Summer Cannibals

by Melanie Hobson

  He liked to start his day here, among his possessions, reassuring himself of his success.

  Taking his seat at the head of the big table they used only for special occasions, David thought, as he did every time he sank into them, how absolutely correct he’d been to have the chairs reupholstered in padded red velvet. His wife had wanted to keep the chairs in the original leather but he’d gone ahead and had it done, and weeks had passed before she’d even noticed. There was so much, he sighed, that woman doesn’t see. So much she didn’t give him credit for. She liked to remind him that she suffered, as if he was the cause of that, when really everything he did was for her comfort. He only gave her what he knew she needed.

  Over the past week, David had been going through the gardening expenses, and the view of the extravagant herbaceous border outside the window was reassuring. He could have bought a summer cottage with all that money, and furnished it and had a boat or two and taken months off every year to use them with the family, but instead he’d built a garden, maintaining and improving it, flower beds devouring the grass and enough trees felled that they’d kept their fireplaces blazing for the last twenty-seven winters without having to buy any wood. Something to be said for that. Self-sufficiency. It was an investment, he chuckled, that would just keep growing. Would burn with returns. Smoke and fire. A bonfire of earnings.

  Something about being there made him giddy. His wife immobile in the room above him while he sat there, his loot spread out. Arley Hall, Beth Chatto, Kew, Castle Howard, Hidcote, Stowe … every famous garden they’d ever toured, it was all around him. He’d reproduced the best of each of them right outside, on his own property. A smaller scale perhaps but there is perfection, he mused, in miniatures. If anything, it takes even more skill to get it right—the tiny parterre, the shrunken maze, the child-sized folly, the delicate tracery of a water feature. David likened himself to a duke who’d made a pile of money that would become, with his eventual passing, Old Money, which could be used to maintain The Estate. It was the twenty-first century; a girl could inherit that. Even the Queen had changed the rules of succession to account for a girl. And tomorrow, he was going to show it all off. His private pleasure would become a public park, just long enough for jealousy to overtake his visitors. Because David needed that. And maybe, he dared hope, one of them would go home and take a spade to his own yard and make something lasting and close to beautiful. David had always felt he had a duty to lead by example and thereby force improvements in others who needed them, but didn’t have the audacity and vigour (as he did) to undertake them on their own.

  He checked his watch. He still had to speak to his wife about the refreshments; to put her to work. The terrace, he thought, shifting his ledgers around, would be the obvious place to serve them. Another hour and he’d turn her out of bed and get her cracking on that. Thinking how reasonable that was, to let her have a little sleep even though her efforts during the night had been small. His orgasm, if he thought about it, had had very little to do with her. And when Jacqueline was back from her exercising, he’d put her to work weeding around the bases of the topiary. Even she, he thought, won’t be able to mess that up.

  And the others—well, the others would have to wait.

  Georgina sat at the big table in the bay window having breakfast by herself. The newspaper, a half-eaten bagel, a cup of coffee and silence. Trying for silence, but it was impossible to escape the fact of Pippa in the room above her. Impossible not to feel the weight of her condition pressing down. A distant sail flashed in the sunshine and it made Georgina think of placards, gleaming white, proclaiming something (Darfur? Free Tibet? Afghanistan?), and of being pulled along by Pippa as she plunged into a demonstration to find her group of activists because this—she’d shouted back to Georgina, glowing—is national. Not some lame local bullshit. It seemed enormous, that crowd, once they were pushing through it. Georgina had grabbed her sister’s hand, worried they’d be separated and she’d be left there with no one and no understanding of the cause, and that the zealots would sniff her out. Feed on her apathy, her lack of politics. But as they went deeper and met up with the other local agitators, Georgina became worried for her sister who was like fresh meat, surrounded by all those lions. And not the proud lions of fable, but beasts whose scabbed shanks knocked together and whose backs and shoulders were unequal to the size of their heads. Heads that swivelled at Pippa the moment she arrived; eyes that were feverish, ravenous.

