The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

In 2008, a young man named Tim got on a Greyhound bus. He put in his headphones, turned on some music, and fell asleep against the window. The next thing he knew, a knife was going in and out of his chest. He woke up screaming, screams that would haunt many of the other passengers for years afterward. A man was sitting next to him, calmly stabbing a knife into his chest, staining the seats with blood. When the knife blade disappeared into Tim's neck, his screams became gurgles as he started to choke on his own blood.

The driver slammed on the brakes. He opened the doors and fled the bus, along with the horrified passengers. In the final moments of Tim's life, the killer took the knife and decapitated him. The people outside the bus watched as the killer took the head and then proudly displayed to them through the window. Many of the passengers cried and vomited.

While the police arrived, Li was eating parts of McLean's body, including his eyes.

All this happened on a Canadian Greyhound bus. Much like the bus I took from Toronto to Montreal. For most people, it's a mystery why Vince Li did what he did, and it will forever remain a mystery. Well, okay, admittedly there's the fact that Li was mentally ill at the time. He was a untreated schizophrenic. But apart from that, no one knows why he did it.

Well, I think I know why it happened: it's because of the stress of riding on a Greyhound bus. The seats are uncomfortable for one thing, and for another thing, the Wi-Fi doesn't work. That's enough to turn even Ned Flanders into a killer. Plus there's nothing to eat, which explains the whole eye-eating thing - Vince Li was just hungry. All he had to eat were his fellow passengers.

I don't actually remember anything about my own bus ride, the one I took in 2012 to get to Montreal. I know I wasn't murdered because I'm still here today. Either it was completely uneventful or it was so bad that my mind has blocked out the memories to protect me from psychological trauma. Quite likely, it was the latter.

I have an idea. While we wait for the bus to reach Montreal, let me tell you some Canadian history. Don't worry, I promise it won't be boring. I'll just tell you the interesting parts.

First, Canada could have been called Efisga.

You see, when the first colonists were trying to think of a name for the new land they'd just conquered, suggestions included Victorialand (after Queen Victoria), Transatlantia, Borealia (from 'borealis', the Latin word for 'northern') and Ursalia ('the place of the bears'). And one guy piped up "Efisga". No, he wasn't having a stroke or up to his eyeballs on psychoactive mushrooms. Efisga is an acronym for English, French, Irish, Scottish, German, and Aboriginal, the people who made up Canada at the time.

In the end, of course, Canada was called Canada, as we all know, by the fact it's called Canada.

But even the name "Canada" was due to a misunderstanding. You see, in 1535, French explorer Jacques Cartier was exploring the land, in his beret, a long coat and with a sword hanging from his belt. As he walked in the shade of the tall maple trees, his sword going thunk thunk on his leg and his feet going crunch crunch on the twigs and leaves on the ground, he came across (so goes the story) two Aboriginal youths.

"What's down there?" he asked the youths in French as he pointed down the river.

Miraculously, the two boys understood Cartier's French perfectly, even though they had never heard French before.

"Kanata," replied one of the boys.

"Canada?" said Cartier.

"Kanata," corrected the boy.

"Canada?"

"KanaTA."

"Canada," said Cartier, stroking his beard. "Interesting."

Cartier started using "Canada" in his journals and on his maps, and the name stuck, even to this day. But Canada wasn't the name of the land Cartier had discovered, and neither was the name Kanata; the Indigenous peoples had no word for Canad, as they didn't know they were living in a place so big. Kanata is simply the Huron-Iroquois word for "village", which is what the boys thought Cartier had been pointing to.

Which means if Cartier had been pointing to a toilet instead of a village, then presumably Canada would have been named the Huron-Iroquois word for "shitter" instead.

One day, Cartier met an Aboriginal chief, Chief Donnacona. Now, the thing about Chief Donnacona is that he liked to make stuff up. He liked to spin tall tales. He like to make up lies. According to Donnacona, there was a nearby land where the people had to have to hop around all day because they each only had one leg. Another fantastical land had "men who fly, having wings on their arms like bats". But, Donnacona added, they "fly but little, from the ground to a tree, and from tree to tree to the ground". Then there was another place where people had their "heads submerged in their chests". Cartier was enraptured by these descriptions and believed every word of it, which he dutifully wrote down in his diaries. Cartier was especially interested, I imagine, in the land where the people without anuses. Donnacona claimed he had been there himself. The people there "never eat nor digest but simply make water through the penis" and "possessed no anus". In other words, they piss but don't poop. You couldn't make this stuff up. Except Donnacona did. And Cartier believed it.

Donnaconna's greatest lie was the Kingdom of Saguenay. This was a mythical land in Canada containing "immense quantities of gold, rubies, and other rich things", as Cartier later carefully wrote in his journal, even though all of it was lies. The Kingdom of Saguenay was ruled by blond-hair people - or so Donnacona claimed - whose houses were filled with gems, silver, and precious furs. It was the Canadian El Dorado, a city tantalising close that spelled untold riches for any explorer who found it.

In a gesture of peace and goodwill, Cartier kidnapped Donnaconna - and his two sons - and sailed them off to France. There, Donnacona repated the same tall tales of the golden Kingdom of Saguenay to the King of France. Just as guillable as Cartier, the King believed all of Donnaconna's stories, including the story about the men with wings on their arms like bats, and the one about the men without bumholes, and Donnaconna lived well at the king's expense. Donnaconna and his sons died soon thereafter, and not a single report anywhere says how. The King of France sent Cartier on another voyage to Canada, this time to discover the hidden city of Saguenay and its exotic treasures. But Cartier never did find Saguenay, or the land of one-legged people for that matter, or even the land of people without anuses. Perhaps it's because they didn't exist.

Even though Canada had no magic kingdom containing treasure beyond anyone's wildest imaginings, it was rich in other ways. Especially, strangely, beaver furs. In the 1600s, a fashion craze swept Europe, a craze for wearing felt hats made of beaver fur. Canada had beaver furs in plenty, so early Canadian settlers got to work skinning beavers, turning them into jaunty hats, and making huge amounts of money. Such were the crazy profits being made that other countries wanted a share too. Thus began the Beaver Wars, a real thing I'm not making up, where the French, English, and local Aboriginal tribes fought each other over buck-toothed rodents.

At one point, France ruled over most of North America - including where the United States is today - with an empire called New France. Presumably, everyone in New France wore berets and striped shirts, and when they laughed, they said "hon hon hon". This was before Wild West times, back when people still wore ridiculous hats and wigs.

Well, they weren't laughing when the English overwhelmed them, and eventually pushed the French back to Québec City, for one final climatic battle. Count Frontenac refused to surrender Quebec to the English in 1690, saying: “My only reply will be from the mouths of my cannons!” In 1759, the British defeated the French in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham at Québec City — marking the end of France’s empire in America.

Most of Canada had been explored and exploited by this point, but there was still one part of Canada not yet mapped: the Arctic.

1819, a British man called John Franklin (born more than a century after Cartier) led an expedition into the forests of northwestern Canada, a place better known as the Arctic, or The Single Most Hostile Place on Earth. Things didn't go so well. The weather was cold. There was almost nothing to eat. Their food ran out. They were forced to subsist on lichens scraped from boulders (which they called "tripe de roche"). When there were no lichens, they ate their own shoes. Apparently, if you boil a pair of shoes, you can eat the leather, although it's not something I want to try myself. Here's an example of the kind of things Franklin wrote in his diary: "There was no tripe de roche, so we drank tea and ate some of our shoes for supper." And when the shoes ran out, they resorted to eating maggot-infested deerskins instead. The maggots tasted "as fine as gooseberries" according to [].

And when the maggots ran out, well, they ate each other. At least two men were murdered and eaten on Franklin's expedition, perhaps more. To be honest, I'm fine with that. Cannibalism, I can understand. It's the part about the boots that gets me. Eating boots? I can't imagine how hungry you'd have to be to eat your own footwear. There can't be that many calories in a pair of Nike trainers, surely?

For over a week, the men at Fort Enterprise subsisted on tripe de roche and rotten deerskins, which they ate complete with the maggots, which tasted "as fine as gooseberries."-->

When Franklin got home, he became famous. Not in a good way, but in a "ha-ha, he ate his boots" kind of way. Never mind that eleven of his friends had died; ordinary people would point him out in the street as "that man who ate his boots" and laugh at him. He must have been livid, having gone all the way to the Arctic just to be known as the guy who ate his Doc Martins.

So he went back to Canada again, for a second expedition, and then finally, again, for a third time.

It was this third expedition to Canada that was to be his downfall. Now aged 59, he was no longer the young man he used to be. His face had liver spots and his hands were gnarled. Franklin wasn't the first choice for this voyage, or the second choice, or even the third, but he was the only one insane enough to make another voyage to the Arctic. This time, they took two ships, one of which was called the HMS Terror, which was a fitting name for a boat because that's exactly what the men must have felt when they boarded it: terror, especially knowing that Franklin was their captain. If I was asked to take a trip to explore the Arctic in a boat called the Terror, with a captain known for letting half his men die on a previous expedition, then I'd say no way, no thanks mate, I'd rather play on my Xbox instead (or whatever the equivalent of an Xbox was back in those days - a stick on a ball).

In what is now known as Franklin's lost expedition, Franklin and his 128 men were never seen again. And I don't think it was because they all changed their names and moved to Hawaii. Years later, skeletons of the crew were found, with cut marks on some of the bones, indicating cannibalism.

 

1867 to 1873 and from 1878 to 1891: served as Prime Minister

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Everyone knows that America's first president was George Washington. But can you name Canada's first prime minister? More to the point, do you even care? No, you don't. And it's a shame because, by all accounts, he was an interesting guy.

John Alexander Macdonald, or Johnny to his friends, was born in Glasgow, Scotland, so he wasn't even Canadian. His dad took the family to Canada to flee debt collectors. There, by all accounts Johnny had a fun childhood, which included his younger brother dying from a blow to the head by a servant charged with taking care of the boys. John went on to become a lawyer, then alderman, then a Conservative candidate for his city, and then leader of the Conservatives. During this time, at the age of 28, Macdonald added incest to his list of accomplishments by marrying his cousin.

Then, at the age of 52, he did something remarkable - something no one thought possible - by uniting the various colonies together into one country: the Dominion of Canada. In an article in The Atlantic, David Frum writes:

Back in the 1860s, the idea of stringing together into a single country the British colonies north of the 49th parallel seemed illusory, if not preposterous. [...] The British colonies in North America were so far-flung, more than 3,000 miles from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island. In all this vast territory lived only about 3.5 million people, connected by a few hundred miles of railway line—which was maybe just as well, considering the mutual hostility of the French-speaking minority and the English-speaking majority. Maybe you had to be drunk to believe that any of this could work.

But it did work. And Canada was officially born on July 1, 1867, a day still celebrated as Canada Day. (Although until 1982, it was called “Dominion Day” because Canada's official name used to be the Dominion of Canada. But just think it could have been called 'Ursulia Day'.)

Macdonald became Canada's first Prime Minister. And as Canada's first Prime Minister, Macdonald was known for three things: his wit, his temper, and his rampant alcoholism. He was often drunk, including during Parliament. There was one debate where was he so drunk that he vomited on the stage, and while he was wiping dribbles of vomit from his mouth with his sleeve, his opponent said, "Is this the man you want running your country? A drunk!" Collecting himself, Macdonald replied, "I get sick not because of drink [but because] I am forced to listen to the ranting of my honourable opponent." In other words, "Your bullshit made me puke."

After he died, Canada celebrated Macdonald's achievements by slapping his face onto the Canadian ten-dollar bill. But then, in 2018, Canada scrubbed him off again due to his not-so-good laws involving Aboriginal people (including the 1876 Indian Act, brought in by Macdonald, which resulted in 100,000 Aboriginal children being forcibly taken away from their parents).

Though he's also famous for saying, "Let us be French, let us be English, but most importantly let us be Canadian!" so he can't have been too bad.

 

As for New France, it can still be visited today - in a way. You see, the French, although defeated, never left Canada. They stayed put. They refused assimilation, developed their own way of life and social customs, and became Quebec, the French-speaking region of Canada. And it was here that my coach pulled up one early Tuesday morning in April.

