The Gallery of Lost Species

by Nina Berkhout

  Miss Rogers, who was on outside duty that week, and who also happened to be Viv’s teacher, caught on as the bell rang. She broke up the group and dragged Viv by the hood to the infirmary, where she passed out. When our mother got there, Viv woke up and vomited on Con’s pink patent shoes. Both girls were suspended for a week.

  That was the year Miss Rogers told my parents she thought Viv had psychological issues. Her concerns were based on the smelly sticker incident and the annual poetry contest.

  Each spring, students had to write a poem for English class. A jury of teachers chose the winners, which were read out loud at assembly. My rhyming couplet about bubbles and kittens went unnoticed. Viv’s poem was more troubling: “The monster my mother / crawled out / from under the bed / and crept inside my head / through my ears.”

  “What’s this rubbish, Vivienne?” Constance shook the scrap of paper in front of her after she’d met with Miss Rogers. “Where did you copy this from?”

  When Viv went back to the elementary school after her suspension, her fourth-grade classmates teased her and called her Sauceface and Wino. She hid every lunch hour so she’d be left alone. Then came the twenty-four-hour stretch when she went missing. Police roped off the premises and scoured the neighbourhood. News crews converged near the flagpole, waiting for the principal to answer questions about pedophiles. My parents were frantic and we stayed up through the night with an inspector and his assistant. They discussed tapping our phone in case we received a kidnapper’s ransom call.

  The next afternoon, a maintenance worker found Viv in the school’s subterranean boiler room, which was no longer in use. Nobody ventured down there. Everyone believed the underground tunnels were inhabited by the ghosts of students who died in the flu epidemic of 1918. Even the boys cowered from the space.

  Viv lay unscathed on a blanket near the entrance duct, eating Twinkies, reading Rolling Stone magazine with a flashlight. The only thing Con said after she set eyes on my sister and before she turned and walked off was, “Cette fille sera ma mort.” She was already looking away from Viv and the rest of us, speaking to no one in particular, to the dark air and the tomb-like walls.

  * * *

  THE GRAND SUPREME Prize for the Island of Dreams pageant was a trip for the winner and her family to Hawaii. Constance wanted it badly.

  She took my sister to a coach who taught her a dance where her body drifted around while her head stood still. She spray-tanned Viv penny brown and ordered her a custom-designed grass skirt. She had a lei made fresh by the florist, and an anklet and crown of hard, pointed leaves, which she kept in a cooler for the drive to Peterborough. She bought face glitter and a special iron to make Viv’s hair wavy. This was to be her big comeback.

  Henry was working that weekend, so Con had to bring me along. She summoned and bossed me around like a personal assistant and I begrudgingly fulfilled each task relating to my sister’s imminent triumph.

  Minutes to showtime, when the contestants were lining up backstage, Viv accepted a hug from us before we went to sit in the audience.

  “This is it, my darling,” Con said, her wild eyes glued to the stage.

  “Number three, Vivienne!” the former beauty queen emcee announced. And again, “Number three, Vivienne!”

  The audience craned their necks to catch a glimpse of my sister, infamous for her roller-coaster pageant career.

  The emcee moped. “Number threeee! Vivieeeeennnnnee!”

  My mother’s features began contorting. Her grip tightened on my hand before she released it and marched backstage in her thigh-high vinyl boots.

  The emcee flipped her curls behind her shoulders. “We’ll give Miss Vivienne a few secs, ladies and gents.”

  Mothers whispered conspiratorially to one another, anxious for their daughters to gain marks on Viv for tardiness. The judge tapped the bell on the judging table.

  The emcee straightened up and stuck her chest out from beneath her sweater set. “Presenting … Vivienne!”

  A ukulele and Hawaiian man’s voice singing in a Polynesian dialect came on. But again my sister did not appear. The judge nodded at the emcee again. The music stopped.

  “Number four, Sublime! Presenting Sublime!” A Shania Twain song bellowed through the loudspeakers. Sublime entered stage right, traipsing around in her Daisy Dukes and slinging a back handspring every so often. From the audience her mother yelled encouragement and instructed dance moves.

  I went backstage. I checked the washrooms, the stairwell, and the football field. As I neared the parking lot, I heard my mother’s voice. “That’s it! It’s over. You’re officially a loser. Just what you wanted, p’tite idiote.”

  Viv leaned against the hood in her hula skirt and bikini top, her head bent low.

  “I hope you’re happy,” Constance said. Then she lit a cigarette, shot into her seat, and started the engine. She would have driven away without me. The car was already in motion when I ran to it, my sister pushing the door open so I could jump in.

