Monkey Beach

by Eden Robinson

  “Mmm,” Dad said.

  While Dad and Aunt Kate were doing dishes, she said to me, “You watch out for your brother. No sense. Just like Mick. Nothing in his head but swimming. How’s he going to give me great-grandchildren flapping around the water like that?”

  “I don’t want you to leave,” I said.

  She raised an eyebrow. “When it’s time to go, you go.”

  I sat on the floor and put my head on her knees. “Don’t.”

  “The place I’m going,” she said. “Nobody’s hungry and nobody’s in pain. Sunny all day. People I love everywhere, waiting for me.”

  “No,” I said.

  She touched my hair. “Everybody’s singing. Everybody’s dancing and laughing.” The kettle whistled. She patted my shoulder. “Go get us tea. Go on. Hurry. You want to miss ‘Dynasty’?”

  Ma-ma-oo fell asleep on the couch. I picked up her mug of half-finished tea and brought it in the kitchen where Aunt Kate and Dad were having tea and biscuits.

  “Ma-ma-oo’s getting worse,” I said. “We should call Aunt Trudy. She should be here.”

  “Good luck,” Aunt Kate said.

  “We’ve already called her,” Dad said. “She’s not coming.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “She always has to have someone to blame,” Aunt Kate said. “Nothing’s ever her fault.”

  “Kate,” Dad said.

  “Well, she does. She thinks Mother’s dirt, while she goes out and parties and treats Tab worse than what she blames Mother for.”

  “Let’s put Mother to bed,” Dad said. After they did that, Kate said she could handle it, and that Dad should take me home because I didn’t look well.

  When we were alone, Dad said, “Don’t listen to her. Just be there for Mother. That’s all she needs now.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Good girl.”

  Wind coming up the channel from the south is warm, soft. Wind going down the channel from the north is bitter. When the wind is strong enough, trees fall on the power lines. Some of the power lines are already leaning over the cliffs like old men peering into the water. After a storm, the road is littered with branches, and the whining, teeth-grinding sound of the power saws is in the air. Big storms usually happen after Christmas. February is the worst month. Which also happens to be when the All-Native basketball tournament in Prince Rupert is on.

  During the All-Native, the village is deserted. Everything grinds to a halt. Radio stations tune in to the Northern Native Broadcast. Excitement mounts. Basketball teams with no hope of winning get themselves knocked out quick so they can spend the rest of the week partying. The teams with a real chance of winning live like monks during Mardi Gras. They are in bed before ten, don’t drink, don’t smoke, aren’t even supposed to have sex. Any player who deviates from this is soundly lectured, and then, if the team is serious is penalized by being taken out of a game.

  The Haisla Braves were knocked out by Thursday. I escaped Jimmy and Dad, who were on a break from training. If I had known I was going to be having sex that night, I would have worn something special, instead of jeans and a white shirt, though I don’t know why people make such a big deal about doing it. In all the movies I’ve ever seen, it is this huge, life-changing event. With me, I met Pooch at a party, we went up to a room, took off our clothes, kissed, got on with business and that was it. He was sort of drunk, I was sort of drunk, but by the end of it we were both sober.

  “You want to get married?” Pooch said.

  We both laughed.

  “Gran’s in the hospital,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “You know what the worst part is? She’s dying and all I can think is how much I don’t want to live in a group home.”

  “You staying in town?”

  He shook his head. “Going to Van.”

  “Harsh,” I said.

  “Harsh,” he agreed.

  We were quiet and I didn’t know what to say next. I hadn’t talked to Pooch in ages. I picked my clothes off the floor, Pooch stayed on the bed, all sudden modesty, blankets pulled up to his chin. I lay back beside him and he put one arm under my head.

  He wasn’t in love with me and I wasn’t in love with him, but it was nice to be held and to have someone there. It does make a difference when you’re feeling alone. It takes the feeling away for a few minutes, a few hours. Then it’s over and nothing’s really changed.

