Summer Cannibals

by Melanie Hobson

  David glimpsed his wife out in the garden and bent lower over the sprinkler head he was trying, halfheartedly, to fix. Really he was just getting away from the house and everyone in it. He pulled the sprinkler up from its sleeve and turned it back and forth, attempting to dislodge anything that might be blocking the holes. They never worked properly and this one, judging by the wilted peony bushes, hadn’t been working at all. He looked at his hand, sure a few of the cuts from that broken window would scar. His skin not what it used to be. Everything so much thinner now.

  But what is she doing out here?

  David gave up on the sprinkler. He didn’t know what was wrong with it; didn’t even know the first thing about the elaborate irrigation system he’d paid to have installed and set up to operate independently. He’d have to get someone in to take a look. And because he was afraid to straighten and show himself to his wife, he crouched down on his toes but then lost his balance and tipped over backward onto the lawn. He didn’t even try to get up. What was the point. He was hidden, and it was comfortable in the grass on his back like that, his feet over the edge of the bed, his muscles stretched, the fresh green canopy of the oak high overhead with its cables screwed to the limbs to hold them up. Every year the tree company came and he paid them a small fortune to check those cables and make sure they were still preventing the inevitable and catastrophic collapse. David hoped it happened after he was gone because he was used to that old tree, the way it anchored the garden and shaded the beds, and was laced with drifts of snow all winter long like a painting.

  He closed his eyes, sure that if he tried hard enough he’d be able to feel his wife as she moved around—their mutual existence defined by those boundaries. By the innate sense they’d both developed, over many years, of where the other one was so they could avoid any overlap. There’d been something he’d done as a kid, something from a cowboy story, he tried to remember—put your ear to the ground to hear the horses before the Indians attacked? His scalp was already tingling. He tried, but the grass muffled everything. If she finds me like this, he thought, she’ll think I’ve had a stroke. The possibility appealed to him and he lay there, motionless, hoping now that she would come. This habit of taking things out on her. But … she’d given him a gift. He’d tried to see it as something else—a trap or a bribe, some payback of her own—but lying there, with his whole body pressed solidly into the earth, he knew it was in fact a bounty. A tithe, perhaps, but ultimately something good and grand. Something wonderful that she had gifted him.

  His mind began edging back toward that fugue state he flirted with, his tongue running across his lips, desperate to taste it again, the growing ecstasy.

  Eat now, he thought crudely, picturing that girl in the kitchen. So ripe for it she was bursting through her clothes.

  A gift, he grinned. A prize. A reward he knew he’d earned.

  25

  Goldilocks was finished eating. For now. She knew the old fucks were outside and that the others were somewhere upstairs, so it was a good time to have a look around the ground floor. She’d run through it so quickly the other day, trying to get away from the man who’d paid her to go on the bus with him, that she hadn’t registered much more than the fact that the house was gigantic and stuffed to the cheeks with good shit.

  She went from room to room, trailing her fingers across whatever she fancied, thinking giddily that she’d definitely landed on her feet here. Moneyedfuckingshitisright. And nobody—she lifted a gilt clock—would miss even a quarter of it. Not the gold paperweight, or the delicate ebony burro, its panniers filled with diamonds, or the jade coasters, or the round frame carved out of amber … She lifted them all, cradling them in the crook of one arm and wishing she had a bag. Not believing her luck. Thinking that the fucked-up job she’d taken with that perv who’d said he’d pay her extra for kinky was turning out okay after all, and that even though this new arrangement might not be an actual and official job, she’d been in the game long enough to know how to turn it to her advantage. She picked at a small coloured sticker on the base of a gold ballerina, noticing stickers on some of the other objects she held, and laughed out loud at the idea that this was a flea market, everything priced for sale. Tucking the statue under her arm, grinning. She wasn’t fooled. She’d bargained for enough trifles to know that these were the real deal. And they were free.

