Lost Between Houses

by David Gilmour

  “Phone call,” he said, grunting like a fucking Neanderthal, and then walked out again, clomp, clomp, leaving the door open, his fucked-up legs going down the hall in jeans. (Being a prefect, he was allowed to wear jeans after class. A real incentive to excellence, that one.)

  I went down the stairs and into the phone booth and pulled the door shut. There was all this handwriting and gouging in the wood from all these kids doodling away with pens or knives or fucking machetes. I picked up the phone.

  “If I stand on my tiptoes, I can almost see your room,” she said.

  The anaconda wrapped himself around my chest.

  “Scarlet?”

  “If you don’t want to talk to me, that’s fine.”

  “Well, whe …, where are you?”

  “I’m just down the street. At Bishop Strachan.”

  I opened my mouth but nothing came out. My jaw just hung there like a busted lantern.

  “I got expelled,” she said. “I got caught smoking pot with a nun. Actually she was just a big lesbo from Los Angeles.”

  “Am I on the radio or something?”

  “So now we’re both in captivity,” she said.

  There was a bit of a pause while I picked at the wood with my fingernail, making a white groove.

  “So I guess you heard,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I broke up with Mitch.”

  “I never see Mitch. I couldn’t pick Mitch out of a police line-up.”

  I heard another voice, an older woman’s, at her end of the line. Scarlet put her hand over the mouthpiece and then in a moment she came back on.

  “I gotta go,” she said. “Don’t think too shitty things about me, all right? Like you don’t know the whole story.”

  She waited a second.

  “All right, Simon?”

  “All right.”

  “And don’t tell anyone I called.”

  I went back up to my room.

  “Guess who that was?” I said to E.K. I was pretty goosed up. In fact when I looked out the window, I noticed that everything seemed covered in a sort of magical glaze.

  “Santa Claus,” he said, snapping off a piece of Scotch tape and laying it carefully over something in his scrapbook.

  I put my feet up on the desk. I put my arms behind my head.

  “I wonder what she wants,” I said out loud, not that I expected E.K. to pick up the ball. Since my trip to Texas, he’d been strangely uncurious about the comings and goings of my life. Odd that within a couple of months this guy, who was generally perceived as a cretin’s cretin, was treating me almost like an equal, sometimes like an out-and-out nuisance. Which happens sometimes when people get to know me.

  But later that night, just as I was getting into bed, some of the steam wore off and I thought to myself, something’s wrong here, something is definitely wrong. It was like my subconscious was trying to tell me something but it wasn’t quite loud enough, particularly with E.K. telling me about how he and his sister used to take all their clothes off and play perverto-man with the flashlight and stuff I’d rather not know about. But when something’s bugging you, there’s usually a pretty good reason for it, unless you’re just nuts, and so once E.K shut up, which was after lights out, I started going over the conversation with Scarlet piece by piece. And after awhile it began to assume a “sinister character,” if I might use an expression from my English class. Especially that don’t tell anyone. When people tell you stuff other people aren’t supposed to know, it’s usually time to start sleeping with a revolver.

  I was thinking to myself, fuck, maybe I sounded too friendly. Maybe I should have told her to fuck off. But then she might have. I started thinking about a whole lot of stuff, her kissing that prefect in my basement, giving me the axe only when she had Mitch back in the bag; and now telling me not to tell anyone she called. It was all sort of sneaky. Like she liked it that way. Preferredit that way. Take away the sneakiness and she’s not so interested any more. There are some real shitty people on earth and it occurred to me that my former girlfriend, Scarlet Duke, might just be one of them.

  But then I realized I didn’t give a shit about any of that. I got all warm and sleepy and I thought, oh well, everything must be okay, otherwise I wouldn’t feel so good, so cosy all tucked up here in my bed and falling asleep.

