Summer Cannibals

by Melanie Hobson

  Have you named her? Georgina asked.

  And Pippa, as if remembering the baby then, reached for her, but Margaret had already turned away and was pacing and rocking because the baby had begun to cry, muffled by Margaret’s arm but still audible. All the women in that room knew the baby was hungry, and that the cry would only become more insistent, but they did nothing to make it stop. Pippa, calmly, sipped her tea as if the baby should wait. Laying down boundaries, showing she was capable again, that no one ruled her life but her.

  Lucia, she said, looking over at Jax. I’ll call her Lucy.

  No mistaking that for a boy, Jax said.

  And as if, now named, the spell was broken, Margaret passed the baby back and the mood lifted and they all stood where they were, smiling foolishly, as if they’d each been handed an enormous prize. Nothing they’d asked for, but now that they had it—they knew it was going to make everything all right. All of it, just all right.

  They drew in, like moths, around that mother and her nursing child, each of them remembering what that was like. A drug. Time slowing to nothing.

  Why don’t you have a shower, Margaret said when the baby was full and sleeping, lifting it off its mother. You’ll feel so much better after a shower, Philippa.

  Then she left her daughters there, moving slowly so she wouldn’t raise the alarm, although they scarcely paid attention to her anyway because they were sisters—their own tribe—and she knew they’d never had much use for her. She went to the library and nestled into the armchair under the windows, facing the dusty fireplace and the books that were laddered to the ceiling. The rubbish from the stickers was still spread across the desk. It was the last place anyone would think to look for her, because Margaret just needed some time. She cooed, bending her head to that delicious newborn smell, kissing the baby’s forehead with her lips parted so she could taste it. Philippa already has enough and this one—she held it more tightly—can be mine. My baby has come back for me.

  Gave us quite a scare, Margaret said softly, looking down at the baby. Yes, she decided. Wrapped up in its white blanket, face pinched and eyes tight, this one could certainly be a boy.

  Margaret untucked the corner of the blanket and began to unwind it like a shroud, working carefully, ready to catch any burial objects that might fall from between its layers. What she needed was the umbilicus so she could add it to the very centre of her collage. It was exactly what she needed to complete the piece. She kept unravelling until she’d bared the pulsing tummy and she put her fingers on the shrivelled stump, tugged it gently just above the plastic clip, but it was still too fresh and pliable to break. She would have to sever it herself. There were scissors in her studio.

  She floated through the house as though it was midnight and she was trying not to wake her family. As soon as she turned the light on, she could see that someone had been going through her work. It was all out of order, scattered about like garbage. Even the ones from the cupboard had been brought down and left lying on the floor and across the desk, propped up on chairs and windowsills and against the baseboards. Margaret clutched the baby. Who? But she knew. That little bitch in heat.

  Margaret backed out of the room, livid, even the presence of the baby not enough to draw her anger down, and she half ran upstairs. The girl’s door was open but she wasn’t in there, or in the closet, or cowering beneath the cushions or duvet or behind any of the other possessions she’d looted—Margaret could see that now—to decorate the space. Like she owned the place.

  Margaret strode across the attic to the other staircase and down to her own bedroom, sure she’d find her there in flagrante delicto with her husband, but it was only David, coming out of the bathroom with a towel about his waist—and she wanted to screech with laughter and belittle him. Point out how old he looked. How his chest sagged and the skin along his sides was loose and pale, and that there was even something pathetic about how he had to grip the towel to keep it up. That nothing about him was lusty or essential.

  It’s over, she said.

  David regarded her coolly, looking from his wife’s face to the baby and back up to her face again, the picture steady now. He’d had his small moment of weakness but that was over and he was a leopard again, on the battlefield.

  I know, he said. I was there.

  The girl, Margaret spat at him. That girl is done.

  Oh. Is she?

  He slid past the foot of the bed and around to his dressing room, everything about him telegraphing nonchalance, but Margaret knew this technique of his. It was designed to put her off, and she wouldn’t have it. Not this time. Not ever again.