Montreal

It felt good to be walking again. My legs were waking up. The wheels of my suitcase trundled behind me. Okay, I hadn't slept, but I was in a new city. I breathed in the fresh morning air of Montreal and instead started coughing on the car fumes, dust and petrol. Even though it was spring there was still a chill in the air. And as I walked to where the hostel should be, I noticed something odd. Every single sign was in French. They were like this: Gare d'Autocars de Montréal Centre de Chirurgie Zone Quartier Latin - Quartier Des Spectacles Montréal L'inclusion au quotidien. Engagée à soutenir la communauté LGBT+. Boulevard de Maisonneuve Hôtel There wasn't a single English word written anywhere. No one had ever told me that Montreal was all in French. If I'd known, I might have actually paid attention in French class at school. The effect was like being hit in the face with a French dictionary. French bombarded me from every direction. Every word my eyes landed on was French. For all intents and purposes, I was now illiterate. I could no longer understand the written word. Or the spoken word for that matter. A homeless man called out to me, "Excusez-moi meisseur, as tu de l'argent?" I was amazed. Even the homeless people here spoke French! How glamorous! How sophisticated! I had no idea what he was saying - probably some profound wisdom about life or love — so I just smiled at him and carried on. But the homeless man called after me: "Hé ! Putain de merde ! Donne moi de l'argent !" I don't know what he was saying. He was probably wishing me a good day or something. French is a beautiful language! If I'd done my research, which I hadn't, then I would have known that Montreal is the largest French-speaking city in North America. Now, most people would be a bit worried by this. By suddenly finding yourself in a place where you don't understand the language. But not me. All the French words excited me. I actually liked this feeling of not knowing what every sign said. I liked not being to understand. I dragged my suitcase to the spot where the hostel should be. But the hostel wasn't there. "Excuse me," I said to a man walking his dog. Fuck, I should have said Excusez-moi. "Do you know where the Alexandrie hostel is?" "It's that building there," he said, pointing to a building on the corner of the block. I'd walked straight passed it on account of it looking more like a abandoned prison instead of a hostel. "Thanks," I said. I crossed the road and rang the bell. A young woman opened the door. "Er, bonjour," I said. "Bonjour!" she said. "Tu parles francais?" "Er... I don't speak French," I admitted. Bonjour was all I knew. That and "j'ai une baguette" which probably wouldn't be useful right now. "I have a reservation?" The woman looked at me with bright, twinkly eyes. "Oh that's great!" she said cheerily. "I'm Stephany. Why don't you come inside and I'll check you in!" So I pulled my suitcase up the step and into the hostel. Inside, I was hit by a library-like silence. Two young backpackers were sitting at a table, studying maps. Apart from them, and the receptionist, the hostel was empty. I looked around. The chairs and sofa were all of different styles, and half of them were broken. The ceiling was bare, grey concrete, like an underground car park. Random pipes and exposed wires hung down. I'm not sure I'd wanted to touch one of those wires. I'm not sure I wanted to touch anything for that matter. I was looking forward to going to bed and sleeping for a few hours. I'd spent the night riding a Greyhound bus from Toronto to Montreal and hadn't been able to sleep. "So is this your first time in Montreal?" Stephany asked. "Yeah, I just got here this morning," I said. "Oh! Well, bienvenue! Let me tell you about the city." This wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to go to bed. But before I could protest, Stephany took me to a map of Montreal pinned to the wall. "So this street all along here is Sainte-Catherine street," she said, "and it's the main street of the city. All the big shops are on Sainte-Catherine, and the gay district too. This street is Rue Saint-Denis. It's a great street for nightlife! There's lots of bars there, and there's even an Irish pub so you'll feel right at home!" As an Englishman, I don't think an Irish pub was going to feel like home. "This hill is called Mont Royal, and if you go there on Sunday, there's a thing called tam tam where lots of people play drums." I just kept nodding and saying 'Uh-huh'. My eyes started to close. I forced them back open. I'd been awake for thirty hours straight now. Thirty. Finally, Stephany finished her lecture on the history, geography and culture of Montreal. It lasted half an hour. I kid you not. "Now, let me get you your bedsheets," she said. With a smile and more inane, pointless chatter, Stephany fetched a pile of linen and handed it to me. "What's this?" I said. "It's for your bed," said Stephany. I'd expected my bed to me made for me. "Now follow me and I'll show you to your room!" she said with her special brand of unwarranted enthusiasm. I followed her. At least we were heading to a dorm room now, where there might actually be a bed. Along the way, I passed a man using the hostel computer. He was clicking the mouse lazily as if he'd had a lobotomy. I was horrified to see the computer was running Windows 95, an operating system that was almost two decades old. Before I could see any further, Stephany led me through a door and up some stairs. I heaved my suitcase up the stairs. Stephany saw me struggling and said, "Don't worry, it's just a few flights more." "A few flights more??" I said as I desperately tried to stop my suitcase from falling back down the stairs. "Your dorm's at the top, on the third floor." Of course, of course, it would be at the top, wouldn't it? We finally arrived at the third floor. I was panting for breath. As I reached the final step, I threw my suitcase to the safety of the landing. Then I leaned against the wall, trying to catch my breath. "Are you okay?" asked Stephany, looking concerned. "Yeah, fine," I said. I just didn't expect to be climbing Mount Everest today. "I suppose it is hard with a suitcase. It's the old building you see, it was built before elevators existed." What, in Roman times? Stephany handed me a keycard. She showed me how to use it to open the door. You had to put the card on the lock. This made a red light turn green and THUNK, the door unlocked. It's not fucking rocket science. "Well, thanks," I said. Would I finally be able to sleep now? "I'll be downstairs if you need anything!" she said and then she went back down the stairs. I opened the room to the dorm. Morning light streamed in through a window. The room was empty apart from four bunk beds. Most of the beds had sheets and pillows on them in various states of dishevelment. If Stephany wanted to make some quick money, she could sell these beds for a small fortune by pretending they were made by Tracey Emin. A bed on a lower bunk had a sheet hung around it, giving the impression that someone had died and Stephany had put a sheet around the bed to hide the body. There was only one bed without sheets on it. I guessed this was my bed. I dumped my pile of linen on the bed, pulled off my shoes, climbed up into the bed, and fell asleep.

Crotch man

It's a weird feeling, waking up with a man's hand on your crotch. "Are you okay?" he whispered. As he said this, his hand was cupped over my genitals. "Yes, I'm okay," I mumbled. He looked at me for a few more moments —- perhaps unsure if I was truly 'okay' or not —- but who can ever be 'okay' after waking up a stranger's hand on their genitals? —- and then took his hand away. I rolled over and pretended to go back to sleep. I listened to him fumble around with his suitcase for a bit. Then finally, he left the room. The door closed with a click. They say that travelling leads to new experiences but I never expected one of those experiences to be a man molesting me. This was a first. Honestly, what annoyed me most was that he'd woken me up. I was still tired. I'd only had about four hours of sleep. I climbed down the ladder of the bunk bed and put my shoes on. The bed below me still had a sheet hung around it as if a corpse was in there. I peeked inside, but to my disappointment, it was empty. Surprisingly, I wasn't the least bit bothered that I'd just been molested. I decided to go for a walk. So I put on my coat and went outside. My plan was to go back to the Montreal Bus Terminal, buy a bus ticket, and go west to New Brunswick, where I imagined there were forests instead of cities. But I got to the Montreal Bus Terminal and asked for a bus ticket to New Brunswick, the woman looked surprised and said, "New Brunswick? There's no service to New Brunswick right now." "What? But why?" I asked. "You haven't heard?" "No?" I said. "I don't live here. I only arrived today." "Oh," she said. "Well, the bus drivers are on strike." "The bus drivers are on strike?" I asked. "The bus drivers are on strike," she confirmed. "But... Well..." I mumbled. The bus drivers were on strike? But that's not convenient! What about the people who need to go to New Brunswick? Like me, for instance? "Do you know when the strike will end?" I asked finally. She shrugged. "Could be tomorrow, could be weeks from now." I left the Montreal Bus Terminal with my shoulders hunched over in disappointment. My plan to get out of Montreal had been derailed because of some bus drivers' strike. Which is ironic because buses don't even use rails. There was one thing I knew for certain though — I would definitely not be spending the rest of the year in Montreal. Even though it was spring, there was still a winter chill in the air. I pulled my coat tighter around me. Then, unknowingly, I stumbled into Montreal's red-light district. Bright neon signs started clamouring for my attention. Signs with words like sexe and strip tease. It seems that in Montreal, you can't get a bus but they practically through strip teases at you. One building blasted the word sexothèque, lit up in red and blue neon. Sexothèque. What a brilliant word. I'd have to get a notebook to start writing some of these French words down. But what caught my eye was the ambulance, and the five paramedics standing around a man in a gurney. The man was lying down, apparently unconscious. What had happened to him? I guess the excitement of the sexothèque had been too much and he'd had a heart attack. What must be inside a sexothèque if it gives you a heart attack? It must be something really good, no doubt. Maybe you even get to see a lady's vagina. But unfortunately, I never went inside the sexothèque to find out. I was too scared. And I still regret that to this day. Just like how I regret never going into the hotel in Toronto that gave out free lap dances. Next, I saw a building with a huge red neon sign saying SUPER SEXE. I rubbed my eyes in disbelief. Around the sign were pictures of bikini-clad women with wings. Things just kept getting better and better. This wasn't just sexe - this was SUPER SEXE. Below the sign, at street level, was a Bureau de change with a sign that read $€£¥, which, to my eyes at least, spelt out SEXY. Even the currency exchange was in on it. I continued to wander around Montreal, giddy, wide-eyed and in disbelief, like Pinocchio at Pleasure Island. According to montrealnitelifetours.com, Montreal’s red-light district "began as a necessary evil to protect innocent girls from the dangers of lusty sailors". I didn't see any lusty sailors so maybe it had worked. I went into a book shop just for a few moments of sanity. Inside, I noticed that all the signs of the book shop were in French. There was Histoire, Cuisine, Humour, Livres pour enfants, Langues, and, bizarrely, a massive section called Romans. There were hundreds and hundreds of books in the Romans section. Why were the Romans so important in Montreal? I could understand in Italy, maybe, where the Romans used to live. But here in Canada? Then, from outside, the shouting started. Screaming. Chanting. Horns and trumpets. Now what?? This was only my first day in Montreal. Jesus Christ, Lord of Nazareth, now what was happening?? Then I saw them: hundreds of them. No, thousands. All walking down the street, chanting and shouting and blowing horns. They were chanting things in French I couldn't understand. They were holding signs and placards in French I couldn't understand. And — here's the strangest thing — not a single person in the bookshop showed any interest. The people in the bookshop were all still browsing books as if nothing was happening outside. Were the Romans really that interesting? In desperation, I went to the counter to ask someone about what was happening and make sure I wasn't hallucinating. "Do you see that?" I asked the cashier. I pointed to the massive protest happening outside, just a few meters away, on the other side of the bookstore window. He looked outside. Then he looked at me and frowned. "Sure," he said. "Happens every day." Happens every day?? The protest tailed off. The last of the protesters were followed by policemen in big, bulky black clothes. They wore helmets and had riot sticks. Then they were gone too. Finally, the street was empty again as if nothing had happened. It was dark now so I headed back to the hostel. When I got back, there was some kind of party going on. People were drunk. Stephany the receptionist wasn't there so I knew no one. It felt like starting a new school where everyone is already friends and you don't know anyone. I went to the dorm. To my relief, the man who had touched my dick had checked out. Perhaps he'd gone elsewhere to molest people. If this was just one day in Montreal, then what was the rest of the year like? I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

El Terreno

Montreal is a city of scholars. It boasts six universities and 24 colleges, as well as the highest proportion of post-secondary students of all the major cities in North America — there are 248,000 post-secondary students in Montreal, one of the largest numbers in the world. So when something happens that affects students, it's going to happen most in Montreal. Something like a tuition fee rise. In 2011 — a year before I arrived in Montreal — the government announced an increase in university tuition fees in Quebec from $2,168 to $3,793. The effect was like a lightning to the student movement, whose members consider low tuition sacrosanct in promoting access to postsecondary education. The next year saw massive protests in Montreal. When I arrived in Montreal, there had already been a month of protests, happening every day. At the peak of the protests, 400,000 protesters marched through the streets of Montreal, according to democracynow.org. The organisers claimed it was "the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history". None of this sparked my interest, unfortunately. I quickly grew used to the sight of angry students and the sound of people banging pots and pans. In fact, what they were protesting about, I never even bothered to find out. I started to get to know the people in the hostel. And they were a strange bunch of people. I started wondering if checking into this hostel had maybe been a bad idea. First, there was Stephany, who I had already met. She was always beaming and smiling. Whatever antidepressants she was on, I want some. As far as I could tell, Stephany was the most normal person there. So, moving on. So then there was H, another receptionist. What did H stand for? I didn't know. It was a mystery. What I do know is that he was short, fat, middle-aged and Chilean. How and why he moved from Chile to live in Montreal, I don't know. He had long, black hair, which he normally wore in a bun, and his face was always stubbled with a few day's worth of beard. Also, despite his facial stubble, he was as camp as a row of pink tents. He was gay and proud of it. He loved nothing more than dancing to Chilean pop music on a Friday night, with his hair down. But H had a temper. One day, he yelled at one of the guests because she'd forgotten to pay for her room or whatever. But he he shouted at her so much that she broke down in tears and fled the hostel. Later, she came back with a police escort to collect her stuff. Yes, H had scared her so huch that she'd actually had gone to a police station and asked for the police to accompany her to the hostel, just so she could collect her bag. Maybe H stood for 'hateful'. A third receptionist - the hostel had a lot of receptionists for some reason - was Mouri. He was from Africa and had scars on his face. No one knew how Mauri had gotten these scars. I suppose we could have just asked him. But one day, Mouri disappeared from the hostel and was never seen again. Then there was Suzan and Rebecca. They were a mother and daughter duo travelling around the world by working in hostels for food and accomodation. Even though Suzan and Rebecca were technically mother and daugther, they couldn't have looked more different. Whereas Suzanne was a pale white woman with hair the colour of bimbo blonde, Rebecca was a six-foot tall black girl with a giant afro. I suppose Rebecca must have taken her traits from her dad's side instead of mom's side.

Suzan was the strangest of the two. She claimed to have an IQ of 159 and a Mensa membership. But if that was the case, then why did she spent her days sitting at the common room table and bitching about the other guests? Instead of building rockets or something. That's what I'd do if I had a genious IQ. But instead she'd sit there, with a sour expression, and say things like, "I hate everyone in this godawful place, and pass me those biscuits." Another thing Suzan liked to do was complain about the noise - which is a weird when you're living in a hostel? You have to expect some noise? Because it's - hello - a hostel? It'd be like going to Barbados and bitching about the sun.

Then there were Suzan's selfies on Facebook. There were so many of photos of her - her Facebook feed just went on and on for miles with them - and they were all semi-pornographic. Photos of her lying on a bed wearing lingerie; photos of her in swimsuits; topless photos, her nipples covered by her hands or carefully positioned emojis. There were even a few nudes in there as well, none of which I've saved to my computer for research purposes. Suzan was past her sell-by-date. With her sagging breasts, pale body and hippopotamus thighs, she looked more like a glamourous granny than a Page 3 model. I never found any of those pictures attractive. In fact, I found the photos a bit sad and depressing. It was like discovering your elderly mother-in-law has an Onlyfans fans account. Though there may be a market for these photos somewhere - maturetube.com, for example.

The number of weird people at the hostel just went on and on. There was Dilbert, a painfully shy Irish man who spoke to no one and only ever stared at his laptop; Joy, a tiny Swahili woman with a shaved head who folded laundry while dreaming about finding a boyfriend; Stephanie, a woman from Brighton who wanted to open and strip club and believed her soul-mate was Keanu Reeves; a receptionist called Antoine with a self-confessed "fetish for Asian women"; the list goes on.

