Hellgoing

by Lynn Coady

  I found the girl creepy, for reasons I understand now but didn’t then. I knew she wouldn’t do for a regular friend; that she would have to be a secret friend, a beach friend. I wasn’t about to reject her friendship outright, however. I was too fascinated by what she had to say.

  I hunted Michael Elleman for a few days that summer, and once I got him alone I told him my own version of the stories the girl from the beach had told me. He listened, but he still wouldn’t meet my eyes. When I finished, he just stood there looking spooked.

  By the end of the summer, I knew I had secured Michael’s attention. So when I started Grade Seven I was feeling sort of smug and triumphant. But I was still waiting to see what it all would amount to.

  In the hallway, I tried to get past Mr. Hope unnoticed. I felt so changed, I was almost convinced he wouldn’t recognize me.

  “Greta,” came the low horn.

  The feeling was like a lid being closed above my head.

  He was our history teacher now. We had to sit in a classroom with him every other day. Even though it was our first experience of World History, it was clear that Mr. Hope’s approach to the subject was by no means standard. Instead of teaching us units on Ancient Egypt and Julius Caesar, his units were called things like: MEGALOMANIACS AND UNDERDOGS — always all-caps, scrawled across the centre of the chalkboard when we arrived — ADULTERER-KINGS: THE BIGGEST WHORE WINS.

  Now that childhood was over, it didn’t seem right that Mr. Hope was still able to mess with us like this. It had always struck me as wrong, but now it felt distinctly wrong. For one thing, it wasn’t happening only once in a while anymore, on a substitute teacher’s schedule. It was every other day. Which meant it didn’t feel like play; like Mr. Hope just fooling around, experimenting. But maybe it had never been play. Maybe I’d assumed it was play, simply by virtue of being a kid. Grown-ups played with kids, had been my kid-assumption, they didn’t bother with them otherwise; didn’t enlist them in their grand obsessions or personal schemes.

  I decided to try telling my parents about Mr. Hope.

  “Mr. Hope,” I told them one night, “said ‘whore’ in class.”

  “About you?” my brother jeered.

  “No,” I said. “About all the world leaders.”

  “All of them?” said my mother.

  “Only the really successful ones,” I said.

  “Hah!” shouted my father around a cud of food. “Well, God bless Mr. Hope.”

  I decided that maybe the trick was not to be interested in school — that is, to make my lack of interest as clear as possible to all concerned and not be my usual passive self about it. Explicit non-interest. Mr. Hope called on me one day not long after I’d made this decision. I was busy looking at Michael Elleman at the time. Michael was the one thing in the world I did not feel passive toward. And I hadn’t acted passive toward him either. My victory with Michael over the summer had made me feel sort of emboldened about life in general.

  Michael always knew when I was looking at him, but still he never looked at me. He would brace himself on the edge of his desk and his earlobes would turn red like someone had bit them. I became addicted to this ritual — doing something to Michael with a look; a look not even returned or otherwise acknowledged.

  “Greta.”

  Nobody ever commented on the fact that he called me Greta. Not even teachers. Nobody thought it was strange, or had a problem with it. I turned away from Michael.

  “Cleopatra,” I drawled.

  It wasn’t a completely out-of-the-blue thing to say. We’d covered Cleopatra last week, Mr. Hope explaining that while Cleopatra was an example of an especially successful whore, her reign had come to an end because she wasn’t, ultimately, the biggest or the best. She just couldn’t sustain it.

  But just then Mr. Hope had not been talking about Cleopatra. She’d committed suicide in last week’s class. She was dead and buried, taking her glittering empire with her, and history had moved on.

  “I beg your pardon, Greta?”

  “Cleopatra. That’s my answer.”

  “I haven’t asked you a question yet.”

  “Oh,” I said, playing dumb. “Sorry.”

  The other children tittered edgily at my tone. Explicit non-interest.

  Mr. Hope allowed the tittering to continue for a moment or two before silencing every one of us with his response. His response was that he lit up — he actually set himself ablaze — in a terrible grin. All burning eyes, long teeth, recessive gums.

  He even clapped his hands together like a child.

  “Insubordination!” boomed Mr. Hope. “Right on time, Greta. Congratulations on your garden-variety adolescent rebellion.”

  He beamed at me. He batted his eyelashes.

  “You’re welcome,” I answered. It was an incoherent answer, upon which Mr. Hope pounced.

  “Oh, I’m welcome!” said Mr. Hope, his pitch crawling up toward the grotesque octave he’d used on Bernie Heany in Grade Five. “Am I welcome? I’m welcome to all this? He spread his hands, taking in the classroom, the highway outside our window, the squatting town beyond. “Thanks so much, Greta. What largesse. What riches you offer.”

