Summer Cannibals

by Melanie Hobson

  And to her relief, when she entered the lane and the drive, everything looked just the same as it always did. Leaves were only just now budding out, and in the gardens, planted as they’d been to showcase every season, with the leaves gone and the blossoms not yet there, the shapes of things had become paramount. Even the barren trees seemed sculpted by an artist’s hand. Made to look like staghorns and fragile gorgonians—something you might chance upon in a fairy tale. The drive had its dappling of light and the house looked fiery in the full sun. It always felt good to come back, especially after an absence, the house always giving the impression of welcoming you. Of being a refuge you could count on. Many lifetimes of memories keeping its walls upright.

  Every Easter, like some grand estate, her parents had opened these gardens for a hunt that was attended by other children whom Georgina and her sisters barely knew. Girls and boys that they’d had to race for their milk chocolate and jellybeans, the adults ranged along the terrace coaching them. Blood sport, their father called it admiringly, watching the escalating carnage unspool while their mother moved anxiously among the mob of children trying to preserve her swaying beds of alliums from being snapped, and to curtail the trampling of pasque flowers, striped squills, daffodils and rock cress that were so pretty at that time of year. Back when it was still only their mother who fretted about what the bacchanalia would do to the plantings. The ground, Georgina recalled as she slowed her car on the crunching gravel, was often soft from rain, and all the lovely Easter dresses and short pants, by the end of the hunt, were ruined by mud. Great licks of it up shins and across chests where the children had flung themselves under shrubs to fight for the sweets.

  It was their father who hid those sweets. Georgina and her sisters would spy him from the upper windows before everyone arrived as he trundled the wheelbarrow along pathways, heavy with chocolate—never any pretense of a magical bunny—and always, somewhere, he would hide a golden egg. A small gilt oval hinged on one side, into which he’d folded a one-hundred-dollar note. He hid it so ingeniously that none of the children could ever find it, and after they tried and failed for what he deemed long enough he opened the search to the seething adults, and Georgina remembered how dangerous that had felt with those heavy bodies careening out of control, and how all the children would flee for the safety of the tennis court to watch their parents rage beyond the chain-link fence. But one uncommon year, Georgina recalled as she stopped her car, stricken by the memory, it was she who’d found the golden egg hidden high in the crook of that hawthorn tree there, nestled among three-inch thorns and new blossoms. It had glinted at her in the weak afternoon sun as she’d shimmied up the trunk, breaking spikes off until her palms and wrists were striped red but determined to get it, just barely reaching the egg with her fingertips and knocking it loose. Fumbling then, both she and the prize falling to the ground, where she lost it in the circular planting of marsh marigolds—just long enough for a boy, older and bigger than her, to pounce on it.

  Mine! he’d cried in victory, dropping his shoulder and all his weight against her outstretched arm and splintering it into the ground, her fingers wrapped around the gold orb and refusing to let go.

  Georgina had worn a plaster cast for a month—a comminuted fracture of her right humerus—but more memorable was her father’s approval that she’d kept her grip. For fighting, he’d announced proudly as he’d carried her to the house from the base of that tree, for what was rightfully yours and threatened.

  Georgina had basked in the adulation of that father—her golden, unassailable father—the egg and its contents pressed into her stomach, folded into the sling of her ten-year-old body as it hung lightly from her father’s arms as if it was just where it had always belonged, because she was struck by how effortless his movements were. Her father didn’t groan at the added weight, or run short of breath. He strode. The crowd parted. She was his.

  As she’d done countless times before, Georgina went into the kitchen and called out for anyone home, for her father, and then opened the refrigerator to scan it for something tasty. Always hungry in that house. The fridge was filled, every inch of it, with take-out containers. Styrofoam, cardboard, clear plastic clamshell packaging—every ethnicity the city harboured. Their sides were stained overflows of red and green and mustard yellow, and even with all the sauces congealed she could smell coriander and oyster sauce and cumin. Strange, because her father maintained that spices only ruined the taste of food—that a good gravy was all you ever needed. The door in her hand rattled with beer bottles and ginger ales. When had her father started to drink those?