  THIRTEEN

  A FEW MONTHS LATER, Viv had a new friend. His dad was in the military, so he moved around a lot. His name was Nick Angel.

  An aboveground tunnel connected their high school to my middle school. After class, I’d see Viv making out with him in the parking lot. She didn’t walk home with me anymore. I’d pass by them and Nick would be looping her long, honey hair around his finger, pressing her up against the brick wall like in a music video.

  Nick Angel was hot in a mean sort of way. He had seductive wolf eyes and a crewcut. He wore steel-toed boots and marched down the hall as though he was on a mission. I imagined him raging through the buildings with a machine gun.

  “Why are you hanging out with that creep?” I asked her.

  “He’s misunderstood. He’s a poet,” she told me.

  She had begun skipping classes and was coming home smelling like pot and beer. I knew the smell from Daphne’s older brothers, who were stoners. Now, with her pageanting career behind her, she had a lot of spare time on her hands.

  Then she shaved her head. When she strolled through the kitchen’s saloon doors, my gasp prompted Con to look up from the lotto tickets she was scratching. I waited for our mother to hit the roof. But when she saw my sister, all she did was stare her down, light a cigarette, and blow the smoke in Viv’s face.

  Each time Viv altered her once-prized physique, Constance had the same reaction. At night, though, Con would lock herself in the bathroom and run water for a bath, only the water ran long enough to fill twenty tubs.

  Their duel was wordless. Con took away her allowance. Viv somehow still had money and got along fine. Con removed her bedroom phone. Viv used the booth down the street and then she bought a cellphone. Con threatened to take her to a centre for disobedient teens. Viv barricaded herself in her room and smashed the mirrors with the base of her floor lamp. Con unhinged her door and replaced it with a transparent curtain. This went on for months.

  My father wasn’t disturbed by Viv’s new style. Provided that she was painting—and she was, obsessively—he thought she was merely asserting herself and figuring out her identity. He said it was normal, which made me fear I’d have to go through it too.

  “Well. This is different!” he’d say when she came home with black nail polish or an outfit adorned with holes and safety pins.

  Soon Viv had piercings all the way up her ears, a diamond in her nostril, and a hoop in her eyebrow. Then she got a tattoo of a paintbrush on her shoulder blade. I wanted to take her picture and send it to Liam to horrify him. The problem was that Viv was still beautiful, just fiercer.

  She traced thick sooty liner around her eyes and bought her clothes and lace-up boots from the army surplus store. Her teachers couldn’t express disdain because she was still maintaining As.

  Nick Angel was bad news. In the school parking lot, kids approached him and an exchange took place. He got away with it because there were no security cameras back there. His father was often travelling, so
he had the house to himself and he brought Viv there after class.

  “Ciao!” My sister waved to me, clutching Nick’s meaty arm.

  “Bye sweetheart, be good,” Nick Angel called, grinning.

  Constance was home less and less herself. I turned into a latchkey kid. None of us knew where she went in the afternoons and Henry’s shift had changed from four until midnight.

  Alone in the house, I’d go into Viv’s room to inspect her graphite drawings. There were sketches all over and I was always curious to see what she was working on. To my dismay, her most recent stack were all naked pictures of Nick Angel.

  I fetched a hat box from under her bed. It contained awful love notes signed NA. I read a few and got bored. I looked forward to telling Liam about this new relationship in my next letter.

  Under the notes I found a dainty glass pipe, pale blue and shaped like a bird with a golden brown streak on its spine. It was as fine as any paperweight and I debated taking it so I could begin a new collection.

  I put my lips around the pipe’s stem and inhaled. The glass had a burnt, earthy taste to it. Next to it was a piece of foil, which I unwrapped. A small brown chunk fell onto the carpet. It had a strong and unpleasant smell.

  Then I found two tiny zip-lock bags of white powder. The powder looked like the artificial sweetener Con used in her coffee. I put one in my pocket and returned everything else to the hat box.

  I went to the pantry to marvel at Viv’s costumes—I was too fat to try any on—but they were all gone. The small, vandalized space was empty and dirty. Constance must have sold off the dresses to Viv’s competitors or shredded them with a knife like she’d sworn to do. The trophy cases had been cleared out too.

  The following day, I told Omar about Nick Angel and showed him my finding.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “My sister.”

  “That’s nose candy. Blow.”

  “How would you know?”

  “My mom’s ex made me bag it. When she found out, she rammed her rifle into his crotch and kicked him out.”

  I grabbed the miniature zip-lock from Omar and shoved it into my pocket.

  “Put that back where you found it,” he told me.

  “This is Nick’s doing. He’s a pig.”

