Summer Cannibals

by Melanie Hobson

  And hadn’t she had her share of those?

  It was Leo who’d suggested it, and it hadn’t seemed a stretch. He was generous with everyone. His fishing charter that day, he’d told her over the dishes, had been swingers.

  We smoked a few joints, and it got pretty hot. I mean, watching them.

  They had sex on the boat? And you watched?

  No, he laughed, tapping her nose with his finger. Just messing around. Kissing and stuff.

  He cupped her breast. Ran his hand under the curve of it and down. Tucked his fingers in the waistband of her shorts.

  She’d laughed. He couldn’t be serious. Nobody did that anymore. It wasn’t the first time he’d mentioned someone else but it had always been in the middle of sex when a lot of things were said and never followed through with. Never after dinner, when they were cleaning the kitchen and the boys were in the next room watching television.

  There’s a service, he said. It’s anonymous. They set you up.

  It had started like that. A bit of news from his day. A suggestion, a dare—and in the end she’d taken it because it seemed to fit with all the other decisions she’d made, which weren’t decisions at all but simple reactions to whatever came in front of her. And weren’t they finished having kids? And hadn’t they earned some fun for themselves? We had—he reminded her—ten years before the babies started coming. Wasn’t it time to go back to that?

  Yeah, okay, she’d said a week later. Giving in. Why not.

  But he enjoyed it more than she did. Especially when she got pregnant this time. She stopped altogether when the pregnancy advanced and even though he said he’d stop too, she knew he hadn’t. Knew that too often his errands were invented and that now it was Leo and the husbands, both sharing the wife. And that left her … where? And safe sex, in the context of swinging, had seemed counterintuitive and oxymoronic. The other husbands all said they’d had vasectomies, but the scars were too microscopic to see, so how could she be sure? And vasectomies, like anything, can fail. Marriage, she’d thought recklessly at the time, is its own sort of birth control. Bastard-proof, anyway. But now that she was pregnant, she realized she didn’t know for certain who the father was.

  Pippa rolled onto her knees, walking her hands up the opposing boulders until she was standing, letting the weight of her baby settle. She had to get away from here. I should’ve had a plan, she thought. All along, I should’ve had a plan. Life had just carried her—and what did that make her? A peddler of truths so hackneyed and shallow she couldn’t even form the words now without all the moisture evaporating from her mouth. Without her mouth clacking like a castanet: No television. No sugar. No polyester, BPAs, generic sunblock or corporate mosquito repellent. No saying no. With the other mothers, she’d squatted on the grass unwrapping cotton napkins filled with homemade granola bars and nuts and fruit and let the children circle in to graze whenever they wanted to, their whims and impulses paramount. She’d swapped platitudes. She’d wept for the children with their babysitters who were never allowed to go barefoot or shirtless or without a hat in the summertime, and who stuck to a schedule that never changed. Who were secured in a swing and pushed for an hour, and then strapped to a stroller and escorted home for a nap even if they were five years old and had done nothing to tire themselves out. Probably given cough syrup or valerian root in their lunch to make them sleep.

  We’re better, Pippa and her mothers agreed. We’re down here at the level of our child, taking our cues from them, our only preconceived ideas that what is natural and spontaneous is always best. And how can that possibly hurt anyone?

  But when they grow, Pippa thought now, they leave you down there on the ground. At least Pippa had been left. The other mothers had gone back to work—shedding the granola like a summer tan—whereas Pippa was down there still, her children clambering across her as if she were a jungle gym, their droppings in her hair. All those babies had been her way of fixing the rut she’d fallen into when life with Leo had become just life, no longer the excitement and adventure and novelty it had started out as. She’d thought babies could fix anything. But she was an adult and adults, Pippa thought in her lucid moments, are supposed to have a plan. Long-term, not just day-to-day. Why had her parents never taught her that? Insisted on it. Realized she was flailing, and reeled her in? At least made her go to university and get a degree, some sort of basic credentials. Why hadn’t they objected more strenuously to her sudden marriage?

  Her husband had looked relieved when she’d told him she was going home for a rest. Leo’s answer to her problem was to smoke more weed and leave joints for her on the nightstand or in the bathroom so there was always one handy if she wanted it. He busied himself with the cooking and the chores, taking the older boys to work on the boat with him and dropping the younger two off at the Maori neighbours up the street who had so many kids of their own a few more wouldn’t make a difference. She doubted he’d even cleared it with them first. He’ll be glad I’ve gone away. It would make it easier for him, her not being there to bring him down. He wouldn’t have to try and understand why she couldn’t just snap out of it—be pregnant, have a baby, and get on with it like she’d done every other time. Why she had to make such a fuss. He could go back to enjoying things.

  When the trail began to climb again, away from the fences and yards, Pippa started to seriously doubt her course. And when, through a gap in the trees, she saw the tall spire of the cathedral, which she knew was near the highway at the city’s western edge, she knew she’d come too far. She was nowhere near downtown or the neighbourhood where all her friends lived: she’d somehow missed everything, and was out where the city bled into wilderness.

