Going Down Swinging

by Billie Livingston

  “All right, I won’t deprive you of your tea, but just one cup and only if it’s half milk. And only one teaspoon of sugar, not three. And promise promise promise you’ll try going two weeks eating your lunch every day. And no chocolate bars. OK? Let’s just try this little experiment. And if you feel shaky or you get voices in your head that you can’t get out, try eating an orange or an apple. Bring some extra fruit with you to school and keep them with you so if you start getting confused in class you can eat some fruit and balance out your system again.”

  So I said, “This sounds a little drastic,” and Sheryl started laughing again and she told me I killed her. So that was good. I don’t know, I guess I didn’t really believe it that much, though. But I promised I’d eat my lunch. So. I’d do that part. At least she didn’t think I was mental or anything.

  After Rockford Files and Night Stalker were over, I went back upstairs. I was really wanting some of that chocolate cake that I made a couple days ago, but I already finished it. I didn’t eat it all, I brought a piece to school for Josh. And plus I brought a piece for Mrs. Annis, my new homeroom teacher, but she was still a big pig-head so she wasn’t getting any more cakes from me, that was for sure.

  I made myself a brown sugar sandwich instead, like Mum used to make me for a treat when I was little, with the light-brown kind of brown sugar and lots of butter. I thought about what Sheryl said, but it was just a sandwich, not a chocolate bar, and plus I made it with whole wheat bread.

  I took it to bed with a glass of milk for extra protein. Since George went away, I was sleeping in Mum’s bed again. I laid awake after my sandwich for a long time cuz I kept wondering about my birthday and Mum getting too sick before it, but I fell asleep counting how much money I was going to have by Christmas and thinking how, for now, it was a pretty good deal cuz Mum got to go out and be with adults and I was getting super-rich. Until I woke up from hearing different feet in the house and then a guy’s voice that wasn’t George’s and my heart started going like crazy.

  It was like she wrecked the bargain.

  He sounded drunk the way he laughed all slow. Like Stewart maybe. After George left, my mum’s friend Stewart started calling again, wanting to take her for lunch or a coffee or whatever. And I had to listen to his crunchy dumb voice when I picked up the phone. He always sounded like he was retarded or something, he tried so hard to make kid conversation.

  I kept still, listening. And then it sounded like two guys. My arms went hot and I got butterflies in my ribs. I tried to make out some words, but they were all warbly and foggy. Almost like cow noises. Then Mum did that laugh like she used to do when she drank, the more-deeper, throaty kind.

  Adults need adult company the same way kids need kid company. I kept hearing Mum say that in my head.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and they flapped back open—I couldn’t tell what time it was—stupid clock was supposed to be glow-in-the-dark but it always stopped glowing hardly any time after the lights went out. My toes and my teeth clenched and then I started sliding them back and forth over each other—toes with toes and teeth with teeth, I mean. Then I pretended that the clock was really crickets and I was in the country. Then there was more cow noises. Not Stewart. And they weren’t George, they didn’t give a care about her, they were going to make her drink and get her to do stuff. Same as how it used to be, until she got too sick to move. Same way as Toronto. I got a picture in my head of them out there trying to dump booze right down her throat. And then “Shutt Upp!”—and knives clanging plates, a skinny high laugh, mean English ladies, fork sounds on teeth, and spoons, and “Shutt Upp!” until I couldn’t hear anything down the hall. Not even Mum’s voice any more; I couldn’t tell how many people were really there. I tried to hear through the rich-people dinner in my brain, treat it like a spaghetti strainer that would let through words I wanted, but it worked the opposite and all the voices got stuck in a tangled-up mess.

  I squeezed my arms in hard against my sides until my pits hurt, clenching so my body wouldn’t fly off the bed and bang down the hall and scream “Shutt Upp!” in all their faces. I forced myself heavy, until my arms went deep in the mattress and I fell asleep, going in and out, sitting at the long table, seeing the hands of the Shutt Upp Lady, her throat, and all the silverware clinking, and bottles clinking and Mum’s voice and laughing and my bed, and a man’s voice and then Josh’s voice and Kolchak from Night Stalker on TV. I was sitting with Kolchak and Josh in Riley Park. And glue sniffers were there, but I wouldn’t look at them; Kolchak and Josh’s shoulders and chest were big and thick and then they were horses and they curved their whole selves around me like walls.

