Lost Between Houses

by David Gilmour

  CHAPTER TWO

  BECAUSE WE WERE RICH LITTLE PRICKS we got out of school for the summer three weeks before everybody else. But first we had exams. My brother was writing the provincial finals, which was a big deal, him walking around the upstairs hallway with King Lear in his hand (it had a purple cover), looking out the window and whispering to himself. His skin had broken out again. He was mighty uptight. So was I, to be honest.

  I got through History all right, I aced English, Latin was a breeze, I passed Math, maybe a 60, but then there was the last one, Physics. Sure enough, just like I’d predestined it, the night before my exam I open that book with the scary cover, I’m looking at the soup cans and I’ve never seen them before. I study till around midnight, till I’ve got sand in my eyes and then I go to bed up in the maid’s room. I set the alarm for four o’clock. I check it about five times. I turn out the light. I close my eyes. I sink right down to the bottom of the tank. I mean I’m like a dead man, lying there on the bottom, when the alarm goes off. I think it can’t be four o’clock, not yet, I’ve just got to sleep, there must be something wrong with the clock. So I pick it up in the dark and I squint at it. Fuck me: Four it is. I’m so tired I feel sick to my stomach, like something really bad is going to happen if I don’tgo right back to sleep. I feel like calling for my mother and getting her to write me a note, saying I can’t come to school today. Simon’s not feeling well. You can say that again.

  But I get up and go over and sit at the desk, staring at the yellow wall, wrapped in a blanket. I open the horrible physics book. I turn the pages: more soup cans, more arrows.

  After awhile I can hear the city waking up, I hear Bluestein’s mutt, I hear a car drive down the street, a solitary car, the first of the day. It’s sort of a relief actually when the sunlight comes through the window, it means I’m getting near the end. I go down to the kitchen and get some orange juice and toast and come back up to the maid’s room.

  It’s an afternoon exam so I leave the house around noon. The street has a strange feel to it, and I realize it’s because I never come along here at this time. But it’s a pretty spring day, the sun high up in the sky; the clouds are long and feathery and the air smells sweet. I get to school an hour early. Some of the guys like to hang around the exam room, yacking like crazy, asking each other questions, but I don’t do that. I figure somebody’ll ask me something I don’t know and it’ll rattle the shit out of me. So I stay away. I feel like I’m balancing a big medicine ball on top of my head and any sudden movement in any direction will make it fall off and I won’t remember a thing. I head out to the soccer field. There’s nobody there and I settle down in the grass, me and my physics book. I lie on my stomach. I can see the school from here, I can see the boys, little tiny figures milling around the front door, I can hear their voices coming across the grounds. I can smell the grass. I look down and I can see an ant crawling around. I part the grass carefully and I watch him.

  I finally open up the physics book. The sun reflects off the pages, it makes me squint, I stare down at the book, I start to read but after awhile I realize I’m thinking about being in the boat up at our cottage, I’m thinking of the chink-chink the waves make under the hull on a choppy day. I turn the page, I look at it, but my attention just slides off like an egg slipping off a plate. Same for the next page. I can’t read any more, I can’t read another word or think about anything more and if it’s on the exam, well, that’s too bad for me. So I close the book, I just stretch out, I put my hand under my chin and I just wait there in the warm grass.

  The exam went all right. I mean it didn’t make me sign up for science camp or anything, but I didn’t bomb out either. Funny thing about that book, though. The textbook. Like the minute I got out of the exam, it went from being the most important book in the world, right in the centre of the universe, to just a pile of pages with doodles all over them. It even looked different. I brought it home though. I was too superstitious to leave it lying around on a windowsill at school. I was afraid it might get pissed off at me and arrange things so I flunked. You can never be too careful.

  Next day, we packed up the car and headed north to our cottage. The old man stayed in the Clinic. Which was just fine with me.

