Summer Cannibals

by Melanie Hobson

  Hello, darling.

  Margaret had come in quietly, reaching past her daughter to fill the kettle.

  Mind if I just— The hollyhocks are over, aren’t they?

  Georgina stepped aside while her mother ran water into the kettle, claiming that sink with all the years and the meals she’d cooked and all the judgments she’d laid down among her children to keep their squabbles from drawing blood.

  I don’t know what your father was thinking, arranging a tour at this time of year. And his first one too.

  Margaret reached for a tea bag, readying her cup with a third of a teaspoon of sugar, leaving the spoon in, drawing her dressing gown more tightly across her chest. Patterned blue paisley satin that was unravelling but she wore it anyway. She started picking up the flowers, stripping their stems.

  Did he talk to you about it? Before he booked it?

  It was an innocent enough question, conversational, but Georgina knew it was more than that. Her mother was trying to determine the extent of the enemy. How best to counterattack.

  I’ll get another vase, Georgina said rather than answering, going into the next room and getting the putty-white one from the mantel.

  They’re for the bedrooms, Georgina told her mother when she came back, putting down the small vase that she’d brought and lifting the big glass one out of the sink before her mother could stuff any more flowers into it. Her mood was already souring, the kitchen beginning to feel small with herself and her mother in it.

  When does Jax get in? Georgina asked, manoeuvring herself carefully back in front of the sink so her mother couldn’t reach the flowers or the vase, looking at what was left to work with—yellow rudbeckia, one short phlox and two longer ones, and a confusion of different-coloured poppies. None of which would look good together.

  Oh. Late. Midnight, something like that. I told her, take a taxi from the airport, I’ll pay for it.

  As if Jax doesn’t have a wallet.

  Where’s your father? she asked then, in that way she had of making impatience sound like indifference. Practised over years and years. I suppose I’ll have to make another cake, she said, frowning at what was left of the one she’d made the other day. Crumbs, mostly. It hadn’t even stayed around long enough for Margaret to shake the icing sugar across its top or transfer it to a plate from the butcher’s block where she’d knocked it out of the pan to cool.

  Georgina shrugged. She could tell her mother was looking for a fight and she wasn’t going to give it to her. Bad enough she was there at all instead of at her own house, working, which was what she was supposed to be doing, which was why she’d put James in sailing camp so she could prepare her syllabi and her lectures and finish the article she’d promised to have ready a month ago. Bullshit, Georgina said under her breath, cramming the flowers into the two vases. She wasn’t going to let this get to her. She was an adult and a mother too, she thought, looking out past the cliff to the lake. James, her son, was down there somewhere sulking. Somewhere at the blunted edge of all those streets.

  We don’t even get on the water until the last day, he’d shrieked before slamming the car door that morning. The very last day.

  Georgina had read about this in the newspaper, early puberty, but she thought it only affected the girls. Just another thing, she thought, where he’s different. Another aberration on my plate—feeling increasingly sorry for herself, stuck there in her childhood kitchen. She stood still a moment, hands on the vase’s neck, her mother working on her tea, and she looked over the lake toward the boomerang of escarpment on the other side. It was hazy, the heat already rising from the highway and running along its base into Toronto, where everything she longed for happened. There was too much smog to see it properly but she knew it was there and stuffed with life, its downtown stacked to the sky, the single gold tower of the Royal Bank gleaming like an ingot. It was always there, just far enough away to be beyond her reach. If this house was a country seat, then Toronto was a walled palace where the brightest minds lived under the patronage of a populace who could never get enough. Were always hungry for improvements, discoveries, magnum opuses. A productive riot of creativity and innovation. While out here in the provinces, Georgina thought defeatedly, we’re still rotating the same crops year after year after fucking year. Even her grandparents had never seen her as someone who might, one day, benefit from their civic largesse. As if her last name—her father’s name—didn’t have the necessary brass to do anything original. The one thing we’ll give you credit for, Georgina had once overheard her grandparents tell her father, is that you didn’t indulge Margaret’s artistic pretensions.