  Pity, isn’t it? he said casually. About that baby being a girl.

  He was across the threshold, hand on the door and ready to close it, the space between them so piled high with grievances that his words were almost lost in their accumulated mass. But he knew, from the way she stood motionless and unbreathing, that they’d hit their mark.

  Before the family had their supper, Margaret took a tray to Goldilocks, who was up in her room now, stretched out under the covers and sleeping. On that tray was a feast, and all of it laced with the stockpiled chemicals. Enough to sicken, not kill—but enough to make the girl unavailable. For Margaret to show her husband that whatever he had was because of her, and she could take it all away.

  Dear, she said, reaching for the rise of the girl’s shoulder. Jostling it, maintaining the note of cheeriness she’d practised the whole way up, coaxing. I know you’re hungry. She watched as the girl flung an arm out—confirming that she was only motivated by appetites, a beast, pulling the chunk of cake in under the covers to eat, shooting her other hand out to grab pasta. A rumble of obscenities as the bitterness registered on her taste buds, but the sensation only made her reach for more and more, as if the antidote was gluttony. A bigger flavour to mask a lesser one. That it was only the shell of the offerings that were repulsive and that like so many other things in her experience, all she had to do was push through the discomfort to get to her reward. She’d tasted worse. Not for a moment did she consider poison.

  Margaret shut the door, passed the broken window with a few jagged shards still vibrating in the glazing, and went downstairs. Let the house do the rest, she thought. Let the unforgiving heat build throughout the day. Let that corner room, with its sloped ceiling, become the widening gyre.

  Tuesday

  31

  It was as if they hadn’t even moved, Margaret and the girls. Still milling about the kitchen with cups of tea and bits of cake, and the baby in someone’s arms and crying. As if it had all just continued without David there, all night. Couldn’t they do anything properly? He was already in a foul mood—his evening pleasures having been denied to him, just when he’d begun to settle into a comfortable routine.

  Give it here, he said, taking the baby, still in his pyjamas and dressing gown. He would walk it and make it quiet, play the martyr. It wasn’t only his wife who was good at that. Before his tea or his porridge or the morning paper even, before any of that, he’d show them how it was done. Out the door and down the drive, remembering the course he’d trodden with the other grandchildren when they were babies and crying and he’d taken them. Conquered them. Down the drive, into the rhodies, around the tennis court and back round to the roses, and again and again for as long as it took. And when that loop got tedious he’d take the path along the perennials to the cliff and the white garden and pool and herbaceous border … my empire, he thought above the baby’s racket, is vast. A hundred thousand ways I can travel through my realm. And this one—he shifted the baby to the other side—weighs nothing. Some of those others had been heavy as lead, but this little thing is featherlight. Hardly there. He rolled her into his chest, stifling the cries, watching her tiny fists against him, feeling how stiff she was, impressed by her drive to sustain herself. A fighter. Yes. Girls are always that. And boys? What did he know of them except … mine didn’t fight hard enough.

  He moved wit
h it to the tennis court. Skirted the edge, around to the roses, a sprawling bush snagging his pyjamas at the knee and scratching his skin. The baby was still screaming, louder than ever. His arms were suddenly heavy and he wondered if this might be the start of a heart attack, trying to concentrate on the pins and needles—which arm? And shooting pain as well? Was he short of breath? And dizzy? A stroke, with the stress he’d been under, wouldn’t surprise him at all. And cancer lurking somewhere in his cells was a virtual certainty. But the baby wouldn’t let him concentrate. The noise, even smothered by his body, was maddening and someone had left cuttings along the bed’s edge, and it made the ground uneven, and it wouldn’t be hard to stumble, squashing the breath right out of both of them. He’d sustain an injury. Be knocked unconscious, probably. Might even die. Thinking, suddenly, of Goldi and how unresponsive she’d been. Like fucking a corpse, he thought, uneasy, seeing it now for what it was—a prefiguring of his own collapse.