  Next day I got out of bed with an unusual sensation. I had something to look forward to. I saw Mitch in the hallway just before prayers. He was hanging out with his gang of coolies, same bunch of war criminals as always. Normally I kind of slunk past these guys, hoping nobody would say anything to me. I usually had a little something prepared, some quick retort. That was the thing with those guys: if they weren’t quite sure what you were going to come back with, they tended to leave you alone. But today I didn’t find my heart speeding up when I got near them. In fact I felt a kind of weird kinship for old Mitch. It even felt a bit like affection; but I’m not stupid, I knew what it was. Now that he’d been kicked on his can, he didn’t have it over me any more. I even had a terrible temptation to go over and say, “I heard from our little friend last night,” just so him and his buddies would know. But I had a feeling that might be a little premature and I didn’t want to look like an asshole twice. Moreover old Mitch didn’t look exactly heartbroken. In fact he looked as if everything was hunky-dory. I wondered if he even knew he’d been broken up with. Hard to tell with a guy like Mitch. They’re sort of like poodles, those guys. It doesn’t take much to get them to wag their tails.

  Later that night, when I was back in my room for study period, I heard the phone ring at the far end of the building and I thought,that’s for me. I mean I wasn’t hoping it was, I just knew. And sure enough, a few seconds later I heard footsteps coming along the hall and there was Mr Crater Face standing in the doorway.

  “It’s me again,” she said. “Did you know it was me?”

  “Course.”

  “I had a dream about you last night. I dreamt you took some girl back to my parents’ apartment over on Chaplin. It made me really jealous. Why do you suppose I’d have a dream like that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do you ever have dreams like that?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “You’re not hexing me are you? One of the girls here said you probably put a hex on me.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Well, I wasn’t very considerate, was I?”

  “Oh hell, that’s all over, Scarlet. People fall in love, they break up, big deal. Happens to everybody.”

  “You sound so blasé. Do you have a girlfriend? No, don’t tell me. It’ll just make me jealous. Don’t you think it’s strange though, me having that dream?”

  I was cutting a groove in the counter with my nail again, brushing away the guck so you could see the clean white wood underneath.

  “I’ve heard of stranger things.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “I had to get him back, you know. I had to,” she said. “A guy like you, you’re probably above that stuff. But I’m not. I just had to know I could get him back. For awhile there, it was like he had like all the secrets to the universe.”

  “Mitch? Mitch can hardly find his way to the tuck shop.”

  “But you know what I mean. I mean I bet you wanted toget even with Daphne Gunn. I bet if she’d given you a chance to, you know, even when you were with me, you would have taken it.”

  “Did you ever tell him, by the way?”

  “About what?”

  “About my aunt’s house.”

  “I did, actually.”

  I suddenly remembered what Rachel had said about Scarlet staying out all night.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “It did to me,” she said. “It was my first time.”

  “I thought you were with that folksinger.”

  “I told you. He just got it in part of the way. It didn’t really count.”

  There was a si
lence.

  “All the girls masturbate here,” she said. “It’s like a chicken coop at night.”

  “Jesus, Scarlet. No wonder you got expelled.”

  “Believe me, if you got expelled for that, there’d be nobody in the school. Do they put that saltpetre in your food?”

  “Yeah. Tons of it.”

  “Doesn’t do me any good,” she said. “I must be oversexed or something.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Sometimes I think the police are just going to come and take me away. Don’t you think it’s funny the way we can talk? You know, so easy. There must be a thread there or something.”

  “I don’t know, Scarlet. Maybe.”

  “My father always said I should marry you. Right from the first time he met you. Shit,” she said suddenly, whispering, “I have to go. Fuck. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  On Thursday night, my mother came down to the city and took me out to dinner. That was pretty unusual, going out on a week-night. She must have cleared it with Psycho, who was always sucking up to parents. All that pip, pip, pseudo-British stuff. (Now I knew what pseudo meant, I used it like every third word.)

  We went to our favourite restaurant, that French joint. I was sort of excited, to tell you the truth. I had a feeling something was up, that there was something good in it for me. (Sometimes you can just feel your luck changing. Like opening a window in a stuffy room.) But I also had a feeling it would piss her off if she knew that, so I kept my cards pretty close to my chest. Finally she came out with it. Very understated, of course, but the fact was this; she couldn’t stand living up north with the old man and she was splitting for awhile. Going to go down to stay with her old friend Aunt Marnie who had an apartment in Palm Beach.

