Summer Cannibals

by Melanie Hobson

  Inside, the family was hiding too. The tour had been an unprecedented disaster and every one of them knew that there was bound to be a reckoning. And David, already beginning to refortify, knew that something was owed to him.

  14

  They’d both known it would come. The violence was a periodic necessity of their life together, like a climate oscillation—a prolonged freeze hit by a sudden thaw. And that it came at night, and on the heels of the tour, was no surprise either, because that was how it always was between David and his wife. Neither of them would ever attach the word “rape” to it, because they were married after all and she let him do it. The triggers were predictable and Margaret never shied from them. This time she’d even precipitated it, which fit neatly with David’s conviction that she enjoyed it too. Was eager to submit and take the thrashing he delivered. They had, he believed, an understanding that worked for each of them.

  The garden tour, he’d thought as he’d pushed himself off her back that night, was a triumph after all. The young girl would have been better, there was no denying it, but he could still imagine her whimperings in the submissive cries of his wife. And that, after all, was better than nothing. It would see him through for a while. Margaret had sworn that the girl wasn’t her doing—Just a coincidence—but that had only aroused him further. The randomness; the dumb luck. The electrifying tease of live pornography in his very own territory.

  David stretched out on his back and took the bed, secure in the knowledge that this was a reset. Whatever debts had accrued were now settled, and the unencumbered life could begin anew.

  Margaret, as she always did when it was over, had gone downstairs to wander between rooms until she found herself in the library. She sat at the desk, gingerly, a sheet of sticky dots in front of her. Outside, the storm that had arrived after dark was ferocious. The library windows were rattling, her reflection in them distorted by rain, and the table lamp she switched on wasn’t bright enough and Margaret could feel her eyes straining as she debated with herself whether or not to use a colour code. There were blue, orange, yellow, white and red sticker dots, and so she could assign a colour to each child: red dots could be Georgina, blue ones Jax and etcetera.

  But what if they forgot or she forgot to tell them? No. Safer, she decided, just to label them with letters.

  She sat at the library desk and began marking the stickers with Gs, Js, and Ps, having already decided that she would place them on the bottoms of everything and then no one would have to guess. When she and David died, all the girls would have to do was read the sticker to know if the thing was theirs or not. She considered the lamp. It was porcelain, Chinese, a gold dragon in a field of turquoise, its base dark lacquered wood. They’d bought it years and years ago at a market in Australia, a sort of antique market near the Brisbane docks. She looked down at the dots in front of her. P for Pippa. She peeled it off and stuck the white sticker underneath, next to where the cord came out, wincing because her shoulder hurt. Something about this lamp seemed right for Philippa. That girl needed a dragon. She needed turquoise and beauty and pools of light. Margaret took more objects and stickered them, focused: a tray of meerschaums, prints of da Vinci’s sketches, alabaster eggs … she didn’t bother keeping count, tallying things equally for each girl; she just let her feelings guide her, believing she knew what they’d want, what was best for them. She was their mother, after all. If she couldn’t do that then what could she do? What had all of it been for? Didn’t she know them better than anyone?

  Margaret left the library, pausing because she thought she heard sounds in the kitchen, but decided it was just the house bending to the storm. She went through to the living room, raising vases and figurines and bowls and paintings—anything a sticker would adhere to—knowing she’d have to do something about the textiles. The rugs and cushions and throws, even the furniture would need labels. Maybe those tags you iron on clothes when your kids go off to camp. Surely they still made those? She circled around the table with her husband’s papers heaped and sliding across it, thankful that at least it wasn’t a train set he was obsessing over like so many other men his age. Or a battlefield. Wasn’t that something else retired men did as they aged? Glued regiments and artillery onto tables, creating re-enactments of history’s most aggressive moments? Some kind of displaced virility. She laughed, girlish, putting a sticker on the underside of the table—a G for Georgina, the only one with a house this table might fit in. They’d had her wedding lunch at this table. Margaret could still see the pretty cake she’d made, chocolate-coated rose petals dusting the platter she’d set it on, three diminishing layers of orange cake with lemon icing, and almond slivers in a chevron around its edges.

