Excerpt: "Fall," by Colin McAdam

by: CTV.ca
Date: 10/26/2009 4:55:00 PM ET

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. H urlius, 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.”

From Fall by Colin McAdam. Copyright © Colin McAdam, 2009. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Group (Canada), a Division of Pearson Canada Inc.