Writings / Fiction: Janet E. Cameron

It wasn’t the first time I’d had these thoughts. Not the first time, not even the thousandth. Ever since I was a kid I’d had this stuff in my head. Ever since I was eleven or twelve I’d been telling it to go away, waiting to wake up and have it gone.

So what was different about tonight? Why did it feel like revelation?

It was the light on Mark’s face. It was the extra hours of day now that it was spring. It was having less than three months of high school left. It was the TV and the smoke and the stale flat taste of beer and my mother asleep upstairs and what I’d just said, and what he’d just said and the food processor on the screen, turning the resources of the earth into pureed mush. It was everything.

I kissed him. He kissed me back. We came up for air and sat with our foreheads resting together, breathing into the silence, hands moving over each other’s faces. A few seconds of perfect certainty. You don’t have to be angry all the time, Mark. I don’t have to be always afraid. Because we’ve got each other now and everything’s going to be different. The end. Roll the credits.

I swore and punched myself in the head.

I’d been relaxed enough to let it in, to let myself feel it. Just before reality came crashing down and I was alone again.

He’d kill me.

That scary temper. Mark hated fags, queers, anything to do with that. How did I think he’d react if I sidled up and planted one on him? I’d end my days with my head split open on that concrete floor in front of the TV. Nice mess of blood and brains and failure for someone to mop up in the morning.

The stain would never go away. It would be like those children’s stories where you follow the adventures of a statue or a tin soldier, and at the end they get thrown in the fire with the trash. But after the burning there’s always something that remains. A heart, a little silver key. I imagined my mother would try to sell the house, have some real estate agent walking people too quickly through the basement, trying to explain it away: the shape of my love splattered onto the floor.

Love. Was that what I was calling it?

Remember when I said I’d never thought about whether me and Mark actually liked each other? When I said it was the same as oxygen, that you inhale it without even knowing it’s there?

Bullshit again. I liked oxygen. I knew I liked oxygen. In fact there was a good chance I loved oxygen. Maybe I’d always loved it. And it occurred to me that it would be nice to be able to breathe. Nice to be able to breathe without somebody thinking I was doing something disgusting just to spite them.

The window was a square of darkness, then it was full of cautious grey light that quietly shifted into blue. I heard a rush of water in the sink downstairs, chirps of cupboard doors opening and closing. My mother was moving around the kitchen. A smart little clack as she loaded the tape player on the counter with her favourite Sunday morning music: the Velvet Underground with Sunday Morning.

I sat on the edge of my bed and blinked into the light. I’d been sitting there for hours. When I finally got up, it felt like I’d forgotten how to walk.

Mark was at the kitchen table with my mother, wearing my father’s old suit jacket and eating cinnamon toast.

Cinnamon toast is my mother’s thing. Her background is Russian, so really we should be having, I don’t know, brown bread and pickles, or porridge made of old copies of Pravda, or whatever they eat over there. It was all these British children’s books she grew up with. I read the same ones when I was a kid. Taught herself how to make cinnamon toast after she read about the Famous Five preparing it on a campfire for one of their endless little picnics.

Cinnamon toast. She told me she’d loved the sound of the words. ‘Didn’t know what it was,’ she said, ‘but I knew I had to have it.’

So there was Mark, chowing down on Enid Blyton food, in my father’s jacket with the leather patches on the elbows, big seventies lapels. The physical fact of him was making me uncomfortable. He was shoving toast in his face – a mess of crumbs sprinkled over the table and a light glaze of butter coating his chin. I leaned against the counter with my elbows grazing the sink. Mom left the kitchen to check something in the wash.

Sun on his hair, big hands curled around a blue striped mug with chipped edges. His shadow was cut out on a square of sunlight on the table behind him, with the shadow of the floating steam rising, and watery lines of heat from the cup’s surface. Mark looked up at me and I turned away.

‘Stephen, are you, like, okay? What happened last night?’

‘What do you mean?’ I pretended to rub my eyes.

‘You just took off. Had to get rid of all the butts and cans myself and I didn’t know what to do with them, so…’ He held up his backpack, which was swollen with garbage from last night. Our Sunday morning ritual of getting rid of the evidence from Saturday. I had a hundred places around the house to stash it all. But today I’d left him to deal with that alone.

‘Fell asleep upstairs. Sorry.’ I stared into the yellow and green linoleum at my feet. I’d never had to work at having a conversation with Mark before.

‘You’ll be late,’ I said.

He glanced at our clock, a plastic daisy on the wall.

‘Shit. You’re right. Ten minutes.’ Mark stood up, slung his backpack over his shoulder and stuck a piece of cinnamon toast in his mouth. He mumbled something about returning the jacket and was out the door in seconds.

Striding down the driveway munching on a piece of toast, with the sun falling on the shoulders of my father’s coat. Off to church. Mark’s belief in God tended to waver in and out depending on how he felt about himself and life in general. But he never missed a service at St Andrew’s Presbyterian. ‘It’s forty minutes out of the week where you’re concentrating on not being a selfish asshole,’ he’d told me once. ‘Everything else is mostly pushing in the other direction.’

I realised my mother was standing beside me. Weird how she’d always seemed so tall when I was a little kid, and now she was barely up to my shoulder. At this rate I’ll be able to carry her around in a shoebox by the time she’s seventy. Well, I’ll save on old people homes, anyway.

‘So, Mom. Is this some freaky hormonal thing, dressing teenage boys up like your ex-husband?’

She laughed and wrapped her hands around a mug of tea for warmth. My mother is fair-haired and light, fine-boned. It would be nice if I looked more like her, but I’m dark and angular like my father, all bumping elbows and jutting knees. You’d want to fold me up and stack me in a corner. That morning Mom was in flannel pyjamas, with her hair down her back in light brown waves and a bathrobe I remembered from early childhood. It’d been turquoise back then. I wasn’t sure what colour I’d call it now.

‘He didn’t have time to go home and change for church,’ she said.

‘He should just keep it. Not like I’m going to wear it.’

‘Doesn’t really fit you. You don’t have the shoulders.’ She ambled over to the tape player and rewound the cassette.

‘So…what were you guys talking about when I came in?’ I said.

Mom tweaked opened a cupboard door, gazed into it for a moment and then seemed to forget why she was there. I had to ask her again.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Mark? The usual. Cooking. He wants to make supper for his little sister tomorrow.’

The sounds of Sunday Morning started to fill the kitchen once more, innocent music box notes of the intro, then Lou Reed’s drifting drugged-up voice talking about wasted years and a restless feeling by his side, telling us to watch out. The world was behind us.

We moved around each other. The room should have felt bigger with Mark gone, but I was still acting as if he was there, sitting invisibly at the table with a plate of crumbs in front of him. After a while Mom decided she’d had enough cinnamon toast and it was time to go off and do something else. Left me alone with this empty feeling whirling around inside.

I felt drained, lifeless. I was sure that everything was ruined. I’d never feel the same way around Mark. It would never be easy and comfortable between us again.

I was right, as it turned out.

Now you tell me that’s not the end of the world.

* The novel of which this story is an excerpt will be released in April 2013 in Ireland and Canada under the title, Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World.

 

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