You Could Believe in Nothing Read online

  “Should be.”

  “Two and one should be good enough to make the playoffs,” said Kev, squeezing from the table and signalling to the bar. “See, that’s not right.”

  “That team from Clarenville won three games. Did you see them? Shit team. Won all three fucking games.”

  “You could actually predict it, if you had the right model, statistically.”

  “Do tell, Murph.”

  “Randomness is just a word we use because we can’t find the pattern,” said Murph. His finger drew streaks in the wet rings on the table. “But there’s always a pattern. A shitty team, most times they lose all their games and go home. But then it could come in bunches. Maybe they win two games, maybe three. It’s a Poisson Burst, that’s what they call it.”

  “Burst?”

  “This guy developed a model.” Murph spread his hands on the table. “It’ll give you the probability of unlikely events occurring in time, a fixed space of time.”

  “Did you see Hiscock nail buddy this afternoon?” said Nels Pittman. “Fucking flattened him.” He banged his bottle off the table, and quickly jammed it in his mouth to catch the beer foaming over.

  “He get thrown out?”

  “Yeah, but it was worth it. Got all of him.”

  “You can’t say it’ll never happen,” said Murph. “If it’s possible, it has to have a probability. Fucking wild when you think about it.”

  The jukebox came to life, its music muffled by a broken speaker. Derek picked up the muted pounding of bass and drums, a singer shouting about his Cadillac. He reached for his coat.

  “You’re on for Thursday night,” said Brian.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Just call if you can’t make it. That’s all I ask.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Do you know what she was up to years ago?”

  “Who?”

  “Nicole. Do you know if she got around? Was she with a lot of guys? What kind of guys?”

  “Jesus, Brian. What are you getting at?”

  “If you know that stuff it helps you figure out who she is. It’s all part of the life you’ll have with her. Like Louise. Louise was a hard case back in her day, believe me. I know more than I want to know.”

  “He’s French, this guy,” said Murph. “He’s got it all down, statistically.”

  The sky was black, without stars or moonlight. Snowflakes appeared just above the street lights and dissolved where they landed. Derek took the courthouse steps to Duckworth, and followed the curve of Church Hill to a plateau on Queen Street. He thought he might see solitary women and slow, prowling cars. But the block was desolate.

  Maybe Louise was right. If he didn’t go after Nicole right away, if the urge to chase wasn’t imperative, maybe it was already over. For so long Nicole had stuck to him, like dog shit on the heel of his shoe. It was liberating, the notion that he might finally take a garden hose to the mess. The feeling would fade by morning, so he revelled in it, allowing himself a small, leaping laugh.

  Derek started up the steps that would take him to the basilica and the darkened path to his apartment behind the church grounds. To his left was Theatre Pharmacy, where a doctor used to trade pills for blow jobs and one of the Drukens shot his brother in the parking lot. To his right Queen Street carried on, ending at the blue house were Lisa Thorne used to live. Like many others, Derek had trained himself to walk the city streets in a state of low-grade amnesia, so as not to be overtaken by memories so close at hand. But the blue house lingered. Its three storeys made three apartments, joined by a poorly lit and treacherous staircase. Derek and Lisa would stay close and silent, taking the uneven steps to the top floor. His time with Lisa was brief, so it was the staircase he remembered best, its creaking, echoing darkness and the way it trapped damp summery smells, like saltwater and cut grass.

  FOUR

  EnCom stood poised for a breakthrough in quality and innovation.

  “We’ve positioned ourselves,” said Mr. Moulton. “Positioned ourselves strategically.” He pushed a pamphlet across the table:

  Ennis Communications

  Strategic Marketing, Advertising, Design

  “Where Quality Meets Innovation!”

  “Think transformative,” he said. “Think vision.”

  Derek fingered the pamphlet, trying to summon his father’s advice—how to dodge tough questions, how to use body language. Before he could answer, Mr. Moulton resumed talking. He was building a creative core, he said. He had hired one fellow, a designer, who came to work on a bicycle every day, even in winter! He was fascinated by creative types.

