Read Kicking Tomorrow for Free Online

watching
Woodstock
. (It’s Robbie’s nineteenth time. Ivy used to work here, and in the good old days he always got in for free.) Rosie sucks his fingers and makes them sticky. He’s vaguely aware of this. She lays her head on his shoulder, lifts it, lays it down again, lifts it, lays it down; weird, he imagines he has a large feathered wing, just one, restless, ruffling, twitching heavy on his shoulder. He concentrates hard on the movie, wishing after all that he’d been a part of that whole groovy business, that whole exuberant crowd. A crowd with a purpose, doing its own original thing. And he might have been part of something today, but for Rosie’s emotions. He rocks out, although by three a.m. he finds himself melancholy once more, unexpectedly so, given that he knows every frame in the film by heart. Ridiculously sad in fact, weeping- as he discovers when his lips taste salt – to see that field of garbage during Hendrix, for it looks exactly like what he feels has been bequeathed to him as a seventies guy. He feels so ambivalent, he hardly knows himself. People were part of something back then, or so it was reported. All he senses he’s a part of is some Great Hangover; he’s grabbed at the end of the sixties and, like a lizard’s tail, it has come off in his hands.

3
    THE COTTAGE SEASON IS REVVED UP, MIRIAM AND BARNABUS are out of school for the summer, and Mom’s back. Where has she been? A certain continent. Truth is, Robbie’s stoned again, and wasn’t really paying attention that closely when she plopped her luggage down, and got it all confused when she described the documentary she’d been making about, about – spices… species?… faeces? Same difference; whatever it was, knowing Mom’s show, it was probably bad news for nature.
    Anyhow, now it’s rush rush rush to get out of this hot smelly town, and the Bookbinders nod to the other Westmount families packing up their cars in their driveways sprinkled with apple blossom. A routine Robbie despises, and he makes no bones about it. Dad has to tell him, “Sorry, Robbie, but in this fam–I, this house is out of – look, we’re locking up for the summer. That is non-negotiable. I don’t want you having some, some–”
    “Some whut? Some whut?”
    “Some
harsh
party,” Barnabus says. “I heard him tell Mom.”
    “Hushed
party is what he said, STUPID ,” Miriam says.
“As is your wont
, Rob.”
    “Won’t
whut?”
Robbie demands. Fists on hips, red-eared and steaming, he shoots the Rubinsteins a withering stare clear acrossthe street, tosses his hair off his shoulders, rests the knuckles of one fist on the hood of the car, instantly yanking them off the burning metal.
    “Look,” he spits. “You can tell Dad I’m wasting my teens away slaving over a hot lawnmower. It’s the wilderness out there, not a croquet lawn. It’s futile, I’ll tell you that much for free–keeping that place the way Mom and Dad like it is like digging a hole in the ocean.”
    “Dad says you’re too angry about nothing and that we need quality-intensive time together,” Miriam says snittily, going back to her
Owl
magazine.
    “Hard family labour, he means.”
    “And Mom says next time we’ll buy the Alexis Nihon Plaza so you can hang out in the mall.”
    Grumbling, he stuffs a sack full of groceries (he’s been
forced
to do this) under the hatchback and squeezes in the back seat with his brother and sister. Mendoza the boxer jumps in too, slobbering on his lap. Robbie slams the door extremely hard. It’s suffocatingly hot as they wait for Dad to switch on the air-conditioning. The car has the familiar stink of sticky coffee at the bottoms of Mom’s
Hello World!
TV -show mugs, the reminder of last week’s french onion soup that slopped over during the dirt-road stretch of the trip, and the repulsive memory of Barnabus’s abruptly reviewed lunch, all three courses.
    “Oh. Now. Chrissake. SBD . Who’s the dirty pig?”
    “He who smelt it dealt