Idea in Stone (18 page)

“I know. It’s just—”

“Don’t leave a mess. Promise?”

He sighed. He’d planned on slipping away. “Okay,” he acquiesced.

“Good. Now,” she said, “get out. I have work to do and I can’t have you taking up my whole evening.”

It was sudden, more abrupt than the goodbye he’d pictured. But he guessed this was not the first time someone left her behind. He hugged her small, lumpy body.

“Alright,” she said, “get off me. Out!”

Stefan stopped at the door and waved at her. She smiled, waved, and shooed him out.

~

The bouncer’s white dress shirt was stretched to its limits across his chest, illuminated by the yellow, blue, and pink neon tubes beside him, whose coloured gases burned the words “Girls, Girls, Girls”. The black tie he wore was too short because of the width of the neck it had to encompass. Over his head shone an old cinema marquee, now featuring one word:
Lapland
.

The man blocked Stefan’s entrance to the club.

“Um,” said Stefan.

“Yeah?”

“I’m here to see the band.”

The man’s stern face broke into a laugh. “Yeah, and I read
Playboy
for the articles. Ten bucks cover, pay inside.”

Stefan paid at the small window and moved through the darkness, weaving his way around small tables populated by lone men, moving toward the stage, where the band talked to each other, adjusting their instruments under the spotlights.

“Rick!” said Stefan.

“Hey, you made it! Guys, this is Stefan.” Rick introduced him to the other three musicians, variations on Rick’s grunge musician look, with hair gelled into post-sleep nests, baggy trousers, sneakers, and loose T-shirts of various colours featuring unintelligible names of what Stefan figured were other bands or skateboarding equipment.

“Welcome to our third gig,” said Rick.

“This is great.”

“Yup. You’re looking at an ex-window-washer.”

“You got rid of the business?” asked Stefan.

“Nope. I finally took Allen’s advice, and I got some students to work for me. And lots of insurance. So now I’m free to focus on my music. We’ve got a manager, and we’ve got two more bookings this month.”

“Wow!”

“Yeah, and with the extra money, I’m going to take a trip to Malaysia.”

“Oh, great, to meet—”

“Jennifer, yeah. I can’t wait.”

I wonder how she feels about that
, thought Stefan, but he said “Cool.”

“The bar manager’s giving us the signal to start again. The audience is anxious to get to the part of the night with girls in it. The gang is over there in the back corner. I’ll join you when we’re finished. Oh, hey,” he reached into his guitar case and pulled out a CD case, “we did a demo, too!” He handed it to Stefan. “That’s an extra copy. You can keep it.”

“Alright!” said Stefan. “Wow, congratulations. I’m really happy you’ve got all this going.” He stepped off the stage and fumbled through the darkness, his night vision ruined by the stage lights. After bumping into two businessmen who didn’t make eye contact when he apologised, Stefan found Allen, Paulo, and Paulo’s boyfriend Adam at the back, where they were talking to a woman wearing a pair of sequinned Canadian flag panties and red tasselled pasties.

“So,” the woman said to his friends, “I’ve only got two more biology courses to finish, and then I want to get into a good veterinary medicine program.”

“That’s great, Wendy,” said Adam, who had a strange ability to get people to tell him their most private thoughts within minutes.

Allen stood up unsteadily and hugged Stefan. He had a deep tan and wore a white T-shirt from a recent vacation that read “The Coast is Queer”. He and his partner took the trip after they’d both received promotions.

“So,” asked Wendy, “would you guys like more drinks?”

“What about you,” Paulo asked Stefan, “would you like a drink, or five?”

“Ooh, big spender. What’s with you?”

Adam leaned forward and proudly announced that Paulo had just won a leading role in a summer stock theatre company.

“And the theatre is really close to our cottage,” said Paulo. He was about to say more, but the band blared into their last set.

“How are they?” yelled Stefan.

“Actually,” replied Allen at the top of his lungs, “they’re pretty good!.”

Stefan smiled and sat back in his chair. Wendy brought their drinks, and Stefan tried to figure out where to look as she leaned over them, tassels dangling, trying to give each of them the proper drink. The table soon became a game of alcohol chess. Her difficulty remembering their orders made Stefan worry about the animals who would be her patients one day.

He drank too quickly, and felt blissfully blurry by the time Rick joined them. An announcer spoke excitedly about each of the girls as they came on and did their themed acts. His voice, blaring over the speakers, combined with the unintelligible second voice, made Stefan feel unsteady. He couldn’t hear or follow the conversation. He just watched his friends, whose lives were already moving forward without him. They loved him, he had no doubt of that, but they all knew that sooner or later their ambitions, their love-lives, or something would send them off in different directions.

Stefan found himself staring at a naked woman who wrapped herself around a pole and moved upward like a zero-gravity fire-fighter.

He stood and announced to the others that he was leaving. They hugged, and Allen followed him outside, where the air was cool and clear after the hot, clammy atmosphere inside.

“So this is it,” said Allen.

“Yup,” answered Stefan.

“It’s not going to be the same.”

“No. It’s going to be different. But it’ll go on without me.”

They hugged for a long time, and Stefan felt Allen’s chest jerking as he cried. “Oh, don’t,” said Stefan. But it was too late. After holding each other for several minutes more, Stefan let go. They both wiped at their faces, laughing through their tears. “Okay,” said Stefan, “I’m going to go.”

“Maybe we’ll visit next year,” said Allen. But they both knew it was a lie. His partner would never participate in a vacation that had Stefan as its destination.

“Yeah,” said Stefan, participating in the lie to avoid making things worse. “So I’ll see you when I see you.”

“Yeah. Good luck with the play.”

“Thanks. Okay, I’m going to—” he nodded away.

“Right.”

“Right.”

