My Temporary Life (4 page)

“
That’s good, now harder Malcolm. Aim for the wall and hit my face. Hit it as hard as you can. Think of them. Use the hate. Use yer hate.”

His head doesn’t move at first, but as I realize that he isn’t going to dodge out of the way and let my hand hit the wall, or even worse hit me back, I strike him with increased ferocity, until finally, he tells me to stop. His face is red, and there’s puffiness under his right eye, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. He just raises himself back up to his normal height, and tells me that I’ve done well.

We spend the rest of the afternoon punching things. He finds an old cloth bag under the stairs and fills it with wet leaves. We hang it from the railing that leads to our neighbour’s upstairs, and he shows me the correct way to punch it.

I tell him about the hair clutching and the head kicking, but it doesn’t faze him. He says that the secret is to just keep punching. The secret is to not stop, to not care. Find the target and pound it relentlessly, until you’re either too tired to continue, or your opponent has stopped fighting back.

“
Ignore the hits you take, Malcolm. You can deal with the pain later. Just keep going forward and don’t think about how much he’s hurting you.”

By supper time that night, I’m sore in places that I didn’t realize I had, even though a blow hasn’t landed on me all day. As we sit across from each other, slurping down our soup, I try not to laugh as the bruises on my father’s face start to show. I make my way to bed shortly after that, and to my surprise he calls me a name that he hasn’t in a long time.

“
Goodnight, Son. I’ll see you in the morning.”

I don’t turn. I just mumble back at him, and walk blindly to my room. It takes several minutes of sitting on the edge of my bed, before his words have an effect on me, and I realize that my usually silent uncommunicative father may indeed realize that he does actually have a son.

CHAPTER 4

I spot him before I see my mother, and I know that he’s the one. His t-shirt has a man playing a guitar on it, and his bulging belly is bouncing around as he waves his arms, gesturing for me to come to him, and laughing, all at the same time. He’s tall and chunky and seems to have hair growing out of his hair. When I get closer, and let him squeeze my hand in his, I see only small patches of skin, on a face covered by a beard and moustache, plus two mountainous tufts of hair, one sprouting from each of his ears.

“
Say hello to George, Malcolm,
Uncle
George.” My mother giggles like a school girl as she slips one arm around his waist, and rubs my hair with her free hand, welcoming me back to Canada.

“
Say this for me in your Scawttish accent, Mal, say, ‘No Problem, Uncle George, no problem.’ That’s what we say in Canada, Mal, no problem, nothing’s ever a problem here.” He has a big friendly grin on his face when he says it, and I find it very hard not to smile back at him.

There have been others of course. My mother doesn’t like to be alone and seems to have no trouble finding male company. I call them my one visit uncles. I meet them at the beginning of the summer and the next year I meet their replacement. She calls each of them the man of her dreams, the man she’s been waiting for her whole life. And each one of them seems to worship her. We live in their homes and eat at their tables and of course sleep in their beds, and my mother makes it seem as though it’s the most natural thing in the world. We do family type things from time to time, and are all very polite as we try to pretend that we’re all exactly where we want to be.

I remember the uncle from two summers before George. My mother called him Richard, but everyone else called him Dick, just plain Dick. Dick was cold and aloof and only seemed to come to life after drinking some of the stubby, little, brown bottles of beer that he kept in his fridge. I spotted a calendar one day, high on the wall in the back laundry room. It had my arrival date circled and then every day that I’d stayed with them had a hard, red ‘X’
drawn through it. When I turned the calendar over to the next month there was a smiley face drawn across my departure date. It was in Dick’s writing. I’m sure of that.

It’s hard not to like George though. He’s loud and boisterous and seems to be genuinely pleased to see me. By the time we’ve driven from Vancouver airport to his house, I’ve heard his life story. He’s a long-time bachelor, works as a mechanic at the local car dealership, and is tired of playing the field. He doesn’t have to tell me that he’s totally enamoured with my mother, but he does anyways. As he’s driving, he reaches over and pulls a small blue bottle from the glove compartment and, with one hand on the wheel; he removes the lid and pours the liquid from it onto his hands. Then, to my surprise, he rubs it between both hands and loudly smacks it onto his face.

“
That airport always makes me feel sticky, need to freshen up,” he says, winking at my mother. “A man’s gotta smell good, Mal. Ain’t that right, gotta smell good for the ladies.” He’s laughing a warm, hearty laugh as he says it, and it’s impossible not to laugh with him. “Here, Mal, you try it. You’re gonna need it for those young Canadian girls that you’re gonna meet this summer.”

The bottle flies through the air and lands in the back seat on my lap, and I wonder how he managed to throw it so expertly without adjusting his eyes from the road. It smells medicinal and I wonder why anyone would want to smell that way, but out of politeness I pour some onto my hand and then smack it on my cheeks, just the way he did. I learn later, when I see the shelves in his bathroom that he has lots of similar bottles that say, Hai Karate, and Brut for Men, and the one that he carries in his car, Aqua Velva. I wince in pain at the self imposed smack, and my mother laughs; George laughs; we all laugh. It’s a good moment. It feels right and I realize that I haven’t thought about Hardly or my father or Scotland since I’ve landed.

I’m tired when we reach his house, but I’m an experienced traveller and have learned the tricks to beat jet lag by now. The secret is to eat and to stay awake for as long as you can. It helps you adjust to the time change. My mother stands over the electric stove, scrambling eggs and toasting bread, while I sit at the kitchen table with my head held up by my hands, forcing myself to stay awake. George has moved to the other room. There is a television on and I can hear him talking to it, telling the players to move faster or hit harder. Once in a while he calls out to my mother or to me, relaying an incident that just happened, asking us if we can believe it, telling us what he would do if he were playing.

