Fall - Softcover

Colin McAdam’s novel Some Great Thing won the Books in Canada First Novel Award and was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the UK. His most recent work, A Beautiful Truth, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. He has written for Harper’s and lives in Toronto.

1
The days that made me, that were supposed to change me, that didn’t actually make me, are showing me now what I was. My days in the room with Julius. Years have provided some safety.

That was not a school with pipes and dons and tweeds.
    It wasn’t a place where people spoke like people don’t speak.
    It wasn’t in the Highlands of Scotland or the hills of New England.
    It was a place of traditions but the traditions weren’t old.
    Like most private schools it was part fantasy, part reality, and therefore all reality. A place where stories happened, not fables, where there was learning, not lessons, and no one came away with memories of neat moral episodes. I came away with memories.
    There were too many contradictions for there to have been any sense, and my life has always been so. We were boys who wore suits, monkeys with manners. We didn’t have parents but were treated like babies. We were left on our own but had hundreds of rules to abide.
    We were eighteen years old, as grown-up as we could be.
    My memories are twitching like morning in the city.

“Laundry day,” said Chuck. He was standing in the hall with Ant, looking into our bedroom, where Julius was lying with a cloth over his eyes.
    “Laundry day,” said Ant, echoing Chuck, and he rushed into our room, swung his laundry-filled pillowcase, and pounded Julius in the head.
    Julius said, “Fuck off. I mean it.”

I had to take a test to get into St. Ebury. I was fourteen. My parents took me—just before they went away. The three of us sat across from the Head Master, who did all the interviews himself, and I noticed that he never looked at me oddly.
    “Noel will have to take a test,” he said. I looked for signs.
    Money was all that mattered—that’s what I’d heard about St. Ebury. Money wasn’t an issue. I looked for signs on his face to see if he was uncomfortable about my eye.
    “It’s an intelligence test, essentially,” he said.
    “We weren’t told,” I said, speaking for my parents.
    “There’s no preparation,” the Head Master said. “No need to study. All you need is this pencil.” I was sent to an empty classroom.

Julius had a hangover.
    “He’s hung,” said Chuck.
    “Big night,” said Ant.
    “Big hung,” said Chuck.
    “He wishes,” said Ant.
    “Better hung than you,” said Chuck, and Ant pounded him in the head with his laundry-filled pillowcase.
    “Get the fuck out,” said Julius, his face in his pillow now.
    It was Sunday and everyone had stories about the weekend.
    “Ant found some of your barf on his shoes this morning,” Chuck said to Julius.
    “I smelled it first,” said Ant. “Then I found it. A bit of, like, potato, caught up in the laces.”
    “Fffuh,” said Julius.
    “And you’re cleaning it,” said Ant.
    “It’s laundry day,” said Chuck. “Clean away the weekend, man, wash it all away. I can not believe how Fuck In Drunk I was last night, and there I am in the corner thinking, I will not get any action tonight and I look over at you two, Jules over here, Mr. Hurlius, hurling and heaving all over your shoes, and I think, Man, I will get action tonight because I am not as ugly as those two chumps.”
    “And the fact?” said Ant.
    “The fact is,” said Chuck, “that I did not get any action.”
    “The sad truth,” said Ant.
    “It is the sad truth, Antony, and the sadder truth is that you have barf on your sneakers, and sadder . . . the saddest truth of all is that Mr. Hurlius here got action and we came back with nothing.”
    “Sad,” said Ant.
    “So,” said Chuck. “Wake the fuck up, Julius, and tell us.”
    “Cheeses, Choolius, tell us all about it.”
    “Please get out,” said Julius. He rolled over to make it clear. “Please, get out of my room,” he said, and buried his face again.
    “Your room?” said Chuck. He leaned on the top bunk, looking at Julius on the bottom. He tapped on the empty top mattress.
    “Your room?” said Ant, who looked toward the sink in the corner of the room.
    “Come on, Jules. Wake up. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Wake up. It’s two o’clock. It’s sunny. It’s laundry day. Three hours before Chapel. One load of whites. One load of darks. Two smokes. And Chapel is upon us.”
    “Come on,” said Ant.
    “Come on,” said Chuck.
    “Come on,” said Ant.
    “Come on,” said Chuck.
    “Come on,” said Ant.
    “Oh for fucks,” said Julius and he rolled out of bed, landing on the floor face upward. He lifted up his shirt, exposing his nipples, looked at Chuck and Ant, and said: “Suck ’em.”
    Chuck opened the door to the closet and grabbed Julius’s laundryfilled pillowcase from the closet floor.
    “His nipples are brown,” said Ant of the nipples of Julius.
    “Yum,” said Chuck.
    “It’s a tan,” said Julius.
    Chuck threw the pillowcase at Julius. “The man with the tan,” said Chuck. “Now,” he said. “Tell us. Tell us how this man with the weird brown nipples gets so fuckin’ lucky.”
    They walked toward the door, one, two, three, and each raised his eyebrows at the sink in the corner.
    I was standing by the sink and continued to brush my teeth.

St. Ebury sat on a hill in the richest part of town, Sutton, where all the ambassadors lived. St. Ebury turned 121 that year, making it one of the oldest schools in Canada. There were 114 boarders between grades nine and twelve. Only thirty of them were girls.

