Educating Simon (17 page)

Thank the gods I have Graeme—my fantasy version of Graeme—to keep me warm. As it were. Otherwise I think I'd go berserk thinking about Michael all the time.

I was not especially attentive to Toby Thursday afternoon. First, I was late, because I'd stopped at the house to drop off my books so I wouldn't be lugging those around all evening, and I also wanted to change my St. Bony shirt to something more intentional.

On a single sheet of paper I had a list of words I'd looked up for Toby, but it wasn't long enough, and I had a hard time using his dictionary to find words at random of sufficient obscurity to stump him. I was going to have to put in more effort; that was sure. I was so distracted that at one point, when he finally missed a word, I said, “No, there's more yellow. You missed the second
i
.” Which of course made him quiz me about what that meant until I had to tell him about my synaesthesia.

“Wow! If I had that, I'd win for sure! Would they even have let you compete? I mean, when you were younger? Or would that be considered cheating?”

“I'm sure I don't know.” I hoped my dismissive tone would discourage more questions, but no; it seemed he wanted to know the colour of every single letter. Finally I pointed out that he was wasting time better spent on practice, and he buckled down again.

During our break, with Colleen puttering about in the kitchen and Toby rambling on about how much he loves the film
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and speculating about the coloured lights that flash when the alien ship is sending out tones and whether the aliens had synaesthesia, my mind wandered away again towards Michael and what it would be like spending the evening with him. I tried to refocus by reminding myself that he was not to be touched, but that just ended up making me feel sad and vulnerable.

Toby was explaining how
Close Encounters
is all about being open to other creatures we can learn to understand when La La surprised me by jumping onto my lap. Automatically, my fingers began to rub behind her ears, and suddenly my eyes stung with tears. I squinted hard to keep them away.

Toby, unfortunately, noticed. “Simon! Are you all right? What's wrong?”

My voice would break, I knew, if I spoke right away, so I shook my head and coughed, which sent La La back to the floor. I managed, “I'll tell you another time.”

There was no putting him off forever, though. During the rest of our practice, he deliberately misspelled some words, I think to try and make me feel better. Finally I had to tell him that I'd had to leave my cat behind in England. He jumped up and threw his arms around my shoulders as best he could. I didn't get out of my chair to make it any easier. As he sat down again, he wiped tears from his own eyes.

No Mr. Lloyd appeared to darken the rest of Toby's afternoon. When I was downstairs in the entrance lobby, alone at last, I pulled out my phone, brought up the entry for Michael's number, and sat there staring at it until the screen dimmed. I touched the phone to brighten it again. This went on for some number of times I lost track of until I finally just hit the Call icon. He answered on the second ring.

“Michael, Simon here. Ready for your art lesson?”

“Primo. I can be at the entrance on Museum Road in twenty. You?”

“Same. See you.” And I rang off before anything in my voice could give away that I was shaking a little.

I sat where I was for another couple of minutes, trying to talk myself out of this funk.
Get it together, Simon. What is wrong with you? You're acting like a child. Grow a pair. Find your backbone.

 

I spotted him immediately, leaning against the side of the building, casual, at ease, and oh, so handsome. He wore a white cotton shirt tucked loosely into blue jeans, sleeves rolled up to reveal well-formed forearms in that olive tone of his heritage that contrasts beautifully with white. A couple of girls passed by him ahead of me, and they both turned to look at him. But he was watching me.

Inside, he led us right to the museum's permanent European collection. He had some specific works in mind that he wanted to examine, some paintings and some sculpture. I think I impressed him by drawing his attention to other types of art: silver work, furniture, textiles—other works in which he might detect the patterns that were distinctly English or Italian.

It was intoxicating, standing close to him for minutes at a time, examining a work of art, inhaling the scent of him: wool, warmed by the sun. No cologne, no added fragrance. I stumbled on the technique of asking him a leading question and then basking in his nearness as he formulated an analysis. I listened to his responses only enough to tell that he knows a heck of a lot more about art than I do, and to come up with another question so we wouldn't have to move on and, inevitably, apart any sooner than necessary.

