Summer Cannibals

by Melanie Hobson

  Jax ran her thumb over the back of her hand, over the liver spot that had appeared there earlier that summer, and recognized the gesture. It was her mother’s. It was what she’d been doing in those quiet moments when Jax came upon her seated in the garden or at the breakfast table before everyone woke up, tracing the patterns of time upon her skin. She was aging, and now so am I. Her husband had seen it first. He’d tapped it with his finger, and smirked.

  She lay back on the bed, staring at the sloped ceiling, stretching her legs after her run, and undid the towel she’d wrapped herself in after her shower, letting it fall open and glancing over at the door. Closed but not locked, but then who would trek all the way up to the third floor to discover her there, naked, spread across the bed. She closed her eyes and thought about Billy. There’d been whispers of that boyfriend ever since she’d arrived without her husband and children; nothing to stop her from listening to them. She tried to remember what they’d done together, how he’d kissed her, what it had felt like to be pressed against his shoulder, the smell of a boy still exhilarating and new, the firmness of his chest. She slid her hand between her legs, remembering his hand beneath the waistband of her panties and how much she’d loved it—the surrender of it, him wanting her, eager but unsure, his fingers finally inside, together, secretive, wherever they could find a place just beyond the party or in the passenger seat of his mother’s car. Skirts, she remembered, had made it easier. And camisoles instead of bras.

  She moved her hand more quickly, trying to settle on a single image of him, impressions of his back in a faded rugby jersey, his tensed hand resting on the thigh of her jeans, and the harder she tried, the more her mind wandered to other fantasies he wasn’t in. She tried forcing him back to the centre of everything, only him, that boy she’d loved and missed, trying to correct the mistake she’d made, but the orgasm she managed barely registered and hardly seemed worth the shower or the towel or the time or any of it. They’d never had sex. Was that the mistake she’d made? There’d been other boys and other sex, but why not with him?

  Jax yanked the towel across herself. Idiot, she thought. Maybe it’s true, that only my husband has rights to this.

  William Boscoe, she said in a whisper. William. Billy. Jacqueline Boscoe. Jax. She said her nickname the way he used to say it, like a snap. The cracking of a whip.

  She’d find out soon enough.

  Georgina, going up to get dressed, met her mother on the stairs.

  Darling, Margaret said, pausing on her way down. Have you had your breakfast?

  I’m going up.

  Your sisters?

  Sleeping. Unless Jax is out running, but I don’t think so.

  Her mother continued past her. And your father? she said, over her shoulder as if he was an afterthought.

  Georgina shrugged. Garden, she offered. A guess. But as soon as she said it she was certain it was true—that he’d be out there straightening up and erasing all evidence of that debacle the previous day. Tidying, fixing, ordering and then putting his attention on reframing the entire experience as a tour de force.

  I suppose I’ll have to make him a cup of tea, Margaret sighed, as though resigned to forever making cups of tea for this husband who was always somewhere else. Would you like one too, Georgie?

  Georgina paused at the top of the stairs, arrested by the childish moniker.

  Why don’t you get Pippa down, Margaret called up to her. See if she’ll eat. You can tell her I’m making her a tea, and there’s cake.

  Margaret hoped that was true, that the one she’d made the day before was still there. More than a mouthful, anyway—more than a few crumbs. I’ll have to make another one, she thought briskly, as if everything depended on her and what she could do. She listened to her daughter upstairs walking across to Pippa’s bedroom and then, a few seconds later, coming back to the stairs.

  She’s not there, Georgina called down.

  What do you mean?

  Pip’s not in her room.

  Did you check the bathroom?

  Georgina shouted that she had.

  She’s probably—. Margaret hesitated, trying to think of something plausible her daughter might be doing.

  I’ll look around, Georgina said abruptly. She’s probably gone looking for something in another room.

  Margaret listened to Georgina’s shouts fade to one end of the house, upstairs to the second floor and up again to the third, where Pippa might have wandered for old time’s sake, the closets up there still filled with the girls’ bric-a-brac. But it was only Georgina who thundered back down again. Standing in the kitchen, she stared blankly at her mother.