  The next day, me and Jimmy were sitting in the bleachers for one of the playoff games. The Haisla Braves weren’t playing so we weren’t as excited as the rest of the fans who jumped out of their seats, cheering or booing, screaming at the refs over each call, and shouting encouragement to their boys. Jimmy froze, then ducked his head. I looked over to see what he was hiding from and saw Karaoke standing in the entrance with Pooch. They were talking with their heads close together. Karaoke gave him a hug. He looked miserable. I guessed he was telling her he was leaving.

  I looked back at Jimmy. “Why don’t you go over there?”

  He glared at me, and hunched farther into himself.

  “Want me to call her over?”

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “Do you like her?”

  He didn’t say anything, but he blushed and looked down. He would dart I-have-to-pee glances in her direction. It was the first time I’d seen him painfully shy. I was going to call her over but saw Josh approach them. He put a hand on Pooch’s shoulder. Pooch shrugged it off. Josh handed him an envelope. He threw it in Josh’s face and tried to push past him. His uncle grabbed his arm and held him while Karaoke picked up the envelope and handed it to Pooch. Josh put his hand on Pooch’s neck, then steered him out of the gym. Karaoke watched this for a while, then turned her head and concentrated on the game.

  “She’s alone now,” I said to Jimmy.

  “She’s so pretty,” he said.

  “You aren’t dog food yourself,” I said. “Look, this is silly. Go over to her. Say hi. Ask her if she wants a pop or something. Life is short, Jim.”

  “You think she’d go out with me?”

  “You’ll never know until you try.”

  He stayed beside me, taking deep breaths. He stood, gave me a nervous smile, made it to the bottom of the bleachers, paused and turned around, annoying the anxious fans who hissed at him as he pushed his way through them back to me. Maybe it was better this way, I thought as he sheepishly sat beside me. If you never fall in love, you never get your heart broken.

  When I arrived at Ma-ma-oo’s house that afternoon, the house was filled with the sound of ghosts murmuring. Ma-ma-oo rested on the couch by the window.

  “There’s Mimayus,” Ma-ma-oo said to me, pointing her teaspoon at the corner of the room. “And Solomon, and Bertha, and Hector, and Vern—oh, I had eyes for him when he was young.”

  “You see them?” I said. I could catch movement from the corner of my eyes and caught the whiff of cigarettes, but I couldn’t see them clearly and didn’t want to.

  “They came this morning,” she said.

  Aunt Kate was in the kitchen boiling water for tea. The phone rang and she went to get it. Ma-ma-oo poked her spoon at my arm. “You’ll never get a boyfriend if you look like a stick.”

  “Ma-ma-oo,” I said.

  She reached under the chair and lifted an unwrapped brown box and offered it to me. Inside was a silver locket engraved with curling vines and leaves. I clicked it open and inside was a picture of Mick. She watched my face carefully.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I think about him too,” she said. She put her hand on my cheek. “Some days you give up. That’s the way it is when you’re mourning.”

  “I’m not mourning any more.”

  “No, you’re still mad.”

  I pushed her hand away from me.

  I touch my throat where the locket bounces against my neck. I hate to get it wet, but the rain is starting again.

  Aunt Kate sent me home later that evening, s
aying I wasn’t doing Ma-ma-oo any good looking so glum. Aunt Kate’s son J.J. called Ma-ma-oo’s later that evening and asked Aunt Kate to drive her granddaughter to Emergency. She’d fallen and chipped a tooth. Ma-ma-oo waved her off and said, “Go, go. I’m sick of you hanging over me like a vulture.”

  Aunt Kate tried to call me, but I’d gone over to Pooch’s goodbye party. I stayed at Pooch’s until Frank came. It was awkward, and neither of us looked at the other. I went out to the back porch. I leaned against the railing and noticed the northern lights, barely visible above the trees, smudgy green ribbons flapping slowly as if underwater.

  I could feel the cold coming up through the rubber in my running shoes, cold seeping in the holes in my leggings and the wrists and neck of my jacket. The scum of ice covering the snow cracked and complained as I tucked my hands under my arms and followed a path that led to a clearing where I used to pick blueberries at the base of the mountain. The clearing was a lot in a new subsection, the farthest out, and slightly on a tilt.

