From the Novel Call It In the Air
Typhoon George
By: Gregory Light - Jun 10, 2026
(London 1982, Toronto Circa 1971)
The lunch Joey had promised McDougal slipped his mind until the last moment; literally. He recalled it on the first bite of a cheese sandwich he'd quickly slapped together to get him past a series of nagging hunger pangs which were disturbing his pretence at work.
'Ah shit!' he exclaimed, looking at his watch. He still had half an hour. Just enough time if he left immediately. "Immediately" was the operative word. No time to hesitate. No time to deliberate over the lack of progress in his morning's work. Just go.
On the Underground, he fought off the image of what might have happened if he'd stayed and worked—maybe a full first draft? More than unlikely. But possible. He cursed McDougal, blaming him for all the writing he wasn't getting written. As it was, he arrived at George's office seven minutes later, to be told that Mr. McDougal was in a very important meeting and would be another ten minutes. Joey shook his head. Very important meeting. Yeah sure. He huffed, shifting his eyes upwards, letting the secretary know that he knew she knew that McDougal was full of it. George had planned it this way. That three-fingered slob didn't have "very important" anything. Certainly not meetings: unless they were about his job.
The thought caught Joey, broadside. Yeah, he mused, slumping back into the plush leather sofa George's company thoughtfully provided out in reception, maybe that's it? He's being fired. It was a wonderful idea to daydream about; McDougal getting the sack, the boot, the old heave-ho. For the past two years, Joey had prayed ardently for such a day; ever since he'd received a letter from George saying that he, too, was coming out to England and looked forward to seeing him again.
Devastated, Joey's first words had been, 'How ... how did he get our address?'
Joanna had tried reassurance. 'Don't worry. It's probably a short business trip. It'll be nice to see George again.'
But it wasn't nice to see George again. And it wasn’t a short business trip. It was a complete business transfer. McDougal was coming to London to live. To work. The same work which had hustled George out of Joey's life for five years—'Five glorious years,' he told the guy behind the bar at his local pub—was now thrusting him back into it.
Five years earlier George had been an ambitious, upwardly mobile, sales executive working for the Canadian subsidiary of an American company selling farm equipment in the Canadian market. His sales record was impeccable. In his first year alone, he picked up a washing machine, a quadraphonic stereo system, and over three thousand dollars (U.S.) under the company’s various incentive schemes. And that was just the icing on the cake of hefty commissions. 'Call me Mr. Wealth,' McDougal liked to say. Joey had come to accept living with weekly reports from George on his increasing affluence. Then suddenly "Mr. Wealth" was transferred to Chicago, American headquarters in the Sears Tower. The last time they had spoken was at the going away party George had thrown for himself. He had planned and promised a "big bash", but it turned out to be a pathetic affair. Unlike most of the guests, Joey and Joanna had shown up. 'I'll keep in touch?' a grateful and sodden George had sobbed to Joey. He had followed Joey into the bathroom and clapped him fiercely on the back as he was peeing. A startled stream splashed up from the porcelain. 'Don't worry about that, man. I still love you,' McDougal said, tears on his cheeks. At the door, he slobbered on Joey's neck and had to be pried loose from Joanna. 'Love is a many-splendored thing,' he said as Joey finally managed to pull the cab door shut. Two weeks later, Joey persuaded Joanna to move to a smaller apartment ('We'll save thirty bucks a month,') and went ex-directory. He heard George was trying to get in touch with them but ignored it. Then, with wild rumours circulating that McDougal was returning, Joey, Joanna and Amy moved to England. Joey still harboured suspicions that Joanna had circulated the rumours. The rumours had certainly played a major role in persuading him to surmount his deep simmering doubts about the move. Nevertheless, despite his sombre feelings about the place, in vast anonymous London, at least, Joey felt safe.
And that, naturally, is when it happened. Early in 1980, McDougal's company made a corporate decision to expand into the European market, and McDougal was one of a team given the task of setting up the London office. "Perfect timing or what?" he wrote in his letter to Joey. Somewhere he also tucked in the words "best friends". Joanna chuckled. Joey moaned. He thought of Gary. What would Gary say? Joey immediately wrote back saying that expansion into Thatcherite Britain was corporate suicide, but McDougal responded with optimism and excited anticipation.
