Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (35 page)

‘Sorry.’ He laughed to himself, lamely. Then a little movement of his head, a long breath outwards.

‘Aw, Stephen. Listen. For what it’s worth, I hope you do find somebody who’s gonna love you back.
He’d
…’ Mark paused. The word seemed to taste bad in his mouth. ‘… he’d be a lucky guy.’

I realised Mark was walking away, stepping backwards, his eyes on me.

‘I gotta go home,’ he said. ‘I’m needed.’ He held up his hand. A wave, or a salute. ‘February. The baby’s due in February.
You have to meet my kid. Please.’

‘Course. Course I will, Mark.’

‘Cool. I’ll see ya then.’ He stopped. ‘Goodbye, Stephen.’

‘Goodbye.’ I wasn’t sure if I’d said this out loud. He turned to go, striding away, same as when he’d first come into view
by the river: head lowered, hands thrust into his pockets. I settled onto one of the swings. The only other thing moving was
a black dog at the edge of the playground, stepping carefully over the snow. I felt like I was getting squeezed to death by
something I couldn’t see.

I’m not sure how I got back to my house. I remember calling the Dowds and leaving a message that I was holding on to Mom’s
car for another day. After that, I just sat at the kitchen table, watching the shadows get longer and the sun fade in the
windows.

The flashing light from the answering machine on the counter seemed to be getting brighter as the kitchen sank into darkness.
Who would want to talk to us that badly? I forced myself out of the chair, stiff and creaky like an old man, rewound the tape
and pushed the play button.

Ryan Darby’s voice filled the room – nerved-up, nasally, ready to pick a fight with the whole world. It made me laugh.

‘It’s me.’ An angry sigh. ‘It’s Christmas. It’s Christmas and I’m not home with my family. I’m at a lousy stupid youth hostel.
Because … oh, forget it.’ That was the first message. How many more? At least five. Inertia made me listen to them all. Ryan
was having a one-sided argument with me, with himself, his voice thicker and more slurred after each brisk little beep. He
was at the Harbour Front Youth Hostel,
he said. The college wouldn’t let him stay at the dorm over the holidays. And he couldn’t go home to his family in the States
because he was having emotional problems. I was the cause of his emotional problems, he told me.

‘Goddammit, Stephen.’ Second last message. I could barely make him out. ‘You’re so stupid. I don’t know how anybody could
be as stupid as you and still be alive. Why didn’t you open that box? Did you just throw it away or something?’

He sounded like he was on the verge of tears. Another beep, and he was wishing me a merry Christmas and happy Hanukkah, even
though he said he knew I didn’t celebrate either one. He finished by telling me he hoped I’d have a good life. And that I
was still stupid. There were a couple of other messages. Sheila and the girls calling from Montreal. Lana. Then nothing.

So Ryan Darby was having a meltdown in some Halifax hostel and he’d apparently spent Christmas Day harassing me about it.
What was the deal with that stupid box? I couldn’t even remember what I’d done with it.

No, wait. It was here, in a pocket of my overcoat. I took it out. Still perfectly seamless, lidless, covered in tiny intricate
patterns. I found I was squeezing and pushing at the edges with my fingernails. Then something started to move. A side of
the box slid downwards a few millimetres. I fooled around with it for a while, nudging little tiles of wood around until the
top of the box glided off. Easy. So what was in the damn thing?

Nothing. It was empty.

Or maybe not. There was some kind of pattern on the bottom. Letters? I held the box up to the window, caught the last of the
afternoon light.

Oh, shit. Written on the bottom, in felt marker. Very messy, very crude. Almost illegible.

‘I love you.’

On the inner sides of the box, scrawled in even messier letters: ‘Ryan loves Stephen.’ There wasn’t a little heart, was there?
Yes, of course there was. And a smiley face.

Fuck. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t want to hurt this freak. I was pacing around the kitchen, bouncing from corner to corner, the
box still in my hand, saying ‘I love you’ every time I looked at it. Something a twelve-year-old girl would put together and
give to a boy, who would show all his friends and laugh at her.

Outside now, locking the front door, heading for the car. The city was a two-hour drive away. I could be there by six, ask
Ryan what the hell he’d meant by this box myself.

I pulled out of the driveway. Packed snow groaned under the tyres. Out to the main road, past houses I’d trudged by a thousand
times on my way to school. Then I hit the highway. Goodbye, Riverside! Goodbye.

It was almost dark. There was nothing on the radio but Christmas carols and country songs. Mom’s terrible music lay in a clutter
of cassettes shoved into the glove compartment. Phil Collins, Steve Winwood. No thanks. But there was an old Big Country tape
near the back that she’d borrowed off me way back when. I eased it into the cassette player. Sing-along tunes from the bad
old days. When the tape went quiet, I kept singing. Long, white fields gave way to scrubby pines, miles and miles of nothing.
The road to the city.

So what was I going to say to this poor dork? Sorry, Ry. It makes me sick to think of you like that. Even for a second. You
know how it is, man. He’d probably still be in his pjs. I’d seen him knocking around
his dorm room like that at four in the afternoon. Blue flannel with a pattern of comets, moons and stars. They were actually
girls’ pyjamas, but he got extremely prickly and defensive when I’d tried to tell him this.

The puzzle box lay on the passenger seat with its lid off, still telling me that it loved me. Well, box, I like you too. And
I also liked my space alien friend Ryan. I remembered the time he’d helped me clean up the apartment before my mom came to
visit. We’d decided the dishes were too far gone to save, so we’d lugged all these plates and bowls and saucers across town
and chucked them off the top of the ferry terminal building and into the harbour at three in the morning. I’d miss times like
that. I’d miss him.