  The clock said just past seven when I woke up. There was still voices in the living room, low jumbles like rolling clumps of dirt. Mum never came to bed. I sat up and dumped my feet on the floor and balled up the extra cloth of my flannel nightie in my fists. My nanna’d sent it to me last Christmas and I was still a bit short for it. I tipped my feet up and grabbed the hem-part in my toes and then it sounded like my mother said, “The cat’s shoulders squirm in God’s head.” I went down the hall to the living room.

  Mum and a guy were sprawled on the couch, another guy was passed out in the armchair. She raised her head up and her face turned slowly when I came in the room; her lids were sinking halfway down her eyes and she said, “Hiya. What’re you doing up to, darlin’? mm?” Her blouse was slipped to one side and you could see her black bra-strap showing on her shoulder. She had one foot curled underneath her and one sticking out straight with a high heel hanging half off. Her other shoe was on the coffee table. The way her legs were bent yanked up her skirt and made it so you could see her garter belt and stockings and everything. I suddenly got super-pissed-off with her for looking that way, right in front of people, and I wanted to kick her: for the lipstick on her chin and mascara and blue stuff all smeary around her eyes.

  Her mouth was dry and she twitched it sideways, made a pout-face and looked around. She sat up straighter on the edge of the couch, trying to push hair back out of her eyes. “Christ,” crawled out her throat like a bug, “I gotta lie down.” She stuffed both her fists in the couch cushions, but nothing happened; her body didn’t notice. She wobbled her head side to side and gave our ceiling “the look” as if it was keeping her down. Then a breath and a sigh, and she looked at the guy beside her and shoved herself up. He watched her limp past me to the hallway, then shut his eyes and she scraped along the wall, limping till she kicked her one shoe off along the way. I followed after her.

  She fell on the bed and dragged herself up to a pillow. I said, “Mummy,” at her like maybe it might make her shake her head and say, “Holy cow, what am I doing?” She didn’t answer.

  “Mum!”

  “Shhhh … what. Lemme sleep, OK, sweety.”

  I went up near her face and whispered in case it’d get her attention more. “But those guys are still there, you know. Those guys are in the living room … Mummy. Mum!”

  “What.”

  “Those guys.”

  “Mmhmm. They’ll go,” and she fell asleep. I sat beside her a minute, chewing the inside of my cheek, then crawled in beside her. At least she wasn’t moaning and groaning because of her head hurting.

  The room stank like cigarettes and sour wine. I stared at the ceiling, let it go dark and then bright, gave it stripes, then leaves, then clouds, and hoped for footsteps and a door slam. Mum snored.

  I wished it wasn’t Sunday, I wished it was tomorrow so I could be getting ready for school. I started grade 4 almost a month before that. The kids were nicer at General Wolfe, but my homeroom teacher was a mean bag: Mrs. Annis. The whole class was scared of her. The harder she whacked yardsticks on desks, hucked chalk at loud kids and told us how unsufferable we were, the more crazy the room went when she left it: fighting, screaming, swearing, chalk-chucking, desk-dancing—and always, we put a kid to be lookout at the door who’d yell “Anus” when he could see her or hear her shoes coming aroun
d the corner. She was also the music teacher, and music was the only thing she made as big a deal about as us keeping our yaps shut; she did both at the same time sometimes. Like on Friday, when she gathered us all around her piano, handed out papers with the song notes and words and told us not to sing just listen. Only listen. She put her fingers on the piano keys and warned us over her shoulder one more time, “No singing now, just follow along on your sheet music.” So we did. Then she played the piano and then, sticking her chest up the way she made us do, yelled out the lyrics to “Here Comes the Sun.” She sounded like when Eddy pretended to be Ethel Merman and she kept watching our lips and eyes the whole time. I watched my pages but, cuz of how I have buck teeth and an overbite, my mouth comes open a bit and the next thing I knew, Anus smashed her fists down on the piano and screamed, “I said no singing!” All the kids’ eyes flicked around like they were scared for whoever went and did it. “Grace! Look at me when I’m speaking to you. Did you hear me, were you listening? Do not sing! Now, put your music away and go sit down.” I was going to explain but I just said forget-it in my head, and sat down.