Perhaps the reason the hostel attracted weird people was because it was the cheapest hostel in the city. At $17 a night (off-peak, in a 8-bed dorm), you couldn't find anything cheaper. Indeed, the cheap prices had been a major factor in my own decision for staying there. But now I knew I had to leave. I knew I had to get out of this crazy hostel before I ended up like one of the crazy residents. So I left the hostel and did the obvious thing: I went to live in a forest with a man named Javier. I'd found Javier on HelpX. HelpX, if you don't know, is a website where you can find voluteer work in exchange for free accomodation and food. (Although usually the accomodation is a flea-ridden bed and the work is ten hours gruelling manual labour.) Javier's profile stood out to me, because, in his picture, he was standing in a forest and had two thumbs up, and the forest reminded me of my Canadian dream to live in a log pile house and wear flannel shirts like a lumberjack. Through online messages, Javier explained to me that he had bought a plot of land in the Canadian wilderness, about three hours north of Montreal. El Terreno, he called it - "The Earth" - though very soon, through personal experience, I'd come to know it as "The freezing shithole". Javier said he was building a house there and needed volunteers to help him. Obviously, I knew nothing about building houses, but I agreed to go anyway because at least I'd get away from the hostel. And that's how, one morning, I found myself being driven to the Canadian wilderness by Javier. Javier was larger than life. He was a Mexican man, of Mexican descent, but dressed in Rastafarian clothes (baggy trousers and a torn t-shirt), sunglasses and a bandana. Also in the car was another volunteer, a quiet French guy called Derpwin, or at least I think that's what his name was.

Javier and Derpwin chatted away to each other in French. I tried to understand what they were saying, but couldn't as I couldn't understand French, so I just looked out the window instead. It was all just trees, as far as the eye could see. Spruce, oak, sycamore. And the highway in front of us, stretching off like a long grey ribbon.

Soon, Javier made a few turns and the road started to get more and more broken and wild. It was then I realised I didn't know Javier all too well. Or Derpwin for that matter. I tried to memorise the turns Javier was making in case I'd have to lead the local police back here later, but found I couldn't.

And then we arrived at El Terreno. Javier stopped the car and we got out. The air smelled of pine. It was essentially a secluded campsite in the middle of a forest. There were signs attached to the trees that said "Private property" and "Trespassers will be shot". Then there was a sign with a picture of an archer and the words "Archer à l'affût". My French was bad but I knew this one meant: "If you come here without my permission I'll turn you into a human pincushion".

Another sign said "EL TERRENO!" Javier was standing underneath it.

"Welcome to El Terreno!" said Javier.

"Uh... thanks?" I said. "I guess?"

Derpwin and I pulled our suitcases out of the car.

"Let me show you to your rooms," Javier said with a smile.

The rooms turned out to be tents. Of course. I threw my suitcase inside my tent and checked my phone: no signal. Shit. Whatever was going to happen over the next few days, I wouldn't be able to rely on the police to come rescue me.

The first day we didn't do any work. Instead, Javier showed us around his campsite. "Here's a tree," he would say. "And here's another tree." Or something like that. Actually he was speaking in French most of the time so I didn't understand him.

"And here's the lake."

Now this was nice. It was a beautiful lake, like a scene from a postcard of Canada.

"Oh wow," I said. "Is it cold?"

"All lakes are cold, man," said Javier. "Especially in Canada."

When night came. Javier handed me and Derpwin a flashlight each so we could find our tents. The flashlights were the kind where you click the end to turn it on and off. I amused myself by clicking the light off and on again repeatedly until Javier got annoyed and said it was time for bed.

So Derpwin and I trudged off to our tents. Derpwin found his tent first. He always did everything better than me - such a goody-two-shoes. "Bonne nuit," he said and went off to his tent.

Crunch, crunch, crunch as he walked through the leaves and twigs.

Now I was alone. There was total silence. Everything was dark except for the narrow beam of light from my torch. I clicked off the torch and immediately I could see nothing at all. Nothing at all. I couldn't even make out my hand an inch from my face. Never before had I experienced such darkness.

I frantically turned my torch back on. Click. The beam of light was back. I breathed a sigh of relief.

I headed to my own tent. Crunch crunch crunch. I zipped open the tent door - zzzzzzzzzzzip. Then I climbed inside and zipped the tent closed again - zzzzzzzzzzzip. I rummaged around in my luggage for toothpaste and toothbrush. I could only find the toothpaste - the toothbrush must have burrowed further into the suitcase for warmth - so I just rubbed toothpaste over my teeth. It was mint flavour.

I checked my phone. It was pointless because there was no signal. So I turned it off to conserve the battery. Then I got into my sleeping bag and turned off the torch.

After a couple of minutes, I fell asleep.

  Day 2

In the morning, I woke up cold and sore. Now it was light outside. I forced my way out the sleeping bag, like a butterfly wriggling out of a coccoon. I was shivering and my teeth were chattering. My breath smelled bad so I rubbed some more toothpaste on my teeth. That should do it.

I walked to the camp and Javier and Derpwin were there eating breakfast.

"Man, you're late," said Javier.

"It's only 8 o'clock," I said.

"We get up early here," he said. "I'll let you off though because it's your first day."

Yeah, whatevere. Despite my late arrival, Javier let me have breakfast, which was fried eggs and sausages.

After that, we did four or five hours of manual labour. The tasks mainly involved moving wood in variosu different forms from one place to another. Tree trunks, firewood, branches, sticks: they all had somewhere to go. I thought we'd be helping Javier build his house but no. The construction site was desolate. I think he was waiting waiting for planning permission.

  Day 3 On my third day at El Terreno, Javier handed me a chainsaw. That's right: a chainsaw. "Wow!" I said, marvelling at this modern . Never mind that I'd never had chainsaw training or even ever used a chainsaw before. El Terreno just went up a notch in my estimation. Javier was worried that his neighbour was trying to get onto his property. "He's always trying to sneak in," said Javier. This was despite that 1) I'd never seen his neighbour and 2) even if his neighbour did exist, he probably lived several miles away 3) El Terreno was in the middle of nowhere He told us to go around cutting down trees, because he believed that fallen trees would make his property harder to enter. Whatever. I just couldn't believe I was getting an actual chainsaw. A chainsaw! And it was great! I would have happily cut trees down all day long with it. In hindsight, I was lucky I didn't cut my hand off. But still: a chainsaw! Wow!   Day 4

By the fourth day at El Terreno, Javier and Derpwin were beginning to smell just a bit. Or quite a lot, in fact. Javier smelled like a rotten remains of a chicken carcass inside a garbage can and Derpwin smelled like onions. I didn't smell, of course. I'm lucky because I never get BO. And if I did smell, then it was like daisies and pot pourri. Javier must have noticed that he smelled bad, because he said, "Who wants a bath?"

"Uh... me?" I said. The idea of a warm bath was very tempting at this point. Not because I smelled bad (as I said, I don't get BO), but because the weather was so cold.

So Javier walked us down to the lake.

"Uh... where's the bath?" I said.

"This is it!" said Javier, gesturing to the lake with his arms.

Christ on a monkey's uncle. So there was no nice warm bath; only the cold lake. You'd have to be mad to jump in there, I thought. And, just as I was thinking this, Javier flung off his clothes, leaving only his underpants, and jumped into the lake.

Apparently Javier didn't feel the cold. Maybe that part of his brain that felt cold didn't work, along with the part for mental reasoning.

"Come on in!" Javier said, who was now just a head bobbing in the middle of the lake.

I took off my shoes and socks, rolled up my trousers and dipped my toe in the water. The water was like ice. Somehow, I managed to wade in up to my shins. I couldn't go any further because of the cold.

Javier was doing backstroke now. "Hey, amigo! Don't be scared! The water, he is beautiful!" he yelled. Screw that. I hobbled back to the shore and put my socks and shoes back on. I'd rather stink of B.O.   Day 5 On my fifth day at El Terreno, Javier had to drive back to Montreal for some reason. Maybe he remembered he'd locked his dog in a cupboard or something, or that his wife and kids were still back there. "I have to go back to Montreal," said Javier. "Does anyone want to go back?" "Me!" I cried.

Derpwin said he would stay. I think he hated civilisation. I wouldn't be surprised if he actually turned into a tree one day. Meanwhile, I wanted to make like a tree and leave.

Soon, Javier and I were on the road again. I was looking forward to getting back to the city. I missed the luxuries of city life such as showers and safe drinking water. I longed for the polluted air of Montreal and the constant sounds of traffic.

On the car's dashboard stood a figure of a Hawaiian girl holding a ukulele. As the car moved, she swayed her hips. I can remember her vividly because she was all I had to look at for three hours. We finally got back to Montreal. There were people again! Cars! Buildings! Civilisation seemed like a miracle even though I'd only been away for five days. I could have gotten out the car and kissed the pavement under my feet. Sweet, sweet Montreal! Never again will I leave you! Javier dropped me off outside his house. AS he helped take my suitcase out of the boot, he said, "Let me know if you ever want to go back." "Yeahthatsnevergoingtohappen," I said. "What?" "I said, yeah, I'll give you a call." So that was my time at El Terreno. I never did go back there, and I don't know if Javier ever finished building his eco-house either. Though I know one thing for certain: I'll never step foot into that freezing cold lake again. I watched Javier drive off into the distance, leaving me standing on the sandy shores of Montreal. Now where to go? I went back to the only place I knew: the Alexandrie hostel. The now familiar sound of my suitcase wheels trundling along behind me accompanied me as I walked back to the the hostel. When I got there, Stephany was at the front desk. She looked surprised to see me. "You're back already? How was the forest thing?" "Forest life wasn't really for me," I said, picking pine needles out of my hair. Then I sniffed my left armpit. "And I think I need a shower," I said. "Yeah, I think you probably do," she said, pinching her nose shut. "Oh well. At least you had a new experience. So do you want to check in?"

"Yeah, that would be great," I said. Of course I wanted to check in. I don't know why else she thought I would drag my suitcase back here. So I booked myself into a dorm room. And then I had a nice, long, hot shower. Eventually I used up all of the hostel's hot water, leaving none for anyone else, but by that point I was already so relaxed that I didn't care. So, like that, I was staying at the Alexandrie Hostel again. It seemed I couldn't get away. It was like when you die in a video game and you keep respawning at the same spot. Leaving Montreal was going to be harder than I thought.

Night watchman

Pretty soon, I wasn't just a guest at the hostel anyone. I got a job there. My official title was night watchman. But before I tell you about that, let me tell you more about the hostel. The Alexandrie Hostel must have been the largest hostel in Montreal. And Montreal is the second-biggest city in Canada, which itself is the second-biggest country in the world. So I think the Alexandrie was a pretty big deal. The building was a three-story building that spanned a whole city block. In fact, the building was so big that it had multiple addresses. And you could enter the hostel on one street and leave the hostel on a totally different street, leaving you disoriented and lost. The hostel had 39 bedrooms in total — six one-bed rooms, twelve two-bed rooms, one three-bed room, five four-bed rooms and fifteen eight-bed rooms (for people who wanted the cheapest rate or didn't mind the sound of snoring). Some rooms had their own bathrooms, but many didn't, which meant a walk down a corridor in the middle of night if you needed a wee. Then, the hostel had a separate, self-contained area for long-termers, with its own kitchen, living room, and bathroom, as well as its own entrance from the street. In all, there were enough beds in the hostel for 157 people, though the hostel rarely reached full occupancy. The only time it was completely full was the weekend of the Canadian Grand Prix. Whereas in winter, the hostel had so few guests that it closed for four months. The hostel had two terraces, a kitchen, a lounge area with a TV and an N64, and two computers that ran Windows 95 and were older than some of the guests. Most of pans in the kitchen were scratched to shit, making cooking an awful experience, because food would inevitably get stuck to the pans and you had to scrub the pans for ages to get them clean again. (Surprisingly, people did clean their pans. The guests were actually, on the whole, nice and responsible, completely going against my preconceptions of what people at a hostel were supposed to be like.) The hostel also had a basement, but this basement was off-limits. Not because scary things happened down there - things involving torture and sex toys - but because it's where the hostel owner kept all the junk, like broken furniture. The hostel office was also down there, as well as a storage area for the food. The owner was probably afraid that guests would go down there and steal stuff. His fears were justified, because sometimes I'd go down to the basement to steal bananas and jars of peanut butter that was intended for the hostel breakfast. I don't think anyone ever noticed a few bananes and jars of peanut butter going missing. The hostel had secret places. There was the balcony on the top floor for instance. Few people went up there, probably because they didn't even know it existed. I liked to go up there and watch the twinkling lights of Montreal at night. One skyscraper had a roof whose colours changed with holidays and seasons: a festive red and green for Christmas, a romantic red for Valentine's Day, a vivid green for St. Patrick's Day, traditional pastels for Easter, and rousing red and white for Canada Day. There was a sense of calm and seclusion about that secret balcony, and it gave me a place to think. Not that I had much to think about. I still had a red mark on my forehead from where Ariel had pushed my head into a carpet a few months before. But the red mark was fading. By this point, it just looked like I'd been wearing a baseball cap too tight. I still had my "Crazy Paul" persona I'd developed at Blue Mountain. So I made it my mission to talk to random people in the hostel and try to do as many crazy things as possible. These included: - I asked a Chinese girl to teach me some basic Chinese words. Then I went to Montreal's Chinatown and started using the words on Chinese people. They were amazed that I could speak Mandarin, even though it was only a handful of words. - I did a strip tease on Sangria night, where I took off all my clothes and danced naked on the sofa. Someone handed me a glass and I put my penis and balls into it. No one wanted to drink out of that glass after that. I don't know why. - One day, some hostel friends and I hired a quadricycle down by the Montreal docks. A quadricycle is a vehicle like a golf cart, but it doesn't have an engine, so you have to pedal it. (It was a thing for tourists to do in Montreal, okay?) I volunteered to steer it. And so, for an hour, my friends pedalled while I sent the cart veering into the paths of pedestrians, pulling away at the last moment to avoid collision and sending people screaming and running for cover. No one got harmed, thankfully. Dilbert said it was the most fun he ever had in Canada, which is a bit sad really. - One night I put on a novelty apron designed to look like a naked man. Then I went out into Montreal and wore it all night. At one point I pressed by body against the glass window of a coffee shop and French kissed the air, amusing and disgusting the patrons inside. - The same night, I remember cradling a bottle of rum in my arms as if it were my baby. Someone tried to take the rum from me and I screamed, "MINE!" and yanked it back. I pulled the bottle too hard though and all the rum spilt out onto the floor. I frantically got down on my hands and knees and started licking the rum off the floor while other people watched in disgust. The next morning, I woke up on the hostel sofa, hungover. I shuffled to the bathroom where I threw up twice. I vowed never to get drunk again. And I never have. Well, okay, one or two times more.