  Pippa’s “causes” in high school were so changeable that Georgina, a few years into university by then, had briefly assumed the role of mentor to try to straighten her out. Teach her to focus. Get her to identify, at the very least, with a single group because the randomness of her attachments had become—to Georgina, who was still living at home—like a meta-commentary on Georgina’s growing sense that she herself was too single-minded and narrow in her choices. Each time Pippa picked a new banner to get behind, it felt like a jab at the constancy of Georgina’s path. Like a broadsword to her feet.

  Georgina’s gaze wandered to the west end of the city, and she thought about her colleague who’d died the week before. Such a stupid death. Gridlocked in a traffic jam on his way to the airport, he’d stepped out to take a piss. He was forty-four, never married, no children, and his mother was driving. He’d climbed over the low wall of the overpass they were stalled on, lost his footing, and fell dick out onto the freeway below. The mother told the faculty everything, an outpouring of information in a long email prompted by guilt because she didn’t get out to look for him right away. And what would you have done, her mail asked between its lines. Would you have followed him? Would you have told him to stop being a fool and wait for a proper toilet? Blaming herself but, in her tone, also blaming them. As if they were all complicit in the sad state of his life. Within the week, an adjunct claimed his office and his mailbox, and it had started Georgina wondering if she could do it as well. Disappear. Actually put into action her desire to be more than what she was. Because no one, it seemed, would care. She pushed her mug around, imagining her whole life like a parade of oiled soldiers marching over the cliff and drowning themselves in the lake. There must be a way to speed that up, a way to get it done so things can start over again. Somehow go back and take a different path.

  Her reveries were interrupted by her sister running past the windows, hopping awkwardly as she pried her shoes off, and diving into the shallow end. Jax had always made a habit of that, just to flout the safety rules and irritate their parents.

  So, Georgina thought, she’s arrived.

  She went to the window and stood there a full five minutes before she was noticed, and then Jax’s answer to her wave was a cheeky bottoms-up and water kicked so hard and high it almost wet the glass. Only thing that’s changed, Georgina thought as she watched her sister swim, is that she’s wearing clothes. A small mercy.

  It had probably been a year or more since Jax had been back. More, Georgina decided, remembering that the previous summer Jax and her husband and kids had gone to California instead. Yosemite? San Francisco? Something, anyway, more important than bringing her kids here to spend time with their only Canadian cousin. But Jax has always been like that, Georgina thought, watching her floating on her back with her eyes closed and arms outstretched like an ad for a luxury retreat. Serene. Self-satisfied. Selfish. She’s not going to be any help. Why had their mother flown her home, and why had Jax gone along with it?

  Turning away, leaving her sister to her pleasure games, Georgina went upstairs to check on Pippa. She found her lying on her side facing the wall, the bedspread half-heartedly dragged over one leg and a hip. Not even dressed, just a towel tucked under her arms. Probably from her shower the night before.

  Pips?

  Georgina waited a minute.

  Philippa, she said again, a little louder, stepping into the room and around the bed, stooping to get a better look—doing what she’d done with her son when he was a baby, creeping in to check if he’
d gone to sleep, her stomach tight, waiting for the sharp gasp that always preceded the wail. She pulled the bedspread over Pippa, up around her chin, purposefully a little rough to try and jostle her awake so they could get to the bottom of whatever had brought her there, interrupting their lives, making them nurses and handlers—as if they had the answers to anything. As if, as a collective force, they were omnipotent. Her sympathy beginning to fall away as she realized how familiar this was—ministering to Philippa. How even as adults, her little sister played the child and expected them to do what they’d always done—look after her.