  Derek was twenty-three years old and wearing his only good pants, a wool blend purchased for convocation at sixty percent off. At university he had signed up for the wrong courses, stumbling from business to arts. (Arts. For fuck’s sake.) He pursued girls who didn’t want him and failed badly, publicly, in a bid for student council. He didn’t get laid until third year, as the last of several to screw Holly from Spencer House. It was a fitful interlude at an end-of-term party, his chance nearly wasted when she pulled away to drunkenly adjust her diaphragm. Stories emerging the next day earned him the nickname “Rear Admiral.” He laughed along, wondering why he had been singled out this way.

  You want to be ahead of the game, said Mr. Moulton. You don’t want to chase. He came around to Derek’s side of the desk and placed a pad of paper before them. At the top of the page he drew a square, a circle, and a triangle. “Let me try out this paradigm on you,” he said.

  Derek waited until he was finished, and took the job.

  The EnCom building was his introduction to the working world. A flat brick structure on Torbay Road, designed to strangle all hope at the beginning of the day. The lobby tiles were patterned in streaks of brown and cream, to obscure the mud tracked in from an unfinished parking lot. The coffee counter, sticky with cup rings and sour milk, combined with the nearby photocopier to produce a burnt, industrial perfume. There was a pear-shaped dark patch of unknown origin at the end of the hallway carpet, and a toilet leak left a mustardy stain on the bathroom floor.

  “Shocking,” whispered Fiona, indicating Moulton’s office with a toss of her head. “His girls are not speaking to him, you know. Not. Speaking.”

  Mr. Moulton had forced out his partner, Mr. Ennis, by taking the man’s wife. Hence the change from Ennis Communications to EnCom, a name with “more go in it,” according to Moulton. Fiona managed the office. She told Derek he might as well know what he was getting himself into. “A faithless outfit,” she said.

  Derek was young enough to be impressed, to imagine seduction as the prosperous man’s prerogative. He asked about the wife.

  “She won’t show her face,” said Fiona. “After pulling a stunt the like of that? No, I wouldn’t say.”

  A junior partner remained, a man who insisted everyone call him Stevey. His blond hair was shaped to a feathery mullet and he discarded his suit jacket every morning, rolling shirt sleeves to the elbows and circulating the building. “My rounds,” he said. Both he and Moulton had mustaches, and their waistbands buckled under spare tires. They joked about their weight, usually when returning from regular fish-and-chip lunches. But Moulton didn’t like Stevey. “The maverick,” he called him, when Stevey wasn’t in the room.

  The employees numbered a dozen or more, but Derek rarely saw the creatives. He saw Fiona, who ate a microwaved lunch at her desk every day, and Trevor, who talked about golf. He reported to Kate. She rowed in the regatta every year and had a beautiful—truly beautiful—rear end. Trevor lusted after Kate in a comical sort of way. But something about her suggested a woman with no inner life. She was just a beautiful ass.

  Derek joined as the “media monitor,” clipping the papers and taping newscasts. Paltry work for paltry wages, but at least he could start in on his student loans. At five o’clock every
afternoon the brick building emptied, leaving him in a tiny video room to catalogue the six o’clock news, with its traffic accidents, municipal squabbles, broken sewer mains, break-and-enters, and other petty inhumanities of the grey day, now turning dark outside his window.

  The wool blend tended to ride up his crotch when he sat down, and as spring turned to summer, the fabric drove him mad with sweating and itching. Derek would lock himself in the video room and drop the pants to his ankles, furiously raking at his thighs and balls. So he went to Tip Top and spent nearly a week’s salary on slacks and dress shirts—one cut above the cheapest—and serious black shoes. Rather than confer an air of tidy confidence, the fresh clothes only enhanced a growing squeamishness about his body. His in-turned feet. The hairy shins poking from his pant legs, skin imprinted with the grip of ribbed dress socks. He came to hate those socks, the sight of them crumpled on his bedroom floor, soiled and flaccid. He chewed breath mints to counter the stale afternoon air of the office, became vigilant for any sign of nose hair, and learned to exercise great care in tucking away his dick—a tug and a waggle, then a spread of the legs and a pelvic thrust before a leap to the safe haven of his jockeys—all to avoid the crushing humiliation of a final piss dribble staining the pant leg. Embarrassment lurked everywhere, in the sound of his ass on the leather chair, a spot on his tie, the persistent damp inside his salt-stained winter boots. Back in university, when he played hockey or flag football, his sweat was vital and urgent. Now a tired odour of decay drifted from his crevices at the close of a working day.