Since I didn't have a job, I suddenly had all this free time on my hands. I sat around thinking what to do, when, one day, an idea pinged into my head: painting! I decided I wanted to paint. Why painting? I don't know.

Now, to paint, you need (as a general rule) some paints, plus paintbrushes, plus something to paint on. To acquire these items, most people would simply go out to a shop and buy them. But I wasn't like most people. For one thing, I didn't have a job like most people. For another thing, it's highly possible I suffered brain damage as a child. So how could I get these paint supplies? Well, to save money, I stole them. It wasn't hard. All I had to do - and this is 100% true - was just walk out of the shop carrying with the paints, paintbrushes and canvasses in my hands. Sounds crazy, I know. I didn't even try to hide the fact I was carrying 11x14 inch canvases out the shop. I just picked them up and walked out the shop with them. No one ever stopped me.

Now, even though shoplifting is immoral, I still had my own set of ethics. I'd never steal from small businesses, for example: mom-and-pop stores and corner shops were off limits. These small shops struggle to get by, and I didn't want to be the one responsible for Mr and Mrs Rajuvaripet shivering in the cold because their shop had gone out of business. So I'd only steal from big chain stores, like Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire. These big stores, I presumed, could afford shoplifting loses. When I stole paint supplies, I stole from a store called De Serres, a chain store of art shops that has several locations across Canada. I figured they wouldn't go out of business if I just took a few things.

I brought my stolen paints and canvases back to the hostel, and, over the course of several days, built up a collection big enough to start a hostel painting group. Those were nice days. We'd sit out on the hostel terrace in the sun, channel the spirit of Bob Ross and paint stuff. One girl painted a [etc]

I wasn't secretive about where these painting supplies were coming from. In fact, sometimes I'd just outright tell people: "Hey, that canvas you're painting on? It's stolen. I shoplifted it." They'd react with surprise and disbelief at first, but once the initial shock wore off, no one cared I was shoplifting. They even thought it was funny. Even Luc, the hostel owner, didn't care. In fact, one morning, the noise of hammering in the common room woke me up: BANG BANG BANG BANG. I got out of bed to see what was going on. There was Luc, on a ladder, putting up all the paintings on the walls. BANG BANG BANG BANG. All the paintings we'd done? Using stolen art supplies? They were part of the hostel now, adding much-needed colour and life to the drab and dreary walls. That was a good day. It felt good, knowing I was doing something to help the hostel. Of course, all this shoplifting came at a price. You can't just steal things and expect to get away with it. Eventually the universe's gonna smack your ass down, to remind you that nothing comes for free and that shoplifting isn't a viable career path. That day came for me on a cold, crisp day in October, when... but let's not get ahead of ourselves: this was still Spring. October was still a long way away yet. But don't worry, I'll get round to telling you eventually. So instead, let me tell you about the time I painted a dick and balls onto a canvas and left it in the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art. So, every year, Montreal has a free musuems day. It falls on the last Sunday in every May and you can go to a bunch of different museums for free. It's a great idea because people can visit museums they wouldn't visit otherwise. I decided to take part in this very special day by making my own very special painting: a giant grotesque pink penis and hairy testicles. The massive genitals almost filled the entire canvas. Then I snuck the painting into the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art in a carrier bag. The shy Irish guy, Dilbert, came too, like a Robin to my Batman. Inside the museum, I found a secluded spot to get my painting out and hissed, "Keep a look out," to Dilbert.

"Okay Paul," he said.

So while Dilbert was keeping an eye on the fat security guard around the corner, I pulled my latest painting out of a carrier bag. Then I ducked under a velvet security rope and carefully put my painting under a real artwork, which was a giant pink glowing ring. I don't know what the ring was supposed to represent. Some kind of modern art shite. It made no more sense that my painting of a cock and balls, so my painting fitted in perfectly.

My painting in place, I quickly ducked back under the security rope. I was just in time because people started coming round the corner.

Dilbert was trying to suppress his laughter as an Asian woman walked slowly up my penis painting. She pulled out her camera and started taking photos. Other people came to look, stared, then moved on.

Dilbert and I were trying to act normal, which was difficult as neither of us was normal to begin with.

Soon there was a crowd of people. The guard noticed and he started coming over.

"Let's get out of here," I hissed to Dilbert. So we left as fast as we could. Soon we were outside in the sun and open air.

The Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art never did find out who left them that penis painting.

  Despite painting obscene images onto canvases and shoplifting on an almost daily basis, I was a positive influence on the hostel. I talked to people. I made them laugh. I encouraged people to try painting. I made friends. Luc noticed by good behaviour. One day, he rewarded me by giving me a job as the hostel's official night watchman. It all started when one day Stephany came up to me. She was beaming with joy as usual, and she said, "Paul! I've got something to tell you." "Oh right," I said. I wondered if it was some crap news like she'd bought a puppy or some organic lube. "Luc and I..." Oh Christ. Are they getting married? Quick brain, what's the correct response for when someone's getting married. And don't say, 'Thanks, you too.' "...we had this idea that you could work here!" "Oh yeah?" Now I was listening intently. Maybe there was money involved. "We need someone to be here at night, in case a guest needs help." "Like a night watchman?" I said. "Yes!" she said. "Exactly. A night watchman." A night watchman. I imagined myself wearing a cape and sitting on the rooftop at night, like Batman. "Wow," I said. "You normally go to bed late anyway right?" said Stephany. "Yeah, like 5 am." "So is it paid?" I Her face fell. "No, unfortunately, no." Her head fell to one side in a sympathetic gesture. But then her face lit up again. "But you'd get a free room," she said. "I'll do it," I said instantly. Stephany walked me over to my new room. It was on the ground floor, next to the hostel common room. Stephany placed her keycard next to the lock and the lock opened with a beep. She pushed open the door. Sunlight streamed in through a huge window. There was a desk, a chair, a lamp, and shelves. And four bunk beds. "This would be my room?" I asked. "That's right," said Stephany. "But there's four bunk beds?" "We only give this room to guests if all the other rooms are full," she explained. "Most of the time you'll have it to yourself." I froze. "Is it... haunted?" Stephany laughed. She thought I'd made a joke. "No, it's not haunted," she said. I breathed a sigh of relied. "But the room's next to the common area so there might be some noise at night. That's why we don't let guests use this room, because of the noise at night? But that's not a problem for you, right? Because you stay up late anyway." "Yeah," I said. Finally, staying up to 4 am every night was paying off! "So, what do I have to do?" I asked. "Oh, it's simple," she said. "So at night, there are no receptionists, right? So you'd be the one responsible for the hostel." "For the whole hostel?" I said. "Yes, but don't worry, it's easy peasy. Most nights, you won't have to do anything. Your job would just to be help guests who have lost their key cards." "Oh right," I said. "Do guests lose their keycards often?" "No, not really. Most nights you'll be doing nothing," she said. A free room for doing nothing? This was great! "And so if a guest loses a key card, what do I do?" I asked. "Well, without their key card, they can't get into their room, right? So you'd go get the master keycard. Go and see H, he'll show you where it is." H was the short, middle-aged man from Chile who worked at the hostel as a receptionist. What did 'H' stand for anyway? I didn't know. It was a mystery. So I went to see H about the master key card. He was busy doing nothing at the receptionist desk. "Hey," he said, scrunching his face up in disgust at the sight of me. For some reason, he didn't like me; maybe it's because he didn't trust me, a known thief. "You work here now, huh?" he said. "Yeah," I said. "Stephany said I'm the night watchman. She said, uh, to come see you about the master key card?" H eyed me up and down with distrust. Finally, he said, "Follow me." H took me downstairs to the basement. I'd never been down to the basement before. What was down here? A sex dungeon? Was I being initiated into a secret sex club? Or could it be a secret MI5 base? The only people with one-letter names are spies who work for MI5. Did H work for MI5, like Q and M? It was too dark to see anything. H flicked on the light. It was just an office. Piles of paper. Desks, chairs. A computer. H opened a drawer and took out a keycard. "Use this RESPONSIBLY," he said as he waved the card in front of me. The keycard looked like any other key card except for the word MASTER written on it in permanent marker. So this was the fabled master key card, a key card that could open any door in the hostel. I thought H was going to give it to me, but instead, he put the card back and shut the drawer. He probably wasn't happy with the idea of giving the master keycard to a known shoplifter and thief. "Now you know where it is," he said. I thanked H and then went and then got busy moving all my belongings down to my new room. This took five minutes because everything I owned fit into one suitcase. I stood alone in my new room. A whole room just for me! With four bunk beds! And best of all, it was free! And best of all, no more people molesting me in the middle of the night! Stephany came and put a sign saying "Urgence de nuit" (night emergencies) on my door. Now it was official. With no credentials, no experience of working in a hostel, and with a reputation as a shoplifter/thief, I had become the hostel's Night Watchman.   So, that night, I started my very first shift as the official hostel night watchman. Nothing happened though. There was just Dilbert using his laptop. The light from the laptop screen gave his face a ghostly pallor, making him look ill, or more ill than he did normally. "Do you need help Dilbert?" I said. "What with?" "I don't know. Like if you lost your keycard or something." "But I have my keycard right here," he said, patting his shirt pocket. "Right. Well, that's good. Carry on." Dilbert continued to stare at this computer screen. That's literally all he did all day: stare at his computer. "Well, I'm going to bed." I said. "Goodnight." I stood up from the table, my chair scraping on the floor. "Goodnight," he said, though he never took his eyes from his laptop. I don't know what he was doing on there. Probably reading about how to hide bodies. I went to my new room. There, I opened my laptop and masturbated in the dark to fetish porn. Then I went to bed. Just as I was falling asleep, I heard a knock at the door. "Dilbert, if that's you, I don't want to suck your dick," I said as I got up and opened the door. It wasn't Dilbert. No, it was some French twat called Charlie and some drunk, giggling girl. "Yo, I need your help man. You see, we" - pointing to himself and the girl - "need a place that's private, to, you know..." A place to do what? It's 3 am. No one does anything at 3 am. Except maybe gravediggers, digging up corpses to sell to medical schools. Did they want to dig up a corpse? "You know, to, you know." Then it hit me. They wanted somewhere to have sex. "Sorry," I said, trying to close the door. But Charlie put his foot in the door. "Come on man," he whined. "You must know a place. There must be an empty room somewhere. We can't go to our dorm because there are people sleeping in there. Come on maaaaaaan." I sighed. "Okay," I said. One of my many faults is that I'm too nice sometimes. "Wait here," I said. Charlie and his new girlfriend giggled as I went down to the basement. The basement was dark and I couldn't see anything. The light switch must have changed location because I couldn't find it. Annoyingly, when Stephany gave me the night watchman job, she didn't give me any special night vision powers. Or a torch. I hit my leg on a table. "Bastard fuck!" I shouted. "Yo, is everything alright down there?" shouted Charlie. My hand found the lightswitch. Click. There was the office. Desks, papers, chairs. "Yeah," I called up. But It felt wrong being down here. I opened a drawer. There was the master keycard. The card was giving me a sour look. "I know, I know," I said to it, picking it up. The master keycard said nothing but I knew what it was thinking. It was thinking that I was bringing dishonour to generations of hostel volunteers. The key card was only supposed to be for emergencies. "Use this RESPONSIBLY," H had said. I could hear still his voice in my head like Luke Skywalker hearing the voice of Obi Won Kenobi. Oh well. H wasn't here now, was he? So I trudged back up the stairs. Charlie's eyes lit up when he saw the card. "105 should be free," I said. So we all went over to room 105, which was only a few feet away. I put the keycard to the lock. Thunk, the lock retracted. I opened the door. I switched on the light switch. Immediately the bright ceiling light came on and woke up four Chinese tourists who were sleeping in the room. "Shit shit. Sorry sorry. Go back to sleep," I muttered as I closed the door. "Let's try 104," said Charlie. "No let's not," I said. "I'm not going around the hostel waking everyone up." "What about your room?" he said. "You're alone in there right? Maybe you could let us... borrow it? Anyway, your room has like a thousand bunk beds, right?" An image came into my head of Charlie and his chick banging away, doggy style, in one of my four bunk beds, cum flying everywhere. "Sorry, but you can't use my room," I said. "But look, there's room 101. That's free." "Yeah, that sounds good!" said Charlie "Room 101!" So I took them to room 101. "There's no door," said Charlie. He was right, there was no door. "You can't be picky," I said. "Look, there's a bunk bed." "Ok, ok. Thanks Paul." Charlie grinned and slapped me on the back. Then he slapped his girlfriend on the ass. I'm glad he didn't get us mixed up and slap me on the ass. "Yeah... thanks Paul," said the girl giggling. I felt dirty. Already my imaginary night watchman badge had been stained. Stained with dishonour and semen. I went back down to the basement, carefully put the master keycard back in its place, whispered apologies to it, then went back to bed. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. Then I heard: "OH! OH! OH! OH! OH!" It was Charlie's girlfriend. The walls were so thin that I could hear her sex noises from my room. So I put my pillow over my ears to try to block the sound out. "OH! OH! OH! OH! OH!" Finally, after five minutes, it stopped. I breathed a sigh of relief. Then it started again. "OH! OH! OH! OH! OH!" None of us got much sleep that night, including the four Chinese people.   Morning light streamed through the window. Car horns and and the tinkle of bicycle bells woke me up. Stephany warned me about noise at night, but she never told me about the noise of the street in the morning. I tentatively went to the door of my dorm room and opened it. There was the hostel common room. People were chatting and eating toast. It's strange to open your bedroom door and encounter dozens of people. It makes you less likely to sleep in the nude, that's for sure. I went to the hostel kitchen and poured myself a glass of water. Then someone slapped me on the back, causing me to spill some of the water over myself. "Thanks for last night man!" It was Charlie, the guy I'd helped get laid the night before. "Yeah whatever" I said. I didn't know what else to say, so I added: "Anytime" I wished I hadn't just said anytime. Now he thought of his personal sex assistant or something. He leaned in and said, "That girl had such a tight pussy man, you wouldn't believe. It's the kind that really grips your dick." "Sure," I said. I didn't really need to know that. Charlie went off to talk to his actual friends. Meanwhile, I tried to get some of the water off my t-shirt. Still though, things weren't all bad. In fact, things were pretty good. I'd be saving $600 a month now, thanks to my free room. Plus I had the room all to myself! This was probably the biggest stroke of luck I'd had since arriving in Canada. All those plans I had to move out the hostel were now forgotten. Log cabins? Snow-peaked mountains? No thanks. As far as I was concerned, the Alexandrie hostel was the place to stay. A-LEX-XAN-DRIE! A-LEX-XAN-DRIE! I HAD A FREE ROOM!!

