Summer Cannibals

by Melanie Hobson

  Georgina went to that room now and peered inside, tentative, not sure what she wanted to see. Pulled there by the unfinished oddity of it. Grasping for anything that might draw her away from the whole entire shitshow of this family. But there was no one there, and the room—Georgina went in and flipped the light switch and looked around—was just as it always was, a clutter of stuff. Just a closet and big windows that didn’t even open, so even the air was second-hand. And that’s when she saw it—the collage her mother had been working on. The entire room, she saw now, was like a whirlwind centred on that—on the canvas, and its intentional markings, and how it had been assembled in such a way that the composition was in perfect balance. Not symmetry, Georgina thought, looking down at it, but balance. She looked up and saw other sheets of similar paper in stacks about the room—all of them blank—and then the long edge of one sticking out of a portfolio book on a shelf in the closet—and then she saw all the other books. Rows and rows of them. She pulled one down and flipped through it, piece after piece after piece—this passion her mother had allowed herself. Art. Which was what made it so unforgivable. That what her mother had made, for no one but herself, and had stuck away there with all the other detritus of the house, was better than every other thing Georgina had ever done or studied. Better, by far, than the student’s work in the gallery downtown. Here, in this otherwise superfluous room, was something essential and genuine.

  And it had been here all along.

  Truthfully, Georgina had come home not for her sister but for her mother—knowing how a crisis could tip their father into something primitive and raw. It had happened before, and they knew their father’s tastes were out of the ordinary, and their mother would suffer for it—but what Georgina realized now was that their mother had never needed any help. These creations spread around her were the earth’s crust that all their lives had been laid upon. And there was nothing—nothing—Georgina had ever done that she could compare it to. And this also, Georgina thought as she realized all the hours that must have gone into creating them, must be why their mother had missed what was happening to Philippa. That helped to make it all okay.

  Monday

  28

  At first light, Georgina was woken by Pippa’s screaming, and she knew, right away, that her sister was having the baby. She rushed down to her sister’s room and saw Pippa dropped against the bed, her knees on the floor, and something—blood!—pooling around her.

  Dad! Georgina yelled into the near-empty house.

  It was all she could do to pull the bedclothes back and lift her sister onto the bed, because the baby was already coming and there was no stopping it.

  Where’s Dad! Georgina yelled, frantic, running to check her parents’ bedroom and then running downstairs, screaming for him to come and help, phoning the paramedics … anything so she wouldn’t have to go back upstairs to what was happening, because it was the Death of Marat and Gericault’s heads. It was Goya, a river of gore.

  She pressed her hands on the kitchen counter, and tried to slow her breathing.

  Dad! she screamed again, emptying her lungs. And then she saw movement out the window—her parents, both of them, closing in on the house.

  David had heard the shouts even in the copse, where he’d been seated on the bench in the shade, Goldi’s smell still on his fingers, marvelling at his immense good fortune. He’d heard his name and his profession being summoned to the house to help, but he didn’t go right away. He waited. Unaccountably, he stood but did nothing else until the garden released his wife, and then he moved. Not a run, and only a touch faster than a walk. His wife was following the driveway, the most direct and unencumbered path, but he went through the garden, stalling the inevitable, because he knew now that the commotion must be the baby. That the house would be filling with anxiety again just when everything had seemed, finally, to be levelling out—and not the same as before, but better. Miles better.

  He brushed past Georgina, who was hysterical, circling the kitchen island like a broken toy whose motor won’t switch off. He climbed the stairs, the narrow servants’ stairs, beginning to feel like one himself, and at the landing didn’t pause but walked right in, and what he saw would never leave him because there was his wife, crouched between their daughter’s legs, and in her hands was the bloodied head as Pippa pushed it out. It was bedlam but in the centre, Margaret, undeterred by the mess and the smell and the terror of her own child giving birth with no one to help if it all went wrong. And what he felt then was wholly unexpected and sudden: a tenderness so profound it dizzied him. Made everything, except his wife, unsteady and shifting, and he knew that there in front of him, on her knees, was his life’s binding. That he owed this woman everything.