  Hadn’t they always, all of them, been a family? she thought.

  Margaret touched her cheek but she wouldn’t admit it was wet, the tears streaming now. Or that the salt stung the split corner of her mouth. Instead, she wiped her hand against her leg and moved on to the sideboard with its cupboards of porcelain and silver. A P on the silver candlesticks, a P on the Waterford crystal, a P on the carved ivory birds of paradise even though Pippa had always yelled about the elephants who’d been butchered to make them. At a certain point, Margaret wanted her to know, you just have to give in. Fight will only take you so far and then there’s a settling. You have to accept, and move on.

  Upstairs, David lay on his side in the oversized bed he sometimes shared with his wife, curled up like a boy. He always lay like this, drawn in on himself; protective, clenched. Nothing woke him. The sleep of the innocent was how he thought of it: the lamb-like slumber of righteousness. If he had dreams he never remembered them and he was thankful for that because they’d only be a distraction from the real work at hand, which was to get himself through the day and acquit himself admirably. To be an example to all. Ductus exemplo. There were enough detours already without importing half-realized narratives. Those, he left to his wife, who was off somewhere now, in the middle of the night, doing precisely that, he was sure of it. Taking what was straightforward and simple and strong, and doing her utmost to weaken it. David sighed. Tired. Already nodding off. Already rewriting the slight wobble of the garden tour in lines of hexameter.

  But tonight—the storm? Pippa being there? that last piece of cake before bed? something about the accounts?—tonight he was restless. His was a twilight sleep, just barely under, as if he sensed the movement in the house and was fighting—against all previous experience and resolutions—to … what? Stop it before it gathered strength? Direct its course? Join this current that ran so deep it coursed through the timber floors and up the walls and shook the mattress …? No, he was struggling to ignore it, not rise up and greet it. Not enter whatever king tide was pushing there at the edge of his consciousness. All he had to do was find that place where he could sink down and be invisible, untroubled, free of everything. Lost to the night. Nulli secundus. Second to none. For his, he believed, was the head that ruled.

  Non omnis moriar. Not all of me shall die.

  Probably it was the thunder that woke them that night, well before dawn. The heat that had been building for days had finally broken, and because they couldn’t go back to sleep Georgina and Jax, separately, went down the back stairs to the kitchen, looking for something to settle them. Expecting to find their mother there. Their mother, whose sleep was so erratic and unpredictable they’d given up trying to understand it and had gotten used to a lifetime of appearances and disappearances. Of finding her on different couches throughout the house in any number of rooms.

  She must be asleep, they said when they found the kitchen empty. Surprised that she’d actually done it, gone to bed and stayed.

  After a day like today, Georgina said, we should all be dead asleep. And my legs are still killing me from that edging.

  The storm was in full rage and rain flew at the windowpanes. Lightning flashes caught the trees mid-shake and they looked alive, threatening, marching on the house, heading for the cliff to
topple over it. The light above the stovetop was too soft to obliterate what was beyond the glass, until Georgina switched on the fluorescents overhead and then the only visible world was the kitchen.

  Jax cut a big triangle of fruitcake.

  She’s been making those, Georgina said, putting the kettle on and then cutting her own wedge, all week. Ever since she spoke to Pip about coming over, it’s been one cake after another. And I’ve been eating them—I need to stop.

  I’ll take a turn, Jax grinned. I’m starving. She stuffed the piece into her mouth.

  She always makes these when we’re pregnant, Georgina murmured. It’s only a shortcut recipe. Not like a Christmas cake with all the soaking and stewing and spiking, but still.

  Yeah, Jax agreed, even though she had no idea what Georgina was talking about. She’d had two babies and today was the first she’d heard—or tasted—of these cakes. That tour was a bust, wasn’t it? she said.

  I don’t think any of it went to plan.

