With just a week to go before the art school entrance interview, Cyril came home from his shift at the IGA one evening and discovered all eight drawings missing. He found his mother watching TV.
“… My drawings… ”
“They’re gone,” she said.
“I kind of noticed that. Where have they gone to?”
She shrugged and kept her eyes on Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen. Cyril watched her watch, then abruptly started searching. The fireplace was clean. The pail under the sink was empty. He went out and looked in the garbage can: nothing.
“Draw flowers or fruit,” she said when he came back in. “People like flowers and fruit. They put them on their walls. Do some nice sunflowers and I’ll buy them.”
Cyril searched the closets, the attic, behind the furnace. From downstairs he shouted up through the main floor. “I worked hard on those, ma!” He pounded back up the steps and into the living room.
On the TV screen the wooden dummy’s jaw clacked mockingly up and down. “Why do you have to keep him alive?” she asked.
“I’m going to miss the application deadline.”
“You know what he did.”
“Are pictures that powerful?”
“He starved us.”
Cyril was stymied. “I worked hard on them…” He heard how hollow his words sounded.
“Three million.”
“They were mine.”
She was wearing a black cardigan and smoking a cigarette—a habit she’d maintained after Darrel left—feet in their hen-feather slippers on the grey Formica coffee table next to the Province and a stack of Reader’s Digests. She turned back to the TV. “Better you get trade.”
“You hate me.”
“You are my son.”
“You still hate me.”
She turned her head slowly like a tank turret and aimed her gaze at him, her eyes wet but tearless, her voice steady. “I love you.”
“It’s revenge. You’re getting back at me.”
She swivelled her gaze back to the TV.
“I’ll draw them again.”
“Draw, don’t draw. Just don’t let me see.”
The interviewer frowned at the picture Cyril had drawn that very morning, torn from his sketchbook and mounted on poster board. The man took up another of the same subject, a be-robed owl whirling dervish-wise, wings out, head tipped, eyes closed. There was a copy of the giddy Stalin on a child’s swing, wearing a bonnet, a soother in his mouth. He’d intended to redo his entire Stalin series but was afraid his mother would destroy them again. He’d got onto owls for no other reason than that Gilbert had bought a stuffed one from the St. Vincent de Paul as a joke and named it Elvis.
“You handle a pencil reasonably well,” admitted the interviewer, a pale man with lank brown hair, a posh British accent, and nicotine-stained fingernails. “They’ve got verve. But they’re hasty. They’re rushed.”
Cyril started to explain what had happened but the other interviewer, a fat man in a black turtleneck, black beard, and black crewcut, seemed in no mood for explanations. He pooched out his wet, red lips then sucked them back in. “Impatience is the mark of the amateur.” Ama-toor.
“Not uninteresting though,” allowed the first. “Intriguing, actually.”
“Makes me want to scrub my hands with bleach,” said the fat one. “And there’s no colour. Nowhere do I see colour.” He sorted through the drawings with his thick-fingered hands. “Drawing and colour are not distinct. As one paints, one draws. Can you tell me who said that?”
Cyril could not.
“Cezanne. When colour is richest, form is most complete.”
“Many fine artists have worked in a limited palette,” said the first.
The other was unimpressed. “Adolescent,” he said, pointing to Stalin in the bonnet. He turned his profile to Cyril, indicating that the interview was at an end.
“That’s a tad harsh, Glen.”
Glen gazed at the door as though longing to obey the EXIT sign above it. “Alistair, dishonesty serves no one.”
Alistair clasped his hands on the desk and looked seriously at Cyril. “Why do you draw?”
“It’s as if there’s always something waiting at the end of the drawing,” he said. “Something surprising.”
Alistair nodded vigorously.
“The question,” said Glen, turning his gaze from the exit sign back to Cyril, “is whether you’ve got any vision worth evolving. Otherwise you are merely a draughtsman.”
“Draughtsmanship is important,” cautioned Alistair.
“But without vision it is merely a trade,” said Glen.
“My father was a draughtsman,” said Alistair. He nodded encouragingly to Cyril. “There’s a call for draughtsman in the building industry. Have you considered draughting?”
That September he moved into the top floor of an old house with slanted ceilings and a view of rooftops and downtown, the closest thing to a Parisian garret the city had to offer. He continued stocking shelves at the IGA and with the rest of his time he drew, occasionally venturing into colour, doing oil pastels of the city at night while listening to the traffic, the sirens, the shouts, the occasional crump of a collision or crack of a gunshot.
He imagined Connie living here with him. She could hang her swords on the wall, he’d help her rehearse her lines, and she’d pose for him. He phoned her house once but her grandmother just kept repeating, “Je ne connais pas. C’est vie pas bon, pas bon… ”
Then Paul showed up one evening. This would have been awkward at the best of times, but the fact that he was drunk made it worse. Paul was erratic when he drank and tended to say even more vicious things than when sober, but this time booze had put him in a maudlin mood; he looked old and tired and troubled; he’d never had many friends and it was terrifying for Cyril to realize that after a lifetime of enduring Paul’s sarcasm he was turning to him. It was a first, and Cyril wasn’t sure how to act.
Sensing Cyril’s unease, Paul reverted to form. “This place is a hole.”
Cyril was almost grateful. “Nice to see you, too.”
Paul raised his middle finger and kissed it. “Any time. Got anything to drink?”
“Tap water.”
Paul sneered then drew a flask from his suit coat, swigged, and was halfway through twisting the cap back on before he paused and tilted it toward Cyril.
“What is it?”
“Chinese tea. What difference does it make?”
Cyril drank. Whisky. He suppressed a grimace and passed it back.