They hugged again, and Stefan walked away, turning back briefly to see that Allen had gone inside. He took a deep breath of the night air and walked across town, looking at the lights and shop-fronts along his path home, all so familiar, yet altered by his knowledge that he was leaving. He stopped as he walked by the grade school he attended for so many years, where he’d been pulled from class to be told that his father died, where the strange old music teacher was such a fan of his mother and personally congratulated him when Delonia went back on air with her own solo show. He laughed, remembering the year he started late, after his mother’s failed experiment in home-schooling.

Stefan walked around the building and sat on the steps he’d burst from for a thousand recesses and many happy final days of school before summer vacation. He looked at the basketball hoops, impossibly high. He doubted that he could sink a shot now, even though he was taller—though not as tall as he’d hoped back then.

He stood, unbuttoned his baggy shorts (a birthday present the year before, ordered from a cooperative, fair-trade cotton farm), and urinated on the door of the school, giggling, walking backwards to get away from the approaching stream. He felt guilty as he buttoned up and remembered Bill, the skinny old janitor who used to clean up after the children whenever they threw up or tracked mud through the school.

Another few blocks’ walk brought him back home, where he stood in front of the house, trying to appreciate that this would be the last night he slept here.

~

Stefan looked around his room. The walls were bare, except for the empty CD racks. He’d sold his collection the week before. He sized up the two huge duffel bags he’d packed, one blue, one green. He had to get these upstairs, but he still hadn’t spoken to his mother about his leaving.
Well, now or never
, he thought, and hoisted the bags, one held in front of him, one behind. He started up the stairs, but fell backward onto the green bag, the blue bag landing on top of him. He struggled back to his feet, and dragged one bag at a time up the stairs. How he was going to manage on the other end, he wasn’t sure. The rest of the cast would arrive in a week, and he hadn’t booked himself a place to stay.

He dragged the bags through the kitchen to the front room. He took his jacket from the coat rack and checked the inside pocket for his ticket, then dropped it on his bags. He tied up his shoes. Every little act was a delay tactic. His heart did a drum roll; he was sorely tempted to slip out the front door, but he’d promised Helen he would leave properly.

The sound of Cerise’s cello resonated from the study. Stefan went to the door and knocked. “Yes?” asked Cerise from within. Stefan opened the door.

“Sorry. Do you know where my mother is?”

“She’s not here,” she said, not looking up from the finger she traced along the sheet music on the stand in front of her.

Stefan’s heart sank. “But—”

“Stefan, do you think she wanted to be here? She
knows
.”

“But how?”

“Well,” she said, shifting her flowing patterned dress around the cello so she could turn and face him, “you said you were going somewhere. You’ve sold or thrown out all your things. You’ve been cagey all week. And she’s a smart woman.”

His mind and his feelings were jumbled. On one hand, he was upset: she’d stolen his thunder once again. On the other, he felt guilty that his plans were hurting her already. Maybe that was his original intention, but that had long passed.

Cerise put her cello to one side and picked up a small package from the old desk beside her. “She wanted you to have this.”

Stefan took it from her, a small, gift-wrapped cube. “What is it?” he asked.

“She said it was a Voice Box. I have no idea what that is, but she said you’re not to open it until you’ve had a change of heart.”

“Um, okay.”

A car horn sounded outside.

“Well, uh, goodbye,” he said. He moved to give Cerise a kiss or a hug or whatever would seem appropriate when he got close to her. But she flipped up a hand and turned her head away. “Don’t be good to me if you can’t be good to her.”

The taxi honked again.

“Okay,” said Stefan, “goodbye.” He took the box with him and, unzipping one loose corner of a duffel bag, stuffed it away. He opened the door and dragged his bags down the steps. The cabbie helped him lift them into the trunk, and they both got into the car.

As the cab pulled away, Stefan looked back at the house. The curtains in one of the upstairs windows moved, and he saw Delonia looking out. He pressed himself against the back window and waved. But the curtains closed.

The cab took him through the heart of town, then out onto the open expressway leading to the airport. He felt the gravity of the city pulling at him, but the cab was travelling fast enough to break away from it. The multicoloured glass buildings receded. The CN Tower pointed into the sky like a giant mechanical pencil. Stefan wondered what else it might have written for him there. But it was too late for that now.

He turned and looked at the road ahead. Cars jockeyed back and forth across the lanes at high speed. The cab passed under a green highway sign with a white airplane on it. He felt dizzy. Everything he knew was back in the city he’d just left.
How did this all start?
he wondered. He’d asked his father to save him. Did this, today, make sense in that context? He reached into his trouser pocket and took out the tiny newsprint letters he’d stuck between pieces of tape.
EDINBURGH
. What did that mean? He knew practically nothing about the place. He was very clear, though, about what he was leaving.

~

Stefan washed his hands in the airport bathroom sink. He ran them through his floppy hair, then put them under the hot air dryer. The lights in the room dimmed. Stefan looked up, then around the room. From the shadows in a corner stepped a man in a wide-brimmed hat and an unseasonably long and heavy black cloak. It was the creature who’d pushed Stefan down the steps of the Matholic church.

Stefan grabbed his ticket from the counter and moved toward the door. But the thing grabbed his hand, struggling to take his ticket. Stefan pulled back with all his might. The figure was strong. His other hand shot to Stefan’s throat and squeezed it hard. Stefan struggled against the grip of the two hands, flailing as he was lifted from his feet. The shadowy man slammed him into the metal doors of the cubicle.

His eyes were watering, closing, but in the mirrors he saw someone else: his father, spotlit in the middle of the room. Stefan went limp and closed his eyes. He felt the figure being pulled away from him, and he fell to the floor. Lying on the cold tile, he opened his eyes. There was no one else in the room.