  David, his wife keened, reaching for him. Oh, David. I shouldn’t have.

  And they both knew she was referring to the miscarriage she’d admitted to. He took the apology, not as a victory—not as a chance to get and keep the upper hand—but rather as a rebuke for having lost sight of her.

  Darling, he said, falling beside her and watching her turn back to the baby as it slid out onto the bed, a viscous mess. And he thought, about his wife: How exquisite she is, how beautiful. How mine. How exactly what I deserve.

  When the paramedics came, swarming the bed, David and his wife stood to one side against the wall, her back to his chest and his arms wrapped around her like they were a new couple. And David squeezed her then, hard, and whispered a promise in her ear.

  I’ll never leave you, he said. Never ever.

  But Margaret heard it as a threat. As if he’d somehow, because of the intensity of the emotions, divined the entire story of the miscarriage—which was that she’d swallowed so many pills, in an attempt to overdose, her body had jettisoned anything superfluous in order to survive.

  We have to take her to the hospital, the paramedics said. It’s protocol.

  And so they carried Pippa. The servants’ stairs were too narrow and the door frames too crooked to get their stretcher through, so the two men—both so young they were almost certainly unmarried and childless—held her in a sheet, an improvised sling, and carried her awkwardly down the stairs and through the butler’s pantry and the kitchen, and down the porch steps to the stretcher that hadn’t even made it off the driveway. They fussed around her, tucking blankets and securing straps and cranking the mattress so Pippa was slightly elevated, all the carnage out of sight and the baby nestled into her and snuffling. Hadn’t even cried yet but no one seemed alarmed, as if the worst was over, and everything from now on was going to be a dream.

  Always thought it would be me, Margaret whispered. Leaving the house like that.

  She and David listened to the ambulance make its way onto the lane and along the escarpment—the crunch of gravel, and the squeak of branches scraping its sides. Both just standing there, next to each other, unremarkable.

  David, she said finally. I have to tell you about Malachy.

  It was dark inside the coach house, and cool. Georgina had brought the two black garbage bags filled with the mess from Pippa’s room—the bottom sheet, the blankets, even the pillow though it didn’t have a drop of anything on it—down the drive to the coach house to be kept until collection day. She’d used two big towels to mop up where Pippa’s water had broken, throwing those into a garbage bag too. No one had asked her to do it, but who else was going to? Jax hadn’t come home last night and that girl upstairs might not be a guest, exactly, but she wasn’t a maid either. And it helped to have something to do.

  After she’d dropped the bags into the large bins, Georgina dawdled—picking up some gardening shears, a broken nozzle, a croquet mallet, part of a plastic pull-behind toy. She drifted into the small side room and brushed by the high bench loaded with chemicals, the empty hooks that the gardening tools were supposed to be hanging from, the bundle of chicken wire, the tangle of garden hoses and power cords. This coach house had always felt, even more than the house itself, like a remnant from anothe
r era. The locks were black metal boxes attached to the doors below the cold porcelain knobs. The mechanism that drew the heavy main doors back like an accordion’s bellows, to allow enough space for two coaches to be backed in side by side, looked like something forged and hammered by a blacksmith. The walls were constructed of limestone mortared together, and the windows were too small to shed light. They’d always seemed, to Georgina, like arrowslits—as though this structure were a barbican. Electricity had been added later, thick knob-and-tube wiring secured to the walls for a single bare bulb in each room to push the gloom back.