  She couldn’t get anything right, not even escape. Pippa sat down, defeated. There hadn’t been a single other person on that trail and she knew why, swatting the mosquitoes the storm had loosed. It was humid and muggy and if you had any sort of choice where to go, this trail in these woods wouldn’t have a shot. Dirt had worked its way into her underwear and it rubbed uncomfortably, and she smelled and had wet herself with the effort of sitting down, everything sticky and grimy and beginning to itch. She lay back. Another minute. Another minute, just to catch her breath, and she’d get up and start walking back the way she’d come. Another minute, she told herself, and she’d be okay. Lying on her back like that, the weight of the baby made it hard to breathe. She turned onto her side, hip grinding against rock, and it was when she pulled her arm up across her chest that the first contraction hit and then there was nothing else but the pain. And why bother with a hospital, she thought wildly, these woods can absorb it just as well. Better, even, no one to hear me scream. She waited, letting the contractions pin her, waiting for her water to break, knowing the baby would be quick like the others had been, that there was no stopping it, ready to get it over with. To get the whole fucking thing over with. And how perfect to be there like an animal, writhing in the dirt. It was what life had brought her to. It was where she belonged. Down on that ground again and no way back up. And she’d done it to herself. Hadn’t she done it to herself? The old memory blazing forward like a meteor.

  Get on, you little bitch.

  All he’d said to her. A growl.

  And she’d done it. Drawn the crotch of her bathing suit aside and put his hard dick in with her own hands, her breasts already out, the water slapping them. Legs around to his back like a horsey-ride. Obedient. Forbidden. Because wasn’t this what she’d been looking for in every flaming Sambuca, spliff or binge, every line of shooters, every party, every pack of cigarettes smoked down in grotty apartments, every phalanx breached to grab whatever was on the bar, didn’t matter, as long as it pushed her further. Why wouldn’t she get on? She was eighteen; he wasn’t her first.

  He was her parents’ friend. A friend of their family since before she was born. In every way possible, he was safe. It happened at his cottage one holiday, swimming in the lake with the stars like radioactive crumbs above them, darkness, a fri
sson of danger like electricity, like the air before a charge, the whole lake pushing them closer until they were waist deep and he was already naked. Waiting. That first time, it was quick. Exhilarating and quick. But each time after that, their sessions went longer and became more complex and he made her do things he said all men would want from her.

  I’m schooling you, he’d say as he teased and played with her. Show me how grateful you can be. Making her grovel and perform.

  18

  There were no special craft tables in the room where Margaret worked above the kitchen, next door to where Pippa should have been sleeping and directly below Goldilocks. It was just an extra room with some bonus furniture and a big oak desk pushed against one wall that might have even been there when they’d bought the house, no one could remember. One window looked out onto the driveway and the other one to the neighbour’s property which, at that point, was a dense line of evergreens so substantial they were like the edge of a forest that might continue for miles. In the summer the room was hot, positioned as it was to miss the breezes coming up off the lake. It was a room that nobody wanted. A blind spot in the household’s array.

  Margaret kept her books in the closet, jammed up on the shelf above the clothes rail. So many, and so big, that the wood sagged under the weight of them. The materials she used to build her collages were collected in messy piles and stacks and bins—just something someone had cleared away from somewhere else and put there, on that side table or in that corner or on a chair or windowsill, because this was the waiting room for things whose fate was unclear. To the rest of the family this was not a studio but a junk room. A wasting place.

  She began with the leftover stickers she’d been placing on objects throughout the house. Onto the new pillowcase-sized blank sheet she pulled out, she wrote the date at the top in minuscule numbers only she would know to look for and then placed one round sticker of each colour, for each girl, at the centre. Making them overlap. She didn’t need a letter to tell them apart—she only needed colours. Everything would radiate from that. Around those stickers now she laid the buds of cotton swabs, snapped off and dipped into glue and held to the page with a carefully placed rotation of flower stems and toothpicks cased in foil, sprays of tinsel that she’d found behind a tin of baked beans in the pantry, a ribbon of red electrical tape securing the brittle spokes of what she now saw was a wheel. Misshapen, it was true, but close enough to being round that it would be able to move, albeit with a clatter. Anyone would hear it coming, even the preoccupied. From the pocket of her dressing gown Margaret pulled out the petals she’d saved from Georgina’s bouquets and dusted them behind the wheel like multicoloured gravel kicked up by the screeching velocity of this vehicle she seemed to be constructing. Tiny streaks of pollen marked the paper. She laid clear tape over the bits of flowers as if the tape was the gusting wind, locking everything to the page.

  But, no, it’s not all flowers, she thought, standing back. Not only sunshine and light. Philippa was gone. She walked around the room, fingering the piles, flicking through bins of castoffs, picking things up, aware of Goldilocks above her—the key heavy in her pocket. She touched a butter knife—its bone handle split, the cap for a bottle of cider, an old Christmas card with a dove on it, rubber letters and numbers from a stamping kit, a length of yarn … It wasn’t a wheel, she saw now when she circled back and looked at the paper. Not something for transport. It was an eye, the centre of a hurricane, a whirlpool drawing the whole world in and Margaret could feel herself beginning to spin, having tried so hard all morning to act like there was no pain when in fact it hurt to stand or to sit, and even the featherlight satin of her dressing gown chafed her skin. He’d left bruises everywhere. The sore spots on her calves, where his knees had ground into her like pestles, were what tipped her forward now against the desk, and just as she hit the edge, she heard a thud overhead.