  The night was moonless. The party rocked on without me, and I was filled with sadness that no one even noticed I was gone. The soulful wailing of Led Zeppelin, muffled by distance and the trees, came to me almost like a memory. In the clearing, the only sounds were my rattling breath and the creak of the trees that formed a disapproving circle. The air was so still that the stars stared down unblinking.

  I heard something crunching on the hardened snow. In the distance, I could hear whistles. Something was coming towards me. I kept watching the sky. No one’s here, I told myself. I’m not letting my imagination get away from me. I am alone, and I don’t see anything but the auroras, low on the horizon, undulating to their own music. I sat on a log until my butt went numb, and then I went home.

  The fire alarm in Kitamaat Village is loud enough to be heard from Suicide Hill, some two to three kilometres away. I’ve never heard it go off in the daytime, except as practice.

  I remember arriving at the door just as it went off, then the phone began to ring. I couldn’t get the door open and listened to it ring, over and over again as I struggled with the keys. No one answered it. Jimmy was staying over at his friend’s place. I realized that Mom and Dad weren’t home.

  I went to every window in the house, looking out for the fire. House lights went on and people waited in their doorways to hear who the unlucky ones were. I didn’t bother phoning the fire hall because everyone else would be doing the same thing. There was nothing to do but wait. I went back and made myself a cup of hot chocolate, wondering who had been careless. Wondering if anyone was dead. I went back to the doorway and heard someone shouting that it was old Agnes Hill’s place.

  Ma-ma-oo. Ma-ma-oo’s place.

  By the time I got there, her house was a black shell and lights were flashing over it, fire-engine lights, ambulance lights, camera lights and the constant murmur of the people waiting, shifting.

  Sometimes I dream about it, how Ma-ma-oo decided to make herself some forbidden food, fried bacon. The frying pan caught fire. I see Ma-ma-oo as she takes a lid to cover the pan and it burns her arm. She collapses as her heart speeds up, she falls to the floor, gasping for breath as her heart labours. She makes no move to leave her house, even when she hears the fire, when she smells it. She stays on the kitchen floor, curled over, hugging her chest. As fire crawls over her ceiling and the pink insulation in the attic shrivels in the heat and the gyproc walls crack, she doesn’t move, even as the fire sizzles down her walls and the sound of engines approaches.

  I stood there, my mouth and throat frozen. There were arms around me, people held me and waited for me to cry. I stared at her house, at the ambulance, at my mother. I walked towards Ma-ma-oo’s house and no one stopped me. It felt as if no one could see me.

  Two volunteer firemen carried her body up out of the rubble. She had no hair, no skin. She was charred and smelled like bacon. My mother and my aunt shrieked. I remember that the clearest, my aunt’s voice cutting through all the other sounds.

  Dad grabbed me then and covered my eyes. He led me towards Mom saying, “It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”

  Ma-ma-oo always said that she was leaving everything to me. I thought she meant the house. Since she didn’t own anything, I had assumed she had no money. What I hadn’t thought of was how long she’d worked and how frugally she’d lived.

  “I bought my coffin today,” she’d told me. “Everything is arranged.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “What kind did you get?”

  “A plain one,” she said. “You know how much they cost? They were trying to make me buy a big, fancy one.” She snorted.

  Mom upgraded a bit when Ma-ma-oo died. The handles were nicer and the mouldings were more intricate, but as Ma-ma-oo had pointed out, when you’re dead, you’re dead. I imagined her in the other world, shaking her head at our waste of money. After settling her estate, she’d left me more than $219,800, so I told Mom to do what she thought best with it.

  Some of the money went towards Jimmy’s swimming. Some went to pay off bills. Most of it, Dad invested. I had a trust fund and got so much in interest a month. Dad tried to tell me what he was doing with the money, but it went in one ear and out the other. I didn’t care. I tried to get excited, but whenever I touched it, I remembered that I could have saved her. If I had listened to my gift instead of ignoring it, I could have saved her.

  The tide rocks the kelp beds, the long dark leaves trail gently in the cloudy green water. I hear squeaking and chirping. Dark bodies twirl in the water, pause, still for a moment as I’m examined. I dip my hands in the water and the sea otters dart away, then back, timid as fish.

