Summer Cannibals

by Melanie Hobson

  Georgina didn’t want to be on that lane skirting the potholes, but where else could she go. Her own house—her husband and son—didn’t fit in to any of this. She hadn’t even thought about them since this all began, and there had to be a reason for that. The gallery had made her feel worse about her career, but no better about that recurring theme of hers—walking away from it—because there wasn’t enough of a difference between the two to justify the effort. She wondered if she was too filled with precedents now, from decades in the academy, to ever see anything as an original ever again. Doomed to copies, how could she ever produce something genuine?

  Even this house, she thought, slowing down and easing her car through the gate and along the drive, is derivative. Even my father, standing there and staring me down, is a caricature. And yet … we all came home when trouble sounded. Answered immediately when that clarion call went out. Was there something valuable at the root of that cliché? The trope of “blood is thicker than water”? Or was it just a matter of “keep your enemies close”? She watched her father go back into the coach house as she rolled past, thankful he hadn’t chosen to confront her about where she’d been. All she wanted was a cup of coffee and something to eat. A few minutes of peace before Pippa’s baby came and sent them all back down to the hospital again. Because she knew it was coming, and soon.

  She swung her car in next to her father’s, not hopeful about the chance of coffee and food and peace. Of avoiding the questions about where she’d gone and what she’d been doing and why hadn’t she come back when Pippa and Jax and their father had—and why hadn’t she told anyone? A barrage of recriminations she expected the minute she went inside. The house might be the polestar, but my family, Georgina groused, are careening meteors.

  But the house she returned to was not the house she had left.

  22

  Jax hadn’t told anyone where she was going. She’d slipped away when no one was looking because it was none of their business and she didn’t want to explain. They were assholes, anyway, especially George, who’d try to stop her from going anywhere or doing anything unless it involved the precious Pip. But Pippa was on her way back up to the house now and they’d had official word from doctors and a psychiatrist that she was fine, so—fuck it—time to have some fun. She cracked her back, arms still sore from that stupid maniac paddle in the Gulf. Leaving the hospital, she walked north toward downtown, letting the other pedestrians carry her along the crowded sidewalk. She’d changed the plans, a flurry of emails, and now she and Billy were meeting for an afternoon pint because why put it off when they were both there, staying with family, and desperate for a break. His parents, she remembered, were suffocating. When they’d dated in high school his mother had shoehorned her into his all-boy family like a daughter, confiding intimate details of her marriage over cups of tea while Billy and his father were sent to fetch a missing ingredient.

  Fuuuuuuuck, Jax exhaled. No surprise he’d moved to Singapore halfway through university.

  When we’re both married, he’d told her over the phone from his room on Shenton Way, we’ll leave them and be together.

  She walked west now. She felt loosed to the city, like a teenager again. The corner stores, the gourmet cookie shop, the Episcopal church and its portico where she used to shelter when it rained. The old customs house turned into a club, the side street where the hookers worked, the salon where she’d had her hair streaked red the summer after eleventh grade. So many memories like snow falling and sitting on her lashes, turning to ice, freezing her mind. Her muscles, only her muscles, moving her forward now. “The Hammer” was the city’s nickname; its citizens imprinted with its beaten streets, with its mistimed traffic lights and dingy storefronts and walk-up windows selling pizza slices, falafels and lottery tickets. Even the people seemed bent as old nails, sorting and re-sorting themselves as they crossed streets and entered and exited stores, rusty and grim. Detritus of the job site, left behind when the city’s walls were raised by steelworkers whose descendants still worked the shifts their fathers and grandfathers had. The record store, the upstairs reggae club, the year-round farmers’ market with its immigrant foods, the dive Billy took her to once or twice to play pool, young and dangerous … and down there somewhere at the city’s edge, slate-grey, the lake. Always a boundary, cold and unfriendly, a massive confused unfurling of industry like a canvas painted in sludge, brush strokes sculpted with a trowel. This was her city, and she loved it.

