Fall (11 page)

I remember starting to picture their kisses from her point of view, enjoying a new perspective.

He rarely said anything in class. He would respond if a teacher asked him something directly, but otherwise he was quiet. I was often impressed by his responses. People occasionally thought Julius was vaguely stupid because his answers were brief and oblique, but I knew how perceptive he was.

I can’t think of examples offhand.

“We’re going to Dad’s for lunch. Wanna come?”

We technically weren’t supposed to leave school grounds during the day—everyone was supposed to eat in the Dining Hall.

I didn’t hesitate. We left through the door beside the gym. Chuck ran and caught up with us. “It’s lamb stew today,” said Julius, referring to the menu at school. “Chuck here found a Band-Aid in his stew once.” Whenever lamb stew was on the menu Julius and Chuck had a pact to eat somewhere else, usually Julius’s place.

The walk to his father’s residence was beautiful. Sutton had the grandest houses in the city, and many of them, like Julius’s, had been turned into ambassadors’ residences. I felt a little anxious about being off school grounds, but I dismissed it. “I’m eighteen years old” was a refrain I kept repeating through that year.

Chuck gave Julius a cigarette, put his pack in his pocket, and then remembered he hadn’t offered me one.

“No thanks,” I said. I don’t think I said much more until we got to the residence. I had only heard about it, and when I finally saw it I was amazed at the size of the house, and its grounds. I asked Julius how large the property was and he said he didn’t know. I caught a look from Chuck that suggested there was nothing interesting about the size of houses.

The property was surrounded by a stone-and-iron fence, with cameras pointing everywhere. We walked through the main gate and Julius gestured to the RCMP.

Chuck said, “I want steak and fries.” He apparently always told the police what he wanted for his meal.

I saw a Marine stationed near the front door.

We went in through the staff entrance and into the kitchen. The chef was a French-Canadian woman named Marie-Claude. When she met me I noticed that she felt no need to hide her curiosity about my eye. I in turn was impressed by her moustache. Julius said, “This is Noel” and “You know Chuckie.” She had a nice smile and said, “Trois steak-frites, avec un Band-Aid.” I could tell that she loved Julius.

We stayed in the kitchen. I saw no more of the house. I was trying to settle into how casual the event was. Julius inviting me out of the blue. Chuck not showing any obvious curiosity or disapproval
of my company. The steak wasn’t as good as I thought it would be. Marie-Claude turned her attention to us as we were eating and said, “Okay?” She stared at my eye as I ate. It usually goes into spasms when I chew.

I wondered whether Marie-Claude was the kind of woman who liked to be asked for second helpings. Julius asked me if I wanted more.

“Please.”

“Noel is beefing up,” he said.

Chuck looked at my shoulders.

“You play rugby?” he asked

“Not really.”

“There’s a game this Saturday. We play pick-up with local teams. You could play prop.”

“Ant plays our prop,” said Julius.

“And he sucks,” said Chuck.

“He doesn’t suck. He just wins by filth. Pure dirt. He puts his fingers in eyes and assholes.”

“Beware Ant’s finger,” said Chuck.

“You could be a backup prop for when Ant gets his head knocked off by whoever he gooses.”

“I’ve never really played,” I said.

Chuck gave me a suit-yourself shrug. I wanted to push the table across the room. I liked the idea of rugby, of running at someone’s shoulders. “I’ll play,” I said.

Neither of them said “good” or “great” because that’s not what they were like. Marie-Claude gave us three more steaks, with less friendliness, and we walked back to school.

A strange suspense lingered through the rest of the day. Was this a new world, and how should I prepare for it?

“You can borrow my cleats,” said Julius, “I’ll wear my soccer ones.”

I was nervous and didn’t say much. The game was on school grounds and the opponents were the Ottawa Irish—mostly middle-aged men.

“These guys like violence,” Julius said when we got to the pitch. “They’re bald and full of resentment.”

They were all solid, and I remember thinking that the hair on their legs looked unashamedly pubic.

I had no idea how to play rugby. I had spent the rest of that week doing research. Invented at Rugby School. Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Game of ruffians played by gentlemen. I had never liked watching it in Australia, but that was Rugby League, a vulgar version. We were going to play Rugby Union, and my role as prop was to anchor the scrum. “Stay low and push” was the advice I got from everyone. Julius told me to tape my ears and put Vaseline on my face and I thought he was joking.

