A boy. My kingdom for a boy.
It wasn’t until he turned away for something to stanch the bleeding, that he saw the little heap of clothing his wife had dropped outside the door. Those cheap lace panties a perfect match for the bra he’d taken. He twisted them around his wounds, holding them to his nose, sliding his tongue across them and tasting sex. More bitterness. More of what he deserved just beyond his reach. Always, he thought, kept unfairly beyond my reach. And he fell against the door to steady himself and knew, from the way it resisted him, that it was locked
Locked?
He tapped softly with his fingertips. Drumming the line of them like a meditation. He tried the doorknob. And then he thundered at the wood with both fists. Margaret, in less than a minute, was at his side. Swift when she needed to be. And when she drew the key from her pocket and he looked at her, stupefied, she realized he didn’t know anything about Goldilocks being there. That the girl was a surprise, a novelty, for both of them. That Goldilocks was her doing, not his. And that changed everything.
Margaret saw that Goldilocks had eaten the cake. It explained her prone across the bed, face down and breathing shallowly, her shoulders scarcely moving. As she and David crept forward together, Margaret closing the door behind them, they both saw the crisp red apple tattoo on the girl’s bottom, and in their heightened state, they looked at each other and snickered.
It’s okay, Margaret whispered, putting a hand against her husband’s leg. I’ve made sure it’ll be okay.
And David didn’t need to ask what she meant by that; he knew. And he turned to his wife then, beaming, and wanted to kiss her. She’d known all along how much he’d wanted this, and she was giving it to him. Had arranged everything. He pulled his wife to his chest so she could feel his benevolence, his gratitude. He wanted to say something, a perfect bon mot, a benediction, but she pushed back before he could utter them and he watched, spellbound, as she knelt on the bed beside the girl and ran a hand over her calf and the back of one thigh and the tattoo, small of her back and up to her shoulder and then, in a single unexpected movement, went under and flipped the girl onto her back so that she lay there for the taking—exposed and quivering. His wife cut her eyes at him then, and he knew that look. It was a challenge. An invitation to play. An apology for having lost my son.
He dropped the panties he’d been clutching and lowered himself, gingerly, to his knees and took both the girl’s feet in his hands and, not taking his eyes from his wife, pried them gently apart, sliding his hands up and crawling forward until he was close enough to bury his face in that delicious smell. Margaret, trembling, moved up the bed and rolled the girl’s head into her lap, legs either side, and watched as the girl—stirring now—pulled him even deeper inside herself, moaning with the pleasure of it.
The possibilities had just exploded, and her husband, buried in the girl’s pussy, didn’t even know it yet.
24
After the last dinner party, Georgina told her husband that she was through with it. That she wouldn’t sit on another beige microfibre couch in a room pocked with African threshers and hatchets and other everyday objects of the very poor and powerless raised to the level of collectibles, artfully displayed across the colour-neutral walls. She wouldn’t sit, with a belly full of locally sourced fusion cooking, and decry the lack of civility in politics, the misplaced funding, the declining quality of the students they were labouring to teach … It was the same tired bullshit every time, the same hollow arguments, the same outrage they doused each other with to warm their hearts. And then, by dessert, they’d all be flipping their scholarship out like bibs on a baby, staking their claims to righteousness, opening their mouths to let their ideas dribble out. Georgina knew she was guilty too. She’d written two books—each one a rehash of other work (Matisse in Paris, Matisse post-Paris)—and she had a store of quotes she pulled out to refill her glass and continue the toast to their communal excellence, their intellectual superiority, their relevance even though she knew it was just a system they’d invented to avoid doing anything original themselves. They were carrion. Great big flapping oily carrion.
She’d said all of this and her husband, Pieter, had just looked at her, nothing registering. Those dinner parties, she knew, were his finest moments and he’d never give them up. Gorging on the sinews and tendons of someone else’s creativity were what his jaws did best. Snap! Snap! He mashed through cartilage. Snap! Snap! He ate through bone. Ate it, shat it, and came reeling back for more. His field, political science, was a charnel house—his job to take apart and reassemble carcasses, and push them on the world as something new. Something vibrant and alive.
Georgina sighed. She stood in the driveway between her car and the big house feeling she was teetering on the verge of something, but without understanding what it was. For someone whose life had been as finely engineered as an aqueduct, this was unsettling. It made the house—with its edifice of tradition and respectability—seem even more solid and comforting, and so when she moved to the kitchen door it was for consolation and reassurance that, like a child, everything would be all right.
This is Goldi, her mother said lightly when Georgina stepped inside, gesturing at the figure walking to the table with a plate of food. The girl from upstairs, Georgina realized. And wearing my clothes—a sleeveless silk top and linen shorts, both of which were absurdly small on her.
The girl kept walking, no acknowledgment, and sat down with her back to the room, facing the bay window and the view out, and if it weren’t for her elbows working up and down you wouldn’t know that she was busy eating. You’d just think she was being rude.
Oh, Georgina said, trying to mask her shock.