It came to an end at last, though later than Michael had planned. “We'll have to hoof it or we won't have much time to talk with Chas.”

A taxi was just dropping a passenger off, and I hailed it. Michael said, “Whoa, there, that's pricey.”

I smiled at him and held the door. “My treat.” And I sat as close to him in the backseat as could possibly be deemed reasonable, not quite but almost touching. He didn't move away.

“Aberdeen Street,” he said to the driver. I tried to pay attention to how we got there from the museum, but the distraction of Michael's leg or shoulder occasionally touching mine was too much for me.

Aberdeen turned out to be a short block of underwhelming buildings. We got out of the taxi with a row of cars between us and the building. I paid for the ride and was putting my wallet away when my eye fell on a sticker on the bumper of a parked car. Michael was greeting someone, undoubtedly another college student, who had just come out of the nearest doorway and had unlocked this same car, his remote causing a short
beep
of the horn. But my attention was on that bumper sticker. It read, L
OST YOUR CAT
? C
HECK MY TIRE TREADS.

“Simon,” Michael was saying to me, “this is Dick. He lives on the first floor.”

Dick, a large fellow, lots of bulk to him and rather unattractive, was holding his hand out. I didn't take it. Instead, looking right at him, I said, “Dick, is it? How appropriate.”

Dick lowered his hand and scowled at me. “What's your problem?”

“Not my problem. Yours.” I pointed to the bumper sticker. “Did you put this on here?”

“What if I did?”

Michael, unsure what was going on, moved to where he could see the sticker. He looked at it, looked at me, looked at Dick.

Dick repeated, “What's your problem, dude? You some kind of cat lover?”

“Well,
your
attitude towards cats is hanging on your proverbial sleeve. You realise,” I said to him in a voice that suggested sarcastic confusion, “that cats can't read, right?”

“So?”

“So your problem must be with people who like cats. So your problem is with me.” I lifted a foot and dragged the sole of my shoe across the nasty thing. “
This
is a prehistoric attitude to project towards people you haven't even met. You don't know me, but you want me to be angry with you.” I shook my head. “Primitive. Michael, are we going inside?” I turned my back on “Dick” and headed towards the doorway.

No doubt more to avoid additional conflict than to do my bidding, Michael practically jumped towards the door. “See you later,” he called to Dick.

“And that faggy limey had better not be here when I get back!”

Michael pulled the door open and held it, aiming a hoarse whisper at me as I passed. “What did you do that for?”

I halted in the doorway. “The question should be, ‘What did
he
do that for?' He's a Neanderthal, Michael.” I moved forwards, and he followed. “Though that's an insult to Neanderthals.”

“Okay, but they're dangerous! I just hope he doesn't see you again later.”

I decided against pursuing this discussion further.

The foyer was what you might expect: ancient, grimy floor tiles that might have started life as cream or maybe even white; dirt caked into corners and wherever the floor and a wall met; badly maintained wooden panelling on the walls below a chair rail, white marble with black veins above—badly in need of resurfacing. I followed him up two flights of stairs made of some unidentifiable stone, each step depressed in the centre from the wear of countless feet treading up and down and up and down. He shared three tiny rooms with a fellow who was seated at a desk on the left side of the room we entered from the hall. Without standing, this fellow turned towards me and held his hand out. I decided against annoying another of Michael's acquaintances and shook hands.

“Brad Tollman,” he said. I gave him my name, and he turned back to his desk. There was another desk and a small couch in this windowless room. There were doors to two other rooms, both bedrooms with windows.

Michael turned to the right and gestured to a door. “Make yourself at home,” he said to me. “I'll go roust Chas, and we can head out.”

Michael's bedroom. I was alone in Michael's bedroom. I would have expected to notice the bed first, but the posters on the wall were so intense they practically assaulted me. Straight Edge imagery, bands with trap sets and electric guitars and keyboards, one image of some shirtless guy holding his tattooed shoulder so close to the camera that the rest of him was blurred.
X
s all over the place. The only poster I could tolerate looking at for more than a few seconds was over the head of his bed: Van Gogh's
Starry Night,
outlandishly out of place.