  Jax was sunbathing, and David and Georgina had gone to the police station to file the missing person report, so when Goldilocks started hammering on the locked door with her fists and screaming obscenities and hurling threats, it was only Margaret—perfectly still at the foot of the attic stairs now—who could hear her.

  The voice was more robust than Margaret had imagined it would be. Not deep, like a man’s—it was fully feminine, there was no doubting that—but coarse, like a muddied torrent chock full of sticks and stones.

  … thisgoddamnedfuckingbullshitcuntrippingmotherfuckerofa …

  Margaret held her breath and listened to the vile tattoo beating out. So much rage, she thought simply, taking her first step up.

  … bettermotherfuckingopenthismotherfuckingdoororI’llpullyourfuckingballsupthroughyourmouthandfuckingchokeyouwiththemwhenI …

  Margaret couldn’t help herself. She was hooked by that stream of profanities, pulling her one step at a time, closer and closer, to where the door frame was rattling with all the panic of a bird trapped against a window. She knew it must be hot in there. The windows were painted shut, there’d be no hope of a breeze, and at this time of day the sun would be lighting up the whole room, making it a furnace. She could see the girl’s feet backlit at the bottom of the door, in the tiny sliver of space there, and she knew by how they flickered that the girl was jumping. Throwing her whole body against the door trying to break it down. But these doors swung in and were old and heavy, solid wood, and that girl—because Margaret had seen her—was just a chip of a thing. She wouldn’t last. She’d give up, pass out, turn to crying or pleading—she didn’t have what it took to tear a door right off its hinges. To endure a lifetime of what Margaret had endured.

  Margaret sat down and waited. Waited on the stairs, her head just above the landing, level with the girl’s feet—waited for this futile exercise to end. It wouldn’t take long, she didn’t think, and she already knew what must happen next. Goldilocks needed silencing. When Georgina had asked, Margaret had said she’d take care of it. Now was the time.

  Downstairs, Margaret ran water into a tall glass of ice as if preparing refreshments for a guest and then turned to what was left of the fruitcake and cut a modest piece. She had to be sure the girl would eat it all. Too much and Goldilocks might leave the crucial bite uneaten—the piece where Margaret had tucked the sleeping pills in.

  At the second-floor landing she set the glass down on a windowsill and pulled the key out, all her actions steady and deliberate as if she’d done this before. As if prisoners, in that house, were an everyday affair. When she got to the third floor, she stood outside the locked room and listened.

  Nothing. Margaret smiled. Just as she’d predicted, the girl had worn herself out.

  She put the key in and turned it, the old lock sluggish as it withdrew the latch from the door frame, the heavy door giving a little tremor as it sprang free. And before she could admit to herself what madness this was, Margaret turned the handle and pushed it open just enough to see in. And there she was. Naked and golden across the bed.

  As Margaret approached, she saw that the house had done the job for her, just as she’d known it would. Had knocked the girl out with this blazing hothouse of a room. She was splayed on her back across the bed, both arms flung out, and the first thing Margaret noticed was that her breasts were so full and round. Margaret wondered if they were artificial and bent to look, because she’d never seen implants before and her husband, periodically, suggested she should get some. She’d read that they were supposed to be hard and tight, but these breasts looked soft. Inviting. They trembled when Goldilocks breathed out. Margaret could see downy hairs tracking down and across the girl’s stomach and around the tiny blip of her navel and she couldn’t take her eyes from what those spread legs were offering up, all shaved and glistening.

  Goldilocks was older than Margaret had thought she was. Early twenties, probably. But nothing about her body—Margaret looked her over again—had been used up yet. Even those bruises on the inside of her upper arms were such vibrant shades of purple they looked splendid and magn
ificent, and Margaret, who’d never felt attracted to another woman, wanted to fall on top of this one. Wanted to feel that body pushed against her own, and it thrilled her to think that David might have been with them both in the same day. That Goldilocks, the smell and taste of her, might have been all over him when he’d laid the same blows on her.

  Margaret had known her husband had been building to a climax but this—the way she wanted the same dose of medicine she’d directed him to—was new. A surprise. She’d meant for Goldilocks to have taken the brunt of David’s escalating mania, and then she would only have to take what was left to bring him back down to a relative sanity. She and this girl were supposed to be the double dose meant for landing him, but they were not meant to land one another. This attraction, as Margaret took in every beautiful inch of this creature, was pure and visceral and as unexpected as the girl herself.

  Margaret picked her way carefully down the staircase, shoulder running along the wall because her hands were too shaky to hold the railing. Left foot, right foot to meet it and then left foot again. She’d left the cake, she’d locked the door, and she had no plan for what would happen next. For when David went back upstairs for more. For what that could mean for the two of them.

  19

  Roz’s house, Pippa thought. That’s where she needed to go.