhibit.
Aidan saw the girl again. He watched as she insinuated herself deeper into the crowd. A few of his classmates began to horse around, bored by their slow progress. Someone lurched forward, falling against the back of the girl in front of him. She whipped around, red-faced, and shoved the already off-balance offender away. He collapsed into the mass. Raucous laughter. Jeers. People craned their necks, seeking the source of the disturbance. In the confusion, the blue beret moved quickly toward the exhibit entrance. Aidan watched the girl slip past the distracted ushers and disappear up the curved staircase.
Nice move, he thought.
In the first gallery given over to the Van Gogh exhibit, a large, dimly lit space with spotlit canvases ranged along the walls, Aidan sat on the long upholstered bench in the centre of the room and fished his assignment sheet from his inside pocket. Apart from drumming up enthusiasm in her class and lecturing briefly on the life and times of Van Gogh, Sayers had said little about specific works. She wanted her students to experience the paintings fresh, to see them as Van Gogh’s contemporaries had, free of reputation and prejudgment. The task was a sort of treasure hunt. The students were to search out about a dozen paintings Sayers had identified and note each one’s place and date of composition. The second part of the assignment asked for personal impressions and thoughts on any paintings that stood out. “There are no right or wrong opinions,�
� Aidan read from the sheet in his hand.
He reached down and massaged his ankle, still sore from last night’s game. Aidan had slipped Daryl Findlay’s check inside the blue line and swooped in for a shot on goal. Humiliated, Findlay had slashed him in retaliation, then sneered as he skated past him on his way to the penalty box.
Aidan got up and began a slow circuit of the crowded gallery, looking over shoulders and between heads for the works Sayers had identified. He made notes on each. Then he returned to the first of the paintings that had appealed to him. The Langlois Bridge at Arles with Women Washing depicted a horse-drawn cart on a stone bridge over a stream where a few women were cleaning laundry. As he began to write down his impressions, the blue beret bobbed into view among a clutch of middle-aged women and men with audio guides pressed to their ears. Together, they stopped before a canvas showing a sunlit field of flowers. The girl had opened her jacket and freed her hair. The thick auburn tresses brushed her shoulders, gleaming in the spotlights as she stepped closer to the canvas. Aidan consulted his notes. Wheat Field, 1888. The girl’s beret was the exact colour of the sky above the field. She stepped back, melting into the preoccupied crowd, sidling closer to a grey-haired woman in a long leather coat. Aidan watched the girl dip her slender hand into the woman’s tote bag, remove a purse and slip the prize into her own coat pocket. Nonchalantly she drifted to the next painting, paused for a few minutes, then sauntered into the next room.
Nice move again, Aidan thought. But he had read enough detective novels to know that the girl wasn’t exactly a professional. The first thing a pickpocket wants to do is blend in. Her camo clothes and beret were like beacons.
Unsettled by the girl, he turned his attention to the papers in his hand. One of the questions asked him to identify his favourite paintings from the exhibit. Although there were more rooms of Van Goghs, Aidan decided to make it easier by writing about two he had already seen. Wood Gatherers in the Snow depicted a family trudging home at sunset along the edge of a canal or lake, dead tired under their bundles of sticks and probably looking forward to a soft seat and a cup of something warm. The painting caught the mood of a northern winter landscape already drained of light, the sky grey and cheerless and the snow dull. He liked the fact that Van Gogh had painted a family and that they were all together, but he didn’t put that in his notes. Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries de la Mer couldn’t have been more different. Four playfully coloured fishing boats rested on their keels under a Mediterranean sky bursting with light. The sails were furled, the gear packed away, the day’s work done. Fishers and boats safe and sound at home—a feeling Aidan seldom experienced. He omitted that from his observations, too.
Sayers dropped down beside him on the seat.
“So, any thoughts? Which one are you writing about?”
“The one with the boats,” he replied, not looking up from the page.
“Good choice. One of the more famous in this room. Any questions?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Alright, then.”
Sayers rose and walked across the room to a quartet of students who seemed more interested in what was happening on the screen of a smartphone than the art surrounding them. Aidan finished his note and walked into the next room in the exhibit, hoping to see the girl-thief again. She was there, standing before a painting of a yellow house. Aidan approached slowly and stood beside her. She wasn’t pretty in a movie star way, but there was something about her. The background murmur of people fell away. He could hear the girl’s breathing, smell her skin. He wanted to feel her breath on his neck, to take her thick glossy hair into his hands.
Instead he pretended to be fascinated by the canvas. Children’s colours, he thought. Buildings in strong shades of yellow, one with a pink awning, another with a red roof. A man walking past on the sidewalk. An impossibly blue sky.
“There’s no way any sky could be that colour of blue,” he whispered.
She turned to him. He had never seen such green eyes. She spoke with a trace of accent, her voice melancholy and soft.
“Oh, in Provence the sky is exactly like that,” she said. “It’s the bluest sky in the world.”
“You’ve been there?”
“I was born there.”