An encounter with Montreal's worst drug dealer

I don't want to sound trite or anything, but that year I could have been killed. You see, in 2012, there was a high-profile murder in Montreal - in fact, Netflix even made a documentary about it called Don't F**k With Cats - where a gay porn star called Luka Rocco Magnotta met a man online, drugged him and then stabbed him to death with an ice pick. And filmed it. And then, if that wasn't enough, he put the video online under the title, "1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick".

And then, if that wasn't enough, Luka sent the victim's left foot to the Canadian Prime Minister. You could say Luka was taking a real 'hands-on' approach to political activism, or in this case, 'feet-off'. I'm not sure sending body parts in the post is the best way to contact your local MP though; I would have just written a letter. And this was through Canada Post, the equivalent of Royal Mail. Imagine turning up at the post office, holding a severed foot in a box, blood dripping onto the counter, and the post office assistant looks at it and all she says is, "Do you need some more sellotape for that, love?" It's a miracle I'm still alive, really. The murder happened near the hostel, so if I'd decided to go for a walk, I could have been Luka's victim instead.

As far as I know though, I didn't die (as proven by the fact I wrote this book). Working in the hostel gave me a chance to get to know more of the people there. For example, there was Kuan, a Chinese woman who vounteered at the hostel in exchange for a free room. What her job at the hostel consisted of though was never clear. In her own words, she said she "entertained the guests", which doesn't clear things up much. "Entertaining the guests" sounds a bit like she was a geisha, or performing sex work on the side. I trusted Kuan as far about as I could throw a frisbee, which isn't very far. Then there was Antoine, the guy with the self-confessed fetish for Asian women. It was his life-long mission to get an Asian girlfriend. He worked on reception at the hostel and he abused his position to hit on all the Asian guests, all day and non-stop. But after some of the Asian girls complained to the manager about his excessive flirting, Antoine was fired and he lost his job. Oh well. (But, in the end, Antoine did get a girlfriend: one day he proudly showed off a girl on his arm, a Chinese girl called Ming-Na. Good for him, I suppose. But he still didn't have a job.) Then were these two French guys called Antoine and Alex who always hung around together. They usually sat at the hostel table, on their big 17-inch gaming laptops. One day Antoine told about something called 'Bitcoin'. "So, uhh, Bitcoin, he is a currency virtuelle," he was saying. "And you have to, ow you say, mine it, with a computer." What the fuck is he talking about? "And the price, uhh, he has risen? Last year, Bitcoin, he was 30 cents a coin. And right now, one Bitcoin, he is 10 dollars for buy a coin." "It cost 30 cents last year and now it's 10 dollars?" I asked. "Yes, that is correct." Fuck, I'd been too late. At ten dollars, this Bitcoin thing sounded waaaaaaay too expensive. So I never bought any. (That French guy, by the way? Still poor. He never bought any Bitcoin either. What an idiot.) Then there was Michel. He was at the hostel maintenance guy, and he was at the very, very bottom of the hostel food chain. His name was pronounced "Michelle", like the girl's name. He did menial tasks around the hostel, like changing lightbulbs and painting the walls. He was always as dirty as a car mechanic and skulked around like the hostel like the Phantom of the Opera. He wore a dirty baseball cap and his teeth were crooked and yellow. He was perpetually high from the weed he smoked on his breaks. And he took a lot of breaks. I tried to buy some weed from Michel once. It was difficult because we didn't have a common language. I spoke English and he spoke French. But I managed to convey what I wanted by making a hand gesture of smoking a spliff. His face lit up. He became as enthusiastic as a dog with a ball. Now I was talking his language. He told me "Demain, demain." (Tomorrow, tomorrow.) But he never did sell me any weed, the bastard. He forgot, probably due to all his brain damage.

Then there was a young, gay Canadian man called Michael. Michael was from Vancouver and he was also vague about why he was in Montreal — something about wanting to get away for a while? He always wore a blue baseball cap, backwards (and he never took this cap off by the way; not even, I believe, to shower or sleep). He'd sit at the hostel table, with his baseball cap on (backwards), and bitch about the other hostel guests, pausing every few minutes to apply lip balm. Another thing about Michael was that he was always applying lip balm.

Montreal was the ideal place for gay men like Michael. It's a gay-friendly city, and we were in a gay-friendly hostel. Many people there were gay. Even the owner, Luc, was gay.

At one point, it seemed like everyone in the hostel was gay. Michael was gay. H was gay. Dilbert was gay. The hostel's owner, Luc, was gay. So I asked a group of gay people: "Am I gay?"

A gay guy called Inyigo laughed. "You're not gay," he said.

Phew! I was relieved!

I didn't want to be gay. Not because I'm homophobic. No, the reason I didn't want to be gay is because I'm attracted to women. If I'd been gay, it would have made being attracted to women more difficult.

One sunny day, I went for a walk in Montreal with some of these weirdos from the hostel - Stephany, mother-and-daugher Suzan and Rebecca, and Dilbert. At one pooint, we were walking past a park, and Stephany said, "That park is Montreal's drug dealing hotspot!" as if she was pointing out Big 0-year-old on a tour of London. "Wait, what?" I said, stopping in my tracks. "It's Place Émilie-Gamelin," said Stephany. "It's where all the drug dealers hang out at night." I looked at the park. It was just a small park, a nice place to sit and enjoy the sun. It didn't look like a drug-dealing hotspot. "What drugs?" I asked. "Oh, all kinds," she said. "Weed, cocaine." Interesting. I filed the fact about the park away in my brain along with the other useful knowledge I'd learned about Montreal, like the door code for a nearby hostel that had a hammock (4537) and the best place to steal food from (IGA). One night, I went clubbing with Michael, and on the way back to the hostel, I remembered about the park with the supposed drug dealers.

"Hey," I said to Michael.

"What?" Michael said.

"I know where to buy cocaine."

"What?"

"Cocaine," I said. "I know where to buy some."

"Wait, what? You know where to buy cocaine?!" Michael said. "Dude!! Let's buy cocaaaaaaaaaiiine!"

"Shh, not so loud!" I said. But I needn't have worried. No one was going to hear us. The streets were empty.

I was only trying to impress him. I didn't think he'd actually want cocaine.

But now Michael was whining on and on about cocaine. He had cocaine on the brain. "Can we get cocaine? Let's get cocaine!" He was like a little kid who wants to go to McDonald's on the way home. Except instead of a happy meal, he wanted cocaine.

"Okay fine!" I snapped. "We'll get some cocaine!"/p>

It was 2 am and the streets were deserted. The only movement was the flaps of an empty cardboard box fluttering in the breeze. The only sounds were our footsteps on the concrete, the wind, and the distant, faraway wail of a police siren. The street was lit by the eerie glow of streetlamps. We crossed the empty street and neared the park.

There was the park, but it was different to how I'd rememebered it. In the day, it had been a cheery place to sit and enjoy some sunshine. But now, at night, it was just a stretch of darkness, darkness somehow untouched by the light of the street lamps. The dark trees whispered menacingly, their branches swayed in the breeze. I began to have second thoughts about this. And third thoughts.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked Michael.

Michael giggled nervously. "Let's do it!" he said.

So we left the safety of the well-lit street and approached the park.

A man stood there. He was a Black man, maybe in his 40s, and wore trainers, sweatpants and a hoody. I knew right away he was a drug dealer. Not because he was Black but because who else would be standing in a park at 2 am? Not Tickle Me Elmo, that's for sure.

I walked toward him. He looked up.

"We're looking to buy some... cocaine?" I said.

"How much?" he said.

I was right! He was a drug dealer! My confidence soared. I was good at buying drugs!

Or so I thought.

"Um..." I said. "Thirty dollars worth?"

“What, only thirty?” the drug dealer cried with disgust. “Look, I don't even do bags that small. The smallest bag I do is fifty."

But I saw through his sleazy attempt to extract more money from me and I stood my ground. "I only want thirty dollars worth," I said.

Michael was watching with interest. He must have thought I was an expert at negotiating with drug dealers. I wasn't. The only time I'd bought drugs was online, while in the safety of my home. And now Micheal and I was a long way from home.

"The smallest bag I do is fifty," said the drug dealer firmly.

"Thirty," I said.

The drug dealer sighed. "Okay, fine," he said, finally giving in. "But first, give me the money."

I wasn't stupid. So I said, "No, I want to see the drugs first."

"Money first," he said.

I could see we'd be here a while negotiating, and I wanted to get home at some point, ideally that same night. So, against my better judgement, I pulled thirty dollars from my pocket and handed it to the drug dealer. He carefully counted and recounted the notes (all three of them). Then he nodded, stuffed the notes into his pocket and said, "Follow me."

So we followed him deeper into the park. The drug dealer stopped at a low wall and produced a small bag of powder from one of his pockets. "Aw man, why couldn't you just buy the whole bag?" he complained. "I’m gonna have to split the bag now. You could've just bought the whole bag."

I don't know why splitting the bag was such a big deal. It's not like he had more important things to do. Why, just a couple of minutes before, he was just standing alone in a park, doing nothing at all!

“Keep a lookout for cops!” he urged us. Then he tipped the bag of cocaine onto the low wall.

Right at that moment, there was a sudden gust of wind. The wind blew most of the powder away. We all watched helplessly — me, Michael, the drug dealer — as the powder took flight and was gone into the night.

"You see what happens when I have to split the bag!" cried the drug dealer.

Wait — this was my fault? He was blaming me for unpredictable weather conditions?

After a lot of swearing and grumbling, the dealer finally finished dividing out what was left of the cocaine now the wind had taken its share.

You would think that would be it: deal done. But no. Because the dealer had another dilemma: he didn't have a bag to put the cocaine in.

"You SEE what happens when I have to split the bag?" he spluttered in anger as he rummaged around his pockets for something to put my cocaine in. Now he was blaming me again — this time for a lack of prepackaged thirty-dollar cocaine bags.

Finally, he pulled out a little white envelope from one of his many pockets. He put the powder in the envelope and handed it to me.

Michael and I walked quickly home, like two excited schoolboys with a stolen packet of sweets. I kept looking over my shoulder to make sure no one was following us. But we were alone.

Finally, we reached the hostel and hurried to my room. Safe in my bedroom, with the door closed, I tipped the cocaine out onto a shelf. Michael watched over my shoulder. He was practically dancing in anticipation.

We both looked down at the powder.

It wasn't white.

And it wasn't cocaine.

"What is it?" said Michael.

My heart sank. Whatever the drug dealer had given us, it wasn't cocaine. No, it seemed to be metallic shavings; like what you'd get from drilling into a chunk of metal. The pieces were tiny and grey. They reflected the light of my bedroom lamp.

There was no way I was snorting that. You'd have to be the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz to get high off it.

He'd tricked us! That cocaine man had tricked us! He was probably laughing to himself right at that moment and fanning himself with my thirty dollars' worth of banknotes. Maybe he hadn't even been a drug dealer. Maybe his name was Clive and he worked in software development, and he did fake drug dealing as a side hustle. "Yo, we need to go back," said Michael. "We need to get your money back." "No way," I said. "I'm not going back to that scary park again." "But I want cocaaaaaaaine," Michael whined.

"Wait," I said. "There's something else here."

Michael's eyes suddenly got their gleam back.

There was something else inside the envelope, besides the metal shavings. I pulled it out. "What is it?" asked Michael. It was a passport photo of the drug dealer. There he was, in the photo, glaring at us. A photo of the guy who had just ripped me off.

So, to recap: instead of receiving cocaine, we had received

• some shit metal shavings
• a photo of a fake drug dealer

Whoever this fake drug dealer was, he wasn't even a competent fake drug dealer, because he'd given us his passport photo by mistake.

Michael went to bed soon after, unconcerned about the money I'd wasted and oblivious to the danger he'd put us through just to get a photo and some shit metal shavings. He probably fell asleep with his thumb in his mouth and a smile on his face, dreaming of cocaine and drug dealers.

I stayed up for another couple of hours, in the cold glow of a computer screen, before going to bed at the break of dawn.

Summer

I worked at the hostel now (though I use the term 'work' in the loosest possible sense, because at most, I was just washing the leftout dishes at the end of the night.) You think Canada's a cold country. And you're right. Eskimos sitting around a hole in the ice and shivering comically. Schoolchildren getting their tongues stuck to flagpoles. Except in the summer. Because in the summer, it's really hot. Really hot. In summer, people die from heat waves. No joke. Canada gets hot. Air conditioning units sell out. People are at risk at heat exhaustion. It's a country of temperature extremes. In winter you freeze your balls off and in summer you die of heatstroke. For example, in 2021, the small town of Lytton, British Columbia, reached 49.6 degrees Celcius, the all-time highest temperature ever recorded in Canada. Three years before this, in winter, a town called Rabbit Kettle in the Northwest Territories experienced −49.8 °C. That's a hundred-degree difference in the same country. See what I mean? And that's not just a one-off. I myself experienced −30 °C one winter and 33 °C the next summer. I was there. How can it be that a country has such extremes? Today everyone in the hostel looked sweaty and tired. My t-shirt was stuck to my back with sweat. I was sitting in front of the hostel's single fan, letting the blessed cool air blow over my skin. "Hey, Stephany?" I yelled. "Do you think we could get some air-con?" Stephany laughed. "You're so funny Paul." "No but really." She saw I was serious. "Luc will never pay for air-con. I had to beg Luc for weeks just to get that fan." I was a loser at school if you can believe it. I was unpopular. People wouldn't sit next to me if they could help it. I know. It's hard to believe. But now, in the hostel, things were different. People liked me. I was popular. But I wish I'd chosen a better hostel to live in. Some of the dorm rooms didn't have bathrooms. So you had to go down three flights of stairs just to take a piss. Do you know what it's like to live in a hostel? Do you, really? I'm guessing you don't. I wasn't just a guest at the hostel anymore. I lived there. It was my home.