  “Are you going to get a divorce?” I asked.

  “For God’s sake, Simon, don’t be such an alarmist.”

  When my mother was feeling guilty sometimes, she went on the attack. I didn’t want her getting all jumpy like that so I said, “You know, ever since I was twelve I wanted you guys to split up.”

  That slowed her down a little bit. She lit a cigarette and very delicately nicked a trace of tobacco off her tongue.

  “There’s nothing final about this. All right? It’s just for now.”

  “Will you get an apartment when you get back?”

  “I don’t know, Simon. I really don’t. God’s teeth!”

  “That would be cool though, you know. I could come and stay with you. Better, I could come and live with you. Get out of boarding. God, that would be fabulous.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to see, Simon.”

  And after awhile we started talking about other stuff, all sorts of things, Scarlet, Psycho, that time she went out with Errol Flynn.

  “Did you know,” she said, “they almost named me Mabel? The nun said to my mother, ‘you’ve got five seconds to think of a name or we’re going to name her Mabel.’ And my mother said, ‘uh, uh, Virginia.’ It just popped out. Virginia Wolfe, that was my name. Imagine that. Ever since that play, people have been coming up to me at parties and saying, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It’s so irritating.”

  “So what do you say?”

  “Oh, I just bare my fangs and smile and pretend I’ve never heard it before. I wrote a story for The New Yorker once, you know. It was published. It was quite good. But then I got married and…”

  “To the race car driver?”

  “Yes. Tommy. So handsome. But a drinker. He hid his bottles in our fireplace, under the ashes, and one day I found them and I just walked out of our apartment. And the next thing I knew, I was at a party over on St George Street and your father was there. Fresh back from the war. He was such a gent. That’s the one thing about your father. He’s a gent. There aren’t many of those out there in the world. I know.”

  And when I looked at her, I felt something sink in my stomach. She still loves him, I thought. She’s going to go away and she’s going to miss him. She going to look around Palm Beach and she won’t find any gents, not like him, and she’ll come back. She’ll come back to him and nothing’s going to change. Nothing is euer going to change.

  It started snowing early in the morning. The air all soft, these big snowflakes drifting by the window of Latin class, like somebody had had a huge pillow fight and all the feathers were slowly settling to earth. I lay with my head on my arms, old Willie Orrgrinding on about the Gauls seizing and carrying off the Etruscan women and everybody kind of giggling until old Willie had finally had enough and he went over and cuffed some kid on the back of his dandruffy head and the whole class jumped like a herd of gazelles. And then everybody settled down again, the snow falling, Willie droning, the heating pipes going clank, clank every so often like some little man, way on the other side of the school, was smacking them with a crowbar. The wall clock went click, click and the arm jumped forward. One more minute gone. Sometimes, looking up at the clock, I’d get a wave of panic, like I was trapped in a car and we were going to keep driving back and forth across the same parking lot for eternity.

  Anyway, finally enough Etruscan women had gotten seized and carried off for one day and we hustled out of Latin with that blast of energy you get at the end of something fatally boring. If you’re not careful you can mistake it for having liked the class. But it’s just relief.

  By noon the back playing fields were covered in snow. A couple of Bishop Strachan girls walked by the main gates, their heads down, snowflakes covering their capes. You could see their bare legs underneath. And the long grey socks they wore up to their knees. Their legs always looked red and splotchy in this weather. Raw. Can’t imagine how their teachers let them out of the school in such silly clothes. It’d be like my parents letting me wander around in shorts in the middle of the winter. Just before dark, there was this weird blue light that fell over the fields and schoolyard, downright biblical. From the second-floor window, I could see some little kid pulling his toboggan across the field, all done up in his snowsuit, scarf wrapped around his neck. A delivery truck made its way up the main drive into the school, sliding sideways and coming to a complete halt.