She’s a stray, Margaret said, dropping her voice, speaking through smoke. From the garden tour. Your father let her in, but I’ve let her stay.
With that lie, giving Goldi’s presence among them a double authority.
I’m washing her clothes, Margaret said, noting where her daughter’s gaze had lingered. I had to give her something in the meantime.
And there it was. That tiny jarring note of anger at being challenged that Georgina knew her mother could ignite, with no warning, into a racing inferno.
Of course, no problem, Georgina said. Laying out firebreaks. Wanting only to slide into that house and get what she needed, too played out already for anything more. There could be twenty strays upstairs and she wouldn’t care. Would make a point not to notice, because all she wanted was to be left alone.
Tea? her mother asked loudly, even though she knew Georgina would never say yes. Would always reach for the coffee, which was what she was doing. Cake?
Georgina accepted the large slice of fruitcake and scrabbled around in the drawer to find a fork, settling for a trident-shaped utensil because all the other forks had already been used. In fact the whole kitchen, she noticed now, was a shambles. Dirty plates everywhere and, on the island, what must have been the entire contents of the refrigerator spread across it. Like a Doré illustration for Gargantua and Pantagruel, she thought, looking at the jars and bottles and blocks of cheese. There was the platter of roasted chicken and potatoes from two nights ago, a dripping boat of warmed-up gravy and, as if to authenticate the comparison, Goldi came back just then to stack more food onto her emptied plate. Using her hands, single-minded, not even looking at Georgina or her mother, still chewing an enormous mouthful of beet and goat cheese salad that Georgina could see swirling crimson across her tongue. There was a smear of drying gravy across her cheek, glossy with oil.
Georgina glanced at her mother, meaning to share her disbelief at this guest’s atrocious manners, but her mother had shrunk back, and the intensity with which she was watching this girl, ready to spring away at the slightest indication of—an attack?—was startling. And Georgina thought that the note she’d detected in her mother’s voice must have been fear, not anger. And it was there now, unmistakable.
Excuse me, Georgina said indignantly, putting a hand on
the dish the girl was lifting. Instinctively jumping to her mother’s defence.
But Margaret’s reaction was even quicker. Taking the dish, she tipped its contents onto Goldi’s plate while pushing Georgina’s hand back and chattering about what else was on offer, as the girl kept grabbing food and piling it up, reaching for more gravy, pouring it over everything. Because Margaret’s fear was in fact the fear of Goldi leaving if she didn’t get enough of what she wanted.
Georgina sighed.
I’m going for a shower, she said. This stray, not a problem she needed to deal with. She’d had enough of other people’s problems and this one was clearly related to her parents and for once, Georgina thought, they can bloody well sort it out for themselves.
Georgina eased the bedroom window’s sash up, the sill mid-thigh, and leaned her head and shoulders out into the wind coming up off the city, into the traffic noise and the sirens and the swirling height, and wondered what the point of it was. Of any of it. When would she feel that she had everything in hand? By squinting to varying degrees, she turned the cityscape from impressionism to cubism to abstract expressionism, but still it didn’t help, to see that the world could hold all of that at once. That all those people down there were moving over and through a giant living canvas. That living itself might be an art form they were all participants in. She saw Jax next to the pool like a Hockney, and thought that there was the sort of composition she needed for herself. Something flat, where everything had its place. A sort of paint-by-numbers, she smiled weakly, beginning to regain some sense of herself, looking out at the larger world and seeing an endless succession of images reflected back at her. Everything contained. It is, she reminded herself, bolstering her claim to how she lived, all just a reproduction anyway. It can all be learned.
Later, she would stand at the opposite window, dripping and woozy from her shower, and watch them down there: her mother and her father, walking away from the house. Both outside in the failing day moving through different parts of the garden, unaware of each other, like a film. Something period. Something Masterpiece. Tiny splinters of noise would reach her through the open window—the crackle of her mother’s feet on the driveway, the click of a tool over her father’s way, the sound of a leaf blower out in the neighbourhood somewhere, its whine consistent and pervasive and so commonplace she had to really focus to make it stand out.
From the ground, the garden always looked spontaneous and impossibly vast, but up here you felt you could almost see its limits and make out the different elements that had been so meticulously arranged: a natural copse, a perennial border, formal hedges, a perfect grass circle ringed with herbs. A rose garden delineated with trellis work, and way back, beneath the oaks, the woodland garden with its carefully selected hostas, ferns, rhododendrons and azaleas, each one laid out and planted to complement the others. An ensemble, Georgina thought. A perfect distillation of a library’s entire wing. There were volumes and volumes of scholarship concentrated in that landscape’s design … Jekyll, Brown, Lloyd, Sackville-West—a festschrift of order over chaos. Something willed. There were clematis on the tennis court fence, their blooms like pressed flowers, and paths lined with enormous mounds of lavender that left their scent on your ankle when you brushed against them. When they’d moved there, as children, the land had been grass and trees and they’d played soccer where the flowers were now. Huge sprawling soccer games with tree trunks as the opponents and goalposts and corner flags, until bit by bit the trees had been felled and the soil tilled. Everything stripped away and then embellished, a riot of greenery and butterflies and bees. Even there, at the open window, if she closed her eyes, Georgina could hear the insect multitudes at work.
