Baby Britain

Baby Britain – Elliot Smith (listen in new tab)

K sits across from G.T. on the subway. G.T. stares into space across from him. His eyes shift left-right subtly, following lazily the passing lights of the tunnel. They’re headed south, rounding the cape of Union station, on the way to King.

The rumble, the air crushed and sliding between the train and the tunnel walls. The thin metal and windows rattle loose, as if every piece of the train can’t decide if it loves or hates the piece next to it. The rivets play match maker.

K can hear the tinny hiss and whisper from the white earbuds hanging from the ears of the teenager next to him. She bobs her head slightly. Her jet black hair (dyed) falls in a 45 degree angle across her forehead. Thickly applied eyeliner makes her look sullen as she texts someone somewhere. Her thumb moves with blind practice.

K knows what song it is. Later, when they’re up on the surface, K still hums it. He do-do-do-de-doos along in his head; his hands shoved deep into his windbreaker’s pockets. The thin red nylon catches in the wind. The sky is dark on dark, lit by the city from below.

The street they’re on is almost empty, except for a few small groups of people waiting for cabs to take them to higher end clubs and slow couples walking expensive dogs with cups from expensive coffee chains.

As they walk, they talk. The bar had been too loud, and the fresh air had loosened their tongues. Maura’s been weird and distant. She didn’t return his calls today. And yesterday. And Shannon. He hadn’t expected to see her, hadn’t expected to ever have his sense of “overness” tested. And how the hell do you know that anyways? And work. Oh, and the library. His contract is almost up with no signs of renewal. And Ulysses’ and where is that headed. It is K’s litany for the night.

His friend’s response is supportive, but not clarifying. He is not pro-relationship tonight. It doesn’t help that Brae had ditched him, too. Everyone has their own problems.
Claire will help. She’s better at this sort of thing. When she’s around.

G.T. shrugs: “I dunno. I guess she’s seeing some rich guy.”

K: “Hence the party.” He points down the road to a large warehouse-cum-condo. Full of what looks like two story lofts. One corner, high up looks brighter, fuller than it’s neighbours.

G.T.: “Hence the party.”

They now walk along quietly.

Nothing in K’s mind feels discrete. Everything is cross-referenced ambivalently. A crammed drawer of ramshackle links between memories, feelings, and on-going debates.

He thinks about his first kiss with Maura, but then he thinks about his about first kiss with Shannon. The sad part about first kisses is that they are always so full of promise that subsequent hurt, lies, or whatever cannot wholly overwrite them. The memories live on, like erased pencil in the margins of old books. The dark grey smudges always outlast the words themselves.

He remembers kissing Claire once. Outside the Fisher King, while waiting for a ride. They were standing beside his Cavalier. The poor car had broken down outside the bar. When their lips met, it was awkward, dry, cut off quickly as Shannon rolled up in her parents’ car (that old grey VW).

K rode in the back. Watching Shannon’s green eyes in the rear-view mirror, he made a joke about his Cavalier giving up its ghost (happily, it would be revived the next day), and Claire laughed. Shannon suggested he get a better job so he could afford a car that worked every time. It seemed to be reasonable advice.

This was what Shannon was like back then. Everything about her when they started dating was reasonable, measured, locked down against some imagined storm always coming. His chest hurt slightly with a familiar welling disappointment that his most emotive, open time with her was after she came back from Paris.

Now he wondered about this new Shannon that had met him outside the library. He runs downs the details in his mind. She was not someone better. Maybe someone who so herself better. But, not someone he was sure he could be attracted to or not attracted to.

They went for drinks after the library. And they talked for a long time, mostly about people they knew and old times. The recent past felt like a mine field. Except, Shannon let slip that she had heard about Maura from Claire. K didn’t dodge the topic, but he was cursory, found himself scaling back his feelings.

Out of consideration for Shannon’s? He hoped.

Shannon didn’t try anything when K hugged her before she went down to the subway. Her body, her chest against his chest, his arms crossed around her, hands flat on her sides feeling the soft cotton of her hoodie. Her arms around him warm on his back. Lucently familiar and inscrutably new.

He tried to call Maura the next day. But, she apparently wasn’t taking calls.

The trees rustle in the wind. Their new leaves flittering light and dark in the street lights. K could tell they were turning over, opening their underside for what was on the rising breeze.

K: “It’s gonna rain.” He stops out side the condo. In the lights that some of the original façade had been preserved. He can barely make out the faded white paint. “O’Baird Shipping Co.?” He read it out loud without meaning to. “Is this the place?”

G.T.: “Looks hoity-toity enough.”

K: “Oh, totally.” He walks ahead, runs his fingers along the list of names in the foyer. “What’s the name we’re looking for?”

G.T.: “Gloucester. Got your gaiters on?”

Too Young

Too Young – Phoenix(listen in new tab)

Moments pile on. Seconds compress under the cumulative weight and ossify into minutes, days, years. Your life becomes dense with the particulate matter of time, eroding fossil memories. It is dense, but not indistinct. Some things still hold shape, so that when you look at them…

The first few bars are familiar; they clear a swath, like a hand wiped across an old pane in a dusty western. Or palms on a fogged shower door in any kind of sexier film.