  Georgina opened the latched door and went upstairs, to where the groomsman would have lived, stepping onto the rough pine floor she and her sisters had painted and repainted with each new club when they were children, and this was their secret meeting place. Roofing tacks shot through the ceiling and they’d all learned to crouch on either side of the ridge line to keep their scalps free of injury. She remembered that now, and ducked. The yellowed lace curtains, the old vinyl couch and chair, the coffee table, the stepstool—everything salvaged from the house, from the occasional purges their mother performed. Entire summers they’d spent up there, jockeying for control, settling arguments by standing in a circle with one bare foot forward until they touched, Georgina raising a brick overhead and letting it fall, the last girl to pull her foot back the winner. Why didn’t we just toss a coin? One potato two potato, eeny-meeny-miny-moe? They’d argued about almost everything: about what they would name their clubs, about what colour paint they would use—even how to hold the brushes and rollers. But between those confrontations, there must have been long, lazy days of calm. She remembered bike rides, with just the three of them. Spy missions undertaken, sleep-outs where they’d huddled together against some imagined common enemy. Moments when they’d come to one another’s rescue, big and small.

  And yet, just now, when Pippa had needed them—she’d walked away, and Jax hadn’t even shown up. When had it come to this?

  The rat droppings, the dirt on the glass, the ragged cobwebs that had taken over now—this, she felt, was what she needed. Not more composure. Not more pianola controlling the tempo of her life, automatic and error-free, its paper roll looping endlessly around the repeating holes of work and family. Not that house down the drive with its comforts, and its people pressing in on her. Philippa had had her baby. What now?

  Georgina placed a hand on the tacks. Still sharp. When, she wondered, had the clubs given way to other secrets? Secrets we kept to ourselves.

  29

  Pippa let the baby press her into the thin raft of hospital pillows at her back, its tight body cramped around her breast, the warmth flooding—she could feel it—down from her shoulders and her chest and her back, all focused on that little striving mouth. She was so beautiful. So perfect and so beautiful. The world was suddenly filled with levity, all the darkness of the past few months fled and replaced by this pure delight. She paid no mind to the doctors or the nurses, letting them move her arms and legs around, peer at her, stick her with needles, stitch her up, take her vitals … all just background to the majesty of this tiny perfect creature curled against her in that hospital bed.

  Leo, Pippa would breathe into the telephone later that night, you have a daughter now. You have to stop. No more sex. Or drugs. Or rock and roll. I’m coming back, but only then. The trans-Pacific cable, thousands of fathoms down on the seabed, almost split by the weight of that—because Pippa knew, and remembered, what a man could do to a girl.

  When Jax stepped into the room, Pippa and the baby were asleep, and so she sat by the bed and waited. It didn’t take long for them to stir, because if they lay on a cushion of innocence, then Jax had come raging in on a tide of sin.

  Where’ve you been? Pippa asked, shifting the baby to her other breast. You look rough.

  Yeah, Jax mumbled. Maybe I’ll take a shower in that invalid bathroom over there.

  Your turn to be sick now, is it?

  Jax pulled her sleeves down. Noticing, only now, that she’d missed a button on her shirt.

  Where is everyone?

  Pippa flicked her eyes to the window, and the cliff face rising up behind the parking garage.

  I had her up at the house, she said.

  Jax stared at the baby’s soft head, trying to picture it, the birth.

  The house?

  Pippa grinned then, the whole experience suddenly so hysterically funny. Yeah. Beside my bed. And then, well, on my bed.

  Jax was laughing now too, still giddy from her night on the lake. Everything off-kilter.

  Had to carry me down in a sheet.

  A sheet?

  Pippa crying she was laughing so hard, recounting—in gasps—what she remembered of that morning: the cute first responder who’d massaged her feet in the back of the ambulance, Georgina panicking, their father up against a wall and staring—she thought, she said, that he might actually have vomited—and Mum. Mum. She got the baby out.

  What?

  Delivered it.

  Mum did?

  Yeah, Pippa nodded. For real.

  Trust you, Jax said, to take something simple and make it a spectacle.

  But where were you?

  Out. Jax smiled.

  Sex, Pippa said, raising an eyebrow. Because Jax was glowing—life suddenly beautiful for her too. I hope you’re being careful, she said, stroking her newborn’s back.

  I don’t even know what you’re talking about.

