Read Kicking Tomorrow for Free Online Page A

it,” Miriam says.
    “He who denied it supplied it,” Barnabus says.
    Robbie rolls down his window and hangs himself out. A breeze cools the damp creases in the crooks of his arms.
Puh PUH duh duh PUH ,
he taps out a demon rhythm, gingerly, on the shell of the car.
Puh PUH duh duh DUH All families must die…
    … at last they’ve driven off. And Robbie’s won a victory: he’s waved goodbye and is strolling back down the garden path now like he’s the owner of this big old house. Turns up the stereo to rock the foundations and sings along at the top of his lungs, churning his throat up hot and raw, all alone in the place that from the neighbours’ point of view must have just become a jumping jukebox
.
    The doorbell rings. It’s Ivy, fresh from the hospital. Her skin is tender and white, as her petroleum jelly-soaked bandages have only recently been removed. They feast on pizza and agree the clams on it look like little denuded vaginas. They drink freely from Dad’s liquor cabinet and in the living room play Ivy’s favourite game, the one in which they take on mystery characters and meet for the first time, again and again. On this woozy evening she’s a writer of erotic literature living in Paris at the time of Debussy and Cocteau and Gide, although Robbie wouldn’t know what that means if you spelled it out for him. She’s sitting on the tapestried couch, squinting against the setting sun, the smoke from her cigarette hanging in the light like a nest of crafty thoughts. He’s pinned to the carpet like a hairy butterfly, twitching, hands fluttering, fishing for flakes of cork on the surface of his wine. Reluctantly he settles on Keef Richards of the Strolling Bones, but then, with shame, realizes he can’t think of a thing to say in order to become Keef Richards, to pull on the heavy mantle of his glory, to adopt the supreme voice of a generation
.
    Robbie loves Ivy, but how he’s starting to hate her, too. She just sits there with the cool of the Sphinx, her legs drawn up and her knees tucked under her chin, her skirt tantalizingly slipped off her thighs. She’s sizing him up through her otter-brown eyes, head cocked insouciantly as if she were unaware he can see her labia squeezing out in the shape of a plum pit, wrapped in the tissue of her panties like fruit on display. When she knows perfectly well…
    … he sighed and shifted in his seat, for the car, vibrating steadily on the highway, was causing the thickly stitched seamsof his far-out sprayed-on bell-bottoms to pinch his scrotum.
    They drove two hours from Montreal through the Eastern Townships to Kilborn Centre, the car’s shadow rippling and tumbling over the drab flat fields, the Madame Patates, the gas stations, and the farmhouses advertising worms. Now, in Robbie’s humble opinion, regardless of what the Quebec Tourism brochures said, Kilborn Centre was an oily little armpit boasting a row of burger joints and tacky souvenir stores on Main Street, and a fish canning factory on a lakeshore crawling with foam. Motorbikes clustered together in the mangy central park next to a Baron Bulgingburger’s franchise. Bikers hung out drinking beer and listening to music – the old ladies with PROPRIÉTÉ DES HELL’S ANGELS on their T-shirts, the brothers with their stitched-on colours and studded leather vests and stupendous beerguts and psycho mountain-man beards. They peed, too, against the war memorial plastered with bird droppings, a bra dangling aloft from the soldier’s upstretched hand. Dad said, “Jesus, look at those smelly, aum…” and remarked that the statue had no right to be there because, during Conscription, the French Canadians had disgraced themselves by fleeing the towns and hiding out in the bush.
    “Chickenshit pea-soups,” Barnabus said, and Mom turned to give Dad an almighty look. Just like on TV ! Grilling some industrial-strength polluter. Robbie sank low in his seat.
    The Bookbinders had to drive through Kilborn