  I listened to Mum breathe, glad at least there wasn’t Anus on Sunday. The only friend I had at school now was Josh, anyway, and he was downstairs. And I hated Gabrielle for not being my friend any more and Mum too for phoning their mum to tell her that Gabrielle’s sister was fired because of smoking in our place. I was getting more lonely-feeling and I couldn’t sleep, so I gave up and left Mum to snore her head off. I went as quietly as I could through the kitchen so I could see if those guys were still there. They were dead asleep now, right where I left them: one on the couch and one in the armchair. Both of them had long stringy arms and matching hair. The one in the chair lolled his head back and his mouth fell open with a snort. He had whiter teeth than I expected to be in that whiskery face and the parts around his mouth and eyes were bluish. The other guy laid on the couch with his face squished in the cushions, one arm behind his back, one dangling on the floor. He had an unsmoked cigarette lying in his floor hand. I backed into the kitchen and made a bowl of Shreddies and sat on the counter not swinging my legs and not banging the spoon against the side of the bowl, just listening to a wheezy sound from one of the noses in the living room. A few minutes later, I put the bowl in the sink, changed and went to find Sheryl Sugarman and Josh.

  They were awake and I could hear them arguing before I knocked: “Josh, turn off the TV and clean that bloody cage … Josh! Jesus, why do you insist on listening to that crap?”

  “Cuz it’s funny. Are there real places like this, like nearby we could go to?”

  “Josh! Your hamsters are living in filth. And you’re Jewish!”

  “Wait, Mum, look, this guy’s blind, watchthis watchthis—ahh-ha!” Josh’s voice was coming from the living room. Sheryl made a growly noise and slammed a door at the other end of the hall. And then only Josh giggling and a preacher-voice on TV. I knocked quietly. He giggled again. I knocked again. Then he stomped his feet fast to the door. It flew open and he pulled me in by my sleeve. “Hey! Com’ere-com’ere, you gotta see this.”

  On TV was a guy with thick grey hair and gold glasses, pounding one of those high church-desk things on a stage. There were tall white flowers in gold vases behind him and a blue fluffy carpet you could see when the camera got far enough away to show the backs of the audience heads. All of them were nodding while the preacher-guy hollered at them. He was more scary than Anus. I was glad for their sake he didn’t have a yardstick. I sat on the couch beside Josh and listened: “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved!”

  Josh whacked me on the forehead with his palm and yelled, “Black and tortured spirit leave thy body” and his hand yanked off, sucking my black spirit with it. I giggled. “You just missed the healings,” he told me. “Next Sunday we have to go find a place where they do this, it’d be a gas—OK, look, see that chick there, she’s—she was all gimpy and now she can walk. Cool, eh? This is way better than wrestling.”

  “Where’s your Mum?” I said, for proof I was never listening outside their door.

  “She’s in her bedroom, I think. She’s mad at me cuz I’m Jewish.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. She’s weird. She’s mad cuz I’m Jewish and I’m watching preacher guys.”

  “I saw this movie with my mum where this lady tries to take this man, who’s Jewish, to a party and he couldn’t go cuz it was restricted.”

  Josh peeled his eyes off the TV. “You mean like there were naked people everywhere?”

  “Yeah, I thought there was going to be too and nobody was. They all had suits and dresses and then my mum was trying to explain, but it was stupid cuz how would they even know he was Jewish and why would they even care?”

  “Well, if Jews had stuff like this, I’d go, though, to synagogue I mean, cuz this is cool. But any Jew stuff my mum ever tells me’s boring; they don’t even get Christmas trees. And plus, ever since my dad left, my mum says we’re going to be more Jewish and we’re not getting a tree any more neither. It’s stupid. Who wants to be Jewish—they don’t eat hot dogs or cheeseburgers, they don’t do nothing. It’s boring.” I listened to him and watched Rhoda crawl up over his shoulder and down his pyjama top. He reached in and picked her out, hamster-noising into her face. “Where’s Carly?” he asked her nose. “You’ve lost Carly. And now she’s pissed off cuz I haven’t cleaned the stupid hamster cage. And cuz she hates this church stuff; she always has a hairy when I put it on.”