  Think entrepreneurial, said Mr. Moulton. Find the advantage. He told Derek he had just built a free-standing Jacuzzi at his cabin in LaManche. By doing his homework, he had saved hundreds on the contractor’s original estimate. “That’s what I’m talking about,” he said.

  A few weeks into the job, Derek found himself behind Kelly Ferguson in a bank lineup. He knew Kelly from his university days. She had been Billy Wright’s girlfriend, living with him in student squalor at Churchill Apartments. Billy hosted parties and poker nights for the ball hockey league, the heat up on bust so he could roam the place in bare feet and gym shorts. Kelly lingered on the perimeter, her mouth set in forbearance.

  “I don’t go to those parties anymore,” said Derek. “I don’t see that crowd.”

  “Neither do I,” she replied. “Seems so long ago.”

  Outside the bank she sat in her car with the window down.

  “Where you living now?” asked Derek.

  “I’m house-sitting. Dog-sitting, actually. They need their walk every day. You could come with us, if you want.”

  They walked a long time that afternoon, each of them taking a leash. They watched the dogs scratch and pee and bury their snouts in anything that looked disgusting.

  On Christmas Eve, after two bottles of beer with lunch, Derek was brought close to tears watching Kelly stand at the kitchen sink in his apartment. She rinsed mugs and glasses like she made love, with her eyes narrowed to a hard, primitive focus. Derek still thought of sex as a physical emergency, a desperate act. But when he saw that look, the way she applied herself to a simple conjugal task, it was a glimpse of how much she had to give.

  A revelation of sorts began to take shape. Derek had fixed the adult world as a place where the body was subdued. Parcelled out to specific tasks, but otherwise bridled and unacknowledged. Even belittled. This approach wasn’t working for him.

  A few hours later, they had dinner with his parents. Lou didn’t come out of the kitchen until it was time to eat. He was stewing partridges and drinking rum, the windows steamed. He brought the rum to the dinner table and ate quickly, rarely looking up, and saying almost nothing. Derek’s mother and sister talked about the tree, and Kelly asked buoyant questions about the Christmas mornings of years past. Even with the back door cracked, there was no relief from the vapours of boiled cabbage and oily bird, the combustible household. They waited for Curtis to phone from Vancouver, then made their excuses. “You can’t leave before pie,” said his father. They ate the pie.

  They went to Kelly’s place for the night. From there they would visit her parents in the morning. “The holidays are always hard,” she said, rubbing his shoulders. Derek was humiliated, by his father, by his own emotional theatrics, even, somehow, by the sight of Kelly’s back, broad and fleshy, with its constellation of freckles below one shoulder blade.

  After coffee on Christmas morning, he cornered her in the bedroom. “Jesus, Derek, we’re late,” she said. “Couldn’t you think of this before we got dressed?” But she responded ardently. She seemed to know what he was thinking, keeping his face before hers, holding his eyes so they had to acknowledge their every move. “Don’t look away,” she said, when he dropped his chin for a moment.

  They drove to her parents’ house, intoxicated. He watched her suede gloves move on the steering wheel, watched those same eyes drift lazily over empty streets. There was no doubt, his assumptions had been all wrong. The body, his body at least, was absolute.

  On Boxing Day he called Brian.

  “We were wondering whatever happened to you.”

  Only a few months before, Derek had resolved to leave it all behind, the exalted boyhood of student life, with its bluster and ball caps and loutish caste system.

  “When can I get a game?” he asked.

  “Today, if you like. A bunch of us rented St. Bon’s for four o’clock.”