I had expected to be nervous throughout but once the game started I felt absorbed and hungry. I focused on Ant, who was playing my position. I thought, as I watched, that I could at least mimic his movements.

We learned about the strength of older men, the power of fat and disappointment. Speed was the crucial element in those games for us. Get the ball out to the wing, to Julius, who could run like the goal of upright evolution. Every time he got the ball it moved to surprising places. But if we couldn’t get the ball to him there was a swamp of pain around the scrum. The men would push our team back, stomp us into the ground.

I realized that Ant wasn’t very good. I noted that his legs in shorts were not as big as mine. He laughed whenever the scrum fell down, the laugh of someone pretending not to be embarrassed. And I saw how he cheated. It was hard to spot, but the aftermath was obvious. One of the old men would shout
Who the fuck was that
and push a few of the St. Ebury boys. It happened a couple of times in the first half. Ant would always be at the back of the fallen scrum, having wriggled out, smirking and pretending to be innocent.

The more we fell, the more I felt from the sidelines a gathering sense of injustice. We were young and should have been strong. I felt the comfort of being mad, of the soft green frame of that field that allowed us to be honest and infuriated. I never got to play that
day. In the second half, one of the forwards from the Irish emerged from the scrum holding Ant by the collar and punched him in the face with a fist as fat as a butcher’s. Everyone from both teams ran toward the fight. All of us from the sidelines. I had never punched a face before. I never forgot the feeling of how a nose gives way.

“You should hear the songs sometimes,” Ant told me. “Everyone singing.” His forehead was swollen above the eye socket and all of us were drunk by five p.m.

I had almost missed the party. I walked off the pitch alone, before everything had settled, and was back up in the Flats, showering. I wondered if the blood on my hand was my own, but when it was clean all I saw was a bruising knuckle.

In the room I found Julius wearing his rugby shirt with jeans. He hadn’t showered. “You coming?” he said.

The ritual was to gather at the Earl of Sussex Pub which was a cab ride from St. Ebury. The pubs required us to be nineteen, but the Earl would serve anyone who seemed convincingly mature.

Normally both teams would gather, but since that game was called off after the fight it was only St. Ebury boys who met. Actually only four of us.

“The songs are fuckin’ hilarious,” Ant said. He started to sing a rugby song but nobody joined him. Chuck stared at him and asked if he had washed his fingers. “What’s wrong with you?” Chuck said.

“They’re animals. Those old guys just want to hurt us. So I humiliated one of them. A few of them.”

I couldn’t help laughing. Not because I found Ant amusing. I was simply confused. Five pints of beer in me on a Saturday afternoon, sitting there with Julius and his friends, a game I never played but learned to love. There was a sense of new momentum, of pistons urging me forward.

“Noel here got a piece of one of them,” Ant said. “You guys see that?”

Chuck said yes and Julius shook his head, and I was holding the table, I remember.

“Boom,” said Ant.

“It was an ugly game,” said Julius.

Ant said Julius always said that when he didn’t get the ball. “It was a battle,” he said.

“I do want to know why you stick your finger up their asses,” Chuck said. “Can you confide in me, as a friend?”

“It unsettles them,” I suggested.

“Exactly,” Ant said.

Chuck and Julius stared at us.

I started to feel my head spinning and when I closed my eyes I saw that man’s head snap back after I smashed his nose. I looked at Chuck’s sideburns and found them annoying. They looked affected. I wanted to tell him he was only pretending to be a man.

Out of the blue he announced that he wanted to be a journalist.

Ant said, “That’s fucked.”

And Chuck said, “Why?”

Ant said, “I don’t know.”

I kept being frightened that I was only eighteen, that the waiter would eventually turn to me and say, “You’re too young.” And then I felt angry. I wanted to declare that I was a man.

Ant started touching my earlobes and said, “You’ve got thick earlobes. They’re soft but they’re thick, eh?”

Julius had a streak of mud under one side of his jawbone. When he turned one way he looked gaunt. Haunted. He was my friend and I wanted to know what was wrong, but it was only mud.

“Leave the man’s ears alone,” he said.

I kept to myself that evening.