  I looked at Rhoda and something rustled under my hair. I knew it was Carly but the shiver on my neck made me jump anyway. I turned and cupped her fat fluffy self up before she could crawl between the couch cushions.

  Josh watched us. “Carly, you frog!” and his eyes snapped back to the TV. “OK, look, watch this—this is cool, people in the audience start rolling their eyes and stuff and moaning like they’re totally off their rockers.”

  The preacher-guy’s face took up the whole screen all the sudden. My nose twitched; it did smell kind of zooish in the room. The preacher-guy tilted his chin up and looked into the lights overhead so that his glasses gave him flashlights for eyes. He pulled off the glasses, tears dripped down onto his cheeks and he said, “I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.”

  Josh cackled. “It’s like Star Trek, eh? There’s a better guy on later, like around lunchtime, but my mum’ll go mental if I watch this till then … What do you wanna do?”

  “I don’t know. What do you wanna do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  So I helped him clean the hamster cage and then he doubled me down to Riley Park and we rode around long enough to get into a scrap about mink fur and Josh’s paintbrushes and mink farms and animal traps and what was the difference between a mink and Carly and Rhoda and I said forget-it to him doubling me any more and he yelled that I was such a goof he wouldn’t let my stupid ass touch his bike anyway and I stomped home by myself, all pissed off that he said ass again but kind of wishing he’d chase after me and make me not mad so I wouldn’t have to go home yet.

  I closed the apartment door behind me and looked down the hall to the living room. Nobody was there. Then chuckles in the bedroom. I went to the door and poked my head in. Mum was sitting up in bed, sipping a beer, and the two guys were on the floor, one cross-legged, one lying sideways, passing a joint around. She looked up and smiled. “There she is,” and she introduced her friends. They both grunted hello through holding their breath, and one of them passed the joint to my mother. I couldn’t stand watching her with that stuff. I’d seen her do it with Sadie’s mum and dad and listened to them giggle and talk and try to hold smoke in their stomachs at the same time. I waited a minute anyway, watching the droopy moustache of the guy who was sleeping on the couch earlier. They were talking about swimming and dying and being buried at sea and the
n something about Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I read that one last month, while I was waiting for Go Ask Alice, and part of me wanted to tell them that, that I knew all about it, but more of me didn’t want to say I read anything they read. The droopy-moustache guy my mother called Gary asked if I ever heard of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Mum watched me with a smirk that I figured was a proud-thing, wanting me to show them what kinda kid she had.

  “Yup, I read it ages ago,” I told him. He asked if I knew what it was about. “Reincarnation,” I said. I saw a guy on The Mike Douglas Show once talking about reincarnation, so I knew the whole scoop on that. “Getting smarter and braver and flying higher until you get higher and higher in heaven.”

  “Whoa,” he said, nodding. He looked at Mum and then back at me and back at my mum. “She’s kind of a trippy kid, eh?”

  Mum kept smiling. “Yup, she’s a funny bird.” They all burst out laughing. I left and heard Mum mumble, “Uh oh—Honey, we weren’t laughing at you, you know. We’re just being silly. Hon? you mad?”

  “No, I’m just—doing something.” I went to the living room and sat on the couch. The air was kind of like that smell that gets in your nose before you barf. There were glasses and empty beer bottles and wine on the coffee table and floor. Cigarette butts were floating in a glass of beer beside a pickle jar of ashes and butts. Dead matches and grey flakes were all over the place. Henry climbed up on the couch and yowled until I remembered to give him cat food.

  I decided to go over to Sadie and Eddy’s.

  When I got there, Eddy was on the porch, leaning over a piece of paper, concentrating like crazy. Sadie stood against the railing eating a piece of watermelon. She spat seeds and watched me get near the house. Eddy didn’t look up until I got to their bottom step. Then they “hi”ed at me together. Sadie sneered at whatever Eddy was looking at. Nobody said anything. It was kind of a long time since I even saw them and I thought they’d be more happy or something. But they were just their crabby old selves. So I said, “What’re you guys doing?”