Lost Between Houses Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Copyright

  Dedicated to my editor, Dennis Lee

  and

  In memory of my extraordinary mother,

  Virginia Logan Wolfe

  CHAPTER ONE

  THAT NIGHT my mom took me to dinner at this French restaurant downtown. It was a cosy little place on a back street. The guy came over and spoke to her in English but she answered him in French, giving me a little look just to make sure I was listening. He took us to our usual perch on the second floor. I loved sitting up there, you could see the whole place, the people eating, the waiters gliding around, a pretty girl in the coat-check room. I raised my arm to get the waiter’s attention. “Don’t,” she whispered. “They have radar. The good ones.” Sure enough the guy, who had his back to us, looked around, saw my mother with her chin on her hand and hurried over. She ordered a martini.

  “You know what I was thinking today?” she began. My mother loved getting all dressed up and going out and when she was happy, like she was tonight, she could talk the hind legs off a donkey.

  “I was thinking that you should have a party. You’re sixteen and you’ve never had one. And I suddenly realized why.” She touched my hand just to make sure I was paying attention.

  “You’re afraid, no, afraid is the wrong word, you’re nervous rather, that no one will come. I felt exactly the same way when I was your age. The shame of no one coming!”

  Her martini arrived and she took a sip, giving it her absolute attention, like she was listening for a very faint sound from the other side of the city.

  “Heaven,” she went on. “You know where they make marvellous martinis? Italy. There’s something about Italy that makes you want to have a martini.”

  She lit a cigarette.

  “So here’s what you do. You get all dressed up in your finery. You invite lots and lots of pretty girls, they inevitably give a party a sense of occasion, and you get your best friends to come early. People love parties. I’m not exaggerating, Simon, may God strike me dead, but it’s more fun to give a good party than to go to one.”

  She reached over and grabbed her purse and opened it and pulled out her cheque book, flipped it open and extracted a narrow silver pen.

  “Just for fun,” she said, “let’s draw up a list of all the people you’d invite if you were going to have a party.”

  So the two of us sat there throwing down names on the side of the paper tablecloth. Very français that, the paper tablecloth.

  The waiter came over.

  “Vous avez décidé, Madame?”

  “Non, pas encore. Mais dites, encore un, s’il vous plaît,” she said, pointing to her martini glass.

  “Comme vous voulez, Madame.”

  “You never say, un autre,” she whispered to me. “That means you want a different kind of drink. Now where were we? Shall we invite Daphne Gunn?”

  “Ugh. No. Like over my dead body. Besides she looks like a fucking potato.”

  She put her pen down. “Simon, that is absolutely intolerable.”

  “All right, I’m sorry. But no, I hate her. She can’t come.”

  “It would be very classy if you asked her. It would show that you’re above the fray.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “Do you ever speak to her?”

  “No, never. It’s like she’s dead.”

  “Well, it’s your party. That’s the thing about a party. You invite whomever you want. So we’ll put Daphne in the holding tank for the moment.”

  “I should have those Catholic girls. They’re really pretty.”

  “Oh yes, especially that tall one. She’s a stunner, that girl. What’s her name?”

  “Anna.”

  “Anna. Yes. What a beauty. Does she have a beau? They always have beaux, those girls.”

  She sat back and did that thing she always did when she was having a good time, cupping her elbow in her hand and holding her cigarette just to the side of her face. She always did it just before she made some observation. “My God, Simon,” she said, “you have such blue eyes it just kills me. Blueberry blue.

  And so on it went until finally the waiter was hanging around the table and we felt sort of compelled to order something to eat. That’s the thing with those French waiters. They can make you feel guilty about anything. They don’t have to say a word.

  “So when you do want to have your do?” she said.

  “Can we have it before the old man gets out of the hospital?”

  It was like everything just sagged and I instantly had the feeling I’d done something wrong.

  “That’s mean,” she said softly.

  “I don’t mean it to be mean. It’s just more fun when he’s not around.”

  The waiter came by. He took a saucer from the table, spotted a soiled serviette on the floor, picked it up and moved off.

  “You’re right,” I said, “they have got radar.”

  But she didn’t answer.

  I didn’t want to wreck dinner, not with her all dressed up like that and the two of us normally such great company.

  “Well you shouldn’t feel bad,” I said.

  “Well I do. It makes me feel like I’ve been a bad parent.”

  “You’ve been a great parent.”

  She was silent.

  “I mean it,” I said. “When I have kids I’m going to raise them exactly like you did.”

  She gave me this quick look and I suddenly imagined her as a young girl, tall with big, handsome features.

  “Really?” she said. “Do you really think I’ve done a good job?”

  “I really do.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “You bet.”

  She grabbed up her pack of cigarettes and shook one out.

  “God, I’m terrible,” she said. “I feel like another martini. Would you think I was a terrible old drunk if I had another martini?”

  Back home, I went straight up to the maid’s room. Well, it’s not the maid’s room any more. She got canned for butting her cigarettes out in the cat box. But since my Easter report card, I’d been getting sent up there every night to do my homework. It’s not a bad little spot really, canary yellow, very away from things. You can hear people coming up the stairs so nobody ever gets the drop on you. Especially my old man, who makes a big racket.