  She kept moving, every vector the start of a new memory because she’d learned the Hammer’s streets by bus, bike and walking and saw all the shortcuts and alleys, shaded sidewalks for summertime and the shelters she’d cowered in during winter. She saw that long summer afternoon she and Billy ditched school to ride the buses out to Gage Park in the east end to play in its splash pad. Hours of making out, and lying side by side on the grass to let the sun dry them enough to go home.

  You’re the first girlfriend, he’d told her, who’s fun to hang out with.

  And beyond downtown, if she kept walking to where Lake Ontario shallowed up and took in water from creek-bottomed ravines and boggy fields, was Cootes Paradise. Acres and acres of water and trees that, if you framed your view to cut the city out, hadn’t changed for a century. She remembered a winter when she’d skated there, the ice so thick she could glide from one side to the other a mile away. It must have been a sudden winter because the water had frozen completely flat and hardly any snow had lain across it and on the far side, in an inlet between an allée of poplar trees, she’d seen fish swimming lazily beneath the ice. Grasses waving underwater as they passed. She remembered lying flat on her stomach and watching that secret world, wondering how the fish could breathe, marvelling at how fat they were, that they were still alive. And she had taken him. Down the cross-country trails she’d memorized by running through the woods in summertime, showing him the way, holding their blades and sliding down the slick frozen hills, balancing against each other to put their skates on, fumbling because it was cold and because this was still new—being alone together and during the day. Not at a party, not with friends, not drinking or smoking pot or listening to music with no pressure to talk. No communal jokes or banter. They’d held hands before the sky and the beauty of the trees and the entire world frozen there as if that was enough. As if they didn’t need the back seat and the kisses and the blowjobs and fingerings and all the rest of it. As if all they needed was this—companionship. Maturity. An equal footing. Somewhere to stride forward from.

  I raced him, she remembered, and won. I left him far behind.

  But couldn’t they start over again? Sex. It’ll be worth having waited for. Jax knew she should think about her husband and kids, a montage of them crying, but she couldn’t picture them at all. And didn’t want to. What she wanted was pure sensation. Music flooding through headphones, vibrations in her feet, a flavour in her mouth. A squall.

  Love? Perhaps. Why not.

  The Gown and Gavel was just as she remembered it. A tall brick house converted to a pub, the large patio in front with flagstone paving, and the stained glass with its whimsical coat of arms over the front door: a wigged judge grasping the handle of a beer tap. They’d spent so many nights here during high school that everyone knew to show up at the start of an evening, arriving singly or in groups, so obviously a few years underage but no one carded them because pub culture, even in Canada thousands of miles from the mother country, was generous. The proprietors understood the need to drink at any age, and they looked after their regulars.

  It was Billy who recognized her first. She’d walked right past him on the street, too busy scanning the patio to notice the man walking out from the parking lot behind the pub.

  Jax.

  She kept walking, not hearing him.

  Jax Attack? he said. His nickname for her.

  She turned then, off balance, twisted unattractively, trying not to fall to the side.

  Hey, she said. Hey.

  S
he lurched, bumped her forehead against his chin and kicked his foot with her shoe as they hugged and fell back, his hands going to the pockets of his walking shorts, trying to look casual. He was wearing sandals. Not the black Docs she remembered, or the leather jacket, and his hair was cut close instead of gelled. They stood there smiling self-consciously, waiting for some sort of cue they weren’t getting, laughing about the collision.

  Should we—? Jax backed toward the patio, letting him go first, choose the table, sit down.

  So, she said once they were seated. Let’s hear some Chinese.

  He laughed. What do you want me to say?

  I don’t know. Whatever. Talk about—. She waved her hand, indicating everything. Was she giggling?

  As he spoke, a few sentences in Mandarin, she laughed and made him keep going. More, she cried, tears in her eyes. Don’t stop! And he was laughing now too and they were those jackasses again, teasing the only Asian girl in their grade because it was something easy they could laugh about together, something that was always there, in front of them, a prop. And the girl was too shy to ever fight back.

  Too funny, Jax said, wiping her eyes when the waitress came to take their order. That is too funny.

  Yeah, he smiled, his demeanour changing. We do a lot of business with Beijing.