The bedcover was a hideous red corduroy, worn in places where someone—Michael, presumably—had sat on it countless times. It was a twin bed; no room for anything bigger in here. But what was interesting was that the bedspread fit it, and it wasn't new, which made me wonder if it had been on Michael's twin bed at his parents' home. I'd always slept in a queen-size bed, or at least since I was twelve or so. Maybe thirteen. And I'd always had a room plenty large enough to accommodate it. The quality of the bedspread—or the lack thereof—and the size gave me the impression that Michael's family were not well-off, financially. Looking around the room I noticed a similar lack of quality, though the furniture itself was possibly provided by the school. The lamps, one on the bed table and one on the bureau, were small and cheaply made. I had just begun to examine the personal items on the bed table when I heard Michael return, someone in tow.

“Chas Dakin,” said the fellow, holding his hand out to me. I shook it and gave him my name, trying not to stare at the two barbell piercings through his right eyebrow or the grey X-inspired T-shirt he wore untucked over a charcoal pair of those hideous not-quite-shorts, not-quite-trousers with the crotch that hangs about halfway down the thigh. Was there no place on this guy I could rest my eyes without wanting to turn away?

Behind me Michael dug into a bureau drawer. I turned in time to see him pull out something olive drab, no doubt another T-shirt. Greedily I took in his bare torso as he removed the white shirt, disappointed that he was rejecting it but enjoying the outline of his abdominal muscles, dropping my eyes down to follow the slanted lines of muscle that disappeared into his jeans. Why had he worn the white shirt to the museum, and why change it now?

Dressed again, he said to me, “You like?”

It was, of course, another X-related thing. A few playing cards were printed in black across his middle. Above them in brick red was, I'
M
S
TRAIGHT
E
DGE
. Below them was, D
EAL WITH
I
T
. Why would I like it? “Do I get in trouble if I tell you how much I preferred the white shirt?”

He laughed without replying. “Shall we head out?”

As Chas turned I noticed a massive tattoo, a gothic-style X on the side of his calf, bright red outlined in thick black ink. I looked away.

We sat at a round table in a forgettable Chinese restaurant. With an effort, I pushed aside my frustrated feelings about Michael and focused my mind on the task at hand, which was to determine if there was enough to this X stuff for me to use it in my coursework, either centrally or peripherally. I learned that the movement had begun within punk, but became a protest against the self-indulgence and hedonism punk is known for. The name Straight Edge came from a song by a group called Minor Threat, and the X symbol was born when a Straight Edge band arrived to play at a club. It seems the band members were underage, and to allow them to stay but prevent them being served alcohol, the club management had put a large black
X
on their hands to alert club staff. Evidently this all goes back to 1980.

Chas, who said he grew up in Colorado, rambled on about how cool it was to be clean, to be able to say no to offers of drugs now that he was in X. He talked about how he'd been into drugs in high school until he'd ended up in hospital. After that, starting the summer before his senior year, he had dedicated himself to X. He'd been to the Sound and Fury Festival in Los Angeles over the summer, and he raved about bands with names like Rotting Out, Minus, Harms Way, and Take Offense.

The nasty bumper sticker still on my mind, I asked Michael, “Is cat-hater Dick in X?”

He shook his head. “No, he's just an asshole. And it's not ‘in' X. It's just X.”

Whatever. I asked Chas, “So what can you tell me about why these bands would deliberately give themselves names with dark or negative connotations, like Take Offense? What is the relationship between being clean, as you put it, and wilfully offending people?”

Chas laughed, but without humour. “If you were X, you'd know what it's like. There's even an X T-shirt that says, ‘Straight Edge means I have no friends.' Being X puts you into a minority group, and we get a lot of grief from people who don't get it. So our response is, you know, ‘In your face, fuckers!' ” He grinned as though he'd love to have someone to say that to right this minute.