  She shut the fridge and looked around and saw, now, that every surface was a mess. And not just dirty dishes and opened tins and food scraps—although there were a multitude of those—but the entire contents of cupboards emptied and piled across tables and countertops, even the floor. A vomitous spewing of possessions, picked over and dumped as if someone had been searching for something particular and these were the spoil piles. The slag heap. And every room Georgina walked through, stunned by the shambles, was the same—everything hidden had been brought out and subjected to light. But where was her father? And what had happened to the cleaning woman who came every other week? She would never have let it come to this. Georgina had always thought it was her father—not her mother—who had kept the household neat with his demands, but this devastation put that into question.

  She went from room to room, calling out. Her father’s car was outside, so she knew he had to be there somewhere. Upstairs, it was even worse. Every one of the beds unmade and every bathroom floor damp and littered with used towels, and the lights were all turned on as if someone wanted to make it eternally day inside. Keeping watch—but for what? Her old bedroom, which should have been dark because its curtains were pulled shut, was illuminated by its sconce and both bedside lamps. Even the closet light had been left on. But there was no sign of her father—unless you counted the tornado of possessions. His room was no different, and the sewing room was piled high with linens and the bed in Pippa’s room had been tossed, and their mother’s hidden room beside that had its door hanging from a hinge, and the frame splintered at the lock where someone had broken it in. Inside, however, it seemed untouched because that room had always been a mess. In fact, Georgina noticed, it had been somewhat tidied. The collages were back on their shelf. She knew her mother would have done that before she’d left—collected and filed them chronologically and—she looked back at the ruined door—locked them away so no one could have them.

  Georgina smiled then, the idea coming to her like a shot as she looked at the neat row of books, thinking that here was something she could do better than anyone. And a reason for her mother to come back.

  She took the first two portfolios down and began to pull the individual sheets out. This work was best curated thematically, she was certain of that. Forgetting about her father, she began to arrange the collages so they’d hang for best effect. She spread them out across the room, stood back to look, rearranged them … these were her mother’s most recent ones. The events were still in Georgina’s memory and she let that guide her, putting it within the framework of all her years of scholarship, until it was perfect—perfect and provocative—and then she took the tub of glue from the desk and began to smear it across the walls. She papered those raw canvases over all the walls on the second floor. She pasted them over Rembrandts and da Vincis and Caravaggios—these pieces of her mother’s there now, instead of hay fields and piazzas and portraiture. She glued them onto windowpanes and doors, and onto the wallpapered expanses between prints. Her mother might have started the work, but it was Georgina who was completing it by pulling it together and showing how it was, in fact, a much larger narrative and not confined to just that house and that family. Teasing out its links to the whole long sweep of art from ancient times. And Georgina didn’t stop until she’d curated both books and created in that house an exhibition that swirled through every room and up eve
ry staircase and even, in the attic, across the ceiling like a plume. Like a torrent looking for an exit. Working in a fever until she came to the corner room, and then she stopped. For here she had found the only room in the entire house that was kept neat and tidy. It was the room the stray girl had been in, she remembered, and she paused at the open doorway to take it in.

  The room was choked with furniture and objets d’art, but everything had been placed so carefully that the effect was of an intentional layering, rather than a jumble. Like a perspectival field—the Teatro Olimpico with its trompe l’oeil panels vanishing to a point. And that point, in this room, was the bed. Its cover taut and its corners tucked, and a mass of pillows propped against the headboard in diminishing bands so that the ones nearest the foot of the bed were little more than a doll’s cushions. The room seemed to have siphoned all the warmth from the rest of the house because the air inside was hot, despite its being early spring and the weak sun failing now as night came. But what was even stranger, Georgina noticed when she stepped over the threshold, was the lack of anything personal. That it could be so perfectly set up, so inhabited, but that there should be no clothes or half-read books or forgotten papers lying around.

  It’s a room made up, she thought, in the hope of a visitor. A guest room at the ready. But who would want to stay up here, when there were larger and better rooms on the second floor?