  She’s not up there, Georgina said slowly. But someone else is.

  Margaret stared.

  A girl. Asleep in one of the beds. I thought it was Jax, but Jax is in her own room getting dressed and this other one has peroxided hair.

  Margaret stared at her daughter, still failing to comprehend, still focused on Pippa because it was inconceivable that the daughter she’d seen off to sleep the night before, so newly arrived from New Zealand and a wreck, could have gone anywhere by herself.

  But … where’s Philippa?

  Maybe she went for a walk, Georgina suggested. Maybe Dad’s taking her around the garden.

  The garden?

  Georgina left her mother then. Left her standing at her place by the kettle, still in her nightdress and dressing gown, automatically dunking tea bags and pouring milk and spooning and stirring the sugar in, while she went outside to search the garden. The only one, her impatience said, with any sense.

  Margaret stayed inside, drifting from window to window, looking out, following Georgina’s shouts, becoming more and more worried as the shouts went unanswered, trying to calm herself by remembering that Pippa was hardly in a condition to shout back. They’d have to stumble upon her to find her. Where would she want to be? Margaret didn’t know. When her children had gone outside she’d never followed them, she just let them go, glad for the distance it created and the peace and quiet. A chance for her to work. Pippa would have a favourite place, Margaret was sure of that, but it would be a secret and they’d have to discover it for themselves. Her husband was looking now too. She could see him stalking between the beds, one hand still gripping a tool, and she hated him then. As if everything was his fault. As if last night had driven their daughter out. And when Georgina and David came down the drive together empty-handed to the house, she had to steady herself against the kitchen counter.

  The cliff, she wanted to shout at them. Go and check the cliff.

  But when she said it her voice was small as though even the suggestion that Pippa was capable of that was a blow to her. It took her saying it a second time to make them go and look. It took her threatening to go and look herself.

  She watched them move out across the escarpment, lean over the fence, look down. Suicide, she knew, was possible. She had tried it once herself.

  And what, she thought vaguely, had Georgina meant about another girl upstairs?

  Margaret climbed the stairs to the third floor, pausing frequently to catch her breath, to delay the inevitable, and when it came—when she pushed the door open and saw the girl from the garden tour lying there—it knocked her lower than her knees.

  She backed out, locked the door and pocketed the key.

  This was David’s doing, she was sure of it. He must have put her there.

  16

  Margaret took the stairs slowly on the way back down. It was a long time since she’d been all the way up to the third floor. The pretty floral wallpaper she’d chosen when they’d moved in was torn now in jagged sections and the plaster beneath it, unpainted, looked faintly mildewed. Her children would have done this—grabbing the unfurling corners and riding the paper sheets down like a zipline—the animals. The bannister under her hand was sticky with dirt and dug out in places, as if someone had struck at it randomly with a hatchet. Multiple outbursts of teenage anger, she supposed. Thank
ful again that this house was so big its empty spaces had absorbed much of that. It had been easy, in a house this size, to avoid confrontations and she realized now, seeing the evidence, that the fights she’d had with her children only represented a fraction of their anger and she was glad the house had borne the brunt of that.

  Goldilocks.

  Margaret named the girl she’d locked in that room receding behind her, trying to recast the key in the pocket of her dressing gown as something foretold and inevitable—part of a well-worn narrative that would play out along the expected tracks those stories follow where she—Goldilocks—was nothing more than a device. A fairy tale. Not a person whom Margaret had just imprisoned without having any kind of plan in mind. Without considering the consequences, or even really meaning to—just driven by an impulse to freeze things as they were until she could make sense of them. Perhaps there was a lesson there, but Margaret had chosen not to read it that way and by the time she reached the second-floor landing she’d put Goldilocks far down the list of what was important, because her baby was still out in the world somewhere, with no one to look after her, and Margaret knew that that was where the real danger lay. In moving beyond the confines and security of this house and family.