  David, resolving not to give in, to let his wife win, to show weakness, to buckle under this problem that had, he thought, been unfairly thrust on him, walked to the farthest reach of his land, as if pressing the very boundaries was all that was needed. To the corner at the cliff where the property lines intersected and, like a shot, the wind coming up from the city and off the lake made the baby catch its breath and stop. Only for an instant, but long enough for David to realize that’s all it took—a change of elevation, a sudden wind. And so he propped his arms on the fence’s edge to take the burden off them, and the baby, suspended, was so still and quiet and his relief was so immediate that, without intending to, he relaxed his grip just enough that gravity took the dead weight of that baby and pulled, and David, realizing a split second too late, could do nothing to stop it. His panic then was genuine and visceral, and despite his age and all his imagined maladies, he ran for the house. Covering the ground in a mad scurrying gait until he gained the porch, bursting into the kitchen and screaming to the room,

  Why’d you give it to me?

  Accusatory, back on top.

  You gave that baby to me.

  32

  Pippa was out the door before her father finished yelling, running not for the mountain’s brow but for the trail at the end of the lane, behind the convent, where she could turn up under the cliff and along the maintenance path she hadn’t been on since she was a kid, exploring. The flat, level ground just wide enough for a man and his tools—someone to tighten the massive bolts pinning the metal retaining wall into the limestone of the Canadian Shield; the only thing stopping the whole slab, and the houses on top of it, from crumbling to the road below.

  She clawed across the piles of yard waste the landscapers and gardeners had been dropping over the cliff, season after season for years. Each house with a sliding pile of grass clippings and leaves and limbs pruned to a point that knifed her in the arms and legs, and down one side of her face. She should slow down. Listen for crying. Anything. Up ahead she could see where the cliff curved out of sight beyond the edge of their property and so she knew she must be almost directly below their fence line, nearing where the baby would have dropped, and what she saw wasn’t reassuring—so much debris tossed over the cliff, over the years, that the path was obliterated by a false hillside. A shifting pocket-filled unstable slurry of vegetative shit that her parents and their help had been adding to for decades. Like a trampoline, she thought, trying to walk across it, her legs falling through in places and springing back up in others. A baby, hitting this, could’ve been bounced clear into the trees, or to the traffic one hundred feet below.

  Lucy, she called out feebly. Luuuucyyy. Checking the limbs of trees for a body hanging there like refuse from a receding flood. As if the baby, less than a day old, might respond. Might have the awareness to know she’d been thrown away. That this glimpse of the world was all she would ever get.

  But Pippa refused to believe that. This girl would be different. Even their father, the despot king, couldn’t extinguish her. Even their mother, she thought triumphantly, searching through the brushwood with both hands, couldn’t ignore that this girl, born out of strife, would live to lay waste to them all. She was the inheritance they’d been saving for.

  And what Pippa found then was a miracle.

  Like a paid ticket stabbed on a spindle, the baby had landed on a cut branch from a lilac tree and the wood was holding her there, eyes closed and face relaxed. Pippa recoiled from the impossible doll-like stillness of the swaddling. The blood, where the stick had pierced the baby’s side, was pooling at her back, and what Pippa saw, inching slowly forward now, making herself do it, was the alabaster perfection of eternal rest. A baby so peaceful and flawless in the rude crèche of her surroundings that the myth of a son of God born in a stable made sense to Pippa now because anyone, she thought, would die for this. Even me. For the shocking innocence of it in the middle of all that wreckage. And when Pippa got close enough for the detritus under them to shift from her weight, she was ready to believe anything.

  Pippa! Pip!

  It was her sisters, at the fence, shouting down, watching her progress, barely audible over the absolute silence she’d made for herself in her baby’s presence. And as she crept forward, the shifting debris must have jiggled the branch just enough to shoot new pain through the tiny body, to tear the skin a little more, rip at the muscle it had grazed next to her rib cage, pinning her there.

  Because Lucy began to cry. And Pippa grabbed her up and put her to her breast, which was wet with milk now. Aching to feed her.