  He played twice that week. It was just them. No league, no refs, no bullshit. On New Year’s Day they booked two hours of ice time and carried on all night from there. Kelly collected him at Brian’s and called the office in the morning to cover for him. She waited until noon before phoning from work.

  “You alive?”

  “Yeah,” said Derek.

  “Do you remember this morning?”

  “No,” he said, which wasn’t quite true.

  “I got out of the shower and came to see if you were okay. And the way you kissed me, it made me get back in bed. But then you passed out again. Out cold! But the way you kissed me, it stayed with me all day.”

  There wasn’t much to be done about your twenties, thought Derek, as he drove from his apartment to his sister’s house in the east end. All you could do was plough through the years without stopping to think, without letting them define you altogether.

  Through the oval window of the front door he could see into the kitchen, where Cynthia swivelled from oven to sink, tipping a pot against its lid and turning her face from the rolling steam. Replacing the pot on its burner, she pushed back a strand of hair, exposing the white crescent beneath her left ear, a reminder of the night she racked up the family car. Then she paused, hands held limp before her, as if trying to remember something. These days she rarely paused for anything. Marriage, two children, divorce, and remarriage had quickened her pace.

  He rang the doorbell and let himself in.

  “Roof daddy!” cried Joey from the living room. A brutish howl of little-girl laughter pealed through the bungalow.

  Cynthia looked up, blinking.

  “Oh, Derek!” She moved quickly to the porch and kissed his cheek. “Watch your feet, it’s all wet. These boots. Just throw your coat there is best. Joey? Derek’s here! Vivian? Tasha? Uncle Derek!”

  In the living room, Joey waved a sponge ball just beyond the reach of his two stepdaughters.

  “Ah-ha-ha!”

  “No!” shrieked Vivian.

  “Ha-HA, ha-HA, ha-HA!”

  “Nooooooo!”

  Derek dropped his jacket over a kitchen chair. Cynthia poured wine in a huge glass and handed it to him. She took off her glasses and lifted her apron to wipe steam from the tiny, rimless rectangles.

  “Joey’s flying to Stephenville in the morning, so we’re a little early tonight if that’s okay. Natasha’s having a terrible time with her belly. I don’t know if she’
ll be any good with that salty ham.”

  Men liked her scar, a solitary imperfection in an otherwise spotless face. It promised iniquity. Derek had discovered this when he and his sister had shared an apartment, back when she kept her hair buzzed short and lounged about in old denim shirts. Her thick glasses made her eyes small and fierce, and she was often taken for a lesbian. But the men who pursued her did so frantically, knowing full well that no good could come of it. Derek would find them at the kitchen table, helpless. When he rediscovered a packet of photos from that year, Cynthia had been charmed and mortified. “Oh my God,” she said, flipping through the stack. “Who was that girl?”

  Tonight the scar was pale, the face drawn into middle age. But what woman doesn’t look middle-aged, drying her hands in an apron and frowning into the brown-sugar glaze while Sunday afternoon fades in the window?

  “Go say hello to the girls.”

  Joey perched on the couch, the cushions pushed aside by his feet. The floor beneath was strewn with plush animals and bright plastic objects.

  “Oh! Oh!” he shouted, making a series of basketball moves. “Oh-oh-uh-uh-ohhh!” Vivian clutched at his legs, drooling with excitement. Natasha sat cross-legged on the floor, giggling into her juice cup, dark stains on the knees of her pink tights. With a great flourish, Joey hooked an arm overhead and tossed the ball towards a little basketball hoop stuck to the wall with suction cups. It missed and rolled across the floor until chased down by Vivian, who jammed it through the hoop with both hands.

  “Roof daddy!”

  The girls screamed, mouths agape.

  Derek was pretty sure “roof daddy” had nothing to do with basketball. Or was he? Although he played briefly in high school, basketball remained as foreign to him as its hip-hop soundtrack. The jargon of sport, like the jargon of youth, had stopped making sense years ago.

  Joey gathered the ball. “Good game. High five.” He held a palm out to Vivian, who drew back and slapped it as hard as she could. “Easy. Easy.”