'It's all over,' Joey said to Joanna, devastated, the pages of McDougal's second letter, dangling limply from his hand. 'I can't shake him.' Joanna just smiled. 'You don't know him. I spent two years in the same university residence with him. The guy's a psycho.'
'You forget. I was there too.'
Joey opened his mouth to protest but he quickly stopped himself. A brief, high vibration sprang off the top of his palate and was emitted through his mouth. But that was it. He shrugged and tossed McDougal's letter on the coffee table. What's the use? He wasn't disputing the fact that Joanna had been at the University of Toronto at the time—it's where they met—but it wasn't the same. Everyone knew McDougal to be a bit of a "loony tune”, but it was Joey that he'd singled out.
'George is my nemesis.' he mumbled under his breath, but Joanna had already left the room.
In university, George A. McDougal was not simply a disaster, but also, as a consensus in the common room of the men's residence put it, a National Emergency. "Hurricane McDougal". "Typhoon George". Not that he was awkward or clumsy—far from it—but he was possessed of a whirl-wind kind of exuberance that was difficult to ignore. Where most people, like Joey, took a civilized hour or so to fully wake up—aided by at least one strong cup of coffee—McDougal was one of those annoying metabolisms that propelled itself into the morning at about seven a.m. as if his alarm had aroused him with an injection of high-grade amphetamines. He was up, had a pee, brushed his teeth, dressed, and out doing three miles jogging before any normal human would have registered the buzz of the alarm.
After his run, McDougal would return and prowl the halls of residence for an hour, steeling himself to pounce on unsuspecting prey foolish enough to still be asleep at nine. In the first week of term, it had been eight, but this had initiated a backlash so potentially lethal that McDougal had surrendered an hour. A total ban on his morning restlessness had proven impossible to police. Besides, he had his supporters. There were a few who found him a convenience; more accurate than an alarm clock and cheaper than a telephone wake-up service. So "hyper-man" (as he was known to some) was generally left to roam the halls, bouncing from door to door like an overactive superball.
In his first year at residence, Joey's cupboard had all but been demolished by McDougal's habit of savagely flinging open the door of his room every morning. The door would whip around into the cupboard, belting it so hard that most of the articles of clothing inside it were knocked off their hangers. When he learned that he and George were to be on the same floor of the residence hall in his second year, Joey immediately went out and bought three rubber stoppers.
He was almost certain he had said ‘sturdy’ to the salesman. ‘Very sturdy stoppers.’ The salesman heard 'springy'.
‘Springy?’ he asked.
“Yes, they must be sturdy.'
After a prolonged search in the stockroom, a suitable trio was found. Three because Joey worried about their strength. They cost him the better part of ten bucks, but if they did the job, it was worth it.
The morning after Joey had screwed the stoppers firmly into the floor, McDougal arrived at precisely 9:02. Joey knew the precise time because he had set his alarm for 8:45 to witness the sturdiness of his defence. His stomach soared when he saw the door fly open, the force even higher than usual. He caught a very short glimpse of George's round and beaming face as he took a step into the room. Then just as forcefully, the door returned off the "highly sturdy" stoppers—absorbing all the energy of the fling, giving it back milliseconds later with little appreciable loss—and smacked McDougal squarely in the face, knocking him back into the hall; the cupboard barely touched. Joey jumped out of bed with a triumphant shriek.
'McDougal, you bastard! I finally stopped you!' He swiftly opened the door. Outside on the floor of the hall, McDougal lay flat on his back, knocked out cold. His nose was completely shoved to the left of his face. There was blood trickling from his lips, both nostrils, and a gash over his right eye. Joey watched, shocked, as a red swelling began to pump up George's face like a lop-sided volleyball. Despite the bashed-in look, he looked strangely peaceful. The beaming smile was still there, distorted to be sure, but recognizable. His left hand, missing the two fingers he'd lost the previous year, was resting quietly on his stomach as if to indicate he'd eaten a particularly satisfying meal. His right arm was tucked neatly down at his side. If he hadn't been breathing, he might easily have passed as the work of a hasty embalmer.
