of kids forge signatures. It’s practically a religion at my school.”
He waits for her protest. When it doesn’t come and she merely taps out a code on the computer, he slaps the wall. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to guilt me by not responding.”
“I thought I was trying to print out a menu.” She clicks “select all,” then “print,” and waits for the machine to spit out pages.
Their jeans land in sculpted heaps on the floor, surrounded by key chains with industrial-sized links. When the twins were small, they slept in bunks and tortured each other with hand-held lasers. Now they sleep in futons at opposite sides of the room, though Mike keeps threatening to move to the crawl space in the cellar. Mark nixed the idea because the furnace is on its last legs and quite possibly leaks noxious fumes. The boys love fire. They are always lighting incense or dollar-store candles, then sitting in the darkened room listening to spacey electronic music. Lucy wasn’t born yesterday. She knows they smoke pot in there and blow the smoke out the open window, even in the depths of winter. No wonder the heating bill is sky-high. She picked a glass tube off Charlie’s desk one day: a crack pipe? Confronted with the evidence, he rolled his eyes and said, “Mum, it’s a vapourizer.”
“A what?”
Lucy loves it when the boys swoop on her, lifting her high in the air and twirling her about. Somehow she’s morphed from being an intimidating mother into this cute miniature Mum, and she never fails to squeal with feigned alarm.
She cleans the house, but not often these days. “My practice time is sacrosanct,” she likes to say, and watches everyone, except perhaps Mark, roll his eyes.
Why waste precious moments scrubbing and dusting? They’ll only mess it all up, grimy fingers stippling a route along the walls and down the stairwell, clustering around light switches. Her anger as she sprays toxic cleanser and starts to mop contains a heavy overlay of martyrdom, which no one notices. It is, after all, not her actual body they trample over in their mud-caked boots, just floorboards and linoleum, symbolic value nil.
The ideal level of tension while playing guitar is four out of ten. Her teacher for the past year is Goran, a Serb from Sarajevo, once a respected performer, who escaped the city’s siege with a piece of shrapnel lodged in his shoulder, hence his teaching career. He likes to lean back in his chair in the conservatory studio and say, “Tell me, how tense now?”
“Seven?”
“I think maybe is nine today. You must feel your spine awaken, like a serpent.” He’s been studying Kundalini yoga to deal with the trauma of his country’s civil war.
Ten
Right hand “m” finger feels as if it got stuck in a crankshaft, thanks to the Montreal humidity. It’s an old problem, going back to the day when staff dragged Toby onto the baseball field for first-base duty. The halfway house was very keen on sports participation. Then some bozo popped the ball to right field where Toby made the heroic leap, landed on his butt and hand, and felt the ominous crunch of ligament. He flexes the finger now, gauging degree of loss of flexibility. He is walking along the buffed corridor of the university building past groups of competitors who huddle in excited chatter. They all seem to know one another. Didn’t we meet in Aspen? Brussels? Houston? Barrueco’s master class? They hail one another in a mishmash of accents, ignoring Toby who tries to look as if he knows where he’s going.
No one is watching, a novel sensation in a competition. He tells himself it is freeing, rather than unnerving. The hall steers left, and he follows the rich fragrance of coffee and baked goods until he reaches the cafeteria with its bistro-style tables. For a moment he stands in the doorway and scans the noisy room. A group of competitors has taken over several tables at the far end, their instruments propped against chairs or lying underfoot. Toby left his own guitar in the locked dorm room. He nods at them, but the gesture is unseen, yet that one glance tells him everything: they are unspeakably young, starting with that baby-faced boy sporting a soul patch and a girl with a shaved head. They might take him for being one of the judges. That’s why they’ve turned to stare and are whispering, trying to figure out who he is in the classical guitar firmament.
Toby throws back his shoulders under the vintage Aerosmith
tour shirt. The room’s concrete walls are painted yellow with windows running down one side, open on this warm day. It’s Indian summer, last gasp before winter closes in. Toby grabs a tray. Because this is Montreal, buttery croissants and salads sprinkled with watercress and crumbled chevre fill the glass shelves — no sign of crap sliced bread or troughs of gravy growing skin. Jasper would approve. Pictures of the Laurentian Mountains decorate the walls alongside sepia-tinged photos of Old Montreal. The girl serving hot dishes sports a neck tattoo and a chain mail bracelet.
“Bonjour,” Toby tries after clearing his throat.
She glances up and nods, acknowledging this triumph of linguistics, then says in perfect English, “You here for the guitar festival?”
“Yes.” Suddenly, he wants to tell her all about it. “I’ve entered the competition segment.”
“Fantastique! I hope you will win.” Then she slides a piece of cake onto his tray, waving off his protests. “You must eat sugar for energy, yes?”
Women always want to feed him. They spot his waif-like form and start scouting for calories. He grabs a fistful of cutlery and paper napkins and pays the cashier, another languid beauty, another neck tattoo.
In Paris the musicians jockeyed to sit with him, even older guys: they all wanted to catch some of what was roaring off him, a sensation that now seems remote. He strides to the table in the corner, holding his tray high, offering an enigmatic half-smile. The musicians glance up and see his white tag. White signals competitor. Yellow means judge and blue indicates exhibitor, one of the guys selling instruments or sheet music in the salon.
A man with a thin face and not much hair pulls out a chair. “Join us, my friend. I am Armand Stolz from Frankfurt.”
Toby reaches over with his free hand to shake Armand’s, then hears the flurry of introductions. He repeats each name in turn, knowing he’ll forget them in an instant. Everyone’s keyed up, a mixture of jet lag and nerves. The small tables feature candles set in the middle, currently unlit. Toby catches a chair leg with his foot and drags it in, manoeuvring around the bulky guitar cases.
“Hausner? So you must be German also,” Armand says, genial in his open-neck shirt and pressed jeans. Crow’s feet around his eyes indicate he’s not so young.
“That’s right,” Toby says, blowing into his coffee. “Another Kraut.” Right away he wishes he could suck back his words. “German heritage on my father’s side but born here in Canada,” he clarifies, then realizes he’s trying to wiggle out of this very heritage. Klaus, when bombed on schnapps, makes dumb-ass Nazi jokes, trying to dispel any imagined tension. When he’s not drunk, he’ll moan, “Why do they reduce hundreds of years of German history down to twelve?”
Armand’s smile tightens. He knows what’s going on.
Toby attacks his salad, peeling back the wrapper. Someone across the table is tittering. The cafeteria doors burst open, and a group of army reservists dressed in fatigues enters and marches toward the food trays without speaking, like monks on retreat. Their convention includes seminars in civil disobedience and emergency disaster management. Toby spotted the schedule posted in the entrance of the building.
Without
