LOND HO ADVENTURES PART SIX

NOVEMBER 1992

That’s enough for me and I tell Bill and his hootchie that I’m off and head for home. The weather has relaxed a bit since we walked to the pub, the wind has died and the snow has crystallized on everything it clings to creating a sparkly, silver shimmer, the streets and sidewalks coated with a veneer of ice.
Back at the flat I kick off my boots after what seems like a twenty minute struggle with the laces and find a can of lager in the fridge, hidden under some wilted lettuce in the back of the crisper drawer. I pop it open and take a swig... its pretty horrid stuff, a fortified lager called “XXX” 7% alcohol by volume and man does it taste like it. I grimace and drink it anyway, our opinion being if we can only afford cheap beer, it may as well be the nastiest and most powerful shit we can find.

I turn the TV on, flip through the channels, then off it goes as there is nothing worth watching as usual. I finish the beer and wander to bed.

Floating aimlessly, without rhyme or reason in that state of being where one drifts just on the cusp of wakefulness and sleep. The mind wanders to writing, hundreds of short stories, thousands of pages, millions of words. So many, one might as well try to count the stars as son as count the words. The words of my friends telling me to quit my crappy job and try to write full time. MacGreggor especially. MacGreggor, my closest friend, and staunchest supporter. The brother I never had. I flash back to the eleventh grade when I met him for the first time in our maths class. Its one of those classes for kids that weren’t very good at the maths, and it’s a class at which we both excelled. One day after breezing through the day’s assignment I’m killing time drawing in my sketchbook and this skinny dark haired kid with glasses is looking across at what I’m doing. He axes me if I’m “drawing Japanimation?” which is what we used to call the Japanese style of Manga art. I tell him yeah, and show him some pages from a comic book I’m working on for extra credit in art class. In only a few days we’re firm friends, finding mutual interests in Japanese Anime and Manga, punk music, cheesy “slasher” flicks, and a half dozen other things, it’s like we are brothers separated at birth. Many days after school we hang out and draw, watch flicks, or old ROBOTECH™ episodes on our VCR’s. On weekends I go over to his place for all night movie marathons, or as I call them, “TV Parties” like the Black Flag song. MacGreggor, Lee, Hikaru and I sitting in the upstairs TV room, drinking pilfered booze, and laughing our asses off as Freddy Kruger eviscerates some hapless teen on the screen, then quipping all James Bond style. There was a serial killer with a sense of humour!

Then at one of these parties I meet his sisters. The younger one, Morag, is a freaking hoot. Always quick with a joke, or a snide remark, even MacGreggor himself found her tolerable. Then I meet the older sister, or should I say, meet her again. I met her for the first time a year earlier in Drama class. Throughout the semester I get to know her rather well, she even occasionally speaks of her “brother” was is according to her a real “bad seed,” and not to be trusted. A year passes and I meet MacGreggor and if I posses any sort of memory for faces and features I would have put two and two together. Indeed, many times he would talk of his “nasty sister” and her asshole boyfriend and not once did the connection form in my mind. Until that night of course.

“Hunter, this is my sister Caitlyn.”

“We’ve met.” I say shaking her bony hand, nearly crushing it in my “Burt Reynolds iron grip.”

The summer arrives and the boys and I are over at Mac’s every weekend practically as his parents have a strange obsession with camping. Of course when Caitlyn accompanied them, or when she would spend the weekends at her boyfriend’s place everything would be just ducky. MacGreggor and I, and a few of our closer buds would congregate at his place and have a good and proper “TV Party.” But whenever Caitlyn decided to stick around she would do all that she could to make our weekend a total freaking misery. She would constantly harp, and whinge on about how we were making “too much noise,” or how “all that smoking” was bothering her even though she herself smoked, and any and all smoke was taking place outside in the backyard. She also lets us know every five seconds that she doesn’t “condone the drinking” that went on and that she was going to tell the parents, and blah, blah, blah.

After witnessing a couple of her pointless fits, I begin to understand why MacGreggor is so annoyed with her all the time. I suppose it would be difficult if her complaints had any modicum of validity to them, but they didn’t. Eventually we come to the conclusion that her constant bitchiness has something to do with her not having much of a life when she was in high school, and being jealous because we always seemed to have such a great time. Or maybe it was because she was never invited to join us.

Mac’s younger sister, Morag was great fun on the other hand. She’s about two years younger that us and completely unburdened with the bitterness that seemed to infest Caitlyn to the very core. She never needed to be told twice to leave, not that it happened that often. She would happily go out and get us smokes if we axed her to and a few times she even brought over a couple of her little girlfriends for our amusement. Morag was certainly the good sister of the two. Years later she, her husband, and MacGreggor’s parents would get into a serious car crash and it came down to me to get the correct information to MacGreggor out in Vancouver, as Caitlyn was too busy spreading bile and misinformation to be any help to anyone in that time of crisis. I was there for MacGreggor to pick him and Maria up from the airport, drive him to where he needed to be and give him a place to stay when he needed it, because that’s what friends do. That’s what brother’s do, and even though we are not related by blood, I’ve always considered Mac to be the brother I never had. Of course Caitlyn decides to take this opportunity to take one last verbal shot at me, and to beak on about how I shouldn’t have even been at the hospital as I’m “not family.” At that point any remaining civil feelings I may have had for Caitlyn (she was still Mac’s sister after all) vanished. It was the proverbial straw snapping the spine of the dromedary, and the only thing that popped into my head at the time was in Caitlyn’s eyes, Maria, who had only been with him a short time, was family and I was not, even though I had been Mac’s faithful bud and family friend for fifteen years. It was at this moment I decided that Caitlyn was to be ignored completely whenever she came into my sight. A year or so later when MacGreggor and Maria got married I remember Caitlyn trying to chat with me at the reception. Did she think I would forget? I ignore her every time until she finally catches me in the kitchen and has the nerve to axe me what my problem was to which I reply: “Why do you care what I have to say? I’m not family.”