Kicking Tomorrow Read Online Free

as Rosie’s beach blanket would cover, somewhere in the centre of the anthill of humanity that bristled with flags and waving arms, and soon they were both lying beneath a big sky getting a buzz off a bottle of fizzing warm apple cider.
    All over the mountain, while the music played, children tugged on kites and families perspired around barbecues; French-Canadian hippies handed out political pamphlets and flags with fleurs-de-lis on them, mimes in whiteface did their utterly compelling act of standing still or being stuck inside glass boxes – the only whiff of violence (apart from the fact that the music was so loud fish were floating up dead on the surface of the lake) was a story that circulated in the crowd about an incident involving the Montreal chapter of the Satan’s Choice and their arch rivals the Dead Man’s Hands, over a cocaine deal. Another story had it that several of the bikers had gang-banged a teenage girl in the bushes, on the east side of the mountain under the giant electric crucifix. But there was so much peace and love and music and political fervour in the air that no one was about to get het up over a little thing like that.
    Robbie lay on his back watching smoke curl lazily upwards, listening to the music performed on a stage half a mile away, and thinking about how the word humanity has the word ant in it. The earth was a vast dish tipping, revolving vertiginously in a luminous universe, the centrifuge pulling him around like a great, lethargic fairground ride. He could barely see the stage at all, but there was so much sweet metal music spilling out from the banksof speakers, like a drawerful of cutlery crashing to the floor, that his skull was numb, and there was still enough noise left over to smack against the rows of houses at the edges of the park and bounce right back again.
    He tried to estimate how many people were there. It was certainly the biggest crowd he’d ever been in. Maybe even bigger than Woodstock!
    “A PARTIR D’ICI ET POUR UN AN!” the immensely popular Yvon Deschamps dictated into the microphone, his arms outstretched.
    “A PARTIR D’ICI ET POUR UN AN!” the crowd responded as one massive, joyous voice from all over Mount Royal.
    “J’vais pas parler Anglais!”
    “J ’VAIS PAS PARLER ANGLAIS!”
    “Dey’re not gonna speak Hinglish because dey don’t know
ow
to speak Hinglish,” Robbie chuckled to himself, splitting a match down the middle to make a flimsy roach-clip.
    Rosie squinted around and whistled low. “You know what, Bob? There’s a
renaissance
going on here. The best and heaviest music in North America, the best and heaviest BOOKS , the best ART , the heaviest POLITICS . It’s crazy, but right now there’s a genuine
revolution
happening, and no one in the outside world even knows about it.”
    “The best and heaviest dope,” Robbie murmured.
    Politics was not his strong point, but as far as he dug it, Quebec separatism went like this: the
pea-soups
had had it up to here with being bossed around by the
Anglos
, who had all the money and the culture and the smarts. It was Dad who called them pea-soups, because that was their national dish, but to Robbie’s generation they
were pepsis –
that’s because, and Robbie was sure he had read this in a scientific magazine, the average Québécois drinks eighteen gallons of pop a year; that’s tops in Canada and second only to certain southern U.S. states. Anyway,now the pepsis wanted a spot guaranteed on the hit parade, and in their own language; they’d tried bombings and kidnappings before, but today a whole lot of pepsis felt the only way to be was out of Canada altogether.
    That was it, in a nutshell. Robbie meanwhile is preoccupied with working enough spittle up in his dried-out mouth to moisten the end of an enormous spliff before the glowing tip falls off and burns Rosie’s back. And Rosie meanwhile has pulled a copy of
The Compleat Illustrated Handbook on the Psychic Sciences
from her