  You’ve been here—what, two nights? Three? Didn’t take you long.

  Jax shrugged, got up and walked around the bed to the window.

  Who was it? Anyone I know?

  Who was what? Nobody, and nothing.

  Uh-huh.

  Jesus. It’s not like it’s a fucking reggae club filled with gigolos, Jax said, turning away from the window, her reaction setting them both laughing again.

  It was Billy, though. Remember Billy?

  Of course I remember Billy, Pippa said. Both of them lost for a moment in that memory of a night when the world had seemed so much bigger than it had eventually turned out to be.

  Is he still hot?

  Yes, Jax sighed. Still very, very hot.

  You always got the best-looking guys.

  Get, Jax corrected her. Because I’m still the best-looking girl.

  Except for me, of course. Ravishing, even after an emergency birth.

  Jax rolled her eyes. You’re a baby, she scoffed. A baby having a baby. When I called home, Mum said she was sending George down. Or Dad, maybe? I don’t remember.

  Hopefully to pick me up. I can’t wait to get out of here.

  So. Jax sat on the bed. What’s her name?

  Pippa looked helpless. I never had to pick a girl’s name before.

  Let me hold her.

  Jax took the tightly swaddled baby and lay her along the bend of one arm, pulling her in against her body and laughing at the little mouth searching for a nipple.

  She’s a good eater, Jax said, putting a finger there for her to latch on to. No Christines or Teresas; they’ll just get shortened to Chris or Teri. You need a definite girl’s name. A Vanessa. Or a Stacey. Catherine?

  I don’t know. Maybe a Maori name.

  Yeah, you’re such a fucking Maori. She’s going to be a redhead like you. What about Ginger! Or Ruby? She handed her back then because the baby had started to cry, her mouth sucking in air and her entire body spasming with the effort. She’s perfect, Jax said, whatever you end up calling her.

  Jax had met her husband over a rock pool at the beach. He’d impressed her by naming everything—chitons, limpets, whelks, krill—and she’d replied with similes—the rocks are like promenades, the crabs like advancing infantry. As if together, their understanding might be complete, their two languages combined to make the original one. He’d known all of it—the class, order, family, genus, species—as though he lived inside a diagram, caught between the pages, a tenth edition, everything vetted by the scientifi
c community and nothing left to chance. Was that what bothered her—that he didn’t ask for more? She knew he was smart enough—that his mind could hold more than it did—but he didn’t seem to care. Even the kayaks, which had been something new they’d discovered together, had become routine and—for him—limiting. When they nosed out of the shallows and left the mangroves she knew he’d paddle straight for open water, disregarding surface breaks that signalled oyster bars and shoals, as if an inch of water didn’t matter and he could just glide over it. Or as if he hadn’t even considered it. She knew he’d throw a hook in without expecting any bites and he’d wait in his seat while she and the children got out to beachcomb the spindrift islands they came upon, marvelling over finds. It was a workout, that’s all it was for him. A chance to get a tan. Was that really all he was?

  What she and her husband had shared, Jax realized now, was cowardice. Never having more than what they’d settled for, which was whatever had come to them easily. But now, she thought, as she watched her sister’s greedy baby—now she’d gone and done something brave. Her husband? He’d never know. And Billy would only be the first of many more to come.

  30

  Margaret declared the crisis over. Holding her newest granddaughter, and making Pippa a restorative cup of tea, she said that it was high time for everyone to go home. Everything—she put the scalding mug down in front of her youngest daughter—had been sorted now. In the morning they should all update their travel plans. She looked from Pippa to Jax to Georgina, daring anyone to contradict her. And she looked at her husband, whom she’d summoned to come and see the new baby, but he was already edging out, back to his unfinished business on the third floor. She knew he hadn’t seen any parallels between Malachy and what he was doing with that girl upstairs, because Goldi was a transaction, not a transgression. A professional. And here, anyway, was the best outcome of that fairy tale—keeping David away. He hardly mattered anymore.