The Ann Ireland Library. Ann Ireland
Читать онлайн книгу.
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 thinking he polishes the tines of his fork on a paper napkin.
“Fastidious,” Armand notes, turning to the others. “Definitely German, yes?”
Trace, the girl with hair shaved close to her skull, sits with her feet drawn up on her chair, resting chin on hands. She’s built like a boy, no chest to speak of, sharp features, no hint of makeup. Half a dozen beaded necklaces decorate her long neck, and at the hollow point where neck and sternum meet, a tattooed rose winks.
“Aerosmith?” she says, reading his shirt. “Joke, right?”
“Absolutely not,” Toby replies, mouth full of lettuce. He eyes her back. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
Jesus. “How long have you been at it?”
She squeezes her knees. “Since I was nine.”
“This your first competition?”
“Not counting Kiwanis.”
How good can she be? Toby wonders. Then he remembers how good he was.
“Where are you from?” He feels like an elder statesman, drawing out the next generation.
“Gulf Islands.”
“What gulf?” Geography isn’t Toby’s strong suit. Jasper claims that he slept through school, thinking only of music. As proof, he’ll ask him to recite the periodic table, and Toby will say, “The what?”
“Off the B.C. coast,” she tells him. “I live on the smallest island that has actual people, Martin.” She pronounces this Mar-teen, the Spanish way.
“Lucky you,” Toby says, letting his gaze wander around to take in the others: a Japanese guy wearing a toque, a Russian, a Brit, a blond woman whose name he missed.
“Lots of goats and hippies,” Trace says. “The most beautiful place on earth. I miss it already.”
It turns out she attends a private arts academy on the mainland instead of a regular high school. She tells Toby this in a voice that pretends not to care, yet she soon lets him know the academy holds a rigorous entrance audition. “Like one in fifty makes the cut.”
Toby was like this at her age, craving attention and at the same time brushing it off. “Can’t wait to hear you play.”
“Really?” She’s pleased.
This is where she should echo the sentiment, but it takes time to learn competition etiquette.
Larry is from Austin, a skinny guy who doesn’t seem faintly Texan until he opens his mouth and speaks. He’s a vegetarian; so much for stereotypes.
“Vegan,” he drawls. “Makes me popular with the good old boys.” He rests his thumb on his belt buckle, which is shaped like a Fender Telecaster.
Toby guesses he put himself through college playing cover tunes in a bar band, one of the brotherhood. Toby played the Yonge Street strip before he was old enough to drink.
Larry peers at his registration package, leafing through the competitors’ bios until he spots Toby’s name. “You’ve been away a piece.”
“Eleven years.”
Larry whistles and waits for an explanation, but Toby doesn’t volunteer one: no point in revealing weakness to this lot. They’ll hoover it up, then wait to see him crack.
“I have played in twenty-one competitions,” Armand announces.
“How many have you won?” Trace asks.
Armand gazes sternly at her. “Young lady, I have earned one participation in semifinals, and this is my aspiration, to achieve that level again.”
“One semifinal in twenty-one tries?” Trace doesn’t disguise her astonishment.
Armand gives her a doleful look while Hiro, a guitarist from Osaka, giggles. He sports a metallic toque worn over spiky hair and moves with a self-conscious grace, tilting his head just so, adjusting his collar. Toby studies him, the smooth skin, grey linen shirt. Queer? Too soon to be sure, and there are cultural differences to consider.
Toby bolts down his food. When he’s on edge, he can’t taste anything and it’s a struggle to get it down. But food is fuel, a necessary stoking of the furnace, and it prevents death — a fact he once notoriously forgot.
The cadets pull half a dozen tables together at the other end of the cafeteria and sit with their legs swung out, boots too big to fit beneath. Their voices pitch low, as if they’re on a secret mission. Armand eyes them and pulls up his collar, pretending to hide. Toby’s the only