Summer Cannibals

by Melanie Hobson

  Margaret pulled their bedsheets tight, smoothed the duvet, spread flat the enormous jewel-red silk fabric she’d bought in India, so sumptuous she’d bought it even though she didn’t need it. Curtains, she’d thought vaguely at the time. Cushion covers? It didn’t matter so long as it was hers. She liked collecting things whose utility was outdone by their pure luxury because what was a life if it wasn’t rife with beauty—and how else to smother all the filth that was always there and threatening to take over. Which had been, if she was honest, her reaction to India as a whole.

  She was trying to gather the strength to pull the curtains back, raise the blinds and let the pale sunlight in. For now, for another minute, it was enough just to stand there as if the day hadn’t started and the house was as she’d left it the night before, with everyone in bed, the storm just beginning, and her children snug—without Pippa gone missing. Without her husband taking everything out on her. Without that girl upstairs.

  Margaret scraped the heavy curtains across their rails and pulled the blinds up. It was wet. Dew was holding the petals down and making leaves droop, and each blade of grass, as the weak sunbeams hit them, looked beaten. The night’s storm had deadheaded and torn blooms off their stems, and a branch from the hawthorn tree had been downed across the lily bed. She could see the end of it poking out onto the grass like the barrel of a sniper’s gun. It had been years since she’d been out there and worked that soil, her joints giving her trouble and too painful now, most of the time, to bend and lift and carry. And as the years had accumulated, as if the garden itself was turning on her, insect bites and even glancing contact with the plants had become fully blown allergic reactions that antihistamines couldn’t treat. Even prednisone didn’t always work, and on the last few occasions that she’d been stricken it was only an injection of epinephrine that had done the trick. David, she thought, had taken some pleasure in that—administering it with what she thought was an unnecessary vigour that had left her bruised.

  She missed the simple work of raising plants. The way you could tear them out when they failed and replace them with newer, stronger variants. Disappointments, in the garden, were so easily remedied. Upon his semi-retirement, David had fired their gardening help and taken to gardening himself. Actual gardening, not just the plotting out of beds on bits of paper as he’d always done before, but really pulling weeds and pruning bushes and thinning and dividing, his hands scratched and his knees pitted and dirty. She tried not to let it bother her the way he talked about it as if he was the only one who knew what it was like to plant twenty rose bushes in a single morning, or edge five beds or trim all the yews bordering the terrace. He liked to stand in the kitchen, with a cup of tea in one hand and a hastily made sandwich in the other, and list everything he’d done and everything he had still to do—the reason he couldn’t sit and rest like her. The reason his lunch was makeshift. The reason he’d drink his tea regardless, even though she’d over-sugared it or made it too strong or too weak or too milky. All the ways, he implied, you try to sabotage me. And all the ways I carry on. Pede poena claudo. Punishment comes limping. Even before he’d reduced his office days down to three a week (and now two), David had always meddled—the initial strike being the time he’d dug up her potager garden.

  It had happened on a rare Saturday when she’d gone in to Toronto with an old art school friend, to see the Picasso Exhibition: Blue Period. Margaret remembered that because she and her friend had talked about how oddly specific that was, to curate only those few years, but also how that quirk made the show doable in one afternoon. They’d stayed in town for dinner and by the time Margaret arrived home it was dark, and all the evidence of David’s trespass was invisible. It wasn’t until she went out to the porch the next morning that she saw the swathe of humped dirt where only the previous morning there’d been cucumbers, zucchini, beans and an entire crop of other edibles. Neat groupings that she’d clipped and trimmed and shifted and replaced until every sightline revealed something startling and beautiful; a pure extravagance of a vegetable garden that produced enough food to feed the neighbourhood if they’d been so inclined.

  An orangery, he’d said simply when she’d turned on him. Obviously. Smaller than I’d like, but when I’m finished it will be an exact replica of the one Queen Anne built at Kensington Palace. In 1704, he’d added, to underscore how much more enduring it would be than her merely seasonal vegetables that needed harvesting and replanting year after year. The workmen, he informed her, start tomorrow.

  David, with that one blow, had ruined this tiny corner of the garden for her and shown how quickly he’d move in when given the chance, bulldozing and imprinting it with ready-made plans that came steeped in precedent. How swiftly he would undo her decades of sculpting by intuition in order to impose his false pedigrees.

  He’d made it easy for her to give up. To retreat, to stop noticing.

  Pippa, Margaret thought, staring now at the windowsill, has to be all right. She refused to believe otherwise. Whatever it took, she’d get her back. She wouldn’t lose another one.

  When Georgina saw her father, he was standing on the grassy verge but making no move to step down to the road and cross, or back onto the sidewalk. He looked helpless and old. Vacant. His dirty clothes were torn in places and his hair was dishevelled as though it were windy. As though he were lost high on a mountaintop, like a hermit who’d just left his cave and to whom the larger world was bewildering. She felt sorry for him then, knowing how much he’d wanted everything to go perfectly and how disappointed he must be that it hadn’t—that his garden had been desecrated, because she knew how deeply he felt about it. That to him it was more than a grouping of plants, or a division of plots—it was a final destination, a mecca, a heavenly sphere with the house at its centre. And right now, she thought, he looks just like the sort of beggar who might spin such a tale and believe it too.