French

(Write a bit about the topic of French in Canada and Quebec here) Back in Blue Mountain, I was surrounded by Australians. But here, in Quebec, it was French people. Les français. They were all on tourist visas or working holiday visas. They were from Paris, Marseille, and Lyon, and they came to Montreal pour l'ete, or to look for work. Annoyingly, every stereotype I knew about French people turned out to be untrue. They didn't wear berets. They didn't smell of cheese. They didn't ride jolly bicycles with a baguette sitting in the front basket. And they weren't stuck-up or arrogant. No, as far as I could tell, French people were decent, kind, funny human beings. To them, I was l'homme anglais. I was the only English person in the hostel. There weren't any other English people. No English people came to this part of Canada, it seemed. I guessed the Frech language was too different. Some nights, we went out to karaoke, and the French people sang drunken renditions of a song like this Alors en Danse. If you aren't familiar with this song, it goes like this: Alors on danse Na, na na na na na Alors on danse Na, na na na na na Alors on danse Na, na na na na na Alors on danse Na, na na na na na I was poor so I couldn't afford to actually buy drinks. I'd have to get drunk beforehand instead. One night I tried to sneak my own bottles of beer into a bar, but this plan failed when the bartender noticed I was drinking a beer the bar didn't sell, as well as the telltale sound of bottles clinking in my coat pockets, and he kicked me out. Despite having French lessons for two years at school, I couldn't remember any French. My French teacher at school was a woman called Mrs Maddy. Mrs Maddy's style of teaching was 'immersion'. This meant she would talk to the whole class in French, regardless of whether we could understand or not. We couldn't. Even getting us to sit down at the start of the class was difficult. "Asseyez vous," she'd say. We would all look at each other blankly. Asseyez vous? What does that mean? "Asseyez vous," she'd say again, but louder this time as if speaking louder would make us understand French. It didn't. Finally she'd sigh and switch to English: "Sit down." Relieved to finally understand something, we all sat down. Then for the rest of the class, she'd talk in a mixture of French and English. French at first, and then English when we inevitably didn't understand her. I remembered nothing from Mrs Maddy's lessons. Despite receiving literally hundreds of hours of French lessons, I could only remember three things: "Bonjour", "Merci," and "Je m'appelle Paul". I was motivated now to learn now though. Partly because now I had a chance to learn a second language and partly because most of the girls in the hostel were French and I wanted to impress them. Fortunately, there were lots of French people in the hostel who wanted to help me learn French. The first thing they taught me was French swear words and chat-up lines. "First, you must learn this: 'Tu es bonne'". "Too ay bon," I repeated back, albeit in a Brummie accent instead of a French accent. "What does it mean?" "It mean, 'You are good'". "You are good?" I said. "Yeah," said the French guy. "It iz a thing to say to girls." Okay then. That's a weird chat-up line, but whatever. So I went up to a French girl and said, "Tu es bonne." Immediately she slapped me in the face. All the conversation around us went silent. "Tu ne peux pas dire ça !" she said. "Tu m'entends ?" Her eyes burned with fury and she was shaking with rage. I had no idea what I'd done wrong. "Sorry, sorry," I kept saying. Eventually, I went and sat back down. My 'friends' were laughing at me. "What happened?" I asked, my face still stinging. "You said to 'er, 'Tu es bonne'" "Yeah?" "It mean, 'You are good... to have sex with'. You know? 'You are good to fuck.'" Well they hadn't mentioned that part, the bastards. If this was how I was going to learn French, I was going to have to invest in some painkillers. Sometimes I'd go to the library and read books in French. But the only books at my level were baby books. They had bright pictures and a single word underneath like ballon or ours en peluche. They were pretty good. I felt a bit weird though, sitting there all alone in the baby's section of the library, so I left. In the end, I learned French the same way babies learn languages: by listening to the same episode of a podcast over and over. News in Slow French, the podcast was called. It's a podcast where, weirdly enough, they read news slowly. And in French. At first, I could understand nothing. It all sounded like "Oui per naire tra tance teh je mer ta". What were they saying? I didn't know. But I knew that because it was French, it must have been something really deep and profound. Every time I listened, I understood a bit more. And a bit more. I began to get the rhythm of the language. Each time I listed, I could understand more and more words. And after around the hundredth listen (and a lot of studying French inbetween), I could finally understand what they were saying. They were talking about fishing quotas in the EU.

Girls

One day, a girl called Jenny joined the hostel. Jenny was different to the other girls. She was quiet, reserved and grown-up as if she'd seen firsthand the grief of a thousand wars. For those reasons, I was drawn to her. But I was mainly drawn to her because she was attractive. I had decided I was in love with Jenny. I wanted to be alone with Jenny. But the only time I could do that was when she went outside to smoke. And there was one problem: I didn't smoke. This didn't deter me though. It just meant I had to start smoking. So I bought a cheap packet of cigarettes and a cheap lighter from the corner store. Smoking couldn't be so difficult because idiots do it all the time. Plus I'd had some practice during my teenage years when I'd smoked a cigarette one time in the upstairs of a McDonald's and coughed my lungs out. I smoked the first cigarette carefully, trying not to cough up. *** talking about coughing *** Jenny was there, smoking like an expert. I knew that now was the moment. My heart was beating rapidly and my chest felt funny. I hoped this was a sign of love and not early smoker's lung disease. "I'd like to kiss you," I said. Jenny smiled, shrugged and said, "Why not?" So we pressed lips together for a few moments. Fanfares of celebration went off in my head. I naively hoped we could be boyfriend and girlfriend but Jenny had other ideas. She said she didn't want to start a relationship because she was leaving Montreal a couple of days later. On Jenny's last night in the hostel, we were both standing on the hostel porch, smoking. It's lucky I didn't actually get addicted given how much I smoked around her. I asked her, "So what about another kiss?" She looked unsure, like a teenage girl unwilling to kiss her dad. It was then I made the mistake of licking my lips, out of habit, as they were dry. She laughed because she thought I was preparing my lips for the kiss. And because of that, the moment was ruined. I never kissed her again and she left the next day to work on a farm in Manitoba. Curse you, dry lips!

A few weeks later I met a girl called Capucine. She was from Switzerland, and, being from Switzerland, she was fluent in four languages — German, French, Italian, and English. I couldn't do anything as impressive. One day, I said I'd cook dinner for her. In hindsight, this was a mistake as I don't have any cooking skills.

"What should I cook?" I asked her.

"I don't know," she said. "Something British?"

Fair enough. So I googled "British food" and one of the results was chicken wrapped in bacon. So I shoplifted some chicken and bacon from the local supermarket and that night I made the unhealthiest meal God has ever witnessed.

We sat down to eat. Capucine was struggling to stifle her laughter. "What's wrong?" I said. "It's just that... Is this really how English people eat?" "What do you mean?" "It's just that... well..." On the plate in front of her was the meal I'd cooked for her: a single, huge chicken breast wrapped in oily bacon and dripping with more oil. We ate the chicken breasts. I was hoping I'd also get to see Capucine's breasts that night. So, later, I asked Capucine if she wanted to have sex with me. Surprisingly, she said no. With nothing else to do to pass my time, I bought a shit Casio keyboard on Craigslist for $30 and tried to teach myself to play it. But the most I could play was generic Chinese music by hitting random black keys. One day, a French girl called Cecile said her favourite song was Comme Les Enfants by Coeur de Pirate. She wasn't even that attractive, but I saw an opportunity: if I could learn to play the song on my keyboard, then she might fall in love with me, like people do in the movies. At this point, I would have done anything to impress a girl, including sticking my hand in a blender or dying my pubes orange.

I didn't know how to play the keyboard. Or any instrument for that matter. But I didn't care. If I could learn to play this song I might get sex out of it, and so I applied myself to learning this song harder than I had ever done with any other task in my life. Every day I'd sit at the keyboard and attempt to learn to play this song, all in the vain hope I might get laid at the end. At first, my fingers refused to obey my orders.

"Okay, left hand," I'd say. "You play the chords." My left hand would obediently play the chords. So far so good.

"Now, right hand," I'd say. "You play the melody." My right hand would play the melody but then my left hand would start playing the melody too so that both hands were playing the melody and neither hand was playing the chords.

"For fuck sake, left hand," I'd say. "You're supposed to be playing the chords, not the melody."

I practised that song for weeks. Guests in the hostel almost went insane. But in the end, I did it. I learned the song.

I was ready. The next day, I found Cecile and plonked my keyboard down next to her. "Want to hear me play a song?" I asked her. "Er, sure?" she said. I flexed my fingers. Then I started to play. I played the most beautiful music anyone has ever heard. I played magnificently and only made three or four mistakes, okay maybe five mistakes. But if Mozart and Beethoven had been there, then they would have cried tears of joy and stood up to give me an ovation, and then afterwards asked me to teach them how they could play as well as I could. I played the final note and then turned to Cecile, triumphant.

"That was good," she said. "What song was it?"

I stared at her in disbelief. "It's Comme Les Enfants by Coeur de Pirate. It's your favourite song?"

"Is that what it was? Oh yeah, I guess it did sound a bit like it."

I couldn't believe it. I'd wasted weeks of my life learning to play this song.

I stood up, disgusted, and walked away. Cecile didn't even look up as I left; she just went back to texting her friends on her phone. Getting a girlfriend was hard, I realised. It was nothing like the movies. You can't just learn a song. It doesn't work. There are days that change your life completely. Days, that when you look back, you wonder how

My life changed when one day, I met a Spanish girl called Girlfriend. Girlfriend was a short, Spanish girl. She had brown hair and brown eyes. She looked like Dora the Explorer, with her short stature, brown skin and dark hair. Girlfriend was staying in Montreal for three months to study French.

I impressed her with my drawings of naked women from the life drawing classes I went to.

"Look at this one," I'd said, showing her my sketchpad, on which I'd drawn a crudely-drawn picture of a naked woman with big boobs. (The boobs had been small in real life but I'd taken artistic licence to make them bigger.)

"Wow," she'd say. "It's actually pretty good." And she seemed to really mean it.

Girlfriend and I came up with an idea to make some extra cash: on Friday nights, the hostel would hold a sangria party, and we would wait until the sangria was finished and then we'd whip out a bottle of our own rum and sell shots for $2 each. The bottle cost us $18, and there were around twenty shots in the bottle, so if we did well, we made around $10 each profit. Hardly worth it really, but any money was cherishable as far I was concerned.

It’s a strange thing, being in love. The voices of other people become white noise. You’re aware of them still but not paying attention to them anymore. Only the girl matters. People around you do their daily business, talking, laughing, but for you and this girl, the world is just each other. It’s like a secret only you and the girl know. And everything seems more intense. Every sound seems more clear, every colour looks more vibrant.

Girlfriend came to Montreal to study French but didn't expect to be practising French kissing as well. One night, while we were kissing on the hostel terrace, Girlfriend whispered in my ear, "Let's go to your room." She had a weird look in her eyes. At first, I was confused. I'd never seen that look before. Then I realised: she wanted to have sex. The reason I'd never seen that look before is that I'd never made a girl horny before.

So we went to my room. We awkwardly undressed each other – she pulled off my t-shirt and unbuckled my jeans and I lifted her dress up over her head. Then we went to my bed and fumbled around with each other for a bit.

Then she reached down with her hand and touched my penis. She stopped.

"Is everything okay?" she said.

My penis, instead of being rock hard, was as limp as a Chinese noodle.

Than night, we kept trying but my dick remained resolutely soft and floppy. We tried again the next night but my dick still refused to get hard. And the next night.

Meanwhile, I desperately searched on the internet for some kind of answer, some explanation for why my dick refused to get hard, and finally, I found it: porn addiction.

I had been watching porn basically every day since the age of twelve. (When my dad started for broadband internet, he didn't know I'd be using it to watch high-quality porn.) And what this does to your brain is makes you dependent on porn to get aroused. Like a Pavlovian dog, you become conditioned to get only get horny when you're watching porn.

So that day, I gave up watching porn.

But there was another problem: the effects of porn addiction take up to a month to go away. Yes, it takes a month for your willy to go back to normal after a lifetime of watching porn. And I didn't have a month to spare. In fact, I only had one day. Girlfriend had a flight the next day to go back to Spain and she wasn't planning on ever coming back. So if I couldn't get hard before then, then I'd never have sex with Girlfriend.

So, in a panic, I went to a doctor to get some Viagara, the miracle drug that makes your willy harder than plaster of Paris in a matter of seconds.

The doctor looked at me and asked, "So what seems to be the problem?"

I said, "Well, I'm here to ask if I can get Viagra? I've been trying to have sex with my girlfriend but my penis doesn't get hard. I looked it up on the internet and I think I have a porn addiction."

The doctor didn't say anything. He just looked uncomfortable.

Then he coughed and then pulled out his prescription pad. "Viagara, you said you wanted?" he said.

"Yes please," I said.

He scribbled a prescription for Viagara and slipped it to me across his desk. I thanked him, left, went immediately to a pharmacy, and bought some viagra. Yippee! I had Viagara!

That very night, I took out my secret little box of viagra. I took one of the blue pills. Then I popped the pill in my mouth and swallowed it.

Half an hour later, my vision started taking on a strange blue tinge. This was weird. Everything looked slightly blue. Also, my heart was beating more slowly and weakly than normal. That probably wasn't good. The doctor hadn't warned me about side effects. Oh well, it was too late now.

This was our last night together. It was either have sex with Girlfriend now, or possibly never have sex with any more women, ever.

Girlfriend and I started making out in my room. We took off our clothes and went to the bed.

