Read Kicking Tomorrow for Free Online Page B

Centre to reach the heart of the Townships. Lush, rolling, contented, the last rural bastion of Quebec’s well-to-do Anglophones, the Townships were drawn together by great Kilborn, whose southernmost tip touched Vermont, U.S.A., where fancy restaurants served seafood specialties on boardwalks with a view. The cottage was on the lake, situated near a Benedictine monastery that once produced Stilton and apple cider. Mom commented that their Stilton had never been aged properly, and the cider had always been unpalatable,and the architecture of the monastery itself was impossibly gaudy, but that as long as the monks had owned all that land, at least the bay had been quiet. Not like now.
    “Play with me, Rob,” Barnabus pleaded. “Like you used to. In the old days when you were nice.”
    “Oh, shut up, Barn,” Robbie snapped. “It’s not my fault if Mom’s ruining the atmosphere.”
    When Mom just commented on things off-handedly like that, you always knew there was more to follow. Mom’s casual comments were, in Robbie’s view, tips of icebergs, fins of sharks. And sure enough, as Barnabus sulked and Mendoza panted with his great chops wobbling, she got her shit in a knot. If you were a regular viewer of
Hello World!
, you’d know why already, for only last week, standing on the family’s own shoreline, she’d detailed the failure of the monks’ operation: if their Stilton hadn’t been quite so rubbery, she reported, the cider so unpalatably sweet, etc. etc., they might never have had to sell their land; now the EPX Chemicals Corporation spelled way worse trouble for the Townships. Spell that P-O-L-L-U-T-I-O-N .
    Robbie stared at the horizon. Start with monastery, end up with provincial politics and a whole lot of gobbledegook like chlorophenols foliage erosion inhibited nitrogen fixation by symbiotic bacteria heavy metals in the soil fecula on the beach acid loadings all over Quebec and thanks to elevated levels of mercury in the sediments, worsening breakdown in the foodchain. You couldn’t match the degree of Mom’s rage, you could never catch up. So, if you were Robbie, you just shrugged your shoulders and brooded like an old factory under clouds of toxic thoughts, and waited for Dad to
really
get her dander up by telling her further studies were – that acid rain and, aum – may be
preventing –
that nature does, nature kills more species than hu – that the monks were just as bad as EPX, pumping their raw sewage into the lake, and so on.
    “Yes,”
Barnabus said. “Poolution.”
    And after that the inevitable brittle silence. Mom should know better, Robbie thought. This is the way it always ends – not with a bang but a simmer. Mom
thought
too much; she never allowed things to simply be what they seemed – they were always propelled by devious invisible mechanisms, rife with Machiavellian schemes, tragically booby-trapped. In her forensic view, it never just rained – someone was seeding the clouds. There was never just a thaw – it was nuclear experiments in the Soviet Union, Birds never just flew south – it was NASA screwing around with magnetic north. Robbie was never just out late – he was doing drugs, abusing nature like everyone else these days,
    “It’s S.P.E.C.T.R.E. ,” he said. “The evil empire. They’re behind it all. We’re all gonna die. Anarchy and destruction is their goal.”
    “Oh,
is
it, really?” Mom said, retrieving her sense of humour at last. “Well, that’s OK , then. I thought it was something serious.”
    “Poo is their goal,” Barnabus said.

    When the Bookbinders bought their place, it had been a weed-rich wilderness, all rocks and spiky fern and maple trees. Hunters must once have lived or roomed in the cottage, for when Robbie had first been sent out to battle the tall grass, spent cartridges were snapped up clanging into the teeth of his mower. If he’d of known what was in Mom’s mind as far as landscaping plans, eh, he would of applied for a