  We need to call the hospitals, Georgina said. And of course she was right. It didn’t take a leap to imagine that Philippa, eight months pregnant, had gone into labour and been taken away from wherever it was she’d gone. Come on, Dad. She took his arm as if he needed steadying, or a caretaker to guide him through this disorienting maze of streets to his leafy country lane. And—Georgina hesitated—we should call the police as well.

  But her father wasn’t listening. She knew this pose; the studied look.

  I thought it went well, she said, softening her tone. The tour, I mean.

  Her choice was simple: she could tell him that none of it, not any of it—all his weeks of work and preparation—had been worth a jot, or she could just play along with what she knew would be a rapid trajectory from letdown to victory, because he always turned his errors into achievements he could boast about. And now that he was old and—she looked at him beside her, frail—there was something sweet and winning about that. An affectation she’d disliked when she was younger but now seemed harmless or, at worst, eccentric.

  When Jax met them at the gateposts, only now dressed and ready to help, it was David who told her what the plan was—hospital and police—as if he’d come up with it himself. Assuming control.

  But—, Jax said slowly as if she was just now beginning to piece things together. Just now waking up. Are you sure Pip’s not upstairs? I’m sure I heard someone up there this morning—down the other end of the attic—

  There was someone, Georgina said, but not Pippa. A girl. Platinum hair.

  Their father didn’t hear them. He was already striding ahead, neatly back inside his conviction that his were the only thoughts that mattered. And so he missed it. Missed the news that would have set him to galloping.

  Mum said it must be a friend of Pippa’s, Georgina said. Remember that hippie commune phase she had? Probably one of them. They’re always looking for a place to crash, and must’ve heard that Pip was back. Mum said she’d take care of it. Get her out.

  This, Jax sighed, looking around at nothing in particular but including all of it, has been
a royally fucked-up handful of days … And she hadn’t even seen Billy yet.

  17

  The night before, during the storm, Pippa hadn’t gone back to bed like her sisters had. She’d gone up the back stairs with them but then quietly, stealthily, she’d come down the front stairs and around to the kitchen, slid into Jax’s flip-flops and gone outside and begun to walk. Down the driveway, the lane and, on a whim, the overgrown trail leading to the busy access road below the house. Walking steadily like that nun from thirty years ago, ignoring the sudden claps of thunder, driven, automatic. How many years had it been since she’d taken this route? She’d remembered it gradually, step by step, down the lane and through the trees to the road’s edge, teetering a moment on the curb before sprinting the six lanes to get across and then the mad energy of the storm became hers and she forgot the baby she was carrying and raised her face to the rain to feel it, the storm. Crying, laughing, hysterical, she could really feel it now.

  There was the trail she used to ride her bike down, shorts and tank top, strong and fit. There were the old wooden stairs, straight down and precipitous. Not the stairs, she’d thought, turning into the dark of the trail, needing something more gradual and intimate, something to hold her close. She’d needed coddling, even as she charged ahead. She had slowed then. It was sheltered from the rain under the trees but dark, and the trail wasn’t as solid as she’d remembered it. More like a gully of loose gravel than a trail. She’d pushed on anyway, through the lightning flashes and down the long, lazy switchbacks she used to ride her bike down, remembering the thrill and exhilaration of barely escaping injury as her tires pounded against rocks, the back wheel fishtailing and the handlebars reverberating with shocks carrying right up through her arms to her head. Once upon a time she’d used this route so regularly she could anticipate every turn and bump and every break in the tree canopy where the sun would shoot through and blind her for a moment before releasing her to the shadows again. This trail had connected her with the city. With her friends and downtown and her part-time jobs. There’d been the summer she’d lifeguarded at the yacht club’s pool, even though her only qualification was being able to swim, and she’d ridden her bike back and forth each day and become tanned and as taut as an athlete, which was something she and her sisters had never been mistaken for. Even Jax, who’d been on teams, had never been very good at any of the sports—but her “spirit,” one coach had told her, more than made up for that.

  It had felt good to be walking outside, where no one could see or bother her. Where she could do as she pleased as though nothing at all was the matter. As though what stretched before her and what was littered behind her were the same—possibility—without the hard lump of inertia her life had become. When she’d been pregnant with her first, she remembered, there’d been dancing. She and a group of women—first-time mothers, all of them—would meet at each other’s houses, send the men away and turn the stereo up as loud as it would go. They’d switch the lights off and let the music spin them, move them, hold them … it wasn’t exercise so much as it was freedom. They’d drop their clothes and just move with the music, on and on, until one by one when they’d had enough, they would get dressed and go home. All their senses jangling. It had been a spontaneous gathering at first, and then gradually became organized as they drew up a roster of whose house they’d meet at next.