  Well, I’m here, I think. At Monkey Beach.

  PART THREE

  In Search of the

  Elusive Sasquatch

  Weegit the raven has mellowed in his old age. He’s still a confirmed bachelor, but he’s not the womanizer he once was. Plying the stock market—instead of spending his time being a trickster—has paid off and he has a comfortable condo downtown. He plays up the angle about creating the world and humans, conveniently forgetting that he did it out of boredom. Yes, he admits, he did steal the sun and the moon, but he insists he did it to bring light to humankind even though he did it so it would be easier for him to find food. After doing some spin control on the crazy pranks of his youth, he’s become respectable. As he sips his low-fat mocha and reads yet another sanitized version of his earlier exploits, only his small, sly smile reveals how much he enjoys pulling the wool over everyone else’s eyes.

  I can hear them in the trees. They whistle—some high and musical, others just muted one-note shrieks—as my speedboat glides towards the shore of Monkey Beach. The hull grinds against the sand. I leap out and splash to shore. Once the boat is tied up, I pull my hood over my face and settle into a smoke. A raindrop splashes the cigarette tip, hissing.

  They begin to giggle.

  I was here last year with Jimmy. 1988. Another banner year. A catalogue of the parties I remember, the amount I drank, the drugs I did would be pointless. It’s a blur. A smudge. Two years erased, down the toilet, blotto. The first year, I managed to slog through grade ten, but I gave up on grade eleven altogether and took off to Vancouver with people I thought were friends but, it turned out, were not. Some of it was fun.

  For the first time in my life, I felt like I was cool, if only because I bought the booze. What had started out as a way to escape turned out to be a ticket to popularity. Temporary, yes, but popularity nonetheless. My favourite bootlegger charged me only 10 per cent to go into the liquor store and get me what I wanted. I didn’t look old enough to get by the cashier without showing my fake ID, which I’d paid a lot of money for but was a useless piece of shit that didn’t stand up to scrutiny. Sometimes I’d go to the pusher who lived two buildings away and get coke or hash or pot without a hassle. And since I was such a loyal customer, he usually gave me a discount. Or so he said. He had the same line for everyone. The longer he st
ayed in business, the more careless he got. He was busted a few days after he bought a new Corvette with cash. The same week, the trust fund allowance for that month ran out, and I was strapped and so were my friends. Without a party, we went our separate ways.

  I would have stayed that way for years if it wasn’t for Tab. She came to me when I woke up lying facedown on cool, sticky tiles. My mouth was dry. My head ached like a bugger. I wanted to stay where I was, but I wanted a cigarette worse, so I put my hands under me and pushed myself up. I stopped when I was on my knees and put both hands against my temples, but that didn’t stop my head from throbbing. I searched through my front pocket and I found my pack and lighter. I became aware of someone staring at me and opened my eyes. The light was burning a hole right through my skull, so I could only squint.

  Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, Tab said, “You sober now?” She was scrawnier than ever, had dyed her hair red and was wearing a black, skin-hugging lace mini and bikini top.

  “Mostly,” I said. I raised the cigarette to my mouth and lit up.

  “You remember where we are?”

  “East Van,” I said. “I’m awake, I’m awake. What happened?”

  “You tell me.”

  From her tone I could tell she was really pissed, so I must have been especially stupid the night before. Or the day before. Whenever. I didn’t feel up to one of her lectures. I flicked my cigarette into the toilet.

  “Want some coffee?” she said. She stood up and waited for me to haul my ass up. I felt shaky and stiff from sleeping on the floor. I scrubbed my face with cold water and saw myself in the mirror. My hair was flat on one side and bar-hair high on the other. It was shoulder-length and tangled, oily—yet dry to the point of feeling like straw. My mascara had migrated down my face and smudged where I’d wiped it. I finally noticed my surroundings. The orange-and-brown sixties’ decor, the crackling silver on the mirror’s corners, the smell of mould and smothering Old Dutch cleanser all screamed cheap motel.