It was the house, she realized then. The house that had brought them all back. For it wasn’t they who’d inhabited the house; it was the house and its grounds that had colonized them. And wasn’t that stray girl, even that girl, some kind of evidence of that? Because hadn’t the house always taken people in? Every weekend there’d been teenagers sleeping on the couches and spare beds throughout the house—friends and acquaintances who’d just drifted in by themselves, coming back after parties or last call, because everyone knew the doors at the Blackford place were never locked and that there was plenty of space, and that the house wouldn’t turn them away. That they could take refuge overnight and in the morning disappear out into the garden and back into the world and that even though the sisters might hear of it later, the parents would never know. A palatial flophouse with no registry. A shelter for those in need.
Margaret left through the front door. She stepped onto the grass track that wound through what was left of the garden after the tour and began popping the dying blooms off plants. She didn’t push into the beds to get at the back, but just worked at what she could reach easily, leaving the snapped heads along the edge as if she meant to go back and collect them and take them to the compost. Pick up her mess. As if this, being out in the garden, wasn’t an anomaly but was instead part of her normal rotation of chores. For so long she’d been confined to the house, looking out at her creation being chiselled free of where she’d placed it. Being ground down and simplified, her husband’s influence through it like a plague of tiny biting things that nibbled-nibbled-nibbled until the ambition of it, the thrilling complexity, the harmony, was reduced to what she recognized as a jingle of pretty colours and department-store smells. A man’s view. An amateur.
She remembered, pausing at the lamb’s ear hostas, the family of rabbits who used to live in there, but she hadn’t seen them for years and sometimes, when she thought about them, she wondered if it was because of the chemical they sprayed to keep the weeds down. The government had banned it but David had stockpiled quantities, and Margaret wondered if they should stop, let those weeds crowd back in and see if the rabbits came back as well. As if a colony of rabbits would balance everything, stop the tilt she felt her world resting on. She had read about bees disappearing and frogs mutating and she wondered how much of that was her fault too, feeling she should go to the coach house now and dump it, all of it. Just get it over with. Send it sailing over the cliff and off the property. She could remember a springtime, years ago, when a duck had brought her new ducklings to the pool to teach them how to swim. For three days the mother had trotted them like a nursery rhyme out of the hostas and daffodils and into the chlorine to paddle around in a wavering stream of yellow fuzz and innocence while Margaret stayed inside, watching them through the glass. Had they died too?
Margaret pulled a cosmos. She supposed it was her fault, all of it. Pippa’s breakdown was because of everything she’d done and hadn’t done. But Pippa had asked to come home, to feel safe, to get better—surely that must count for something? Haven’t I created something wonderful, she thought uncertainly. Something permanent? Another baby was coming and it would come here, for her to hold, its little cries and gripping hands and that small pleasurable weight against her chest …
The scarlet petals had fallen and Margaret with them, bent into the soil, her tears like rain onto that small patch of her relentless gardening where every root that took hold was that baby she’d lost. I should have had a fourth and fifth as well. I should never have stopped. Because Philippa, as if to punish her, had had baby after baby after baby and mothered all of them. And all of them boys. She’d stayed with them, fed them, loved them, shaped little worlds for them the way Margaret never did. I just dropped them to the earth and let them crawl. The tremendous guilt sliding like a glacier and scraping her raw. And she knew it would recede to bide its time before slipping over her, again and again, until she died. Is that what she deserved—all of that? And why—she felt the turning now, the precipice, the rising seas—was the blame all hers? If David … And just like that, she switched. Stacking reasons and excuses, pushing the glacier back, finding her husband wanting, culpable, guilty but somehow free of it. Contentedly, outrageously free. And after all she’d done for him—all she continued to do.
&nb
sp; But now, she thought, he knows.
Perhaps this time the push back could be shouldered between the two of them; they could form a sort of dam. Atonement, she thought, grinding the petals into the dirt with her thumbs, is a red herring. It implied salvation from some other source and Margaret, if she knew nothing else, knew that what we are is what we made.
She looked back at the house. She’d made a life out of managing things, out of providing her husband with what he needed to stay functional. She’d tethered herself to his rages to keep them from soaring beyond what was acceptable because what was a family, after all, if not a population in miniature—and every country needed gerrymandering. Someone to pull the puppet strings. And Margaret knew that she needed those flare-ups too. She needed the extremes to jolt her awake because she’d always believed she was born for greatness and just needed waking up to it. Without the occasional violence, life was too much the same.
Margaret’s gaze drifted to the attic window and then dropped two floors down to where she’d left the girl in the kitchen, eating all their food. The girl was a professional, that much was obvious, and Margaret had decided to use her services to make everything good again. It would be a delicate business, but Margaret could manage it. She always did.
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