Usually seniors could choose their roommates. Julius had too many friends. He had so many friends that they all assumed he was spoken for. They all paired up and Julius was left alone. He didn’t get the roommate he wanted.
    I had been at St. Ebury since grade eight. Julius arrived from the States in grade eleven. I was friends with no one.
    Seniors had only one roommate. When people arrived in grades nine to eleven they got stuck with two or three other roommates in big rooms with two sinks, two bunks, and two closets.
    Seniors lived in the rooms along the front of the school, looking over the main entrance and the avenue to the Head Master’s house. The rooms were narrow, a bunk and a sink along one wall, and two desks with shelves along the other.
    The Head Boy lived alone, and there was one other single room for one other senior. Everyone thought Julius would be Head Boy, but the story was that his father intervened and said it wouldn’t look right.
    Then, once everyone realized he hadn’t found a roommate, it was assumed that Julius would get the other single room. Being alone was a privilege. It was quiet. You could have loud dreams or dreams where you would cry and nobody would know.
    They gave the room to Chris, whose real name was Tim. Chris had acne all over his face and body. One day in grade nine a boarder made him smell a dirty gym shoe. He put Chris in a headlock, held the shoe over his nose and mouth, and the struggle tore some of the acne scabs off his face so it looked like he was crying blood.
    The grade nines and tens were mostly on the floor above. One of the House Masters had an apartment up there, and two Prefects shared a big room at the other end of that hall.
    Julius should have been a Prefect as well, but he decided that the extra duties would get in the way of things. The Prefects helped with monitoring prep at night and making sure lights were out at bedtime. They were supposed to keep everyone in line, especially the juniors, and every night between prep and bed one of the Prefects would hold detention in room 21—an hour for anyone who had misbehaved on the Flats.
    Julius’s and my room was right above the main entrance to the school. The entrance had a porch with large latticed beams that seemed designed for climbing. Most nights Julius would climb out the window to have a smoke in the park across the street from the school. Often enough he would only get as far as above the porch—stopping halfway across the beams, just outside the window, perched up high with his cigarette tip glowing and fading. Sometimes someone else would be out there with him. Our door would burst open at midnight and Chuck or Ant or both would kick the lower bunk, say “Smoke!” and they would slide the window up and go out.
    “Let’s go to the park,” Julius might say, and “Fuck that” might be Chuck’s response. So they would perch out there just beyond the window and share a cigarette’s length of talk.
    Chuck: “I hope we can still play rugby at McGill.”
    Ant: “I’ll be too busy fucking.”
    Chuck: “Your aunt is going to McGill?”
    Ant: “Funny.”
    Julius: “I like the smell of the leaves.”
    They had to leave the window open a crack so they could undo the latch to get back in. They would sit out there sometimes when it was cold saying jesus jesus jesus while the wind blew into the room. Later in the year Julius went away at night and never knew that the papers on his desk turned blue when the moon shone in.
    The daily routine did not change much from year to year. The only thing that changed was curfew. Grades nine and ten had to be in their rooms at 9:30 with Lights Out at 10:00. Elevens had Lights Out at 10:45, and seniors had to have lights off at 11:30. But things were more flexible the older you got, and everything depended on who was on duty.

When I arrived at St. Ebury everyone said:
    “Her father’s an Italian count.”
    “Fuck off.”
    “They wear gloves when they eat dinner.”
    “Her real name is Fallon.”
    “Fallon Fitzgerald DeStaad.”
    “DeStindt.”
    “She’s cold.”
    “She’s funny.”
    “She’s a bitch.”
    “She’s not a real blonde.”
    “She’s smart.”
    “She’s the smartest in the school.”
    “Her father’s high tech.”
    “Rich.”
    “Filthrich.”
    “Started IncoTel.”
    “Is IncoTel.”
    “Was IncoTel, he ditched and made a stinkload.”
    “King’s ransom.”
    “Mother took it all.”
    “They’re divorced.”
    “I’ve seen them together.”
    “They’re always in the paper.”
    “I’ve never seen them.”
    “Lives in the High Tech Hills.”
    “No one knows why she’s a boarder.”
    “Scholarship.”
    “She’s the smartest in the school.”
    “She only looks Italian.”
    “Born in the High Tech Hills.”
    “Her hair is chestnut, pure chestnut, and natural and I think it’s beautiful.”
    “I want her to be my friend.”
    “She is my friend.”
    “She’s everyone’s friend.”
    “I love her.”
    I remember first seeing her in the downstairs common room floating across the school’s eye.

One face could be my guide and salvation. It could be my comfort and the goal of superstition. It seems incredible that I can no longer picture her.
     When I achieved a perfect mark on an essay, it presaged Fall’s eventual love for me. When I scored a shot from the line in basketball, which I rarely did, it was because I would kiss Fall that week, that term, that year.
     Whenever she was near, I knew it. At assemblies, I always knew where she was sitting, almost without looking. If she was in a crowd at the end of a hallway, out of sight, I sensed that she was there, and I would come close, pass by.
     I didn’t need her to notice me right away. I knew that she would come to know me deeply. I felt like an explorer sailing past an uncharted piece of perfection. I knew where it was, I would land there one day and my race would grow.
     And when Julius arrived and everyone, including Fall, was drawn to him, I somehow wasn’t upset. I felt it was part of a plan. I saw them together in the halls and I liked his face, thought she deserved a guy like that for a while.
     Certainly, I never wanted to hurt her.