Then came the moment of truth. Girlfriend reached down and felt my dick with her hand.

"It's bigger!" she said.

"And it's even bigger on the inside," I said. I don't know what this was supposed to mean. I think some kind of joke.

I didn't tell her about the viagra. Or the fact everything looked slightly blue, including her face.

We kissed some more. This is it! I thought. This is where I go to Sex City!

But then Girlfriend started talking. She talked about how sad she was to be leaving, she talked about how much she'd miss me, she talked about how she didn't want to leave.

My dick started to deflate. No! Don't do this! I thought.

She talked, and I talked, and then she talked some more. And in the end, I'm sad to say, we didn't have sex that night.

And the next day, Girlfriend left Canada.

The day the shit hit the fan

On a day in September, on what seemed at first a day like any other, my reckoning had come. I was finally caught shoplifting. And it all started with the corn. Well, no. Actually it all started with the music. It was the music that woke up me. Classical music, like a waltz. Music by Beethoven or Mozart or one of those guys. Stuff that only old people dance to. What fucking time is it? I thought. Sunlight filtered in through the curtains. I groaned, leaned over and picked up my phone from off the floor. The screen said 11:30 AM. 11:30 AM?? Who's playing music so goddamn early?? I'd gone to bed at 5 AM the night before, after a night of dicking around on my computer and failing to do anything productive. Just like every night, in fact. And my night owl habits had only gotten worse since Girlfriend had left. And generally, during the day I just moped around, listening to love songs on my MP3 player. But this waltz music was out of place. Not only was it being played early in the morning (11:30 AM!! So goddamn early!!) but it was also strange to hear it in a hostel. Usually, young people play pop or rap music in hostels, not ballroom waltz music. Curiousity got the better of me. So I got out of bed, got dressed, and opened my bedroom door. My bedroom opened up right onto the hostel common room and there, in the common room, were people dancing. Guys and girls were holding hands and revolving in circles. It was a waltz. "What in the love of actual fucking fuck?" I said. I closed the door and went back to bed. Then next thing I knew, there was a knock on the door. "Fuck off," I shouted. I heard a THUNK as someone unlocked the door. Then a creak as the door opened. Now someone was opening my bedroom door! Talk about an invasion of privacy! I peered over the bedsheet. At the doorway of my bedroom stood Melody, one of the hostel receptionists. "Paul are you in 'ere?" she asked. "No," I said. She wasn't fooled. She came over. "Paul, you 'ave to get up, we are doing the Épluchette de blé d'Inde. Zee corn festival." I didn't know what the fuck she was talking about. Corn festival? I don't think that's a thing. "I'm sleeping," I said. "Paul, if you don't get up I will tell Luc you 'ave been stealing zee peanut butter and zee bananas from zee 'ostel." So I got up and joined the corn festival. So it turns out that every year, Quebec has a corn festival. It's to celebrate the harvest, or something. Every town, village, and group of friends has one. (And every hostel too, apparently.) Corn fucking corn fucking corn. Never in my life had I been subjected to so much corn. Or in any anyone else's life for that matter. Who knew there were so many things you can do with corn? Popcorn, corn on the cob, sweetcorn. You can eat it raw, you can eat it cooked. There are so many things you can do with it. There are even games you can play with corn. All kinds of games. There are prizes to be won - all corn prizes, of course. Here's an corn-themed idea. Joelle could stick the corn up her arse. She'd like that idea because it involves corn. Now Joelle was handing out bits of paper. "You have to " I sneaked away as soon as I could. I'd already wasted an hour on this stupid corn festival and I had plans today. Big plans!! Plans that involved shoplifting. In fact, in my dorm room was a whiteboard on which I'd written a list of things I wanted to shoplift: TO PAUL-CHURSE: nuts hat sunglasses pillow belt shorts I couldn't steal all those thing in one day, but I could make a good go of it. The first thing on the list, nuts, I knew I could steal from a cheap chain store called Dollarama. The rest I could think about later. So I went to my room, got my bike, and started heading out the hostel with it when I bumped into a French guy called Remy. I literally bumped into him, because he was just standing there, in the middle of the corridor, staring at his hands. "Hey," I said. Instead of replying, Remy just looked up at me, confused. "Are you okay?" I said. He stared at me some more, and then he croaked out,

"Je suis super high."

Whoa. This guy was on drugs. I probably should have helped him navigate his drug trip, but instead all I could think was, "This guy's on drugs and maybe he has more." "Yo, uh, are you on drugs?" I asked. Remy nodded. I noticed his eyes were weird. His pupils were big. Cool. "Could I buy some?" I asked.

At first, he was reluctant - perhaps because he thought I was a narc, or possible a ten-foot-high purple dragon - but I badgered him non-stop until he eventually sold me an LSD tab for ten dollars. It was a small blue square, about the size of a pinky fingernail, and it had an ominous yellow smiley face on it.

YES! I had a DRUG! Already this day was going well. It wasn't even lunchtime yet and I'd already successfully bought drugs. I didn't take the LSD tab there and then, though. I didn't want to start spazzing out and seeing monsters, scaring everyone in the hostel and possibly losing me my job. No. Instead, I tucked the LSD tab safely into my wallet for another day.

"Well, thanks," I said to Remy. "I'm going shoplifting now, so goodbye." Then I turned and left with my bike, leaving Remy alone in the corridor. He went back to staring at his hands

Once I was outside in the sun, I jumped on my bike and began furiously pedalling towards downtown. What I needed was some 'retail therapy'. Yeah, that's what I needed to take my mind off Girlfriend.

So I cycled over to Dollarama. It was in this big mall called Place Montreal Trust. I had to lock my bike outside before I could walk in. Dollarama was on the bottom floor, reached through a series of underground corridors. I passed a man in sharply-dressed suit, a busker playing Bob Marley's Redemption Song on an acoustic guitar, a mosaic on a wall, and a phone shop with a bright glaring sign. These corridors, by the way, go on for twenty miles, and it's the largest underground network in the world, according to Wikipedia. I think the idea is when winter comes in Montreal, you stay underground and don't come out. There's everything down there: shops, restaurants, metro stations, gyms. These bland, underground corridors that link the malls, office buildings and metro stations of Montreal together. And then finally I was there: Dollarama. Dollarama, by the way, is my favourite shop in Canada. Everything's so cheap! The next time I was caught shoplifting was in Dollarama, a Canadian dollar store. I had stuffed five packets of almonds into my bag and was on my way out of the store when a woman's voice behind me said, “Excuse me, can you come back inside?” I turned around. There was a security guard. She was a short and kind-looking black woman. "Sure," I said casually. My heart was pounding as I followed her back into the store. It had finally happened: I had been caught. She took me into a back room and told me to take a seat. Another security guard arrived. This one was short and butch. She glared at me for a moment. Then she noticed I was a terrified idiot, and her expression changed to sympathy. But she can't have been too sympathetic because then she went off to phone the police. When the police arrived, I wanted to be helpful and cooperative, so I said. "I’m the shoplifter." But obviously what I should have said was, "I'm the manager" and then waved goodbye and left. One cop said, “Can you stand up for me?" I stood up, and then he said, "Now turn around." I turned around. "Now put your hands behind your back." I put my hands behind my back. Click. Were those... handcuffs? Yes, Good Cop had handcuffed me. I'd never been handcuffed before. I could feel the metal on my wrists. The other cop, who must have been Bad Cop, was searching my bag. He pulled out my artbook. He flicked through the pages. It was full of my drawings of nude women from my life drawing class. "What's this?" Bad Cop asked. "It's my art book," I said. "I go to a life drawing class." Bad Cop showed my drawings of nude women to Good Cop. He chuckled. Bad Cop continued searching my bag. Thankfully it contained nothing but pencils and a bottle of water. There were no stolen jewels or ancient idols. Maybe now they'd let me go. But no. Next, Bad Cop took my wallet out of my pocket. I couldn't do anything as I was handcuffed. He started looking through it. Then he pulled out a small passport photograph. Usually when people keep a photo in their wallet, it's a photo of their wife or children. Not me. I had a photo of the drug dealer who had sold me fake cocaine. "What's this?" asked Bad Cop as he held up the photo to my face. Now I had a choice. I could tell the truth, which was that a cocaine dealer had given me his photo. Or I could lie. I chose to lie to the police officer. "He's a friend," I said. That was the best lie I could think of. I'm not good at thinking, especially in stressful situations. "This is your friend?" said Bad Cop disbelievingly. "Yes," I said. "This man, in the photo, is your friend." "That's right." Bad Cop kept looking through my wallet to see what other incriminating evidence he could find. Fortunately, there was nothing else. Just my bank card and library card. Thank God I had nothing else in there. Then he pulled out a little plastic bag containing a single tab of LSD. "What's this?" demanded Bad Cop. I'd bought that tab of LSD at the hostel. I'd carried it around with me ever since then because I'd been too afraid to use it. In fact, I'd completely forgotten it, probably because it was nestled between my Sainsbury's Nectar card and my Birmingham library card, two things I never used in Canada. "It's LSD," I said to Bad Cop. "I got it from a friend." "You’re in very serious trouble and you should not be lying," he said furiously. In a rare moment of clarity, I realised what had happened. This French Canadian cop, English not being his first language, had misheard me and thought I said, "I’m holding it for a friend". He thought I was trying to lie my way out of the situation by blaming the drug on someone else. So I tried to clear up the confusion. I calmly said, "No, no, you misheard me. I said, I got it from a friend. The drug is mine." Good Cop must have seen something on my face - the traits of an idiot, perhaps - because he decided to go easy on me. He took me to the bathroom with my hands still handcuffed behind me back. There, he lifted up the toilet lid. “This is what you do with drugs,” he said. Then he dropped the bag containing the single LSD tab into the toilet. He flushed the toilet. Wiiiisssshhhhhhh. In my head, silently, I thanked him. Next Good Cop and Bad Cop led me, still in handcuffs, out into the store. Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” was playing over the store's stereo system. I found this song appropriate because it’s the main song in Layer Cake, a crime film. I imagined my life was a film, and this was the final scene - the cops leading me out in handcuffs. It would be in slow-motion and come just before the epilogue, explaining that I was serving a life sentence in jail. I walked with the cops out of the store. Passersby tried not to stare. A woman holding the hands of her two kids, a boy and a girl, frowned and pulled her kids away as I approached. The cops led me through the corridors of the brightly lit underground mall. On and on, we walked. A walk of shame, like Cersei's walk of shame in Game of Thrones. At least I'm wasn't naked though. We'd been walking for five minutes when finally we reached the mall's exit doors. Bad Cop pushed the door open for me. Fresh air. But it wasn't not the fresh air of freedom or even the fresh air of a pine forest. There was a police car. Bad Cop opened the back door for me. I climbed inside the back of the police car, which was tricky with my hands handcuffed behind my back. "What's your address?" barked Bad Cop. I told him. "1750 Rue Amherst." He put the address into a computer. "That's a hostel. You live in a hostel?" "Yes, that's right." They took some more details from me. All this just for stealing eight dollars worth of nuts! But it wasn't just nuts I had stolen. I'd been stealing for years, across two continents. Up until now, I had gotten away with it. But now was the reckoning. A piece of paper. Good Cop handed it to me. "You have to go to court on this date, and go to the police station on this date to have your fingerprints taken. Do you understand?" "Yes," I said. I thought they'd let me go with a cheeky wink and a "Now don't do that again", not that I’d have to attend a court hearing. "Sorry," Good Cop said, "but the shop you stole from, they have an 'always prosecute' policy." He seemed genuinely sorry. "You can go now," said Bad Cop. When I went to open the car door, I saw the two lesbian security guards standing there, looking at me through the window, expressions of disgust on their faces. I'm sure that if it were up to them, I'd be going to jail for life, without parole. I made my way back to the hostel. If I'd had a tail, it would have been between my legs. Back at the hostel, there was another nasty surprise waiting for me. And it wasn't about shoplifting.

H saw me come through the door and said, "Luc want to see you, he's downstair in the office."

So I went downstairs and found Luc, the hostel owner, sitting at the computer.

"H said you wanted to see me?" I asked.

Luc turned and smiled. It was a fake smile, with too much teeth. Despite having lived for at least four decades, Luc had never got the hang of smiling. His default facial expression was a scowl. But when he wanted to, he could attempt a smile. Like now, for instance.

"Paul, 'ow are you? You still like leeving 'ere?"

"Sure," I said. "I still like living here."

"But I 'ave noticed you not are talking with zee guests anymore. You seem a bit down. I think you have lost your - 'ow you say in English joie de vivre? Joy of living?"

He was right. Not about the translation of joie de vivre but about my loss of enthusiasm. I was an introvert and living for months in a hostel had completely drained me.

"Something like that," I said.

"So you do not like eet 'ere?" he asked.

I shuffled my feet uncomfortably. "Well, it's just I've been here so long now..." I said, trailing off.

Luc was smiling and nodding, encouraging me to go on.

"...and after a while, it gets a bit... tiring? Talking to guests all the time."

Luc nodded, satisfied.

But I quickly added, "I still like it here though. It's nice here. It's like my home."

"But maybe eet would be good for you a new place, yes? A new adventure..."

"Um, maybe?" I said. "I'm not sure."

"I think a new place would be very good for you," Luc said.

It dawned on me. "Are you... are you asking me to leave the hostel??"

"As I 'ave said, I think a change would be good for you," he said.

He must have noticed my troubled expression, because then he said, "But do not worry. You do not 'ave to leave now. You can stay 'ere until the end of the year. Okay? You can still 'ave your room until the end of December."

Er... what? The end of December was less than three months away. Less than three months away!

"So we 'ave an agreement?" he said.

"Uh... sure?" I said.

"Then eet is an agreement," he said, looking pleased. "Oh, there iz one more thing. The hostel iz closing for winter. If zee hostel iz closed you 'ave no work, yes? That mean if you stay 'ere you will pay rent, yes?"

"Oh. Well, I suppose so. And how much is the rent?"

"The rent, he is $550 a month. He will start next month."

*****

A few days later, I decided to go talk to Luc again. I hadn't found another place to live yet and I guessed it would be fine if I stayed past the end of December. Staying for a few more days, or weeks, or months in the hostel should be fine. Luc liked me, after all.