  But she didn’t want to know about that—his life, his job, where he lived. She only wanted to go back, refilling their glasses from the pitcher, deflecting the questions he posed about her job and what she did now. Changing the subject, looking around the patio and talking about how everything and nothing had changed.

  The trees, the bar, the—

  But you look the same, he said.

  It caught her off guard and she couldn’t help herself. Are you married? she blurted out.

  He looked at her. Really looked at her.

  Nope, he said finally, sitting back. And then he spoke in Chinese, and grinned rakishly, and she imagined he’d said I’ve only ever loved you.

  What did you say? she squirmed, girlish, sitting forward, breasts shelved on the table, trying to think of a sexy comeback because she wanted to keep things light, and the track they were on was a good one, and they were heading back. She reached out, grabbed his hand, and he gave her fingers a little squeeze and then he reached for her glass, holding it out for her to take instead. That grin again.

  She didn’t know how it happened. They were on their second pitcher and had ordered a basket of fries, sliding right back into high school and university days. Billy went first, but Jax couldn’t wait, so she told the waitress she’d be back and went inside, halfway up the stairs to the landing with the door to the ladies’ room. When she came out, Billy was coming down from the men’s room on the second floor.

  Anyone playing? she asked him, glancing up. Innocent.

  Billy stopped and turned and she was already behind him and they went together to look, but it was dark and the door was closed, but not locked, so they pushed in anyway. The sour smell of old beer, the empty floor, the blacked-out windows—one end of the room cordoned off with microphones and speakers where the band would have been if it was a weekend night—the service bar in the back all locked down, its liquor bottles behind bars. And he took her then, in his arms, and they danced. A stumbling silly giggling waltz neither of them knew the steps for and it careened them across to an alcove where the gumball machines and the automatic photo booth were and, without a word, they ripped into each other. It wasn’t so much sex as it was savagery. And she wanted it. So badly he had to put a hand across her mouth as he fucked her every way he’d ever dreamt of doing and she thrust her ass at him for more.

  Remember what you said? she asked him when they were finished. About divorcing and being together? She whispered it into his chest, forcing it through his shirt with her teeth, afraid to look at him, cum pooling in her underwear.

  He wrapped his arms as far around her as he could and squeezed and she knew, from the steadiness of it, from the firmness of his grip, that he was buying time. That he didn’t remember anything. That she might even have made it up.

  Thank you, he said after a minute. He kissed her forehead, her face between his hands like she was a little girl. Thanks for—

  You’re welcome, she heard herself saying. As if she’d just been paid.

  At least, she thought, I had the courage to do it. As if that made it all right.

  23

  In that room with the twining wallpaper and the windows out to the treetops and sky, Pippa lay counting the angles in the ceiling, trying to work them out. A jog for the chimney, another for a closet and one, in the corner, that must mask a pipe. Architectural overlays to hide the bones. None of the angles were a perfect ninety degrees, nothing a ruler would favour, and even the windows weren’t parallel to the floors or the walls or the crown moulding that edged the room. Everything was crooked. She’d never noticed that before.

  She’d thought she could dismiss the lake and the sex and what came of it, that it would just go away, but it had stayed with her so deep down inside it had taken years to work its way out. Like shrapnel. The coarse voice rasping in her ear and the big hands steadying her slender teenage hips. His strength, the twist of his face when he came, the way he’d looked at her afterwards—triumphant—before swimming out away from shore into the moonlit water without another word, leaving her there to figure out what to do next. To get out. To go inside. To change. To sit at the table, she remembered, and join the card game in the kerosene light, laughing with the rest of them, feeling incredible. Rebellious and dangerous and … And she’d wanted it. Shameful, how much she’d wanted it. And every time afterwards—hadn’t she wanted it then too? Even as he became more and more perverse and demanded things that, at the end, she hadn’t been able to give? Things that he’d taken from her anyway?