  As their babies were born they stopped dancing and started nursing and sharing strategies, and it became just another place where schedule was paramount. With more children it became a playdate, and soon they were all too busy to meet and any dancing was in the grocery aisle between the cart and the children and the frozen foods. They started using preprinted shopping lists because nothing ever changed—they would always need two packets of noodles and a frozen pizza, week after week after week. And it was the women now, not the men, who longed to be sent away, because as much as Pippa tried to make parenting into something that functioned on the level of salvation—raising perfection to inherit the earth, saving the planet one child at a time, modelling peace and love and happiness, ending hunger, redefining poverty, being kind to animals, letting boys wear sparkles and girls dress up as pirate men—it wasn’t. It was none of that at all. It was bribery and corruption, it was waste and all-out war. It was her forever marshalling them into something society would accept. It was giving in and selling out.

  She’d tried conjuring her four little boys but she couldn’t get more than a scratch. The feeling of being raked over with fingernails. Was that really how she thought of them? Tiny clutching grasping grabby little hands? Soundless and cruel? It wasn’t the family she’d set out to make. Where had the bright wooden toys and the homemade play-dough and the piles and piles of picture books gone? Those boys had eaten nothing but breast milk and natural food served on dishes of real porcelain. It had been a continuous twenty-four-hour cycle of loving and hugging and nocturnal shifts into their parents’ bed until by morning the whole family was draped across each other like a heap of laundry, their bedroom a den. She’d set out to construct a utopia of wonder and amazement, populated by little foot soldiers of joy who would go out into the world and cast that joy around—a storybook on homemade paper, written in vegetable dyes and drawn with love, where the words were symbols so anyone could understand … But what she’d gotten were junkyard dogs. Scrappy animals. A howling mess.

  And Leo. Leo, her husband, was having sex with other women. It had begun as an arrangement to benefit them both—she’d take the husband and he’d take the wife—but it wasn’t what she’d bargained for at all. And certainly not this pregnancy from out of that jumble of multiple partners. If she could only walk far enough, she’d thought, and hard enough, she could leave it all behind. This rain might scour and cleanse her and when day broke, she’d be as remade as the land.

  Pippa had woken in the lee of the escarpment that Sunday morning, wedged between the two massive chunks of limestone she’d retreated to when the storm had become too powerful to face. When the thunder and lightning collapsed together and the rain had become as thick and cold as driving snow. It hadn’t been dry where she’d taken refuge, but it had been out of the wind and secure enough that she’d fallen asleep, waking now to the battered silence of morning. She didn’t move, just sat there propped up against the rocks, legs splayed in front of her, one of her hands raking the dirt between her legs, tiny sticks jamming under her fingernails. And her baby, as if to show how resilient it was and how different from this mother who couldn’t bring herself to do anything worthwhile, was writhing and turning like a rock hurtling downhill. As if it was trying to wake its host body and get it back on track to survival.

  Where was she? Trees all around. Pippa squinted but couldn’t see a single house through the layers of trunks and branches and leaves, squirrels and birds skittering through the storm’s destruction. They’re looting, she thought. Scavenging. Cleaning up. Some kind of moral in there, she guessed, but she didn’t care to make the leap. She was tired of making connections, threading things along as if life was just a craft to keep your fingers occupied. It had to be more than that. More than a cobbling-together. More than a giant spillway of happenstance. More than a blind stumble from thing to thing with no reflection, no looking back or forward, no over-arching plan. Didn’t there have to be more to life than drift?

  Staring in front of her, she thought how different this was and how she would have never been able to see through New Zealand woods like she could see through these ones. Never identify individual trunks, the sunbeams cutting through, birds swooping like fish through this air liquid with drafts. And butterflies, scores of butterflies. New Zealand was beautiful but it wasn’t this. It was native bush, feathery with ferns and lush with pongas and flax. It was a downy muted softness. Was that what was wrong with her? Was it only a question of coming home for good? Laying herself and her life across a particular landscape … that the land itself was what would fix her? For a while, last night, before the storm d
rove her to shelter, she’d thought there’d been an improvement under way, but now she knew it had just been the adrenalin of risk. Her world, in New Zealand, was just repetition and routine. The jolt of the unfamiliar, the bristle of danger that had put her out there in the storm—it didn’t happen down there. Even the sex with other couples had become ordinary, in its way. She supposed she’d always thought that one day she’d keep going and complete her circumnavigation of the globe. That the family she’d made over there would come home here too. But how could Leo trade the Pacific Ocean for Lake Ontario? Trade a lifetime of being on the ocean for a landlocked freshwater basin that was frozen half the year? And how had she never even considered that?

  Pippa smoothed the dirt and then raked it back again. There were ants, but not the biting kind, and she let them run over her, brushing them lightly if they got too high—as if that absentminded motion wasn’t maiming them. When they were kids, she and her sisters, they used to set them on fire by angling a magnifying glass and concentrating the sun on their tiny bodies, making them combustible, because they were just ants and therefore numberless and impossible to decimate. In New Zealand, her children pulled the tails off lizards or hung them from their ears, tiny reptilian jaws snapping shut on their fleshy lobes. Earrings, they’d giggle on the playground, shaking their heads at their friends. Every place, Pippa supposed, has its petty cruelties. Every childhood its atrocities.