So I went downstairs to his office. Luc was there, using the computer.

"Hi Luc," I said, trying to sound casual and friendly. "I wanted to ask you something?"

Luc turned to look at me.

"What eez it?" he said. I noticed he wasn't smiling anymore. He was frowning.

"I just wanted to ask if I could stay in the hostel a bit longer? Until February or so? It's just that I've been looking for somewhere else to live and I haven't found anywhere yet."

Luc's expression suddenly changed from annoyance to anger. It was like watching the transformation of Jekyll to Hyde. He sprang from the chair and began spitting words in my face. "What iz wrong with you? 'Ave you 'it your 'ead? I 'ave been good to you, I 'ave give you a room for free, and this iz 'ow you treat me? I 'ave let you stay 'ere all summer and this is 'ow you treat me?!"

"But I can pay for my room!" I said.

"I don't want your money!" he cried. "I 'ave enough money!" His hands were clenched into fists and he was shaking with rage.

This was unnerving. I had never seen this side of Luc before.

Also, Luc was rich apparently. I didn't know that.

He was standing face to face with me now. I could smell onions on his breath. I could see the blemishes on his skin and the hairs in his nose. His furious little eyes burned at me from behind his glasses.

"Okay, okay," I said, defeated. "I'll leave by the end of December."

Without replying, Luc sat back down at the computer. I looked at the back of his balding head for a few moments. Then I trudged back up the stairs.

What a day it had been. I'd been arrested, lost my job, and potentially faced being kicked out of Canada. I hung up my shoplifting hat (which was also stolen) and retired from shoplifting. Things I stole in Canada DC Comics: The New 52 - $199.95 Hat Davy Crockett hat Belt Ray Ban sunglasses $260 Food Lomography camera $80 Canvases, paints and brushes. At least $150 Jumpers T-shirts Shorts Bag from Dollarama $2 Nuts from Dollarama Harmonica $8

Lawyer

The end of the hostel

I'd been living at the Alexandrie hostel for months now, ever since I'd arrived in Montreal in spring. Since then, the leaves had turned green and then brown, and I still had no plans on moving out. Simply put, I was staying put.

I was a deadbeat parasite. The only way I'd leave the hostel is if the owner kicked me out, which would definitely, definitely never happen, because he liked me too much.

But one day, H came over to me and said, "Luc want to see you, he's downstair in the office."

So I went downstairs and found Luc, the hostel owner, sitting at a computer down in the office.

"H said you wanted to see me?" I asked.

Luc turned and smiled. It was a fake smile, with too much teeth. Despite having lived for at least four decades, Luc had never got the hang of smiling. His default facial expression was a scowl. But when he wanted to, he could attempt a smile. Like now, for instance.

"Paul, 'ow are you? You still like leeving 'ere?"

"Sure," I said. "I still like living here."

"But I 'ave noticed you not are talking with zee guests anymore. You seem a bit down. I think you have lost your - 'ow you say in English joie de vivre? Joy of living?"

He was right. Not about the translation of joie de vivre but about my loss of enthusiasm. I was an introvert and living for months in a hostel had completely drained me.

"Something like that," I said.

"So you do not like eet 'ere?" he asked.

I shuffled my feet uncomfortably. "Well, it's just I've been here so long now..." I said, trailing off.

Luc was smiling and nodding, encouraging me to go on.

"...and after a while, it gets a bit... tiring? Talking to guests all the time."

Luc nodded, satisfied.

But I quickly added, "I still like it here though. It's nice here. It's like my home."

"But maybe eet would be good for you a new place, yes? A new adventure..."

"Um, maybe?" I said. "I'm not sure."

"I think a new place would be very good for you," Luc said.

It dawned on me. "Are you... are you asking me to leave the hostel??"

"As I 'ave said, I think a change would be good for you," he said.

He must have noticed my troubled expression, because then he said, "But do not worry. You do not 'ave to leave now. You can stay 'ere until the end of the year. Okay? You can still 'ave your room until the end of December."

Er... what? The end of December was less than three months away. Less than three months away!

"So we 'ave an agreement?" he said.

"Uh... sure?" I said.

"Then eet is an agreement," he said, looking pleased. "Oh, there iz one more thing. The hostel iz closing for winter. If zee hostel iz closed you 'ave no work, yes? That mean if you stay 'ere you will pay rent, yes?"

"Oh. Well, I suppose so. And how much is the rent?"

"The rent, he is $550 a month. He will start next month."

*****

A few days later, I decided to go talk to Luc again. I hadn't found another place to live yet and I guessed it would be fine if I stayed past the end of December. Staying for a few more days, or weeks, or months in the hostel should be fine. Luc liked me, after all.

So I went downstairs to his office. Luc was there, using the computer.

"Hi Luc," I said, trying to sound casual and friendly. "I wanted to ask you something?"

Luc turned to look at me.

"What eez it?" he said. I noticed he wasn't smiling anymore. He was frowning.

"I just wanted to ask if I could stay in the hostel a bit longer? Until February or so? It's just that I've been looking for somewhere else to live and I haven't found anywhere yet."

Luc's expression suddenly changed from annoyance to anger. It was like watching the transformation of Jekyll to Hyde. He sprang from the chair and began spitting words in my face. "What iz wrong with you? 'Ave you 'it your 'ead? I 'ave been good to you, I 'ave give you a room for free, and this iz 'ow you treat me? I 'ave let you stay 'ere all summer and this is 'ow you treat me?!"

"But I can pay for my room!" I said.

"I don't want your money!" he cried. "I 'ave enough money!" His hands were clenched into fists and he was shaking with rage.

This was unnerving. I had never seen this side of Luc before.

Also, Luc was rich apparently. I didn't know that.

He was standing face to face with me now. I could smell onions on his breath. I could see the blemishes on his skin and the hairs in his nose. His furious little eyes burned at me from behind his glasses.

"Okay, okay," I said, defeated. "I'll leave by the end of December."

Without replying, Luc sat back down at the computer. I looked at the back of his balding head for a few moments. Then I trudged back up the stairs.

The worst was the waiting. Sometimes I thought I’d only get a light penalty, like community service. But other times - especially at night, when I was alone in my eight-bed dorm room - I worried I’d be kicked out of Canada. I was in a waiting room at a law firm. I thought law firms were supposed to be fancy? This one wasn't. It was like a rundown motel. Fading wallpaper was peeling off the walls. In the corner stood a half-dead, wilting plant. Next to me, a man slipped off his shoes. Brown leather shoes, black socks. He started stretching his shoeless feet this way and that, ignoring social conventions. "Mr. Jones?" I stood up. There was the lawyer. I knew him from his picture on the internet. He was wearing a suit and had the smile of an alligator. He ran his hair through his receding hair and then we shook hands. His hand was sticky with hair gel. Fuck sake. "Just this way into my office," he said. "We'll have privacy there. It's just here." We went into the office. "Could you shut the door, please? That's it. Thanks. Now tell me about the problem." I told him I'd been caught shoplifting a couple of weeks ago and that I had to go to court in a few weeks. I also told him I had to go to a police station a week from now to give my fingerprints. "Wait. You're saying you got caught stealing $10 worth of nuts?" "Yeah." "What are you, some kind of idiot?" What the fuck? I just glared at him. "That was pretty dumb of you," he said. "Yeah." "I mean, who steals packets of nuts? At least steal something impressive, like a TV or something." I said, "I'll try harder next time". He looked at me in surprise. Then he said, "You better be joking." "So you think the court will drop the case?" I said. "I don't know. Sometimes they're lenient. A guy like you, with no criminal record, someone who's obviously just an idiot, and caught stealing just - what was it again? Candy?" "Nuts," I said. "Nuts, candy, whatever. Best case scenario they'll drop the case." "And worst case scenario?" "Well, I'm here to make sure it doesn't come to that. I'll fight tirelessly and... hang on a minute, let me take this call." He took the phone call while I waited. Finally, he finished his call and put his phone away. "Anyway, where was I? Oh, so the fee. My fee is $500, in cash, today. Then if we need anything else, I'll let you know how much it will be." $500 was a lot of money for me. But I went to the bank, withdrew $500 and brought it back to him. He counted it on the table in front of me. Once he was done counting, he smiled and put the money into his pocket. "So we'll keep in touch?" I said. "Of course, of course," he said as he led me out the door. I annoyed my lawyer with emails, asking questions like: - Couldn't we do a plea bargain? - Would it be best to plead guilty or not guilty? - I feel I should write a letter or apology to the court as it may help my case, and probably make a charity donation too? What do you think? - Could I arrange another meeting with you? - So are you still trying to get the charges dropped, or is it time to start planning to get a discharge? - So next Thursday I will have to go the police station to get my fingerprints taken. Do you still recommend that I simply don't go, so that the court date is rearranged? How much time does this usually buy? - When do you find out if the file is authorized? On the first court date? My lawyer answered almost none of my questions, only emailing occasionally to tell me to do nothing and let him take care of it. On the day of the court date, I heard nothing from my lawyer until 8 pm, when he send this:

Hi Paul, I went to court today and your case was not on the docket. I made the necessary verifications and the file is not wet [wet?] authorized. But it's not quite over yet. They told me you might receive another date by mail. If you do call me. But chances are you'll never get anything. Regards Chris. Sent from my iPhone

I was overjoyed. The spectre of this court date had been haunting me for months and finally I was free. All my worries about being deported back to England vanished in an instant.

Winter

H was standing outside. He had his palms faced up and he was staring into the sky.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"Its snow-ing," he said.

He was right. Little flecks of snow were falling from the sky.

"So what's your real name?" I asked. "What does the H stand for?"

For a long time, he said nothing.

Then finally, he sighed and said, "Hernan."

"Hernan?" I said. "That's your name?"

"Yeah but don't tell anyone!!" he urged me.

"Don't worry, I won't," I lied.

Who would name their kid Hernan? It's like naming your child Dexter or Winston. I mean, if you want your kid to be bullied, then sure, go for it.

Every day it snowed. Soon the hostel terrace was covered with a layer of snow. Icicles hung from the sides of the building. Yes, actual icicles grew on the building. Some were three feet long. It was so cold that even a polar bear would have needed a coat and scarf to go outside. The few remaining guests strung cheery Christmas lights on the terrace and H put up a huge tree in the hostel common room. Now not only was I paying rent, but I also couldn't shoplift anymore. So my savings were going down faster than the Titanic. To save cash, I bought a big bag of rice for $10 from Chinatown. Too big to keep in the kitchen, I had to keep it in my dorm room. That bag of rice became my main form of sustenance. I became like a poor Chinese farmer in medieval times, eating nothing but rice. Breakfast? Rice. Lunch? Rice. Dinner? Rice. On Christmas day, everyone else ate normal Christmas food whereas I, of course, ate a plate of rice. My friends felt bad for me and offered me their food, but I turned it down because it was Gluten And Dairy And Therefore Scary. I started to lose weight, which wasn't good as I was didn't have that much weight to begin with. I've always been skinny but now I was taking it to new extremes. I really had to find a place to live now. At the end of December, I'd have to leave the hostel. Worst case scenario, I'd have to sleep on the street and become one of Montreal's homeless. This wasn't a very comforting idea. I've always assumed I'd make a bad homeless person. I can't play a guitar for one thing. I also require a variety of comforts, like a laptop with internet, matching socks, and unlimited tap water. Being homeless wouldn't suit me at all. To make things more complicated, Girlfriend said that she wanted to come back to Canada and live with me. In normal circumstances, this would have been great news. An actual WOMAN wanted to LIVE WITH ME. Except I didn't have a place to live yet. So now I had to find a place for two people to live, not just one. I found an apartment on Craigslist. A woman was going on vacation for a couple of months and was letting out her apartment. So I went to visit her. Her apartment was perfect except for one thing: it was beyond our budget. She was asking for $1000 a month. "Would you be able to do $500?" I asked. "I can't let out my apartment for just five hundred!" she snapped. "Not an apartment like this! Five hundred is ridiculous!" Ridiculous? To me, turning down five hundred dollars was ridiculous! I tried to reason with her. "If you don't find anyone to let it out to, it'll be empty otherwise, and then you won't get any income from it all," I said. "Well, I'd rather have no one staying here than let it out for five hundred," she said, and crossed her arms. I didn't understand her way of thinking. Surely five hundred dollars is better than zero dollars? So I left. I still didn't have a place to live. I even sent an email to Javier from El Terreno asking if I could volunteer in his forest again. (Yes, I was that desperate.) He replied a month later ("Sorry for the delayed time writing back but this account barely used it") and told me to call him. I never did call him though. Not because I didn't like him; it was because my social anxiety makes me dread speaking to people on the phone. One night I got desperate and emailed every hostel and B&B in Montreal. It took me a couple of hours to scour the internet for all their email addresses. I wrote: We are a couple, I am from England and my girlfriend from Spain. I'm 25 and she's 31. I'm here on a working holiday visa, I've lived in Canada for a year, and Montreal for 8 months (I only learned French here). Currently I'm a private English teacher, I have 4 students now. Our apartment lease will expire on January 1st, but I can move out before then. Maybe ideally, some dates like 27th Dec - 26th January? For a full month? Something like that? We are quiet and clean, and non-smoking. I was still looking for apartments a week before the end of the year, a couple of days before Christmas. Out of all the hostels and B&Bs in Montreal, only one place replied, it was a B&B owned by a Japanese woman called Akiko. She said that her B&B would be closed in January. But she could let a room out for us for $450. She sent a photo of the room and it looked amazing. So i said yes and went over there and paid her in full. On New Year's Eve, Girlfriend arrived after a 20-hour journey or longer from Spain to Montreal. She had been delayed because of a snowstorm. When I picked her up from the airport, the thing that struck me was how short she was. I'd forgotten how tiny she was, she was 1.5 metres. We spent the night in the hostel and On New Year's Day, we took our suitcases and dragged them through to snow several blocks to the Airbnb. I'd already picked up the keys earlier so we just let ourselves in. For me, it was the end of an era. It was the end of the time I spent in the hostel. It was eight months of my life. When we left there was no one there to say goodbye to so we just left. I had spent seven months living in the hostel.