“
See, Malcolm, he has a television set too. He’s watching football, but he likes his hockey, too. You’ll see. You can watch it with him, tomorrow of course, after you’ve slept. He’s a good man, Malcolm, the right man. This time I’ve found the right man.”

She’s staring hard at me when she says it, and her eyes seem to be asking me to believe her, to trust her, but it’s late and I’m tired, and I’ve forgotten the unwritten rules that have been established on previous visits.

“
My dad knows hockey, too. We talked about it at the airport before coming here, just earlier, while he waited with me.” I can still hear the television playing after I’ve said it, and George is still making his noises, but the sound of the eggs being scraped on the frying pan has stopped and I know that she’s watching me. I only realize that my eyes have closed when the toast jumps out of the toaster, and I remember where I am and what I just said.

“
Tell me then, Malcolm. Tell me about your hockey conversation with your father. I’m very interested.” The pleading in her eyes is gone now, and she’s turned away from the stove and has one hand on her hip, while the other holds the spatula as though it were a weapon.

We had listened to a football, or fitba, game on the transistor radio, the night before I left, and he talked to me about it as we sat waiting for my plane at Glasgow airport. Celtic and Rangers were the local rivalry, although rivalry isn’t a strong enough word. It was more of a battle, and sometimes, even a war.

“
Ye wullnae see games like that where you’re going. I’ll have to bring you up tae speed when I phone or when you come back. Canada doesnae have matches like that, dae they?”

“
No, they have hockey though. They like hockey.”

“
Aye, I know hockey. The lassies play it here.”

“
No, Dad, it’s on ice. It’s a different type of hockey.”

He thinks for a moment before answering, visualizing I suppose players skating around on ice, with their skirts flapping, playing hockey.

“
It’s just a game to them though, is it no? I mean, it’s no like our fitba, is it?”

I stifle a smile and come back to the present, as I see my mother raise the spatula and point it towards me.

“
George, honey, can you come in here?” She doesn’t take her eyes from me as she calls into the other room, but to my relief she does put the spatula on the counter and moves the frying pan off the hot burner.

“
George, sorry, Uncle George,” she corrects herself, “as we told you, is an automobile mechanic, Malcolm.”

“
I’m a grease monkey, Mal, don’t listen to her. I fix cars at the dealership, that’s all.”

He’s leaning in the doorway with one eye on us, and the other still on the game in the other room.

“
Go on honey, tell him. Tell Malcolm what you’ve got for him.”

George straightens his back and smiles at my mother, then looks at me with an almost pained expression on his face. “I have a job for you, Mal, a summer job. They need a cleanup kid, a Lot Lizard we call them, at the dealership, and, well, the job’s yours if you want it.”

“
No, not if he wants it, not if he wants it at all. The job is his. Malcolm, you have a job and you start tomorrow. Congratulations.”

I’m not sure if I’m relieved that she isn’t going to strike me with the spatula, or relieved that she doesn’t want to hear about my father’s theories on hockey, so I just smile and thank George, who offers me a big, goofy grin and goes back to his game.

My mother smiles and turns away, back to preparing my meal, and the rules of our game start to become clear again, even to my jet-lagged head. We don’t talk about my father. We don’t mention Scotland. And, we pretend that everything is okay. Everything is normal.

That night, as I lie in the small, single bed that they’ve prepared for me, I toss and turn and think of my father and Hardly and fitba and my mother and George all at the same time. Then, when it seems as though I’ll never fall asleep, I have my dream. t’s the same dream, the same one that I always have. It’s the dream with no beginning and no end.

In the dream, I’m leaving something bad and heading towards something good, or if not good, then at least something better. It’s very hard to explain. There really are no specific things happening, it’s more about sensations, good and bad sensations. I don’t know where I am, although sometimes, I think that I’m on a plane, and I experience this overwhelming sense of dread. I know that something bad is behind me, always just behind me. I never can figure out what I’m running from, or what I’m running towards. The result is always the same and this night is no different. I awaken to my pillowcase soaked in sweat, relieved that I’m whole and alive, but unable to figure out what I’ve been running from. And on this night, of course, unable to figure out exactly where I am and whose bed it is that I’m sleeping in.

CHAPTER 5

I left Kilmarnock more abruptly than usual. After losing our tree and being pissed on by McGregor and Douglas, my father decided that I wouldn’t be going back to school. He made the call to my headmaster from the upstairs neighbour’s telephone while I stood in the doorway, listening to him.

“
It’s Alex Wilson, here, Malcolm’s father. Malcolm will not be attending school until the autumn of this year.”

His expression doesn’t change as he listens to the response on the other end of the phone.

“
I will repeat for you,” he says in a slightly louder, yet still not agitated voice, “Malcolm will not be attending school again until the autumn of this year. Now Cheerio, sir.”

And with that I had two weeks of punching cement bags filled with leaves, and readying myself for Canada. I thought of Hardly from time to time, even walking towards his house at one point, but halfway there I decide to turn back, once again letting him fight his own fight.

I think of these things but then remember that I’m in Canada, Vancouver, Canada, in George’s house, staring up at a poster on the wall of a creature covered in black and white makeup, breathing fire into the air, and singing into a microphone.