  She could hear them, her husband and one of her daughters, down below in the kitchen, and as soon as she laid eyes on David his efforts of the night before came booming back and Margaret saw immediately, in his swagger, that he was revelling in them. Cock-of-his-walk, preening himself before this world laid low in front of his magnificence. And now that she knew about the girl upstairs, his strut was almost unbearable. The key in her pocket became, in that instant, a dagger she would thrust at him. Small and neat, she’d just barely pierce his jugular to make him hemorrhage in misty spurts and then she’d step back and watch as he clamped an ineffectual hand across the puncture. She would make him bleed out, right in front of her. Margaret slid her hand around the key as she entered the kitchen, keeping it there because just knowing she had it was enough for now. She waited for someone else to speak first because they were all there now—even Jax, roused from her bed and already in her bathing suit. But they were all looking to her.

  So, she said finally into the silence. So? Go and search the neighbourhood.

  Jax went back upstairs to get dressed, and David and Georgina walked along the lane as they’d been told to. Neither was talking because what was there to talk about. It was clear that the tour had been an absolute disaster and if either of them were able to think laterally, they’d see it correctly as the precipitous event that had put them in the shitstorm they were in now—dodging potholes and looking for a missing person they both knew they wouldn’t find. Not like this.

  Bloody cheapskates, David growled as he skirted the craters, waving an arm at the house on his right. Look at them with their fancy cars … Audis, Mercedes, Land Rovers, a Rolls-Royce with right-hand drive … The potholes, he exploded into his daughter’s silence. The ruddy potholes.

  The entire lane was his property, deeded with the house, and the lane’s other residents had right-of-way. Legally, repairs were his responsibility, but David didn’t think it was fair that he should have to pay for everything when all the residents were making use of and degrading it. It wasn’t cheap to maintain a road. So he’d worked out a formula, a sliding scale based on use so that he—at the lane’s end—paid the most, and the person in the first house paid the least. It was, he felt, an equitable share of the cost. He’d worked it out in great detail before calling a meeting to present it to the other residents, but he’d seen the way their eyes had cased his living room and all its treasures, and once the meeting was over, and they weren’t face to face anymore, the other two houses had refused to pay anything for maintenance or improvements. Every few years he tried again and still they refused, so every spring the snow melted to reveal deeper and deeper holes as he let the surface deteriorate to teach them a lesson. Never mind, as his wife liked to point out, that it is really we at the end who are suffering the most.

  Georgina nodded, pressing her lips together in a manner she hoped looked like sympathy. She knew his anger was building again and she just wanted to delay it until she was clear because she, like her mother, was alarmed by the bombshell of Pippa’s disappearance and she needed to concentrate on working out how to get her back, not on answering her father’s tantrums which were tiresome and far too regular and, this time, grossly inopportune.

  They fell into step with each other as if they were just out for a stroll and catching up on news: the little threads that bind families together. A father and his adult daughter, chatting … a rich man with his pretty young thing. So everyday, so innocuous, that anyone would think them bright and clean and free of trouble. Would be envious that they could afford the luxury of a mid-morning constitutional, an airing out, a prescription of moderate exercise … But as they walked, the roar of the traffic up the escarpment was becoming louder and more insistent. Pippa was out there somewhere in all that hustle, and they were meant to be finding her.

  You go that way, David said when they arrived at the lane’s end, and he turned to walk in the other direction—out into the capillaries and veins and arteries of the monstrous city that surrounded them. Out to do battle, to repossess one of his own. And Georgina, surprised by his forcefulness, didn’t argue. And it didn’t matter, because neither of them really believed they’d find Pippa wandering the neighboring streets. They were just doing what they’d been told, and as quickly as possible, so they could get back to the house again, which was where the answer was sure to present itself.

  In truth, David thought his wife was overreacting about Philippa, but after last night there was a logic to maintaining the peace. He didn’t fear being overthrown, he was secure in his position, but he did want to enjoy the afterburn of the sex they’d had because it didn’t come around often enough. Not like that. He needed to soak in it. And there’d been the additional windfall of that girl having performed for him outside … and the thrilling fact it had been his wife who’d shown him to the front-row seat. That, perhaps, was the most delicious part of all of this. His wife—her vulgarity laid bare. She’d wanted it just as badly as him, and instead of draining the excitement from his conquest it had made it even more pleasurable. A promise of more, much more, to come. She’d always taken whatever he’d delivered, but now she’d opened up the possibilities into realms he’d never thought she’d let him conquer. Other women? And why shouldn’t he. David stopped and did a deep knee bend, rising suddenly. More vigorous than men half my age.