  Jax snorted. Unless the plan was crazy-time. I think those people were out on day passes. Or a field trip. Some kind of horticultural therapy.

  Mum seemed pretty upset.

  And what about Pippa? She’s a mess.

  Good thing you’re here, Jax, because I couldn’t have worked any of that out for myself.

  Yeah, you’d be lost without me, eh?

  They were quiet then, waiting for the kettle to boil, running through the day’s strangeness on their own. Letting the lateness of the hour work on them.

  I knew she should’ve gone to Europe, Jax said finally.

  Georgina stared.

  Pippa. Aren’t we talking about Pippa? If she’d done her gap year bumming around Europe, she wouldn’t have met Leo. No kids. Problem solved. I mean, why the fuck would you go to New Zealand anyway?

  Georgina leaned back against the sink, feeling it was her kitchen now, that she was in charge, the one with experience and authority because hadn’t Jax just revealed herself as juvenile?

  Just—Georgina snapped her fingers—wish those kids away? That’s your solution?

  Just my fantasy. Sliding back up onto the counter, dangling her legs, remembering how fun it was to bait her older sister. Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it.

  About Philippa, her gap year, and the family she got out of it? No. Surprisingly.

  Wishing your kids away, Jax said. In your case, kid. Emphasizing how easy Georgina had it with only one measly child while the rest of us, she implied, are suffocating under the combined weight of them.

  I think you’re out on a day pass.

  Maybe I should’ve gotten on that bus with the other patients. Bunch of circus freaks, eh? Did you see the giant? And in the pool, I’m pretty sure that was a bearded lady.

  Georgina smiled then, relaxing, starting to laugh as she put tea bags in the mugs, telling her sister about the woman in the sundress and her reaction to the men taking cuttings. And I think I saw someone squatting, back by the lilacs, she said.

  Taking a shit? Jax blurted out, eyes wide. Oh my god. And you should’ve seen Mum’s face when that guy walked into the kitchen. He was a frigging cyclops.

  Jax pantomimed a look of exaggerated terror and now both sisters were laughing … and perhaps it was that, the camaraderie that Pippa sensed, or the storm, or a determined attempt to do something, to put herself in motion, that made her stand up and go downstairs to join her sisters in the kitchen around the island, feeding off cake crumbs, accepting a cup of tea, sliding herself up onto the countertop beside Jax, just as they’d done when they were teenagers and killing time. She didn’t talk, but at least she was there—and wasn’t that a start? And Jax and Georgina, surprised but hoping that this was a change for the positive, kept gossiping about the day as if she was in on that too. The slapstick chaos of the garden tour, their father galloping through it in his nightclothes, the damage the people had done … trying to jolly their little sister along. To make her feel part of something other than whatever was holding her down. They asked her questions but didn’t wait for answers, they included her in their observations and analysis of their parents and the row they were heading for, placing themselves and Pippa solidly in that track of kids bitching about how unfair the adult world was to them. Resurrecting that familiar enemy, arraying themselves in formation against it like a corps, reminding her she had a place in the world no matter what.

  Eventually, though, their energy flagged, and the sisters all went back to their beds to try to sleep through the remainder of the storm and of the night. Georgina feeling that here, at last, was a change for the better.

  Jax stood at the window on the third-floor landing and looked down through the storm to the city spread out below her, its lights insistent, the long ribbons of them leading to where she knew the enormous black smear of Lake Ontario was. At night, that lake was the absence of light. You could trace its edges by the flicker of industry, the shifting headlights, the false dawn of Toronto at the horizon … and she thought not about the tour and its eccentricities but about how, when she’d lived here, she’d been beautiful. Young and strong and beautiful. Suitors—she looked at her reflection in the dimpled glass—had come calling in droves. She’d chosen her husband over all of them. But what if he was just another adventure that had simply run its course? What if she’d made a mistake? There was that boy from long ago … their memories, what it had felt like to be together … she would have said yes if he’d asked her to marry him. Wasn’t she certain of that?