That day when we were walking along the shore and he was driving me crazy, going on about my moral standards or whatever.
I think I’d known then that he was really just feeling jealous and left out.

And what was I feeling?

Ryan Darby, shivering into the wind in his awful yellow polo shirt, pale like uncooked poultry, squinting and twitching his
head as if he were expecting the whole world to come up and attack him. I’d looked at the blue veins on the undersides of
his elbows and felt something unbearably tender sweeping over me. ‘Don’t kick sand in his face,’ I’d wanted to say, though
there was no sand, only slabs of white rock. ‘Everybody, please just try to understand. Don’t hurt him. He’s with me.’

No, no, no. Imagine if I ended up with Ryan. We’d be arguing half the time, just like we did now, but I wouldn’t be able to
walk away from it and go, ‘Jeez, what a weirdo.’ Because he’d be my weirdo.

And goddammit, he still looked like Eric Stoltz fucked a chicken.

A nice chicken. A strangely graceful bird. I could see why Eric had stopped and picked her out from the flock, said hello.

Such a temptation, to start something. Normal life would seem exciting and precious for a while. Maybe I’d bring him back
to Riverside. Even Taggart’s Cross. Go into a big Hollywood smooch on the front steps of the Dowd house, give Granny a good
old heart attack.

Or I might just sit beside him on his hostel bed and hold his hand, let him talk until I understood everything. Would that
be better? The smart thing to do? Which would make Ryan happier, being loved or understood? Imagine if you could have both.

But there was another option, lurking alongside these. I could be cruel. Cruel to him, like so many people had been cruel
to me. It was possible. It might even be likely. Maybe I’d been banged around too much. Maybe I was rotten now.

I’d made good time. Only five thirty and I was already nearing the city. But I realised I’d had nothing to eat all day and
my head felt like it was suspended above me on a string. I pulled into one of those gas stations with a truck stop restaurant
attached, filled up the car and paid with a credit card. It was so cool, being an adult. In the restaurant I flipped the menu
open and closed, spun around on a stool by the counter, too jumpy to settle down and eat real food. I convinced the waitress
to bring me cinnamon toast instead. It was nice. Tasted like home. But home had its limits and I needed to be somewhere else.

I floated back to the car, feeling light and new born. The sky was a deep royal blue, with a thin crescent of yellow moon,
stars just beginning to show.

Of course I didn’t drive all the way out here to be cruel and give Ryan the talk. Getting dropped on your head doesn’t make
you rotten. Bruised, yes; addled, maybe. But bruises come from outside, and rottenness is yours alone. Something different
was going to happen. I wasn’t sure what.

I lit a cigarette and leaned with my elbows on the top of the car, looking down. There was the highway, a swathe of grey with
its broken line curving past a blue hill layered in trees and snow. After that the sweep of the land opening up into the distance,
with the dark water just beyond. I could see the lights of the city nestled in the harbour’s curve, softly glowing white and
yellow and orange. I lived there now.

In a few days, it would be 1988. Twelve years left before Armageddon, in case you believe that sort of thing.

If the end of the world came, would we all be like that, just a bunch of little coloured lights swept into the water and the
dark, everything mixed together and dissolving?

Or maybe it wouldn’t be cold and dark. We’d be sitting at the same table in a room that kept expanding to fit us all.

I swung myself into the car and pulled onto the highway, blasting ‘Fields of Fire’ out the windows. Guitars that sounded like
bagpipes. After a few seconds, I started singing along again. I coasted around the curve of the hill, moving into the horizon,
out of sight of anyone who might be watching from the parking lot above. Twin red and white beams on the back of the car,
another set of lights heading into the city.

I could say more, but I won’t.

It would be impossible to thank everyone who contributed to this book’s development, but I’ll see what I can do. Firstly,
the brilliant Brendan Richardson was with me every step of the way for over two years, sharing feedback, editing suggestions,
encouragement, and his vast knowledge of all things eighties – I can’t thank him enough. Thanks also to Ben Fergusson, who
read early drafts of the first chapters and provided detailed feedback, Maryna Pilkiw for help with Ukrainian phrases, and
Lee Sutton of Sixteen Labs for his (unpaid) work setting up my website. My agent Jonathan Williams saw the book’s potential
early on and promoted it tirelessly, and I owe a major debt of gratitude to Ciara Doorley for her insightful editing, and
of course to everyone else at Hachette Ireland. I would also like to thank Carrie King, June Caldwell, and all the lovely
people at the Irish Writers’ Centre for their support during the Novel Fair 2012 and afterwards. I’m grateful as well to Gerald
Dawe, Carlo Gébler and the gang at the Oscar Wilde Centre at Trinity College Dublin, especially the magnificent Workshop B
2011, and to
Helen Bovaird Ryan and the gang at Pen to Paper, Mount Merrion. Big thanks as well to those who read the manuscript and commented:
Peter Sheridan, Eibhear Walshe, Patrick Brownlee, Mikael Dam, Marni Amirault, Steve Parks, Rose Merrill, Miriam Gormally,
Lisan Jutras, Alice Blondel, Edel Corrigan, Marianne O’Rourke, Sandra Furlong, Bernice Barrington, Sheena Lambert, David Vaughan,
Richard Barnes, and Fiona Cameron. Most importantly, I owe everything and more to my patient husband Aodhan, without whose
loving support I would not have been able to either begin or complete this book. Finally, love and thanks to my family and
friends (Leigha Worth, I want a signed copy of your next book; Alice Brown, the same goes for you), as well as the infamous
Library Bar group, and anybody who danced at my wedding. Thanks all.