Three Years with the Rat by Jay Hosking Read Free Book Online Page B

minute later I flip open the phone and listen to the message.
    “Dude. Nobody’s heard from you in fucken forever. Lee says you quit, too? Come to the Fortress on Friday. Steve and me are playing. You and I are gonna get shittered. Hah. Seriously, though, enough’s enough. Gimme a call, bud.”
    I don’t call him but after the sun goes down on Friday, I makethe walk to the concert on Bloor. The sky in the west is fading from pink skin to deep bruise and the air is perfectly cool. Smokers idle around the graffitied entrance to the Fortress and a white van with a small cargo trailer is parked out front. I recognize a few friends of Nicole but they don’t know my face anymore.
    I make my way past the venue, down the street, until I’m standing in front of the two sushi restaurants. I look up into John and Grace’s old apartment, where the windows are open and the lights are on in the second bedroom. The landlord has repainted the walls and there are cardboard boxes stacked in one corner. I’m unsure if someone new is already moving in or if those boxes hold the possessions John and Grace left behind.
    I walk back to the Fortress and Brian is now outside having a smoke, staring at his phone. He doesn’t bother with cigarettes when he’s sober.
    “You started without me,” I say to get his attention.
    He turns and smiles. “I fucken started at dinner, man.”
    “Sorry, do you want to finish that text message?”
    “Dude, this is my new fancy phone. I’m just half-cocked and on the internet, begging people to be my ‘friend.’ Lee just added me.”
    “That sounds pretty stupid,” I say.
    Brian laughs. “You’re goddamned right it is. You should get on it.”
    I take cash out of the bank machine on the way inside. The machine tells me I have just a little more than two months of rent left. I pay the girl working the door and get my wrist stamped in smudged black ink. Then we fold back the dirty curtain and go inside.
    The inside of the Fortress is a dark cube of noise. The ceiling is extremely high, all the walls and furniture are painted black, and the only lights are on the stage and above the bar at the back. The sound reverberates off the walls and turns the background music into adin. People appear as silhouetted heads unless they are a foot or two from my face. It smells like an empty, rinsed out aluminum can.
    Brian and I squint through the dark and shout over the music, all the way to the bar.
    “What are you drinking?” he asks.
    “Lately? Scotch, whisky, that sort of thing.”
    “Fuck me.” He laughs. He orders us two shots of whisky from the well and two cheap bottles of beer. “Nothing but the best, eh?”
    We tip the shots down our throats and clack the necks of our beer bottles together. My body doesn’t even react to the heat of the liquor anymore. The thought is alarming but my first sip of the beer washes it away.
    Brian belches into his sleeve. “Remember when you looked all young and wide-eyed and shit?”
    “Funny, you look just as rough as you used to,” I say.
    He laughs again. “Man, this city ruined us.”
    “Not just the city,” I say.
    He nods, becomes sombre. “You’ve had a bad run. I’m sorry, dude.”
    Brian leads me to the right of the stage where Lee is dressed snugly and standing with a couple of young women I don’t recognize. I smile and raise my bottle as a greeting.
    “We heard this is where the girlfriends of the band hang out,” Brian shouts into Lee’s ear, leaning his weight on one foot and then the other. His voice cuts through the sludge of sound. “Can we be band girlfriends, too?”
    Lee pushes him away with her elbow and mutters something undoubtedly rude. Her elbow rests against him for a moment longer than necessary, rubbing his chest. It’s odd and it makes me wonder about her boyfriend Steve. I look up to the stage and the first band is setting up, plugging in guitars and keyboards in the near dark.
    Lee is staring at me when I turn back to