  Georgina looked at the hunting scene above the bed: the trim landscape, surging hounds, and in the background the hunting party with their red coats and top hats, horses carrying them across hedgerows and idyllic fences on hooves so dainty and perfect that the fox would be lucky to be a part of that—the named star of such an impeccable show. She remembered this painting because the artist had placed the fox in the foreground, this side of a hillock, and given it a smile. A frozen, nervous, jaw-clenching smile like a cartoon which made the whole scene absurd and weirdly exceptional, and she’d loved it for that. For that pointed little snub of every hunting scene ever painted, and every pompous house they’d ever hung in. But looking at it now, she realized that the intention was ferocity, not irony, and that the artist had missed the mark. And she supposed that’s why her parents had put it there, on that forgotten wall at the forgotten end of the second floor, pushed to the edges by the gorgeously framed copies of Vermeers, Rembrandts and Caravaggios the rest of the house was hung with. This was an original, yes, but a failure.

  Georgina and her sisters had been named for boys—George, Jack and Phillip—but they were, in the end, only girls. And nothing much had ever been expected of them.

  9

  Jax floated on her back, the loose T-shirt billowing around her, and stared up at the early-morning sky without flinching. It was nothing compared to a Florida sky. She knew her parents and sisters would be complaining about the heat but, she sneered, they don’t even know what heat is. This—she swanned both her arms out—is practically cold. Goosebumps all over my body.

  Gripping the pool’s coping with her toes to anchor herself there, Jax let her eyes trace the house from its eaves down to its basement windows. Things were different, of course—there’d been improvements, certainly—but the essence of the place hadn’t changed. It was still home. When their parents had bought the house, there’d been a metal structure stacked like an Erector set from the ground up to the roof to support the old TV aerial, a metal grid like an oven rack. It had stayed there even as the gardens had grown, and the swimming pool been put in, and the new outdoor furniture was placed in conversation groupings around the patio and terrace, expensive planters bought to define boundaries—the aerial just an eyesore against the cut stone. But for a few glorious years, until their parents got around to removing it, it had been her exit route. All she’d had to do was crawl twenty feet across the steeply pitched roof from a dormer window in the attic, and then climb her way down the tower to freedom. A run through the garden’s shadows to the street and, three blocks over, the bus stop and she was away with no curfew.

  Jax sank below the pool water now, remembering. Bars, mostly. Bands. Some house parties, although they weren’t always along a bus route. For a few months there’d been the off-books reggae club in a back few rooms above a store in the north end, near the lake. She’d been initiated into it because that’s how it was—those stolen nights a sketchy network of introductions by alcoholics and addicts who’d vouch for you because you were young or pretty or money enough, and Jax was all three. Sometimes she’d take the city steps instead of waiting for the bus, dropping a hundred feet down the escarpment to the neighbourhood below, which was what she’d done the night Pippa followed her downtown.

  I saw you, Pippa said when Jax, turning, saw her slip from shadow to shadow, trailing her. You went right past my window.

  You climbed down it too? Jax had said, furious, scarcely listening when Pippa explained she’d gone out through the kitchen door, their parents too busy arguing to notice. Pippa quailing in front of her sister’s anger, but impossible now to go back up through those nighttime woods alone.

  That your sister? the taller of two boys said.

  She followed me, Jax said coldly, making it clear she hadn’t brought Pippa along to this rendezvous. The boy kissed her sloppily on the mouth, loosening her up, making her care about nothing else.

  Right on, his friend grinned, slinging an arm around Pippa’s shoulders like they were together. Come on, little sis. Call me Lucifer. He winked. Luce for short.

  Because these two older boys from twelfth grade were relying on Jax to get them into her genuine underground club that was choked—they were counting on it—with weed and sex. It might be a reggae club but it was their wet dream rock and roll and they’d been waiting for this for years. Nothing was going to mess that up.

  It was a school night—a Wednesday—but that scarcely mattered to the people inside the club. School, for them, was an irrelevance. Most of them were too old even for university. It was like being drawn into a foreign country where a white girl in a bunched-up nightgown might lose herself, and Jax, looking at her sister, laughed: at the clothes she’d thrown on over her pyjamas, at her unease, at what she recognized as arousal. An awakening. The press of sweating bodies in that narrow, high-ceilinged space and the music running through all of them, a collective throbbing … what else could they do but give in. It was, Jax would think later, her finest work. The single event she could point to when taking credit for Pippa’s subsequent rebelliousness and the absolute genius of how that had taken the attention away from her own exploits, affording her a freedom she wouldn’t have had if not for that younger, less careful sister who appeared to be screwing up even more than she was.