  It was through the broken third-floor window that she spied him, finally. Standing at the cliff’s edge with his arms raised, the low cloud mist that was covering the city pushing at his feet like ocean foam. He was wearing his dressing gown loose like a robe, but there was nothing revelatory or exultant about him. He was just an old man who’d wandered up against a fence, confused, bedraggled, unsure what to do. He looked frail, as if he needed rescuing. Pitiable.

  And so Georgina started down, confident that her solution would please him. Greedy to tell him what it was.

  David, as he did each day, stood at the cliff’s very edge to look out over his city, believing that the girl would see him. That there was something about him that would glimmer and catch her eye, and she would come back. But today there was a fog right to his feet and he couldn’t see anything, and that was ruining it. He’d tried imagining that what stretched before him was an immense drift of snow, and that her treachery would stand out against it like a fresh kill and there’d be no hiding, and then his sovereignty would be restored and he’d be king again … But it wasn’t quite right for snow. It just looked like ordinary ground, and this fence just a partition between neighbouring yards. Not lofty, or a pinnacle … just ordinary. Ugly and ordinary. No affirmation of a realm.

  She had left in broad daylight like a tinker, her stolen wares gathered in stolen bags that she pulled behind her. So heavy he’d watched the rut she carved in the driveway, and thought she’d never get through the potholes and down the lane. That the handles would break or the fabric tear, or her arms be pulled loose and her ankles shattered by the effort to keep dragging forward. That she’d have to return and seek help, and that all he had to do was to stay where he was and wait. Goldilocks. She was golden, but he knew now that he should have locked her up. That was where he’d gone wrong. His wife had known what to do … if only he’d paid attention. If only—he slammed both hands down onto the fence spikes until the pain made his arms weak—his household hadn’t been so riddled with betrayal.

  Georgina descended through the wondrous thing she’d made of the inside of the house, the walls alive now, and she passed through the living room and out to the terrace. The door swung easily on its jamb, the colder temperatures letting the whole building contract just enough to make its skin porous. The summer furniture was still there, its cushions piled with leaves. It was dusk now, but the gravel path arrowed through the white garden and under the pruned evergreen archway like phosphorescence and she could see there, framed perfectly, a single highrise apartment piercing the clouds that were laid across the city. Next year would be her sabbatical year, and what Georgina saw in that building was power, thrust, velocity. The walls of the house flipped inside out. She could curate and promote the remainder of her mother’s work. Put together a monograph, bring her back, mount a show. Create a demand and put her mother to work. The coach house, she thought, following the fence line to where her father was gripping it, could be a gallery. The university can fall away and I’ll never have to go back to it. This could be, she thought, everything I’ve ever wanted. Mine. The house was just a start. It would be the living museum of an artist’s life. It was the route you’d take to arrive at the gallery where everything else—and there were still books and books of it—would be for sale. And somewhere, her mother, producing more.

  Dad, she said, standing next to him to deliver the message. She told me she’s not coming back, but I’ve found a way to bring her back and keep her here. Come and see what I’ve done.

  He’d turned then and was watching her—this eldest daughter—walk the long way back to the house, around the terrace and past the perennial border. She was walking slowly, waiting for him to catch up.

  A way to bring her back? His mind always on Goldilocks.

  She was running the palm of one hand along the top of a yew hedge he’d clipped as a perimeter, and for one giddy second he thought she might enter the topiary, drop to her knees and crawl. And he would follow her. He would.

  Acknowledgements

  Much love and gratitude to the following people: my fellow writers—John Griswold, Glen Retief, Carissa Neff, Ed Tarkington, Matt Bondurant, Jane Springer, Cynthia Barnett—for their edits, encouragements and introductions; my friends Caroline Raye, Amy Hudson, Carrie Westmark—for their general wickedness; and Bob Shacochis—for all of the above, and more. Elisabeth Schmitz at Grove Atlantic for her early confidence in me, Katie Raissian at Grove Atlantic for her continued support and perceptive edits, and Nicole Winstanley at Penguin Canada for her enthusiasm and sheer brilliance. Shaun Oakey for his copy-edits, and Terri Nimmo for this stunning cover. My agent, Gail Hochman, for her unfailingly good advice.

  And to my family, especially my parents … amor est vitae essentia. Thank you.