When McDougal came round a few minutes later, Joey, heart fluttering wildly with fear that he may have permanently damaged his tormentor, had succeeded in sitting him up.
'What happened?' asked McDougal, pain not yet apparent.
'You've had a terrible fall, George,' Joey replied, guiding him to his feet. Joey was not willing to go into detail about the fall. Not until he was sure McDougal would remember it. 'Take it very easy.' Joey delicately manoeuvred the battered form, looking more and more like a circus freak, back through the door and into his room. He wanted to get George out of the public eye, which so far had not been woken up.
'Hey, I'm bleeding,' said McDougal, carefully examining the substance he had wiped from his mouth through a rapidly closing eyelid. 'And I can hardly see.'
'It's only a nosebleed, George. Take it easy. Sit down on the bed. I'll get you a cold cloth.' George collapsed on the bed under the pressure of Joey's hand.
'It feels worse than a fucking nosebleed,' said McDougal, the bits and pieces of his face beginning to send some very funny sensations to his brain. 'Have you got a mirror?'
Halfway to the sink, Joey suddenly whirled around and restrained the deformed figure that was trying to get to its feet. Under no circumstances did he want McDougal looking at his busted face; not before Joey had a chance to clean it up a bit.
'Don't move George!' he shouted. 'Keep your head back or you'll be leaving blood all over my room.' George meekly obeyed, tilting his head back. At that angle, the swelling in his left eye was so bad he couldn't see out of it.
'What's happened to my eye? I can't see,' he whined softly.
'Black eye, George. It's going to be ugly for a week or so.' Joey forced an artificial casualness into his voice, keeping his description on the level of "nose bleeds" and "black eyes". It accounted for the pain George was feeling but was void of the terror conveyed by words like "concussion" and "plastic surgery" which were now nervously racing through Joey's mind. He returned to McDougal and gently began mopping up the blood. To his relief, it had stopped gushing out of the nostrils and was beginning to coagulate on a badly gashed lower lip. 'I wouldn't count on too many dates for a while,' Joey added with some considerable pleasure.
McDougal had always been extremely successful on dates. He was a natural when it came to looks. He was tall, fair-haired, and clean-looking—the latter in total contrast to the obscene thoughts and words that sprouted from him. He was also lucky. Or so said his rivals. He had never (so the story went) experienced the least trouble laying whatever woman he wanted, his most valued assets being a fundamental mistrust of and disdain for them all. These qualities, he claimed, shielded him from feeling shyness, nervousness, or any other debilitating defect in their company. He was self-confident and aggressive, But he learned to temper his arrogance with a faked introspection. His strategy: construct an emotional conflict against which he made the other side believe they were allied. Once in bed, he experienced no technical trouble because he didn't give a damn about his partner or how she might perceive him. Many women genuinely loathed him, but after he was finished with them, he considered their hatred the clearest evidence of victory. Joey's remark stirred the possibility of a temporary setback in his mind.
'That bad, eh?' George murmured. He was beginning to devise schemes on how to woo a female sympathy vote.
'Don't you remember anything?' asked Joey, hesitantly. He knew McDougal's behaviour was little better in its dealings with men and he came to regard a certain look in George's eye with suspicion; even if it was only in the one battered and swollen eye that remained open.
'Not exactly. Did I fall jogging?' Joey imperceptibly nodded. 'Wait a second.' And at that moment it all swooped back into George's throbbing head. 'This is your room, Edwards. That ... your fucking door came back in my face.'
'Yeah, something like that George,' Joey said, taking a step back. Even cleansed of the blood, McDougal's face was not going to pass an inspection.
'You bastard! You put something behind the door to make it bounce back at me.' George struggled to get up.
'A couple of stoppers to stop you from destroying the room when you come crashing in here every morning.'
McDougal was gingerly touching his face in wonderment. 'What's all this stuff you've put on my skin?'
'Uh, that is your skin, George. It's a bit swollen, that's all.' Joey backed into a more defensible position.