  I was supposed to be doing my physics homework but there’s something about that textbook, something sinister about the cover that really got to me. Filled me with a kind of dread when I looked at it. I even dreamt about it: it’s the night before my final exam and I’m flipping through the book and I suddenly realize that I haven’t seen any of these pages before, all those diagrams of soup cans with the fucking arrows going every which-way, and I realize that I’m screwed, I’m going to flunk my whole year because in my school, if you fail even one subject, you go back to square one the next fall and all the little squirts who are shorter than you, well suddenly they’re sitting beside you in the same grade and all your friends are sitting at a different table for lunch, doing different stuff after school. I mean a complete nightmare, man.

  So I pulled out Scaramouche and started reading it. This wasn’t a complete goof-off, it was on my English course and I’d just gotten to the part where he’s invented a new manoeuvre with his sword, I mean I just loved it, but I also knew I was getting way ahead of the class, I’d be finished
a month early and then I’d probably flunk the test because I wouldn’t be able to remember anything that happened. Sometimes you just can’t win.

  I heard Harper out in the hallway. He’s my brother, two years older than me, the good sheep of the family. Good marks (but not too good), good at sports, the whole business. But not an asshole, not a bully. I gave him a shout.

  “Harper,” I said, “the old lady thinks I should have a party.”

  He popped his head in the door.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Do you have any friends?”

  “A couple.”

  “Well there you go. Why don’t you invite that chick from Bishop Strachan. The one with the big tits. What’s her name?”

  “Massey. Evelyn Massey.”

  “I can’t believe she’s only fifteen.”

  “Well, she is.”

  “She reminds me of Marilyn Monroe. That little kid’s voice.”

  “Yeah. Well she doesn’t really hang around with our crowd.”

  “Now there’s a girl I’d like to submarine. You ever submarined anybody Simon?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “I love it. I’d like to drink a glass of it.”

  “Anyway.”

  “It’s not a bad idea,” he said, once he got his mind off going down on Evelyn Massey.

  “Having a party?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How come?”

  “Well you go to them all the time, Simon. Might not be a bad idea to have one. That way people won’t think you’re a big fucking sponge.”

  “Food for thought,” I said, and we both laughed.

  “I’m going to watch TV,” he said.

  “What’s on?”

  “Fuck all.”

  “Right.”

  By the time I was ready for bed, I figured it was a pretty good idea, this party, I figured no sweat. It was even starting to seem like my own idea. I got into my pyjamas and brushed my teeth and looked at my profile about a hundred times in the mirror and then I came back into the bedroom. Plopped my retainer inmy mouth. It tasted a bit grungy, it’d been sitting in my drawer since the morning, but I dipped it in a glass of water and it freshened up just fine.

  Harper was already in bed, listening to the radio.

  “I think I’m going to do it,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” he said, not giving a shit.

  “Maybe I will invite Evelyn Massey.” This time he wouldn’t bite.

  “I got to listen to this.” It was a baseball game. I got into bed and flipped open a Beatles book, a glossy one. Harper turned out the light.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He waited a second.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  All of which was cool except that I woke up at four in the morning, my heart jumping around. I was full of the most awful dread. I lay there blinking my eyes, trying to figure out what it was. Then I got it. It was the party. It was like the worst idea in the world, nobody would come, just three ugly chicks and I’d be left standing there, the laughing stock of the school. The party that nobody went to. Honestly, I just couldn’t imagine a worse fate. I lay there in the dark thinking what a shitty idea this party was, thinking of how to get out of it without looking totally pathetic. To make things worse, it didn’t look as black outside as it did a little while ago. I hate it when it gets light like that, the slow, depressing creep of grey across the sky, everything all dark and cosy and private and then the light steals it away, makes everything normal and flat again. I heard a dog bark at the end of the street, Mr Bluestein taking his mutt out. He did that every morning, five-thirty a.m., rain or shine. That’s it, Ithought, I’m fucked now. And assuming I was fucked, I fell sound asleep.

  Funny thing is, when the alarm rang a few hours later I felt fine, not worried at all, the sun was out, it was a clear spring day. “Man, that was nuts,” I thought. So I headed off to school, thinking maybe I’d have the party after all.

  By the time I got to the top of our street, I could hear the bell ring across the soccer field. That meant I had five minutes to get to my locker, dump my books in the hallway, and get to prayers. Sure was a bitch to start the day that way, all flustered and out of breath, shirt-tail hanging out of my pants, but you didn’t want to be late either because that meant you lined up outside Willie Orr’s office, he’d been teaching Latin there ever since they spoke it at the school, where you’d get a detention, no questions asked. I made it into my pew just in time, just as all the kids rose with a crash and the masters began their morning parade down the centre aisle, Fairy Flynn swaying back and forth on the organ. They mounted the platform, the headmaster stepped to the podium, we bowed our heads, I closed my eyes, and we said the Lord’s Prayer, some of the guys looking but not me, I was sort of afraid to get caught with my eyes open. We had just started the hymn when I noticed this British kid come skittering down the far aisle. He was holding the change in his pocket to stop it from rattling, sort of biting his lower lip, just to let the masters know he knew he was fucking things up by being so late. He was an English kid with a great accent, he sounded like the Queen. I didn’t know his name but we sort of nodded to each other in the halls. Truth is, I got a bit self-conscious around him, he seemed like a movie star, that accent and playing on the first cricket team, even though he was my age. I wondered if maybe I should invite him to the party. At least that’d give me something to talk to him about.

  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 wassaying 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 expressi
onless, 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 anythingto 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 aboutcrazy 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.