  The implication being that I was the highway, with its gravel shoulder full of cigarette butts and Styrofoam shreds. I was the squatting town, huddled on either side of the highway, leaning into it offering takeout coffee and a free oil change and 2 litres of no-name cola for only 99 cents. I was it and it was me and we were of a piece — inextricable and indivisible. Forever.

  The even worse implication — that I had thrown open my arms. I had made myself so ridiculous as to throw open my arms and say: You’re welcome.

  IN GRADE NINE I became pregnant about halfway through the year. I wrote my midterms in a fog of nausea and stupidity-­hormones, and did poorly, even in my best subjects. I’d become an idiot — “stunned” was the word my brother used, as in “What areya, stunned?” Because I could no longer, for example, remember the words for things — once I called my toothbrush “the kitchen” and my slippers “foot tunnels” because it was the best I could come up with. One day, at the height of it, sitting in the back seat of the car with my brother one Saturday afternoon on the way to the mall, I forgot his name. I sat there laughing in disbelief as he stared at me. “It’s on the tip of my tongue!” I assured him. It didn’t matter, because nothing mattered when you were that stupid. I gloried in my new-found imbecility, knowing I was helpless anyway, that no one could blame me for it any more than they could blame me for barfing up my morning egg before it had even travelled halfway down my esophagus.

  I should say it was not uncommon to be a pregnant fifteen-­year-old in my hometown. Not that it went unremarked upon, but at the same time, the community wasn’t exactly rocked.

  History, Mr. Hope lectured us in Grade Nine, is about giving up. And learning how even those famed for their unwillingness to give up eventually have giving up thrust upon them. They stockpile gold in the path of giving up. They blockade that path with armies. They soak the path with the blood of those armies. Ozymandias. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. History tells us there is no real might. Might is illusory — do we understand the word illusory, people? It’s transitory. You don’t know that word, look it up, I don’t have time to define everything for you. Those are the two things might is — illusory and transitory. Might is not right, people, or wrong for that matter. Because might is not real.

  Well, I remember thinking with the compost I had left for brains, that’s good, I guess. All the invading, civilian-killing armies, the kings chopping heads off wives — they didn’t really exist. Or they did, but they died. So they might as well not have.

  “All that’s left is despair. That’s the footprint, people. Let that sink in for a while.”

  We all sat and did. I stared at Mr. Hope’s sweater-clad D and considered that I now had a D all my own. More of a lower-case d. And I remembered how I learned to print them both, side by side, in Grade On
e. Big D and little d. Nice and neat. One after the other. Never getting the little d confused with b like the other children, because I was so smart back then. I always remembered the way the big and little D faced off — they looked inward, toward one another, never away. That’s how you remembered. I imagined running up to the front of the class like I had as a child, but instead of wrapping my arms around Mr. Hope I would just stand there and face him and we’d compare Ds.

  “Greta.”

  I raised my head. I had been gazing down at my d.

  “Sleepy, Greta?”

  It was a fair question. I had been falling asleep at school a lot since getting pregnant. Most of my teachers just told me to go to the office and ask to lie down when they saw me drooling onto my own shoulder. Mr. Hope, however, always woke me up. Sometimes he’d snap his fingers in front of my face. You’re not getting off that easy, he would tell me.

  “What if you throw a rock?” I asked then.

  And why did I say that? Partly, it was the stupidity thing, where I just said whatever happened to be floating at the front of my brain, like kitchen instead of toothbrush. What was floating in the front of my brain at that moment was Grade One. The truth is, the stupidity was actually more like a sleep-state — that twilight between sleep and waking; balanced at the very top of the juddering chain-link fence that separates the dream of childhood from the rest of real life.

  So Mr. Hope scowled more than usual, as thrown as I’d ever seen him.

  “A rock, Greta? Okay. What if you did?”

  “And it hits a guy in the eye and, like, his eyeball pops out.”

  I didn’t mean for the class to crack up the way it did — I had just been trying to make a vague point about consequence. First an eye is in, then it’s out — that was all I had been trying to say. Ask Teddy: did the rock, hurled at you by the mighty — the Mighty Rock-Wielder — leave its mark on you or not? Was it illusory? Was it transitory?

  Mr. Hope didn’t take my point that way, however. He didn’t even seem to remember about Teddy, whereas for me, because of the way my memory was, Teddy had never left Mr. Hope’s side.

  Mr. Hope wanted, he said above the laughter, to see me for a moment in the hallway.