  That garden tour, he thought smugly, was the catalyst for all of this. He quickened his step. A job exceedingly well done.

  It felt strange at first, walking without a particular destination, just meandering, but after a few blocks David forgot about that and started paying attention to the houses and their gardens and, just as he’d expected, most of them were horrible. No gardens at all. Just threadbare plots of what he supposed the owners called grass, and smack in the middle of every front yard was a tree. Maples mostly, every tenth one a birch. There was obviously a formula to it, some sort of rationale worked out by the city’s arborist or determined by the budget, or simply put there to insist on the Canadian identity. To scream MAPLE LEAF! the way the national flag did. Of all the trees they could have chosen. David was a champion of exotics, of flowering, blossoming extravagance, because what was life without excess. Although, he admitted, the maples were lovely when they turned. He had three or four himself. But to have them—infinitum—in a row down the street like lampposts …

  These houses were all small red brick boxes with little concrete pads jutting out from their front doors, basement windows peeking apologetically from the ground and sealed driveways marking the boundary between the next red box of a house, and so on and so on. Like a Monopoly board except that people actually lived in them, tiny as they were. Every now and then the window next to the front door would be puffed out into a bay, like a s
welling.

  Fifty of these would fit into mine, he thought.

  But it was not so much that which he objected to—the meagreness of them—as it was the occupants’ acceptance of it. Yes, it was a small patch, but something could still be done with it. Why did they settle for such modesty? There was no hint of ambition anywhere.

  He stopped for a moment. Someone had made an effort here. There were common hydrangea bushes under the bay window and they went from pink at one end to a puzzling blue at the other. How had they done that, made the soil change so drastically? Made the roots draw their nutrients so selectively? He had to walk across the lawn and right up to them before he noticed they were planted in pots that had been sunk into the ground, realizing the deception. Well, he thought. Here’s a surprise. Clumsy but effective, and it had fooled him from a distance. If they’d been planted in the ground the colours would be uniform—aesthetically more pleasing, but disappointingly uniform. By sinking them in pots, each one with a different ratio of aluminum to soil, whoever had planted them had created an above-ground colour graph of differing composition like a botanical diagram. He felt heartened by that. Buoyed. Not a patch on his display, of course, but in this house at least someone was thinking, showing some initiative. One bright spot after blocks and blocks of mindless repetition.

  He glanced up at the house, through the window, his chin just at the windowsill. Nothing special, as far as he could see. Couch, chair, rug, corner of a table, a few poorly framed photographs on the wall and in the back, where a light was on, the small kitchen. He could make out a white refrigerator jutting a few inches into the open doorway, its coils exposed. It was everything he would have expected if he’d ever thought about it, which he hadn’t.

  Still, he thought, stepping back, taking the hydrangeas in again. Well done. Well done, indeed.

  He carried on, his tempo up, even though he knew the hydrangeas were meagre and their pots were plastic, probably with their cheap prices still stickered to their sides. But even so … it was something. An attempt. Because life—he flicked at a leaf as he walked—is best when it’s directed, controlled, bent to a vision of how it ought to be. Perhaps—he slowed, the thought coming to him now—perhaps I’ve somewhat failed at that, and he remembered Philippa and why he was here. I should have pruned those girls. Fed them more selectively. He looked around himself, at the conventional neighbourhood, which collared his majestic house-and-five-acres, with its uniform streets and repeating curb-cuts and its mundane tracery of wires bringing electricity to the people who lived there. And for what? To run their freezers and their televisions, to heat and cool their houses while they were away at work—to keep the dull hum of their lives powered on. Have I raised my girls only to transplant them into this? It was like an explosion at his feet, the idea that he’d produced something that might slide into mediocrity.