  It just went on and on, the snow. It blew sideways; snow heaped up on the windowsills, on the stairs leading to the dining room, even on your eyebrows when you walked across the quad. It was like divine intervention. Going to fuck up everything tomorrow, the whole city was going to come to a standstill, half the dayboys wouldn’t turn up, the teachers, seeing there was just half a class, would throw us a spare, let us talk. Always great, those days, a feeling like something different was happening.

  Near nine that night I was back in my dorm, scraping a picture in the frost on the window with my fingernail; a balloon with two eyes and a smile and a long, wiggly string. If you didn’t know better, you’d think I could really draw. But it was the only one I could do. This little genius guy with a brushcut, John Fraser, showed me how to do it years ago and I’d been perfecting it ever since.

  Harper phoned.

  “Listen,” he said, “you gotta do me a favour. The old man called. I think he’s freaking out a bit up at the cottage. The place is pretty fucking barren and he’s been all by himself up there for like three weeks now. He asked me to go up and see him this weekend. I mean he didn’t come out and say it, he just made some bullshit excuse that he needed me to help him with the storm windows. But I think he’s lonely, and I can’t go. I’ve got this chick I’ve got to see. Can you go? Just for the weekend. I feel kind of bad about him being up there.”

  “No,” I said, “I can’t. That’s a whole weekend leave. That means I’d have to give up Saturday night next weekend. I can’t do that. Not to go up there.”

  “Jesus, Simon, he really sounds fucked.”

  “Well, you go. I can’t. Last thing I want to do with my spare time is spend it with that asshole.”

  “Great, Simon. Just great. Like you’re so fucking selfish sometimes I can’t believe it.”


  “I’m selfish? Look who the fuck is talking. Here I am in San Quentin and you won’t leave town because you want to get your wad sucked. And I am getting sick and tired of hearing that word, selfish.”

  “Well think about it anyway, will you? Just think about it?”

  “Sure, I’ll think about it. I promise.”

  And then I put the phone down and never gave it another thought.

  For three days it snowed and it snowed and it snowed. And then one night, right after announcements, it stopped. Just like that, like flicking off a light switch. I opened the window and a pile of snow fell onto the floor. It was soft as grass though, soft and glittery. The moon hung in the sky and I could see my own breath. Suddenly my ears started ringing. Somebody must be thinking about you, that’s what my mother would say.

  A little bit later, that bow-legged fuckweed was standing in my doorway, telling me there was a phone call for me.

  “Some weather eh?” Scarlet said. “Doesn’t it just make you want to go outside and do something? Roll in the snow. Steal something. Throw a rock through a window. Kiss somebody. It’s so exciting. You know that sound, the sound cars make when they hit each other, that sort of crunch. God, I love that. That’s a real winter sound.”

  At the top of the stairs I could see a pair of cowboy boots; the hall prefect was still there, listening.

  “I think I got a bit of an audience here,” I said.

  The boots didn’t move.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll talk. You just say yes or no. Do you have a roommate?”

  “Yep.”

  “Is he a snitch?”

  “Nope.”

  “Like if you snuck out, would he tell on you?”

  I scraped out a groove in the wood with my thumbnail and then blew away the guck.

  “Nope.”

  After awhile she said, “Because I’ve got an idea.”

  After midnight I slid open the window and dropped out into the fresh snow. E.K., having jerked off under the covers the usual six times, had fallen into his nightly coma. I didn’t move. I stood there for a second, looking this way and that. A gust of cold wind blew, the snow all sparkly and exciting under the moon. I ran across the quad and stopped just before the entrance. I didn’t want to run into Psycho coming back from walking his dog, this really ugly-looking boxer. It’s true what they say, by the way: eventually dogs and their masters begin to look like each other. But there was nobody there. I hurried across the upper cricket pitch, the snow coming in over the tops of my shoes. I was a perfect target out there, under a full moon, running knee-deep in the snow. I felt like I was in a movie, running away from prison. Steve McQueen, one of those guys. Over my shoulder I could see the big yellow school clock, same one I remember looking at way up on the ferris wheel, the night Scarlet dumped me. Wow. Who’d have figured on this one?