Y
OU WEREN’T HERE
in grade nine says Chuckie. You never saw that thing with him and Will Anderson.

Right I say. I’m hungry.

You didn’t know Will Anderson he says.

Right.

He was only here for half a year. Him and Noel were roommates. And a couple of other guys. He was annoying, Anderson, you know, kind of . . . he looked older than he was and he tried to be all fuckin tough. Dad owns Anderson Ford.

Right I say. I don’t know what Anderson Ford is.

And he was . . . you know, except for me and Ant, he kind of thought he was better and bigger than anyone in grade nine. He bumped into me once outside the library or the gym and he, you know, squared himself up and I started laughing. And he smiles like he wasn’t squaring himself up and he’s, like, slapping my back without slapping my back. There’s a word for that. When I’m a journalist I’m gonna use it. Pfff he says.

There’s tobacco on his lips ’cause he’s smoking a rollie.

So he was the guy who first called Wink Wink.

Ok.

Always. Wink this, Wink that.

It’s a mean name.

Yeah.

And funny.

It is he says. And Noel, he was always quiet about it. Didn’t complain. You know that way he looks sort of past everything, right.
So you couldn’t tell whether it bothered him or not, and Anderson kept at it, kept pushing it in a really obvious way. And in gym class, you know, he would fire a basketball at Noel’s head and say Wink blinked. That sort of shit.

Mm.

And I don’t know whether Anderson would have lasted or not. One of these fuckin losers who’s proud of being at St. Ebury. Dad with his car dealership. And it’s pretty obvious that he’s never gonna fit in. What they call an arriviste, if you did your homework.

You’re a genius.

So one day. Pfff One of those weird witches days when everything’s happening on the Flats, me and Ant are tossing the Frisbee down the hall. Fling, fling, and out comes everyone from different rooms. And zitty Chris, you know, Tim, he’s walking innocently down the hall and out comes Anderson. He takes off his stinking gym shoe and shoves it in Chris’s face. He puts Chris in a headlock and makes him smell his shoe, you know, and Chris is struggling and all the zits in his face are popping and bleeding.

Nice.

So whatever. Another dumb day. Anderson’s laughing like a moron and a couple of others are smiling and Chris is bleeding and away he walks and I toss Ant the Frisbee. Anderson’s walking around looking for mischief. And there’s Noel down the hall, looking on in his weird way. And Anderson starts walking toward him saying Wink this Wink that. You know, Hey Wink, what
aren’t
you looking at. He walks up to him and does the old shoulder push. And, fuck, have you noticed how much Wink has built up.

Yeah. I told you.

Yeah. Beef! Eh. He was
nothing
like that in grade nine. He was a little guy. So Anderson walks up to him, does the shoulder push, and Noel falls back a mile, like a comedy fall, you know, like he’s falling and falling and it’s funny, and finally he falls and it’s, you know, pretty sad. And Anderson’s laughing his
ass
off when Noel falls. Crack goes the tailbone and Anderson’s in hysterics. And he’s standing over Wink and laughing. He tries to get up and Anderson
holds him down. And Wink shuffles back and gets up, Anderson does the shoulder push, then Noel does the shoulder push and we all think, here we go, and next thing you know Anderson is popping him in the eye. In his
bad
eye, you know. Pop, pop, and Wink is just kind of taking it. Ducking a little, you know, flinching, but not knowing what to do. And Anderson’s getting a taste for it, you know, he’s popping Noel harder, always going for the eye. It made you want to cringe, you know. I remember squeezing the Frisbee and thinking, what the fuck. Should we step in. And a Prefect comes by, what’s his . . . Haffey. He comes by and shouts hey! And those two, you know, Anderson barely looks over, gives Reece another, both of them in their own world, right, and Noel, skinny Noel, he grabs Anderson’s arm . . . s

Hm . . .

I’m not finished. He grabs Anderson’s arm after the punch, and he fuckin chomps. He takes the arm, right, holds it and he bites right into Anderson. And this is not a bite, Julius. This is fuckin
feeding
. Haffey runs over and I swear to Christ, Wink is attached to Anderson’s
fore
arm and Anderson is screaming like a fuckin seagull or something. Screaming. Because Noel Reece has bitten like a coin’s worth of flesh from Anderson’s forearm.