While people eddied around him, he cast about for something else to say, some clever words to keep the conversation going. But she turned away and drifted across the room to where a small group of women seemed mesmerized by a night scene of swirling skies and exploding stars. Here we go again, Aidan thought.
A uniformed guard was sitting in a chair by the door, arms crossed over her chest, a two-way radio at her belt leaking static. She was good at her job. Without seeming to pay attention to anything in particular, she was watching the girl.
Aidan crossed over, putting himself in the guard’s line of sight, and approached the girl from behind.
“The guard has her eye on you,” he whispered.
The girl didn’t react right away. She let a few seconds pass, then, as light and unconcerned as a breeze, meandered out of the gallery.
Behind him, Aidan heard boots on the gallery floor and the creak of a leather belt. He waited a split second, spun around and took a step, looking down at his notes, and crashed into the guard, knocking her radio from her hand. His papers spilled to the ground. He fell to his knees to gather the sheets, getting in the guard’s way as she tried to recover her two-way.
“I’m sorry! My fault!” he said.
Her eyes were on the doorway as she tried to regain her balance. “Never mind,” she snapped, her face pink with embarrassment. “Doesn’t matter.”
Aidan watched her go back to her seat, waiting for her to use her radio. But she settled back and resumed her bored expression.
Aidan was tempted to go after the girl. He tossed the idea almost as soon as it crossed his mind. What would he say or do if he managed to catch up with her? Mumble a few meaningless sentences, probably. Make a fool of himself. He had already crash-landed with his pathetic line about the sky in the picture of the houses. On the other hand, what did he have to lose? No, he should do what he was supposed to do—stay and complete the assignment.
He lowered himself onto the bench in the centre of the gallery, ignoring the patrons moving slowly from canvas to canvas, some speaking in hushed tones, as if in church. He took out his pen, tried to concentrate on the remaining questions, but the girl—her beautiful hair, her green eyes, her daring—pulled at him. He forced himself to resist. Eyes boring resentfully into the page in his hand, he skipped over the references to specific paintings and the invitations to share personal reactions of the “How does it make you feel?” variety to the final query, “ ‘Art is life.’ Comment.”
A typically vague, touchy-feely Sayers question. His eye travelled over the paintings opposite. A field at harvest time with a blue wagon in the middle. Another with irises in the foreground. Aidan wished art was life. If you didn’t like the way yours turned out, you could do what a painter did—change it by painting over it. You could touch it up, make a few minor improvements. Or you could start from scratch and redo the whole thing, work away until you had something that satisfied you. It would be your painting, and you could do what you wanted. You’d be in control.
They said Van Gogh went crazy for a while and spent time in a monastery sanatorium or something. But they also said he did dozens of paintings while he was there—sometimes two or three a day. Wherever he was, each time he began a new work he started with a blank canvas. He decided the dimensions, the type of preparation, the subject. Everything. He took a piece of canvas and created what came out of his mind, anything from a plate of fruit to three fishing boats to a pair of old boots. If he made an error or changed his mind, his brush made what he didn’t like disappear. Even a lousy painter controlled the project.
With a bitter, silent laugh, Aidan thought, if art is life, I’m not the painter; I’m the canvas.
Others made the decisions, s
et the goals, described his obligations. Others wielded the brush. It had always been like that. When he was younger, every time he had thought he was settled with a new foster family and could be normal for once, the ceiling fell in. His caseworker would speak to him, explain why he’d have to move again, assure him it wasn’t his fault. Mr. Foster-McCallum lost his job and had to move out west for work. Aidan packed up his things and waited in the living room for a taxi. Mrs. Foster-Wainwright had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had a rough time ahead of her and couldn’t handle an extra kid to care for. Aidan cleaned up his room for the last time, said goodbye and got into the back seat of his caseworker’s car. And now it was beginning to look like life with the Foster-Boyds might also tumble down like a pile of pick-up sticks. He’d only been with them for about a year and a half.
He didn’t blame the people at the Children’s Aid Society. He didn’t blame anyone. Sometimes he wished he could focus his anger and discontent on somebody. Instead, he stood quietly fuming on the sidelines while other people made decisions about every aspect of his life. Loneliness and instability had hardened him, and he looked at the world from behind a wall of his own making.
One CAS caseworker, Raleigh Diamond, got him into lacrosse. Aidan played for a couple of years, then quit when Raleigh changed jobs and disappeared. Another, Jannie Sugarman, introduced him to hockey when he was ten. He liked hockey—most of the time—and turned out to be good at it, which pleased the Foster-Boyds, especially Henry. Aidan played centre and usually led the league in points. Now his life was a whirl of school, practices, games and sports camps. There had never been a minute of his time that was his.
The feeling that had almost knocked him to the pavement a while earlier as he stared into the hanging snow outside the art gallery swept over him again. A door was about to open, a curtain was about to be drawn. He was sure of it. Was it something to do with the girl in the blue beret?
Aidan jotted a quick note to Sayers on the blank side of his almost complete assignment and gave it to a girl in the class, asking her to wait a half-hour before giving it to Sayers. Then he made his way downstairs, collected his backpack and coat and pushed through the art gallery doors into the street.