  Pippa had met her husband on the catamaran he was piloting, his uncle’s business, running day trips out into the Bay of Islands for paying customers. He came from a farming family, big, powerful men who’d come out from Scotland generations back to clear and settle the land themselves. To get a piece of the colony. The ocean, for those men, was what brought the weather and it was never welcome. They cursed it for every gale and winter storm that hit the farm, blamed it for every irregularity in the stock, every blemish traced back to a frost or wind or flood the bloody ocean had driven in. They’d had one year—they still shouted about it—when that skeeving blasted water sent hail so big it smashed the barn to smithereens and killed fifteen sheep besides. But Leo’s uncle had never gone for that view of things and he’d stepped to the coast, apprenticing himself to a boat-builder until he was old enough to go it alone in the boat he’d built from nothing. Chastity, he’d called it. Pippa and Leo still laughed about that name.

  They’d anchored offshore of an islet and Leo, with Pippa and the other five tourists, had swum across the shallow lagoon with food and drinks balanced on their heads, struggling to keep their lunch dry, shouting in three languages they were going down, laughing so much they nearly choked. Up from the beach, in the shade, Leo sat next to her. He’d noticed her straightaway and divided her from the herd, nipping at her heels, circling, watching how her body bounced on the waves, imagining her bouncing on top of him. He let her think the catamaran was his. It was a travel fling, not supposed to lead anywhere but bed—he could let her believe whatever she wanted to. And anyway your legs, he told her later on their wedding night, should take all the blame. They’re magnificent.

  They’d climbed to the highest point, the catamaran below fading to red in the middle of the pacific blue, bobbing in the scalloped bay, and Leo told her stories—cobbled-together tales of Maori and Pakeha, none of them exactly right, but it wasn’t important because she was interested and he was just trying to keep her there. He’d tell her anything. Pippa listened, watching the waters come to life with war canoes and mythic fish and tales of cannibalism, pride and victory, conquest and strength, Leo’s voice seducing her and they’d h
ad sex, right there, while the others were having lunch. Not even a rock for cover. Just the island beneath them for a bed and the sky for a canopy.

  Everything, with him, had felt natural. Marriage felt right. He was youth and exuberance and delight. He was the sun. He was the sparkling of shallows and the glistening of webs that ran past the horizon. Possibility, anew. He was the joy that would never end. The story she most wanted to believe in at the time.

  A daughter, Pippa thought, staring at the ceiling, flaking paint, decorative hook. She’ll blow it apart and there’ll be two of us, polarities. We’ll bring balance, and a reckoning.

  I’ll have my daughter here, in Canada. She’ll have a choice. A foothold somewhere else.

  And even the sound of breaking glass couldn’t tear her from this reverie. Nor could the pounding; nor what happened next.

  It was strange that David should do this, take the route up to the third floor to go across and down the other stairs to his bedroom and his bathroom to shower, but nothing about that day had been regular. Once in a while he’d do it to check on things: the ceiling to look for evidence of leaks, each room to make sure the lights were switched off and the doors open to let the air circulate, but this time he wasn’t looking at anything in particular. He wasn’t attending to his investment, he was just wandering through this house he was king of, to the upper reaches of it, to where it offered him the largest view. When he paused at the top of the stairs and looked out of the window, down to the city and the lake, he imagined himself in the middle of that blue immensity of water swimming like he’d done as a boy. Diving in and swimming down and seeing how far he could go on just one breath, until the light dimmed and he could feel the cold water sitting at the bottom, frightening him to the surface. He supposed you could swim in that lake. The girls swore it was too polluted and made you itch, but if you took a boat out to the very middle of it, wouldn’t that be fine? Not the rivers of his youth, but fine. A son. A son would have done that very thing. Everything I’ve done and more. This was what he’d been cheated of—another chance. The girls had always favoured their mother over him, but a boy, a boy would have naturally favoured him. Not this coven—he felt his knuckles whiten on the windowsill—this bloody bitching coven I’ve spent my adult life in. I could have been out there—he rapped the glass until it broke, not even considering the pool and its vinyl liner down below, punching at the pieces still holding to the glazing until his fingers were lashed with blood, until the window frame was mostly clear, until he could feel the wind the great lake kicked up to the mountain’s top.