  It was about a three-hour drive to get there and we always stopped at the same place for something to eat. It was a little roadside joint with fabulous hamburgers. Some local guy ran it but he turned it into a big deal, every summer it got bigger, more kids working on the grill, pretty girls taking your order in the parking lot.

  “How come we never go anywhere else?” I said as I burst out of the car. It wasn’t really a question, I was just happy to beout of school and I wanted to talk. But Harper was a little grumpy that day.

  “I don’t know,” he grunted, “good burgers, I guess.” There was no point asking what was bugging him, he’d just tell you to buzz off. He wasn’t like me that way. I can’t keep anything to myself. I mean I find it physically difficult to keep my mouth shut.

  Anyway. Out in the parking lot, the old lady opened a thermos of vodka and orange juice, she’d whipped it up before she left home, and poured herself a drink. She opened the car door and left it open. She had this crazy idea that you could drink in your car as long as you had one foot on the ground. She kept the car door open so she could get her leg out extra fast in case a cop walked by. Jesus. What these folks wouldn’t do for a noggin. Like I mean, what with the old man getting soused in the living room, night after night, you’d think this wasn’t such a hot idea. Everybody walking around in a fucking blur. Getting pissed off at stuff they couldn’t even remember in the morning. One night when I was little, like in grade seven, he called me downstairs to look at my math homework. Talk about looking for trouble. Course it was all screwed up, mistakes all over the place and next thing I know is he hurls the notebook into the air, it’s flapping there like some kind of bird and I’m running for cover.

  I sort of daydreamed that he’d stay in the Clinic all summer, which I know is a bad thing to admit, but at least nobody’d have to be nervous around him. No more walking around like you’re in a minefield, wondering what’s going to set him off, a wet towel on the bed, borrowing a comb and not putting it back. I mean get this, one morning I get up for school, I’m twelve years old and I can’t find my comb. So I go into his bedroom and I pick up his off the night table and I wander around the house,combing my hair, looking here and there, in this mirror, that mirror, I don’t know, I’m twelve remember, and next thing I know he comes charging into my bedroom, fit to be tied, and he wants to know where his comb is. So I say I don’t know. He asks me if I borrowed it and stupidly I tell him the truth, I say, yeah I did. Well that just sets him off. He just about has a fucking stroke right there in his business suit. I can smell the Old Spice when he comes close to me. I can also feel my behind contracting violently.

  “The next time you take my comb,” he says, just shaking, “I’m going to give you a beating!”

  And the thing is, he meant it. He really did.

  Anyway. Enough about him.

  Point is, after awhile, you wish people like that would just stay away.

  Anyway, we’re driving north. We get to Huntsville, we go through town real slow, I’m looking this way, that way, for my summer pals, Greg with the bad teeth, and his sexy sister. I see Mr Jewel who owns the shoe store; Chip Peterson who’s good at golf; we go by the hardware store and cross over the bridge, it rings like a big hollow drum under the car, there’s Blackburn’s Marina where we gas up the boat, Loblaw’s, the Tastee Queen where we go after the dance at Teen Town. It’s all there, just the same as last summer. I see Sandy Hunter on the side of the road, she must be coming home from school, her hair all long and blonde. We pick up speed. Seven point three miles to go. I know all the houses, the barns, the hilltops from here on in. I undo the window and I can feel the air blow on my face. Smells completely different than it does in the city.

  We turn off the road and go down the
lane. Trees on both sides, you can hear the branches scrape the side of the car. You can hear our little stream, which runs through the ravine. There’s our mailbox, all rusted from the winter. Pebbles crunching under the car wheels. We come around a corner and there it is, a big field and our house at the far end. Rambling, a white clapboard house with a double garage and green shutters. There’s my room, top right-hand side, overlooking the garage. I’m so impatient to get going I can hardly breathe. I get out of the car. I want to do everything in my summer vacation all in the next hour. But I have to help bring the stuff into the house, groceries and suitcases and pillow slips stuffed with fresh bedding, all kinds of stuff, records, even a plant. Then I run upstairs to my room. I love the way it smells, all unused and empty, there’s a sort of exciting mothbally tang. The cowboys on the wallpaper from when I was a little squirt, the old clothes in the drawer that don’t fit me any more, a skindiving magazine, an old Field and Stream. A book on graphology. I flip it open. All my notes in the margin. Jesus, remember that? Man, I really worked at it. Last chapter is called “How to Recognize a Murderer.”