  This place didn’t just have curtains, she noticed—it had entire fucking swags of velvet hanging from its rods and pooling on the floor. It was like a museum. Even the walls were covered with stuff and the wallpaper—Goldi ran a hand over it—was fuzzy. The patterns were in felt that stood out and must have been stuck there by hand. By perfect, tiny hands. The rugs under her feet were soft and thick like marshmallow and there were so many cushions arranged on all the furniture that if she piled them up they’d reach to the second floor, at least. And not shiny satin cushions like she had on her one chair in the two rooms she rented, but cushions that were like cream filled donuts, bursting with a softness she couldn’t keep her hands off.

  At the top of the first flight of stairs, she looked in at the open door—too greedy to pass it by—and saw it was the old woman’s dressing room. A closet that was in fact a whole room. There were rows and rows of shoes beneath a hanging extravagance of fabrics, and Goldilocks stepped in and dropped the trinkets in the middle of the carpeted floor to start in on this even bigger treasure trove, in this room the size of a swimming pool.

  Evenfuckingreeksoftoomuchmoneyliketheinsideofavault.

  She squeezed out of Georgina’s borrowed clothes and began trying on Margaret’s. Silk charmeuse, cashmere, suede, silver and gold lamé—anything sumptuous, she put on and took off, closing her eyes to the gorgeous feel of the garments gliding over her skin. She got on her knees and pulled out the most outrageous shoes, from every decade—platforms, stilettos, ankle straps, peep-toes, d’Orsays and kitten heels—sliding her feet, finally, into the knee-high midnight blue velvet boots she pulled out from the back. Triumphant. As if she’d found the precise thing she’d been searching for. Four-inch heels and a zipper that disappeared with such intricate craftsmanship Goldilocks knew these boots had been expensive. Very expensive. Fuckingspitebuyforsure. That was something she knew about. She fingered the jewellery tangled on the dresser in the matching silver boxes, pulled out necklaces and rings and bracelets—all of it as heavy and cold as she always knew rare metals would be—and she draped herself in gold. When David found her there, wearing the boots and jewellery and nothing else, and reaching for the mink stole she’d spied on a high shelf, her bottom out—he pushed her into the bedroom.

  Naughty naughty naughty, he hissed eagerly. Jerking the necklaces up across her face like chains to hold her down.

  When he was finished, Goldi left him there collapsed into the mattress, surprised by the old man’s stamina. But she’d had enough men like him to know they always went at it harder than the young ones did—at least initially. It never lasted. All she had to do was wait it out, and it wouldn’t be long before he preferred simple cuddling or harmless schoolyard fantasies, or even nothing at all but just to have her around as something young and vibrant to get a charge off. Wholejobfuckedupfromthestart. A bodice-ripper, the client had told her, going on about romance novels and milkmaids and something called pastril? pestril? when he’d put her on that bus. But he’d said nothing about trying to drown her in the swimming pool—which he’d called a pond. Or dragging her into the bushes as if it was an actual rape and not a pre-arranged, prepaid transaction. He’d paid for kinky but what he’d tried for was something more extreme and he hadn’t paid nearly enough for that. Ditching him and running inside to hide—she looked around—was working out better than she’d hoped. And it was almost as if she’d been expected. They’d even fed her, for fuck’s sake. This house had been waiting for someone like her to come along.

  She continued her tour, room by room, identifying items she’d return for—certain now, after the old man had c
ome for her again, that she could stay as long as she liked. Even the wife had welcomed her after making sure she wouldn’t run—and why would she? This place was a jackpot. She could stay for years and never go through it all.

