“Definitely German, yes?”
Trace, the girl with hair shaved close to her skull, sits with her feet drawn up on her chair, resting chin on hands. She’s built like a boy, no chest to speak of, sharp features, no hint of makeup. Half a dozen beaded necklaces decorate her long neck, and at the hollow point where neck and sternum meet, a tattooed rose winks.
“Aerosmith?” she says, reading his shirt. “Joke, right?”
“Absolutely not,” Toby replies, mouth full of lettuce. He eyes her back. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
Jesus. “How long have you been at it?”
She squeezes her knees. “Since I was nine.”
“This your first competition?”
“Not counting Kiwanis.”
How good can she be? Toby wonders. Then he remembers how good he was.
“Where are you from?” He feels like an elder statesman, drawing out the next generation.
“Gulf Islands.”
“What gulf?” Geography isn’t Toby’s strong suit. Jasper claims that he slept through school, thinking only of music. As proof, he’ll ask him to recite the periodic table, and Toby will say, “The what?”
“Off the B.C. coast,” she tells him. “I live on the smallest island that has actual people, Martin.” She pronounces this Mar-teen, the Spanish way.
“Lucky you,” Toby says, letting his gaze wander around to take in the others: a Japanese guy wearing a toque, a Russian, a Brit, a blond woman whose name he missed.
“Lots of goats and hippies,” Trace says. “The most beautiful place on earth. I miss it already.”
It turns out she attends a private arts academy on the mainland instead of a regular high school. She tells Toby this in a voice that pretends not to care, yet she soon lets him know the academy holds a rigorous entrance audition. “Like one in fifty makes the cut.”
Toby was like this at her age, craving attention and at the same time brushing it off. “Can’t wait to hear you play.”
“Really?” She’s pleased.
This is where she should echo the sentiment, but it takes time to learn competition etiquette.
Larry is from Austin, a skinny guy who doesn’t seem faintly Texan until he opens his mouth and speaks. He’s a vegetarian; so much for stereotypes.
“Vegan,” he drawls. “Makes me popular with the good old boys.” He rests his thumb on his belt buckle, which is shaped like a Fender Telecaster.
Toby guesses he put himself through college playing cover tunes in a bar band, one of the brotherhood. Toby played the Yonge Street strip before he was old enough to drink.
Larry peers at his registration package, leafing through the competitors’ bios until he spots Toby’s name. “You’ve been away a piece.”
“Eleven years.”
Larry whistles and waits for an explanation, but Toby doesn’t volunteer one: no point in revealing weakness to this lot. They’ll hoover it up, then wait to see him crack.
“I have played in twenty-one competitions,” Armand announces.
“How many have you won?” Trace asks.
Armand gazes sternly at her. “Young lady, I have earned one participation in semifinals, and this is my aspiration, to achieve that level again.”
“One semifinal in twenty-one tries?” Trace doesn’t disguise her astonishment.
Armand gives her a doleful look while Hiro, a guitarist from Osaka, giggles. He sports a metallic toque worn over spiky hair and moves with a self-conscious grace, tilting his head just so, adjusting his collar. Toby studies him, the smooth skin, grey linen shirt. Queer? Too soon to be sure, and there are cultural differences to consider.
Toby bolts down his food. When he’s on edge, he can’t taste anything and it’s a struggle to get it down. But food is fuel, a necessary stoking of the furnace, and it prevents death — a fact he once notoriously forgot.
The cadets pull half a dozen tables together at the other end of the cafeteria and sit with their legs swung out, boots too big to fit beneath. Their voices pitch low, as if they’re on a secret mission. Armand eyes them and pulls up his collar, pretending to hide. Toby’s the only one who laughs, who gets the joke. The other guitarists chatter about the judges, preferences known and rumoured, and possible prejudices: one is a sucker for the lyric line and lush tone, while another craves brash modern dissonance with flamenco trimmings. Information is ammunition.
“What you must understand,” Armand insists, slapping the table with his palm, “is that even a fantastic guitarist can have a bad day. So if you genius people make a mistake onstage, I will be waiting in the wings.”
“Juerta’s here,” Larry says, referring to the eminent judge. “He’s not going to be put off by a few wrong notes.”
“A few wrong notes,” Armand interrupts, “is a catastrophe if —” he lowers his voice “— you cannot instantly recover.”
A short silence follows this remark as each musician imagines himself flubbing onstage, spotlight burning.
“Those of us who have been around these events for years, the judges understand how we play, what we can do,” Armand says, then leans back, hands clasped over his trim belly.
Toby calculates — twenty-one competitions. The man’s been at it for years. He must be well over thirty. Unlike most competitions, this one is open to all ages.
Toby’s name, briefly known in classical guitar circles beyond Canada, means zip to this lot. Whatever reputation he once enjoyed has long since disappeared into the ether of flamed-out early promise. It will happen to many of these characters, too, though such a possibility is far from their minds now. They trade news of master classes attended, guitar gods glimpsed in the hallways, luthiers who use traditional fan bracing versus radial. There had been a day when Toby was in the thick of it, and he wipes his mouth with a paper napkin and waits for all this to feel different, more how it was.
At the far end of the table a woman with tangled blond hair smiles at him. When he meets her gaze, she glances away, then back again. Shy? Perhaps. What he can see of her face intrigues him: she must be at least forty and is dressed with some care in a yellow blouse and silver necklace.
“Where are you from?” she mouths.
“Toronto.”
She points to her chest and mouths back, “Me, too,” then indicates an empty chair next to her. Toby picks up his tray with the remnants of lunch and joins her there.
“Another refugee from the virus,” she says in a too-bright voice, then holds out her hand. “Lucy Shaker.”
They shake, and he sees milky skin under the framing hair and violet
