Lucy shuffles the photographs and stares at them again. What kind of life does Uncle Philip lead over there with these boys, their skin glistening as if oiled? Her own body, she must admit, has seen better days.
Is it so strange to search for beauty?
That’s hardly the point, she reminds herself.
Charlie kicks open the front door on the dot of the half-hour, drops his pack, then begins to bustle about the kitchen below, at the same time popping a basketball, an activity that makes the whole house shake. The racket is pure theatre. He’s proclaiming that he is in no way ashamed of the day’s mishap. In fact, it’s a bonus, because he gets the remainder of the day off. He knows she’s up here; he’s waiting for her to come down and issue the predictable lecture, which he’ll mouth word for word in tandem.
The computer monitor displays a breakdown of prices for the job on Saturday, dinner for eight, three of whom are lactose intolerant. Before each job she determines to earn a higher hourly rate, but somehow it never ends up that way. The twins, Charlie and Mike, hover in the kitchen as she carves the elaborate garnishes that are her specialty: olive rabbits, radish flowers, tomato roses, carrot daisies embedded in aspic, and the boys will say, not inaccurately, that it’s this manic attention to the “crap no one eats” that squeezes her profit margin. You can say that about Baroque embellishments, the mordents and trills that decorate the musical line. Yet it is precisely because they serve no purpose but to please the eye that she fusses over her food decorations. She snaps photographs of the spreads before delivery and mounts them in a portfolio to show prospective clients.
Charlie launches into singing “Stairway to Heaven” in his newly developed baritone voice that still thrills him, and drums on furniture until the microwave dings. He’s slid a pair of chocolate chip cookies in there, liking the way they go soft and gooey, chocolate oozing onto the glass trivet. Lucy knows he’s wondering why she isn’t there laying down the law.
She won’t mention the photographs to Mark, because he’ll want to see them, and Mark is a literal sort of man. He’d insist on shredding them into tiny pieces right away, ensuring they didn’t turn up in recognizable flakes scattering down the street.
“Disgusting old goat,” they’d agree. Then they’d fret over whether Philip had approached the twins in a creepy way during one of his visits. That might explain Charlie’s nosedive at school. And why did Uncle Philip suddenly grow this family feeling after years of nothing more than a UNICEF card sent at Christmas? The visits started three years ago, coinciding with his trips to Thailand, but also with the twins’ free fall into puberty.
“Hey.” Charlie stands in the doorway of her study, gangly five feet eight inches, shaggy hair, ancient Pixies T-shirt.
She looks up, pretending to be surprised.
“I suppose you’re pissed off,” he says through an elaborate yawn.
“I suppose I must be.”
He squints, suspicious. “You don’t sound very.”
“Other things are on my mind at this moment, Charlie.”
He snorts, knowing better. “Hyke way overreacted.”
“Did he now?”
“Lots of kids forge signatures. It’s practically a religion at my school.”
He waits for her protest. When it doesn’t come and she merely taps out a code on the computer, he slaps the wall. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to guilt me by not responding.”
“I thought I was trying to print out a menu.” She clicks “select all,” then “print,” and waits for the machine to spit out pages.
Their jeans land in sculpted heaps on the floor, surrounded by key chains with industrial-sized links. When the twins were small, they slept in bunks and tortured each other with hand-held lasers. Now they sleep in futons at opposite sides of the room, though Mike keeps threatening to move to the crawl space in the cellar. Mark nixed the idea because the furnace is on its last legs and quite possibly leaks noxious fumes. The boys love fire. They are always lighting incense or dollar-store candles, then sitting in the darkened room listening to spacey electronic music. Lucy wasn’t born yesterday. She knows they smoke pot in there and blow the smoke out the open window, even in the depths of winter. No wonder the heating bill is sky-high. She picked a glass tube off Charlie’s desk one day: a crack pipe? Confronted with the evidence, he rolled his eyes and said, “Mum, it’s a vapourizer.”
“A what?”
Lucy loves it when the boys swoop on her, lifting her high in the air and twirling her about. Somehow she’s morphed from being an intimidating mother into this cute miniature Mum, and she never fails to squeal with feigned alarm.
She cleans the house, but not often these days. “My practice time is sacrosanct,” she likes to say, and watches everyone, except perhaps Mark, roll his eyes.
Why waste precious moments scrubbing and dusting? They’ll only mess it all up, grimy fingers stippling a route along the walls and down the stairwell, clustering around light switches. Her anger as she sprays toxic cleanser and starts to mop contains a heavy overlay of martyrdom, which no one notices. It is, after all, not her actual body they trample over in their mud-caked boots, just floorboards and linoleum, symbolic value nil.
The ideal level of tension while playing guitar is four out of ten. Her teacher for the past year is Goran, a Serb from Sarajevo, once a respected performer, who escaped the city’s siege with a piece of shrapnel lodged in his shoulder, hence his teaching career. He likes to lean back in his chair in the conservatory studio and say, “Tell me, how tense now?”
“Seven?”
“I think maybe is nine today. You must feel your spine awaken, like a serpent.” He’s been studying Kundalini yoga to deal with the trauma of his country’s civil war.
Ten
Right hand “m” finger feels as if it got stuck in a crankshaft, thanks to the Montreal humidity. It’s an old problem, going back to the day when staff dragged Toby onto the baseball field for first-base duty. The halfway house was very keen on sports participation. Then some bozo popped the ball to right field where Toby made the heroic leap, landed on his butt and hand, and felt the ominous crunch of ligament. He flexes the finger now, gauging degree of loss of flexibility. He is walking along the buffed corridor of the university building past groups of competitors who huddle in excited chatter. They all seem to know one another. Didn’t we meet in Aspen? Brussels? Houston? Barrueco’s master class? They hail one another in a mishmash of accents, ignoring Toby who tries to look as if he knows where he’s going.
No one is watching, a novel sensation in a competition. He tells himself it is freeing, rather than unnerving. The hall steers left, and he follows the rich fragrance of coffee and baked goods until he reaches the cafeteria with its bistro-style tables. For a moment he stands in the doorway and scans the noisy room. A group of competitors has taken over several tables at the far end, their instruments propped against chairs or lying underfoot. Toby left his own guitar in the locked dorm room. He nods at them, but the gesture is unseen, yet that one glance tells him everything: they are unspeakably young, starting with that baby-faced boy sporting a soul patch and a girl with