  Goldi passed in and out of other bedrooms, one of them occupied with someone showering in its adjoining bathroom, and Goldi knew it was the woman from downstairs whose clothes she’d been given because she recognized the smell. Goldi rifled through the woman’s belongings but there was hardly anything there, and she wondered if perhaps she wasn’t the only runaway. Taking note, and ready to fight for the lottery jackpot of this gig if she had to. Goldi went down a hallway next, and through some connecting rooms to another staircase and a bathroom and, around a slight turn, found herself at the room directly below the one she’d been locked up in. This room, she saw right away, was of a different kind. Nothing solid about it. It was the sort of transient jumble that Goldilocks spent her life in, and so she had no interest in it. Nothing there for her. Standing in the middle of it, the boots and jewellery still on, the old man’s cum seeping from her, she took a swatch of fabric off the desk and ran it between her legs before throwing the cloth down, his sour smell on her fingertips now. She squatted, pushing, trying to expel the rest of him and thinking that if she was going to stay she’d need some supplies. The wife would have to get those for her. She’ll want me clean. The wives, she knew, always wanted you to be clean.

  Goldi stood and spun on one foot, kicking her other leg above her head and laughing when it hit the hanging light fixture, making it swing. She could see the wife now, through the window, standing in the grass and staring up at the house. Goldi turned and waggled her backside and then turned again and shook her tits, finally pressing them against the glass, but the old bat still didn’t see and Goldi knew it would be a cinch to rob these people blind. They didn’t see anything. Fuckingcluelessiswhat.

  She peeked in the room next door and was over the threshold before she noticed the body lying in the bed, facing away. Another woman. It was a whole house of fucking women. She backed out just as the body shifted.

  George? Georgie, is that you?

  Goldi froze. Waiting. Being found there, naked, wouldn’t help her plan of screwing these people over, but the voice was weak and sleepy and Goldi was able to back out before she was seen. Able to creep back down the hall to the stairs, and climb back up to her room. She’d seen so many nice things, but now she had to figure out how many of them she could fit because if she was staying, and she was, her room needed some prettying up.

  Pippa’s eyes were open. She’d been daydreaming, remembering candlelight in that room. An old-fashioned silver candlestick she’d found in a cabinet and jammed a taper into, lighting it at bedtime to read. No one had ever cautioned her about setting the house alight. She didn’t think anyone had even noticed. Their mother’s cigarettes already filled the house with so much smoke that no one would have marked the smell of wax, or the sulphur of matches being struck. They were, all of them, so used to the smouldering. Pippa thought about how she didn’t read at all anymore. Didn’t even pretend. She read children’s stories but she hated them, and when she could get away with it, when her kids were only listening to the sounds she made and not the sense, she’d turn several pages at once just to skip to the end and get it over with. Talking animals. Fucking mice and bunnies. Always a lesson or a moral or an example of heroism and perfection. Couldn’t anyone just look around, Pippa thought, and see how wrong that was? How books and life were two totally different things?

  She wanted to tell someone. Tell them everything. Before this baby came, she had to tell someone what had been done to her at the lake because this baby was a girl and the house must be readied to receive and protect her. This girl, like all girls, would be a target too.

  Pip?

  Georgina, Pippa sighed. Of course.

  Were you calling me?

  And just like that, after twenty-two years, Pippa freed the torrent of images from the basin she’d sealed them up in, and left her sister gagging for air. For something—a root jutting from an embankment, a hanging branch, a floating log—for some sort of lifeline by which to anchor herself in the time before this flood that was overwhelming her. And not just because of the obvious evil of it—an adult taking advantage of a child—but because Pippa, as the youngest, fell under Georgina’s protection too. And Georgina had failed.

  26

  Jax lay poolside even though the afternoon sun was waning and the air cooling, but everything ached and she just needed some time to rest and recuperate. It wasn’t just Billy and the long walk back up to the house dragging the shame of what they’d done, but it was also the kayaking trip and the night’s storm and the poor sleeps, and Pippa and the rest of them … and so instead of being inside and helping her mother with Pippa, or out in the garden with her father cleaning up the mess, she was lying there making herself drift through happier memories of that house, trying to put herself back together.

  She was remembering a huge party, the band setting up right where she was lying now, poolside at the deep end near the diving board. It had started the way parties always start, dates on a calendar when parents will be out of town and friends smirking at you across the classroom or jostling you in the halls, or talking about it at lunch in the coded language of teenagers under the nose of their teachers. A communal push. This party at the Blackford place would be epic. The massive drunken blowout they were always searching for, every weekend and all summer long.