'It feels like dough. Where's the mirror?' George stumbled across Joey's room to the mirror above the sink. He guided himself uneasily with his one unhappy eye, turning his whole head and sniffing at the air like a drunken Cyclops. Joey expected a sharp scream when McDougal saw himself in the mirror. But nothing. George gazed helplessly at his reflection, stunned. It looked to him like something he'd seen in the distorted mirrors at the fairgrounds of the CNE. He moved his head for a less contorted angle, but the view was always the same: busted, bloated, and fearsomely ugly.
'You're dead Edwards,' he whispered menacingly, refusing to take his eye from his misshapen face. 'You've destroyed me. Now you die.'
Joey knew that the death threat was due to McDougal's inclination for making dramatic statements. Just in case, however, he stayed back and out of the way. 'It's mostly swelling. That'll go down soon enough.'
'Swelling!' McDougal boomed. 'You think I care about the fucking swelling. 'It's my nose I'm worried about. Where the fuck is it? If you tell me this mush pushed over onto my cheek is my nose—wait! Oh shit! I can only see one nostril! Where the hell is my left nostril?'
'It's because you can only see out of one eye,' Joey said, the first wave of nervous laughter rising in his stomach.
'If that's supposed to be a joke, Edwards, I'm warning you. I'm?’ McDougal turned to Joey. For the first time, Joey saw his face as the grotesque ogre-like mask it was, and he was utterly unable to control his laughter. It burst out of him, buckling him, a convulsive pain stinging his sides.
'Okay, that's it, Edwards. That's fuucccking it!’ He stretched the word and his fists out towards Joey.
‘Watch your language,’ Joey responded, holding his stomach.
‘What???’ Fuck you! I'm going to fucking end your life.' He flailed clumsily in Joey's direction.
'Take it easy, George. I'm just?’ He broke off in another wave of laughter. McDougal was swinging his arms in a wide arc. 'Your nose will be fine. It's ... it's?' again Joey shook with laughter. It was true. McDougal's nose was inches from its normal resting place and sunk deep into massive swelling. 'I think ... I think you should see a doctor, and have it straightened before it begins to?.' He held his sides again.
McDougal gave up his "search and destroy" mission and flopped down on a chair. "It had better look like fucking new, Edwards. If it's a fraction of a millimetre out, I'll find you, so help me, and when I'm through with you?'
'We'll be twins. Come on George. It was hardly my doing. It's your own fault for bursting in here like Genghis Khan. How did I know the door stoppers would do that to the door? I swear, if I'd known they'd be so springy, I never would have bought them.'
'Keep your mouth shut about how this happened.'
'Sure,' said Joey.
They made a deal. If Joey replaced the stoppers with one ordinary one, and if he promised to go along with McDougal's version of a story which had him mugged by six members of Satan's Choice motorcycle gang while out jogging, then McDougal wouldn't report Joey's deliberate criminal action to the residence authorities and would, in McDougal's words, 'Leave your nose where it is.' It was a deal Joey regretted. He was willing to go along with George's story but changing the stoppers meant that he still burst in on him every morning. In return, Joey had hoped his face would be permanently disfigured, but a few weeks later George was back to his beaming self, his charismatic features all well on their way to recovery.
Oh McDougal, you worm.
When McDougal finally emerged from his "very important meeting", Joey had been stewing for half an hour. He paced the room irascibly, punching one hand into the other and cursing George under his breath. Every few minutes he plagued the secretary with surly demands to interrupt the meeting; something she refused to do, although she twice relayed messages from George saying he would just be a few more minutes.
'A few minutes? That's what he said fifteen minutes ago,' Joey said brusquely.'
'Hey, sorry pal,' George popped his smart, smiling head into reception, 'Didn't mean to be so long. Give me a second to get my coat.'
'Do you know how long I've been waiting?'
But McDougal had disappeared again. “Yeah, sorry pal," Joey muttered cynically.
Five, long minutes later, George stepped into reception again. Joey noticed that he wasn't wearing his coat. In its place, he sported a worried look. Very dramatic. Joey had seen it before.
'Listen, do you think we could postpone the lunch for a few days? Something big has come up. I mean really big.'
'Is it your job?' Joey spurted out, seething, and hoping.
'No. What?'
'Nothing George. A recurring dream I have. I'll get over it.'
But outside Joey raged at himself. An afternoon lost. George had done it to him again. Why on earth had he let it happen?