  From my window I can see all the way down to the lake. All the leaves aren’t grown in. It’s not really summer up here yet. The water is too cold for swimming; it’s sort of colourless and foreign this time of year. But it’s going to warm up just fine and in a month it’ll be like soup. That’s what my mother always says when she slips off the dock into the water, a towel around her head. “My God, boys,” she says, “it’s like soup.”

  And then I set off, I zip all over the house, into the bathroom, the empty bedroom at the end of the hall, the old man’s room, I check the cupboards in the downstairs hallway, I love the way they smell, too. Then I go into the basement. That’s where I set up my drums. Well I don’t have a set of drums, they’re too noisy I’m told, so I set up a whole lot of books, just like adrum kit. Plus I’ve got an old cymbal with a chunk missing, a plastic garbage can lid for a high hat and an old record player. I mounted the whole works on a platform, to give it a sense of occasion, as they say. Man, the daydreams I’ve had down there. I won’t even go into it. But you know what I mean.

  Cha-la-la-la-la,

  It’s not the way you smile

  That breaks my heart

  Cha-la-la-la-la.

  There’s all sorts of old stuff down there, pots covered in spider webs, old photograph albums, a bait box, a workbench, a wonky ping-pong table. Sometimes I feel sort of sorry for the basement, it’s like a person nobody ever visits. I feel like I’m its only protector, the only one in the house that shows any interest in it. If it weren’t for me nobody would care for that place at all. But it also spooks me sometimes, particularly at night. There’s a light bulb down there that you have to turn off before you can go up the stairs. You’ve got to do that last little bit completely in the dark. And sometimes when I’m about half up the stairs, I can feel the hair rise on the back of my neck, I have a feeling that somebody is going to come out from behind the furnace and grab me by the ankles. I don’t know how many times I’ve come blasting into the kitchen like I’ve been shot out of a cannon.

  Anyway, I’m down there for awhile, fooling around, when I hear Harper at the top of the stairs.

  “Let’s go down to the dock,” he says, which means that his bad mood has lifted. And I say sure and we head out.

  Must have been a couple of weeks later. I was in my mother’s bedroom one afternoon, listening to a Latin zither record. She went to town once a week and cleaned out the local record store, I mean she bought everything, Pete Fountain and his clarinet, Elvis Presley’s Golden Hits, Dave Brubeck, soundtracks from Italian movies, the works. It was corny stuff, this Latin zither, but romantic and it made me sentimental, sad about stuff that had never even happened. My mother had this great big picture window in her bedroom, it was huge, you could spread out your arms and not even touch the sides. You could see everything, the field going down to the marsh, the lake all blue and sparkly, a country road way, way off in the distance, and sometimes when the sun was setting, there was a gold light that covered everything. You couldn’t believe anything could be so pretty.

  I heard the phone ring at the other end of the house. It rang a couple of times and then it stopped. I waited. I heard footsteps coming toward me.

  “Simon, it’s for you.”

  I figured it was Greg, the guy with the bad teeth. We were going to Teen Town that night. He looked okay in there, you could hardly notice his teeth. I picked up the phone.

  “Do you remember me?” It was a sort of boyish voice but it was a girl.

  “Scarlet?”

  “Boy, you got a good memory.”

  “I recognized your voice.”

  “A lot of people do. I got your number from a friend of yours.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “A guy at your party.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I can’t remember his name. Not really my type. I hope you don’t mind me calling you.”