  Saturday afternoon, the band plugged their amps and speakers into long extension cords they ran out the library window to the pool deck. The beer started arriving late afternoon, cases of it, bought by kids with fake IDs and stockpiled there in advance, loading both fridges, a few bringing coolers filled with ice. The more paranoid hid their stashes in the garden, where even they would have trouble finding them later, in the dark, when they arrived in their howling carloads. The phone rang constantly: changes of plans, updates, someone’s cousin had heard about it from a kid in his math class and now all of the valley, and even Burlington across the lake, knew about the party that one of the big houses on the mountain was having. Everyone was coming.

  Cancel it, Georgina said when she realized. But there was no stopping it now; it was a juggernaut rolling in. And Jax had told Roz who’d told Billy’s friend that Jax liked Billy, and she’d heard back that Billy liked her too. The party, now, was critical.

  You’re in charge, Georgina, their parents had said when they left for Montreal. We’re trusting you. You’re old enough.

  By eleven p.m., when the police came to unplug the band, cars were parked twenty deep. It was so crowded by then that the officers could have mingled and no one would’ve noticed them. The band moved into the family room, started playing Steppenwolf—”Magic Carpet Ride”—and Billy raided the freezer, pulling out whole fish and shrimp and pitching them into the swimming pool, laughing maniacally, jumping in after them and doing dolphin kicks, Jax laughing so hard she fell in too. He’d touched her then, fumbling to reach the side, both his hands under her shirt, trying to hold on to her breasts, grinding his hips against her. Hard.

  When the band ran out of material, the stereo went on full volume, and as the night wore on and more people arrived and others passed out, and the cans and bottles and cigarette butts and mess piled up, as trysts were formed and broken—as night became early morning—the feeding began. Frying pans were pulled out and eggs cooked and toast made and the refrigerator emptied. Some crept away to sleep and others, a few, the real drunkards, the heroes, the hardcore and enviable and badass few with their cool jeans and T-shirts, kept going and by sunrise, even then, they had beers in hand to toast the coming day. Invincible. The city at their feet. Badge of honour they’d carry for a lifetime. Jax had missed it by an hour, falling asleep in a floating lounger in the pool, Billy pushed in beside her, the two of them all tangled up and a couple now. They didn’t need the sunrise anymore.

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nbsp; Jax had to see him again—just to be sure. She dropped her arms over the side of the lounge chair and ran her palms over the concrete deck, just barely feathering it, the sensation focusing her. She swept her hands out in widening arcs, brushing the fingertips of her right hand against the border of zinnias, and if she’d had her eyes open, and been watching, she’d have seen glass shards bouncing and catching the light on the plants she was riffling, because this technicolour profusion of flowers was directly below the window her father had destroyed.

  They arranged to meet again, that night for dinner. He hadn’t balked. He’d seemed eager, even, and now Jax wondered if she’d misread what had gone down between them as being a transaction when in fact it had been something more meaningful. He’d even suggested a restaurant that hadn’t existed when they’d both lived at home—as if he was ready, at last, for a relationship that was grounded in the present.

  When we’re both married, we’ll leave them and be together.

  I’m going out, Jax told Georgina, who was already at work on a pasta dish for dinner.

  Meet me, Jax had told him, at the bottom of the stairs. The Lodge. She knew he’d remember it because it was the place they’d all gone as teenagers to make out. On Friday and Saturday nights, the small walled parking lot tucked back in the escarpment’s trees was so filled with cars it was difficult to get out if you hadn’t backed your car into its space. When the rookies flicked their headlights on to start their fifty-point turns, the angry car horns from all the exposed couples bounced off the escarpment and could be heard for miles.

  He’d laughed. You know I’m borrowing my mum’s car. And Jax immediately pictured the green Volvo station wagon with all its space in the back, and the wool blankets kept there even in summer when the risk of breaking down in sub-zero temperatures had passed.