  Georgina shifted her eyes to the harbour and the few boats wallowing slack-sailed offshore and thought of James again. She had to stop feeling sorry for him. Daycare, preschool, afterschool—yes, she’d done that to him, started him at four months old, but hadn’t she chosen them well? Programs that got him outside? Not overcrowded single rooms with locks on the door and the same grubby toys year after year, young teachers who were just killing time until someone married them and set them up in their own homes. And that sailing camp had a waiting list that went over to a second page. Georgina had had to pull strings to get him in. She’d hired an occupational therapist to work out his kinks, manipulate his motor skills, brush his arms to organize his sensory input. Wasn’t she doing everything she could?

  He could use a little neglect, she thought. Some time away from her. She’d promised her mother she’d stay and look after Pip, just the sisters, no other family pressing in on them. It was their mother’s idea of a treatment plan. Gather us all together, like a school of doctor fish, and we’ll gnaw all the dead tissue away.

  I suppose, her mother said then, holding the cutting board with the cake’s remnants over the garbage can as if it were a ceremonial platter, I will just have to start again.

  4

  David didn’t know what brought the memory back. Perhaps it was being pushed in there with all the roses, that smell reminding him of the mother’s cheap eau de toilette, or the slight panic he was beginning to feel with the garden tour closing in. That run-in with his neighbour hadn’t helped, or the girls coming to fill the house again … maybe it was all of it combined that had brought the awful memory back.

  They’d been fighting all weekend, David and his friend, since the minute they’d left school together on Friday. They were thirteen and it was supposed to be fun, a weekend sleepover on the friend’s farm, but they’d fought over everything: who was going to have the last slice of bread and jam, who was going to climb the tree first, who was going to have the biggest pillow and the softest cover and who, on that Sunday morning, was going to wear the old rubber gumboots and who was going to wear the leather boots that laced above the ankle and were warm, because it was late fall and neither child was dressed properly for the cold.

  It’s my house, the friend said, the trump card he’d been playing all weekend long. I get to choose. I get whatever I want.

  But I’m your guest, David protested, drawing his shoulders up and trying to look more powerful. Hating his friend, again, for being so greedy and snivelling and spoiled. For thwarting him at every turn. For lording it over him. For making him feel small and inferior, just because he had a whole farm and David lived in town in a mean house with barely a yard and nothing to do all day but stay inside or walk the streets where a hundred sets of eyes were watching, ready to jump on any hint of vandalism. Where everyone had been swindled by his father’s roofing business at least once and would look at David and weigh the benefits of taking him down.

  It was raining that morning, and they’d gone to the barn to find something to do until the sun came out and they could go to the river and spend the afternoon chasing fish and making bridges and dams out of anything they could find—logs, cans, tree limbs, whatever was lying around. They’d get up in the hayloft and make a fort, or mess with the horses, or rummage through all the junk in the tack room—whatever they wanted because a k
id’s life on a farm, David had discovered, was a life without the fun-spoiling oversight of a parent. It was space to roam and the freedom to cut trees with knives and push entire banks into streams to muddy them.

  David saw the spider first. It was in the middle of the barn floor, a huge daddy-long-legs frozen there and waiting for them to make the first move. David grabbed a metal pole from the floor and raced to squash it, pole straight up, and brought it down again and again as the spider darted to escape. His friend grabbed the pole as well, trying to wrestle it for himself, wanting all the glory of the kill. Asserting his right to it. And when the pole hit the faulty overhead line and a thousand volts of electricity came coursing through, David’s friend got the best of that too. The rubber boots David was wearing bounced the current back, and the leather boots, with his friend inside them, took it all. David had wished the little prick dead and now he was, right in front of him, all his muscles cramped around that pole. Scorch marks at the corners of his mouth, as if his scream had been flames licking at his cheeks.