K’s face is screwed up as he tries to hear over the music. “What?”

V. I. Lenin is busier now, swirls around as if he and G.T. are static, pillars in the wake.

G.T. thinks for half a second, wondering if he had said anything. He holds up his glass. It is three quarters empty. The amber fluid sloshes against the fingerprint smudged walls when he taps K’s glass. It is too loud to hear the glasses connect. Except for the settling foam and small waves there would be no proof they had touched.

This pint, the last before they leave to catch up with Claire (she had invited them to some “rich people party,” where the “liquor runneth free” – her words), had waxed G.T.’s brain, glossed it with slippery circumspection. “Nothing,” he says. “Haven’t heard this song in a while.”

K: “It was in that movie. It makes me think of Billy Murray.”

G.T.: “That’s a shame buddy. He wasn’t the high point of that film. At least, for those of us who the view the female form un but de chaque jour.” The movie, though, wasn’t what G.T. was thinking of. Not exactly.

G.T. looks at his cell phone. It’s almost 10:30. “We should go.”

K barely hears him, but he can guess. They finish their glasses, leaving them in a neat pair on a table they pass on the way out.

K taps a poster near the door. Squares, like from an old video game, form a barely discernable unicorn driving an ice cream truck for other smaller unicorns. The thick paper hangs loosely. The scotch tape that was holding the upper left corner, floats in the small drafts, weighed down by a few specks of red paint form the wall.

K: “Hey, the Pixel Kings. I thought they broke up.”

G.T. “Nah. They’re on again, off again these days.” Carefully, he grabs the loosened corner. He smoothes the paper against the wall, feeling the slight irregular textures of the acrylic inks the screen printer used. Colours in Braille.

K: “Remember when we saw them?”

G.T. “Yeah. It was the night you met Shannon.”

K reaches back and rubs the back of his head, feels his hair under his hands as he considers the facts. “Yeah, well, we didn’t “meet” meet that night.”

G.T.: “History is a complex mix of antecedents and accidents. I can understand how you’d get confused.” Besides, before it became the night K met Shannon, it was the night they met Claire.

And they are now outside. Their lungs bring in the damp, spring’s night, exhuming and casting out the silt of the bar’s air. The overcast sky, lit by the newborn weekend’s blithe city, hangs low with promises of rain.

Five years ago, it was already raining. Inside V.I.’s you could hear the pounding, thick and heavy drops obliterating themselves on the roof, adding a low syncopation to the world inside the bar.

It was the lull between bands. The music playing over the sound system, sounded smooth and clean after the fuzzed-out reverb that had driven the close of the opening band’s set.

K and G.T. stand against the back wall. They had come later than they normally would, squeezing in just before the bar reached capacity. No one was there for the opener (some trio lost to the annals of Toronto’s ambitious youth). They were all there for the Pixel Kings (on their way up, that spring – on their way down by the winter).

The only spots left were near the swag table. G.T. watched K try to give the girl selling shirts and CDs a sly look. Both he and his friend were facing a months long girl-drought, such furtive efforts had become common.

It was at that point that Claire walked by. G.T. didn’t see her at first. She was blocked by her friend (G.T. never saw again). But, K saw her for sure. G.T. watched his friend’s head turn to follow them. This meant, historically speaking, that G.T.’s first view of Claire was from behind.

During the Pixel King’s set, K and G.T. had pushed forward. They found themselves crushed in the middle of the dance floor. At some point, Claire reappeared again on her way back from the bar.

She placed a palm on G.T.’s shoulder. Her palm was warm, gentle on his shoulder. He turned to let her pass. She smiled gratefully at G.T. The band tore into a new song. She held to her chest a brace of beer bottles. Her mouths formed a “thanks” as she moved confidently and casually by, into the pumping press of fans.

She disappeared, swallowed into the crowd ahead of him. G.T. was impressed. Moving through that crowd that night was a feat of skill and determination.

They ended up at the bar together after the set. K clumsily started a conversation. They talked about the Pheonix song that was playing. And Lost in Translation. Claire said she liked it. K agreed a little too ingenuously. For some reason G.T., driven to contention by something Claire said, demurred and suggested that better songs and movies existed.

Claire smiled a gracious, cutting “whatever” and left with her drinks. Left with that breezy bounce that G.T. did not yet know was typical of her.

Later, outside, they ran into her again. The rain had stopped. The asphalt, the sidewalk, everything glistened in the street light. She was getting into a car that had just pulled up.

G.T. a little drunk and happily petulant yelled: “Hey! See any better films yet?”

K told G.T. to cool it and ran up to her. He put on his best, “my friend’s a jerk, but I’m ok” act.” The woman driving was nonplussed, annoyed at being held up. Claire, half in the car, quickly scribbled her number on a worn paper customer rewards card from a coffee shop he hadn’t heard of.

K backed away as Claire closed the door. G.T. walked up.

Through the open windows they heard the driver ask: “Who was that loser?”

Claire gave the driver’s headrest a sprightly slap. “Take it easy Shannon. We’re going.”

A small moment. As the car pulls away. Claire looks back at K. Then at G.T. , who doesn't know that look yet, somewhere between disdain and something inexorably gripping. But, he has since learned the language of her face.