  We stood eye to eye, because now we were pretty much the same height. I remembered how important it was to hold his eye, but I couldn’t quite remember why I had always believed this. He began slowly, once he could be sure he had my full attention. The man was a born communicator.

  “I’m doing you a favour, Greta,” he told me. “It’s not my way to take people aside when they’re acting up in class. You know that. I like to settle things up front.”

  I stared at him, remembering my Cleopatra humiliation in Grade Seven. He saw me remembering it and knew I wasn’t grateful.

  “It’s sad,” he told me after we’d eyeballed one another awhile longer, “To witness a person actually choose to be garbage … to watch her make that decision over time.”

  For a moment I just gulped air.

  “You can’t talk to me that way,” I whispered.

  “I can’t?” He looked dramatically around, up and down the hallway, as if for the Gestapo. “And yet I am. And it depresses me, frankly, that no one else has bothered.”

  The tears I was willing out of my eyes were trickling into my nasal cavity and now I sniffed gigantically to keep them from escaping.

  Mr. Hope made a swallow of distaste. “I remember you as a nice girl, Greta,” he told me. “You were once a very sweet little girl.”

  “You think you can do anything,” I said. From the depths of my stupidity and dreaming, I was impressed with myself for saying this out loud — it seemed monumental. But Mr. Hope didn’t even seem to hear me.

  “We were friends, I thought,” he said, and folded his arms, almost pouting.

  And because my perceptions were a soup that day, because my memory wasn’t a memory so much as it was a kind of piling-up of incidents and apprehensions and I had no ability to distinguish here and now as opposed to then and there; because, perhaps, Mr. Hope struck me as not a man but an eternal principle, a planet around which I would revolve forever, my only thought was: Poor David Culligan against the chain-link fence.

  I’d had no sympathy whatsoever for him back in Grade Three, when I pursued him across the schoolyard. I hadn’t given poor David Culligan a second thought until this moment, six years later. David was just a victim, a forgettable casualty.

  And standing there with Mr. Hope, I started blushing. A delayed reaction from six years ago, in response to the awkwardness of that moment in the schoolyard, the excruciation of having trapped David Culligan against the fence. All I’d really been focused on up until that point was the chase. I can compare the feeling now (and I could in the hallway, too, standing and blushing in front of Mr. Hope) to a sexual encounter. The same tentative approach, the same self-conscious embarrassment, which you know must simply be pushed through, and overcome, if you’re to get anywhere.

  I had bounced David against the fence a few times, liking the violent jangle of it. Ug, ug, ug, he grunted with each shove, freckled eyelids fluttering.

  Then, I remembered, I had hesitated. I’d been shoving him as hard as I could, but David didn’t strike me as a boy in mortal terror. Was David, in fact, enjoying himself? Did he think this was playing? I knew the only way to eradicate that possibility was to punch him for real. Hard; in the gut. Where it mattered.

  Who’s going to love me?

  Deep inside my lower-case d, something was turning over; testing the walls. The comprehension that Mr. Hope thought he was being kindly as he stood there pouting at me in the hallway. He thought he was being benevolent — that he had never been anything but. Here is what he had always understood our understanding to be: him kind, reaching down, singling me out, because I was so special to him. More special than anyone.

  I was his Greta.

  My blush drained off. Our Ds faced in. He held my eye, and I held his.

  There was a fence, and someone was against it.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Ongoing gratitude to Melanie Little and Sarah MacLachlan for their kindness, wisdom, and no-nonsense faith. And to the vital, crackling nerve centre of Canadian literature that is House of Anansi.

  Thanks also to Mary Schendlinger and Stephen Osborne for helming Geist magazine in Vancouver, another such nerve centre on the west coast. Geist published two of these stories—“Take This and Eat It” and “The Natural Elements.” The editing process was such that I probably should have been paying them, as opposed to the other way around.

  Thanks also to Emily Schultz at Joyland.com, for bringing “Clear Skies” to the world wide web, the Walrus for publishing “Wireless” and John Metcalf for liking “Dogs in Clothes.” And thanks to Ben Sures for acting as technical adviser on “Body Condom.”

  Thanks always to my agent, Christy Fletcher.

  And thanks to Marina Endicott and Rob Appleford for hanging in there with me through the writing of “Mr. Hope.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © ROB APPLEFORD

  Lynn Coady is the author of the bestselling novel The Antagonist, which was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, as well as the novels Mean Boy, Saints of Big Harbour, and Strange Heaven and the short story collection Play the Monster Blind. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, and has four times made the Globe and Mail’s annual list of Top 100 Books. Originally from Cape Breton, she now lives in Edmonton, Alberta, where she is a founding and senior editor of the award-winning magazine Eighteen Bridges.

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Geo
rge Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”