  That scream had stayed with David for a long time. Years. He could hear it now. High pitched and shrill like an animal, all one note, not the keening modulation of the boy’s mother prying her son off the rod and falling with him to the barn floor, trying to wake him up, kissing and slapping his face … her sounds the same as David’s own, as they’d both sobbed and yelled over the boy’s dead body, David seized with guilt—a terrible accident the mother placed squarely on him, and he knew she was right.

  Even his parents, he remembered, had asked him why he’d done it. What had possessed him to do such a foolish thing? Hadn’t they taught him better than that? And the price, they’d said piously, as if he didn’t already know it down to the grubby soles of his feet, was a human life. A human life. They didn’t need to send him to his room to think about what he’d done because David sent himself, for a week, refusing to come out—pissing out the window and shitting in a drawer. He’d cried more tears in that week than he’d thought possible.

  Funny thing about that kid, he’d told his wife once, when she’d brought it up again. The day before, we’d been playing on dirt—a big pile of it in a field—and it slid and buried him. I grabbed a shovel to dig him out and just as I was going to drive it in, the ground shook and it was his face. Right there. Just where I was going to put that shovel in. I would have put it in his face.

  It’s too bad you didn’t, Margaret had said coolly. He would have been at a hospital instead of in that barn. He’d be alive.

  David reached for another stake, sucking his hand where he’d snagged it on a thorn, thinking about what she’d said—that he might have helped that boy by hurting him, by staving in his face. That a disfigured life was better than no life at all.

  He jammed the stake in. Tied the rose to it. Thinking how much easier it had made it, that she understood. That she took his spikes of violence without complaint. Saw their necessity for a full life; a lived life. A life of honesty.

  You’re passionate, she’d said in the early days, giving it a name. Making it all okay.

  Their own rooms of course, Margaret snapped, as if her daughter’s question, “Which rooms should I prepare?” was just another attempt to get at her. To make her feel that she wasn’t performing adequately. That it was her job to get the bedrooms ready. But why should it be? What, after all, was the point of raising children if you couldn’t lay tasks on them. And she had enough to do already, just trying to make her husband see sense about the garden tour he’d arranged for two days hence.

  Cancel it, she’d told him. Unequivocal.

  It was the way he’d inclined his head, just slightly, and mumbled his response, that told her he had no intention of cancelling anything. That he didn’t see how Pippa and Jax arriving had to make life come to a standstill, and how a luxury coach with fifty-two gawking strangers would be like unleashing locusts. And how she couldn’t withstand another plague. Couldn’t withstand his inevitable rage when the whole venture crumbled, as she knew that it would.

  We, she’d said, steadying herself against the island, are already weakened by the state of things.

  But David had seen only her cigarette’s ash beginning to quiver as it lengthened, about to fall across the back of her hand, and he’d pictured stubbing it out to give her the stigmata he knew she craved. And the royal “we” was his to use, not hers.

  Yes, darling, was all he’d said. Slow and measured. I understand.

  Georgina started with her own room on the second floor, determined to be comfortable if she had to stay there, as her mother said she did. “Your sister’s quarantine,” she was calling it. Her room was across the landing from her parents’ room which, in that house, meant it was twenty leagues across a sea of carpets layered on top of one another. At some point their parents had gone through an extended phase of exotic trips abroad, and more carpets had been sent back than could possibly be accommodated even by all the floors in that enormous house. So there were kilims draped over tables and Kashmir rugs hanging from walls and, in every space free of furniture, piles of rugs cushioning your step like a luxurious patterned turf. It made moving through the house strangely like travelling through an Ottoman court.

  Out of control, Georgina thought, pushing in the door to her old room. Avoiding, instinctively, the creak in the threshold. Her father’s clothes were draped over the wingback chair and his dressing gown was hanging from one of the bed’s columns—her parents’ marriage like a faulty switch that often propelled him out of their shared bed and into his daughter’s four-poster now that she’d moved out. On the nightstand was a box of tissues and three bottles of pills, and the duvet was pushed back where her father must have left it when he’d risen. He’d never made a bed in his life, she was sure of it.