  “No, not at all.”

  “I mean there’s not very much you could say about it, is there?”

  There was a pause.

  “Listen, do you remember that guy I was with?” she said.

  “Mitch?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He dumped me.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, he never really struck me as your type. If you know what I mean.” I sort of jumped into this sentence without thinking about it, and now I was stuck inside it.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, he just didn’t seem like the kind of person you are.

  “What kind of person is that?”

  “Sort of…” I waited for the word to come, “complicated.”

  “You’re complicated, too,” she said. “I could tell.”

  “Oh yeah? How?”

  “Just by the stuff you said. Not having a girlfriend and not caring if anybody knew.”

  “Well, I’ve had a girlfriend before.”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t mean anything, just having one. Just for the sake of it.”

  “Exactly. You don’t want to brag or anything.”

  That stumped her. “

  What do you mean?”

  “Well, there are some things you don’t want to get caught doing and tooting your own horn is definitely one of them.”

  “What are the other things?”

  “What?”

  “The other things you don’t want to get caught doing?”

  “Well, never mind about that.”

  “Tell me.”

  “We don’t really know each other well enough to get into that stuff.”

  “So you’ve had a girlfriend before?”

  “A couple.”

  “Do you have one now?”

  “Not at this very moment.”

  “Yeah, but is there somebody out there thinking they’re your girlfriend?”

  “Not unless they’re mentally ill.”

  “Listen,” she said, “when are you coming back down to the city?”

  I went outside looking for Harper. He was driving golf balls into the ravine.

  “Don’t you think the old man is going to notice he’s missing a few balls?”

  “Nah,” he said. “He won’t notice fuck-all.”

  Harper brought down the club and whacked one into the blue sky; it hung there for a moment and then crackled as it fell through the trees.

  “That’s a beauty,” I said. He teed up another ball.

  “This chick just called me.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “The chick from my party.”

  “It wasn’t Evelyn Massey, was it?”

  “No, she didn’t come, remember? It was somebody else.”

  “God, I’d really like to go down on her.”

  “Yeah, you told me. No, this was somebody else. You remember that chick in the sparkly dress.”

  “The good-looking one?”
r />   “Scarlet.”

  “That her name?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s a fucked-up name.”

  “Anyway.”

  For an older brother, Harper was sort of weirdly sensitive, and he could see I’d come out there to talk to him about the girl.

  “So she called you?” he said.

  “Yeah. Out of the blue.”

  “What’d she want?”

  “She just broke up with her boyfriend.”

  “Really?”

  “Who broke up with who?”

  I hesitated a second.

  “It was kind of mutual.”

  “That’s a good one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If he broke up with her and she’s on the blower in two seconds to another guy, you don’t have to be a fucking genius to figure that one out.”

  “Like she’s getting even?”

  “Or making him jealous or some such bullshit.”

  “You figure?”

  “People fall in love, they break up, they do all sorts of shitty things to each other. Remember that cunt Judy Strickland.”

  I didn’t want to talk about Judy Strickland just now.

  “She was a cunt, that girl. Somebody should’ve taken her out behind the woodshed and put her down. Right at birth.”

  “Anyway, Scarlet wanted to know when I was coming down to the city.”

  “Yeah, well don’t bet the farm on it.”

  He teed up another ball.

  “Judy Strickland. Proof positive that all human beings are not created equal,” he said and whacked a ball into the valley.

  “You can tell by the click,” he said. “When the club makes that kind of a click, you know it’s a beauty.”

  Just then the side door opened and the old lady came out through the garage. She had her shirt tied at her waist, like Harry Belafonte. She must have seen us gabbing from the kitchen window and she wanted to know what was cooking. I started to tell her. Harper went inside right in the middle of it, he’d already heard the story and I was sort of sorry to see him go, it was like it wasn’t interesting enough to hear a second time but once he was gone for awhile I was glad because I didn’t have to be hip about how I described it to my mother.