  Old times, she smiled, coming up for air and feeling suddenly dominant. Just what the doc never orders, but exactly what we always need. Another night out with me will shake Li’l Pips loose of whatever’s got hold of her.

  After those boys, already two hours past their curfew, had dropped them at the end of the lane, Jax let Pippa take her arm because the lane at night was spooky, and they were both afraid.

  That your boyfriend? Pippa whispered, her voice small.

  Maybe, Jax replied. If I want him to be.

  You get to choose?

  Jax shoved her with an elbow.

  Don’t be an idiot. We always get to choose.

  They’d walked quickly, neither of them wanting to be on that dark lane any longer than they had to be, but still it seemed to take ages until they were on the crushed gravel of their driveway. A bathroom light was on upstairs, and the stove light in the kitchen, and as they got closer Jax saw that someone had left the light on in the butler’s pantry.

  Do we have to climb? her sister whispered then, thinking that the kitchen door would be locked and not sure she could make a climb that high—and not sure what happened when you got to the top. How do you get inside from the roof?

  Basement, Jax said confidently. Not that anything’s ever locked, but just in case Mum’s up.

  So Jax had done this before. Pippa dropped her sister’s hand, the house starting to loom over them, and Jax sensed what was happening.

  If you tell on me, she said sharply, I’ll tell on you.

  They’ll say it’s your fault. You’re older. You’re responsible.

  Maybe. But they’ll put bars on every window and you’ll never get out ever again. Not even when you’re George’s age.

  Pippa thought about that. Their house as a block of prison cells wasn’t so hard to believe; their parents’ favoured punishment was grounding them.

  Fine, she said. But I don’t think you should do it again.

  Was pretty fun, though, wasn’t it? Jax shoved her little sister playfully. Luce looked like he had a good time.

  Pippa kicked her shin, and Jax gasped, and at th
e same moment they saw him—their father—sitting at a table on the patio.

  Shit, Jax breathed.

  There was no chance of escape because he was standing now and coming out onto the driveway to intercept them, his footsteps crisp on the gravel.

  He’s been waiting for us, Pippa said.

  The whole night was evaporating before this singular moment—caught red-handed sneaking back in.

  Where have you been?

  He sounded worn out, not angry.

  Neither girl answered: Jax too dumbfounded by her father’s presence after all those other nights of sneaking out and never being caught, and Pippa too scared.

  Go to bed, he said then. Our secret.

  They scuttled past him and into the house, not questioning their luck, just wanting to get away before he changed his mind.

  That’s how he shows his love for us, each sister was thinking as she crept upstairs. By leaving us alone.

  In their childhood memories, their father was not a monster. He was, he would tell them, the essential gearing mechanism that underpinned the entire enterprise of their world, and they’d grown up believing that, as children do, each of them trusting in the basic goodness of this man whose love had branded them. And each sister wore her mark in secrecy, for in the accepted narrative of the family their father was an emotional simpleton—incapable of grasping complexity.

  Dad, they’d scoff to each other, rolling their eyes. His behaviour a toddler’s, his tantrums over the top. And they’d shift to their mother like a tensed phalanx, shields up against the volley of abuse he hurled at them from the pinnacle fortress of his superiority. And they, down there at its base, indulgently just waiting him out. Knowing it would pass and that he was more than that—that these eruptions might be volcanic in their intensity but they blew only ash. Nothing so bad it would entomb them. And their mother—bless her—never buckled. Certainly there were times, when they were teenagers, that the bond between their parents had seemed near to breaking, but the girls’ schools were full of broken homes—divorce was typical—and as far as the sisters knew arguments and tinges of violence were the normal patterns of a marriage. And in those teenage years, each girl had her own traumas and mini tragedies. Their parents were just part of the background. Reliably there, and reliably volatile.