  One day when we’re both married to other people, he’d said to her once, we’ll leave them and be together.

  She’d shrugged it off as immaturity but now, with her hips pressed to the windowsill and only the glass stopping her from falling out, she found herself wondering if it was a premonition. A prophecy. There would have been, she thought, a simplicity to staying put. I might have been happier here. And Toronto … a career could flourish there. Marquees with my name. So many lights, flickering. So many people. So many lives unravelling. Couldn’t she just step on one, on his, the loose thread, and follow it back? Pippa was the obvious and immediate reason why she’d come all the way from Florida, but Billy—Billy Boscoe—was in there too. Why couldn’t they pick up where they’d left off? Why shouldn’t we? she’d thought, his email boldface on her screen. His message saying that he’d be in town. Twenty years of nothing, and now this.

  It’s not me, she’d reasoned as she booked her flight out of Florida. Not me who’s initiating things. Pure happenstance … Her excuses already bleeding out.

  Sunday

  15

  The next day, Jax looked down from her bedroom and marvelled at the lavender drifted up against the boxwood, flickering with bees. Even the morning sunlight was coming down in pretty shafts as though the scene, the garden, was too perfect to do anything but just barely sprinkle it with light, everything glistening from the night’s storm, downed leaves dusted about like calling cards. A paradise. Jax found herself longing to be wrapped in it like childhood and those summer days of pleasure. Tree forts she’d built, lakes and oceans she’d swum in, camping trips, lying on hot pavement corralling ants, riding her bike, chips and candy from the convenience store. When it was too hot to sleep she and her sisters used to spread blankets on the grass and sleep outside, no tent, just blankets and pillows underneath the sky, waking in the morning covered with dew, running inside to get breakfast. Perhaps their mother had helped with that—getting blankets, finding pillows, defining their boundaries for the night—but Jax didn’t think so. As children they were mostly on their own; children the natural fauna of the household.

  She crossed to the other window, the cliff side, and looked down thinking how different from the night before, and how nothing downtown had changed. The waterfront, Georgina told her, had been developed, but from where she stood she couldn’t see the bike path or the tramway, the interactive museum or even HMCS Haida–the only Tribal-class destroyer left in the world, and now
open to the public for tours. The chamber of commerce’s answer to the totality of Toronto and its five million attractions. Funny thing about familiar views, Jax thought. Not the particulars you remember but the overall. And there, as always, was the modest business district with its handful of tall buildings, trees and houses emanating out from it, the grid of streets, the enormous sheeting of lake beyond and, beyond that, everything else—escarpment, sky, Toronto and the sprawl that ended in cottages and, eventually, wilderness. Tundra. Frozen north. The Pole. Still waiting for me. Still lying down at my feet. The same as it had always been.

  Just like me, Jax thought dully, untying her hair, coiling and wrapping it around her finger, making another bun, tying it back in place. Forty-two and no closer to Broadway than I was twenty years ago. And that husband—always encouraging me, never questioning the sense of it, never trying to steer me to something more practical. He’s a science teacher, for fuck’s sake. Supposedly logical. Why support my drive to be a playwright unless, Jax thought, he doesn’t care. If he cared he would’ve tried to save me from myself. She couldn’t even think of a character to compare him to because her knowledge of plays, over the years, had been whittled down to almost nothing. Even at its height it was restricted to the canon—to what was taught at her university in this Dominion of Canada. Nothing too provocative, nothing modern, nothing American. Nothing to rely on and measure yourself against. Nobody becomes a playwright, not really, and of the few who do, why would one be me? He must think there’s something sexy about writers. That if I just become one, we’ll have sex all the time. Just lie around in a drowsy state of post-coitus, fucking on and off. Isn’t that all he’s interested in? All we ever talk about, how he never gets enough?

  Billy, she thought, would never have let it get to this. As if the outspoken teen she’d known would have matured into an even blunter no-nonsense adult.