The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [53]
When Samira smiled and waved he became animated, dropping his shovel and windmilling his arms. As they drew closer they noticed rings round his eyes, as if he had just smoked his way through a kilo of weed. His face was lined, more with laugh lines than worry wrinkles, and fringed with gelled stick-up hair, boy-band hair, and a preliminary scenario for a goatee.
“Welcome partiers!” he shouted, oversalivating. “Welcome to my crib, you’re the first to arrive!” He took Samira’s hand and chivalrously kissed it. He began a playful sparring with Norval, but Norval told him to stop. As he was affectionately clapping Noel on the back, a dog began to bark. Furiously this time. They all paused to listen.
“That’s Merlin the Second,” said JJ. “He’s a stray. He warns me when people approach. Hey Nor, what dog loves to take baths?”
“I’m sorry?”
“What dog loves to take baths? A shampoodle.”
“Right.”
“Why did the poor dog chase his own tail? He was trying to make both ends meet. What do you get when …”
“Please,” said Norval. “Our sides can only take so much heaving.”
“ … when you cross a sheepdog with a rose?”
“Let’s see. A collie-flower?”
“Yes! Who can resist dog jokes, eh? Come.”
They followed JJ to the door, which he opened and held for them. “Enter. Make yourselves at home. Don’t worry about your boots. Have a look around.”
They did as bid, stepping over the worn threshold, and were surprised at what they saw.
“Let me take your coat. If it’s OK with you guys, we’ll wait a few minutes for the others to arrive. Hope I have enough room for everybody!”
The visitors remained mute as they took in some of the objects in the room: a cigar-store Indian, a stuffed cat, two tennis presses and a buggy whip hanging from nine-inch nails, a set of shoetrees resting on a suction bath mat—and other accoutrements signalling mental derangement. In the background was the sound of two black-andwhite televisions broadcasting in two different languages.
“Nor, every time I see you I’m like, amazed,” said JJ. “You know who you look like?”
Norval said that he did.
“You look a bit like Byron! And so do you, Noel. Although Noel looks more like Émile Nelligan.21 Samira, I meant to ask you last week. Is that a Greek name?”
“Arabic.”
“Really? It is true what they say? About the jihad?”
“What do they say?”
“That a man who dies while on jihad will be able to have sexual intercourse with seventy perpetual virgins in heaven?”
Samira smiled. “Well, it’s based on a verse from the Hadith, but it’s a literal translation that’s not … you know, embraced by many people—”
“Arabs,” said Norval, shaking his head, “were once in the vanguard of civilisation. What the hell happened?”
“You French were too,” Samira countered. “What the hell happened?”
“I knew a Greek girl in school,” said JJ, who seemed not to have heard this exchange. “You’re as beautiful as her, I met her at summer camp when I was thirteen, she had hairy legs. I was in love with her, we were never apart as teenagers, in fact I’m still in love with her. She was the thief of my virginity. I learned how to be a hippy from her. She was a bona fide hippy, even though her parents were rich. She ran away from home and grew cabbages in a farmer’s field …”
Calm down, Samira wanted to say, you’re like my mother’s neurotic Chihuahua. Calm down little guy, Norval wanted to say, you’ve had way too many chocolate bars. Noel had no wish to say anything: like faulty reception across the stormiest of airwaves, JJ’s chatter was not coming in; the blunt and boxy shapes, which gave him little trouble in the lab, were now a train wreck of tangled, dirty-white cracks, pops, bangs.
“So it didn’t work out?” said Samira. “With the Greek girl?”
“No, her parents took her to Switzerland for six months in the hope she’d meet someone else.”
“And did she?”
“No. But when she got back to Quebec she did. A member of Les Beaux Gars.”
“A rock band?”
“Biker gang. But I have a feeling she’ll come back to me. I saw her at a summer-camp reunion.