This Is the Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

to try to sit on the long backseat of the bus with the troublemakers and no-hopers and those who had aspirations to play the electric guitar but who would probably end up working behind a counter.
    Seeing me being taken away, Louis—who was a respectable pillar of society back then, with a prefect’s badge and high status as deputy head boy—got off the bus too and accompanied me to the station.
    When news reached the school the next day, they said they would expel me for what I had done to the bush, as itwas plain I was a bad lot and a corrupting influence and heading for the crapper.
    Louis went to the headmaster’s door and knocked on it and requested an interview, during the course of which he relayed the fact that if I got kicked out, he would leave too, and they didn’t want to lose him, so we both stayed.
    I should have been grateful, I suppose, but I wasn’t particularly, as I hated the place and left anyway after a couple of months. But I appreciated his loyalty, since we hadn’t been getting along back then and fought constantly. Once he tried to break a beer glass over my head and told me I treated home like a hotel. I told him it was a pretty poor hotel and not what I was used to—which was a lie, as I’d known nothing else. After that I tried to hit him over his head with a cricket bat, but he was too quick for me. But apart from small skirmishes like that, we got on fairly well.
    At one time, though, Louis had a religious period and our mother started panicking when he let it be known that he felt he maybe had a vocation and would one day become a priest. Our mother went straight to church and prayed that such a thing would never happen, and God, being bountiful, let that particular cup of woe pass to someone else.
    All the same, Louis took possession of the high moral ground and defended it staunchly for several months. When he came across the James Bond paperback I was reading, he tore it up and tossed it in the trash and said reading it was ­a sin.
    I had to tell him that it wasn’t even my book, I’d been loaned it, and it was none of his damned business what I read as I would read whatever I liked and he could go and screw himself and he’d better get me another copy soonbecause I was due to return the book to the boy I’d borrowed it from.
    Give him his due, he bought a replacement, but he said I wasn’t to look inside it, I was to hand it back and no peeking.
    When he was out of the way I finished the novel. I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, unless it was the heavy smoking.
    But that was Louis for you back in those days, always ready with the judgments and the moral tone; but then he mellowed a little in later life and said the school was a nest of hypocrites after it came to light that half of the reverend fathers were now standing accused in their retirement of fiddling with little boys.
    All the same we had a big row once that set the tone for the remainder of our relationship when Louis told me that as soon as he got the chance he was going to move abroad and head for another country so as to get away from me. And that was just what he did—though whether I was the prime mover in this or just another incidental annoyance he wanted to get away from I’m unsure. I suspect the latter and bear no hard feelings, because if he was pleased to go, I was also relieved he was gone, as it meant I could read my books in peace without the censor looking over my shoulder.
    The first place Louis went was Canada. He got his chemistry degree and then went to Alberta to study for a master of science and teach undergraduates. He met a girl there called Chancelle who had a brain the size of his or maybe even bigger, and they both studied chemistry and had a lot of sex, according to Louis, and no doubt some intellectual conversations afterward. They soon moved in together.
    Chancelle was French Canadian and her family supported a free and