  Margaret looked down at her husband sitting there, still struggling to breathe, still wild-eyed and dishevelled, but already beginning—she knew the signs—to rearm himself. She’d expected the glacier, she’d hoped for his help, but she had never expected this. That he’d take another one. That despite everything she’d put in place …

  She would have to hurt him back. She would have to finish him.

  It had been hours since breakfast and the house, after all the commotion, was still. The baby had been patched up and the police tipped off by the hospital. The policeman stood there and waited for an answer to his question. It was Margaret who spoke first, her children arranged beside her on the driveway like a show of flags. A coalition. David was there too, because where else would he be. The girl was upstairs and vomiting.

  He tripped, Margaret said, nodding to her husband. The baby fell. It was, she quavered (her tone believable), a terrible accident.

  Even Pippa, back from the ER and holding her mended baby, nodded that this was true because how else to explain what had happened—and what else would this policeman understand? All that mattered now was to get herself and her baby back home, to New Zealand, and any further enquiries would just delay that from happening. Once she was gone, she would never have to come back.

  Jacqueline, her mother directed, tell the officer everything.

  And so Jax spoke, holding fast to the position that the baby had been saved because of the family’s vigilance. Because of their herculean efforts to restore order when all around them, like a thunderbolt, the world was descending into chaos. She knew they were all accomplices and that her report had to free them all from blame, and so she drew herself up and used heroic language steeped in myth to colour the scene and fashion this baby as the second coming; to elevate her to such grand proportions that who could doubt their intentions with a creature so pure and precious as this one was … or that attractive family, who’d left their well-appointed and magnificent home to meet this nervous young constable on the crushed gravel of their spectacular grounds? They who were sharing the details of this near tragedy, this private matter, without affectation or disdain. Her performance was riveting.

  He snapped his notebook shut and apologized for the intrusion.

  I’m a new father too, he said. I know how hard it can be.

  As if, somehow, this event was just another domestic oversight due to sleeplessness.

  And then there was the scattering:
each family member had somewhere else to go.

  Philippa, her mother said quietly as she turned to go inside. I’ve booked our flights. We leave tomorrow. I’m going with you, she said, answering her daughter’s look, to get you settled.

  Tea, Margaret instructed her eldest daughter then, and Georgina complied without argument because she was floundering, and the familiar ritual would give her something to focus on.

  And Jax? Jax was the first to leave. A taxi back to the airport that very night. She knew, better than anyone, when the party was done—and where the next one was about to begin.

  Epilogue

  It had been months since Georgina had been to the house. Not since everyone, excepting their father, had left. The university was back in session now and she’d been busy with lectures and meetings and student problems, but her mother had called and interrupted that, told her to deliver a message to her father: she was not coming back. This was a message Georgina had relayed before, over the years, and she didn’t credit it this time any more than she had on the previous occasions, even though the particular crisis that had precipitated their mother’s flight had seemed, at least on the face of it, to have been graver than the others. Her father, she thought mercifully, might need the message softened because there was always the chance—statistically infinitesimal—that this would be the instance when the message proved to be true … and it would be she who’d have to deal with the outcome.

  Georgina had spoken to her father on the phone more frequently in recent weeks. A sort of rising tide of communication. He called her when he was looking for things—a book, the can opener, the magnifying glass that should be with the dictionary but wasn’t—and left clipped messages if she didn’t answer, as if he knew that she and her husband and son were screening him. She had the creeping sense that he might be breaking down. In his last call, he’d mentioned retirement as if it were already under way. As if he’d stopped going in for his clinics. Georgina knew that mustn’t be right, because surely it would take longer than a few months for him to close his practice down completely. He had staff he’d have to give notice to, and patients he’d have to stop scheduling, and a building and equipment he’d have to liquidate. None of it sounded right. And even if her mother hadn’t phoned with her declaration, Georgina would probably have gone up to the house anyway just to check on him, make sure he was still ticking along.