  Georgina sighed.

  She paused at the enormous window and looked down at the section of garden she could see outside the front door, sitting for a moment on the window seat to take it in. To calm herself with the careful geometry of the circle and its plantings and its regimented style of gravel pathways like some Celtic knot or simple mandala. Already, being back in her childhood home was wearing on her. Her mother was right: a tour group was a bad idea with both Jax and Pippa arriving that night. They’d all be trapped in the house until the tour was over, and Georgina knew, from other tours her mother had hosted multiple times a year, that the people pressing the flower beds underneath the ground-floor windows wouldn’t be able to resist lifting their eyes and peering in to see what further glories were contained inside that great house set in the midst of the sculpted landscape. These tours, she knew, weren’t really for gardeners at all. Those fanatics were busy tilling their own soil, coaxing life, pruning madly to force a second bloom. No, these tours were filled with lifestyle tourists who wanted to pretend, for one afternoon, that they were to the manor born.

  As if, Georgina thought, pulling the sheets back from the double bed, that’s a benefit. An achievement the world could agree upon.

  She bundled the two large sheets together and left the room, passing through the sewing room with its wall of cupboards stuffed full of sheet sets, pillowcases, draperies, lace tablecloths and stacks and stacks of textiles that had accumulated there over the years. The ironing board was set up in one corner with its iron and spray bottle of starch, as if one still dressed formally for dinner. Or for anything. Georgina herself was still in the T-shirt and shorts that she’d slept in. And they weren’t even hers. Just something she’d pulled from her husband’s dresser the night before because all of her own were dirty, and she’d just wanted to get into bed and go to sleep and get the whole thing started at her parents’. Get it over with.

  You’re so money, a girlfriend had told her once. You can wear rags because your house is so obviously a fucking mansion.

  The back hall, which the sewing room let into, was narrow and plain because it was the servants’ wing. Two bedrooms opened off it, one of them Pippa’s, and they were so small i
n relation to the windows the house was studded with that they seemed all glass, and were bright and sunny and gave the impression of conservatories An unexpected grandeur for a servant—as if the architect had understood oppression and the need for stolen spaces that opened out to a horizon wider than you could ever imagine for yourself. There was just enough wall space for a bed and a tiny nightstand but nothing else, so their parents had paid a carpenter to build drawers into those bedrooms’ closets for their girls to have somewhere to put their clothes. That was one thing Georgina would admit about her parents: they’d always been good at compartments. At relegating and dividing, even if they didn’t always get it right.

  At the far end of the hallway, at the foot of the stairs leading to the third floor, was a large closet with a porcelain utility sink and a jumble of mops and brooms and dusters. The second-floor vacuum cleaner was in there too, and as Georgina opened the laundry chute to toss the dirty sheets down, she glanced at the closet and wondered if she should vacuum as well. Thinking that she may as well make herself useful. Thinking that it was just like Pip to drop her bomb when it would inflict the most damage, inconveniencing everyone. Pippa never considered anyone else but herself. Georgina’s husband had just looked at her when she’d told him she was moving back in with her parents for as long as it took to straighten Pippa out. Days, weeks, she didn’t know. They were both academics and on summer break from their classes, and with only one child between them to manage, all he could do was nod. Their professional lives bled effortlessly into their personal ones, and if he were to challenge her it would first have to be researched, stated clearly and peer reviewed, and neither of them had the time, or desire, for that. Their life together operated under the mandate of least resistance. There’d been a time, at the very beginning, when they’d tried risk—even sex in the campus library’s stacks late at night—but neither had taken to it, and they’d quickly settled into a life of studied repetition and maturity. If Georgina said her family needed her, it wouldn’t even occur to her husband to question it. Or for Georgina not to go.