  “You could poison him with lye.” We mixed lye into our cleaning agents for the coins. “Use a dropper on the coke,” Omar went on, “then return it to its place. The cops will think bad street drugs killed him.”

  I contemplated Omar’s proposition, wondering if I could get away with it. “What if my sister snorts it?”

  “I didn’t say it wouldn’t be risky.”

  He walked around the cases in deep concentration. He paused at one of them as if something hit him, and motioned me over. I could hear Serena banging around upstairs. She’d gone up a half-hour ago to prepare us tea and biscuits. She did that a lot lately and didn’t come back down because her phone rang so often.

  Omar drew my attention to a tetradrachm showing a man wearing a lion’s skin on his head.

  “See that guy? That’s Hercules.”

  “Your mom has taught me a few things, for your information.”

  “Actually, it’s Alexander the Great. He was the first one cocky enough to present himself as a demi-god on his coinage.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Know how he died?”

  “I forget.”

  “By his own hand. He was the toughest hero around. He won all his feats, including killing the Hydra serpent. Then he had to cross this river with his wife Deianira. A centaur named Nessos was there and tried to rape her. Hercules shot an arrow that he’d dipped in the Hydra’s blood at Nessos. As the centaur lay dying, he saturated a cloth in his wound and gave it to Deianira, telling her that if she made an elixir with it, she’d guarantee her husband’s affection forever.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “Time passed. Hercules was a cheater. When he strayed, Deianira recalled the antidote for lost love. She doused her husband’s shirt in the elixir and dried it. Hercules threw on the tunic and was consumed in agony.” Omar was getting worked up, his eyes widening. “He built his own funeral pyre and jumped into the flames!”

  “Weird, but whatever.” I worried the thought of fire might provoke a seizure, but Omar only looked exasperated.

  “My point is, it was his own poisoned arrow that killed him.”

  “So buy a bow and arrow?”

  “Give Nick Angel as much drug money as you can. Eventually he’ll overdose.”

  FOURTEEN

  IN AN ATTEMPT TO bring our crumbling family together, my father bought us a membership to the National Gallery on Sussex Drive.

  During the late eighties, he’d monitored the construction of the glass showpiece from his brown tower on the other side of the bridge. He disapproved of the Museum of Civilization going up simultaneously, steps away from his office and on his side of the river. A Disney of replicas, he called it.

  My father was one of ten thousand civil servants working at Place du Portage in Quebec, near the confluence of the Gatineau and Ottawa rivers. Place du Portage was a complex consisting of four towers occupying a city block. My father was in Complex I—the first of the high-rises to go up in the seventies. Five days a week for over twenty years, he spent his days sealed away in that turret like a prince.

  He always wore a suit. In the windowless locker room that smelled of fuel, where he and the other cleaning staff ate lunch, he changed into his custodial uniform. After every shift, he put his suit back on to travel home.

  “I’m over at Place du Portage,” he told friends, strangers, and acquaintances, without going into detail about the nature of his occupation.

  It was like Fort Knox in Complex I. Every few feet, security guards and screening machines checked staff for bombs and envelopes of white powder.

  People got sick a lot in those buildings. Allegations of poor air circulation and cancer-causing bacteria were made by former employees filing lawsuits. At the elevators there were flats of water bottles and posters on the walls advising staff to hydrate.

  On PD days, at a loss for what to do with us, our mother frequently took us to Complex I for lunch. Our father worked on floors twenty to twenty-five. Since we weren’t allowed up, we’d wait for him in the lobby. “Sure these structures are abominable, but I’ve got a great view!” he told us, pointing to the venerable art gallery we couldn’t see from ground level, while Constance scowled at the milieu.

  * * *

  INSIDE THE GALLERY’S glass entrance dome, Henry distributed our tickets and began his spiel on the genius of the architect. Viv cut him off to say she was going to the contemporary section and would meet us again in two hours.

  A group of artsy men loitered nearby, ogling my sister in her pencil skirt, fishnet stockings, and Doc Martens. She was still shaving her head but had let one lock grow at the nape of her neck. Her shoulder blades poked out like angel wings through her sheer black blouse. She didn’t ask me to join her.

  Henry and Constance held hands like a couple of zombies. I walked with them through the Canadiana rooms. Con skimmed Group of Seven landscapes without interest until she arrived at The Tangled Garden by J. E. H. MacDonald, in which rampant vegetation filled the canvas with a merciless kaleidoscope of colour.

  “Leave me here,” she said at the overgrown, uncultivated patch, as if her affinity with the artist moved her more than we could.

  My father directed me to the European rooms, and to a larger-than-life painting of a pregnant woman staring out at us, naked, with wild red hair. “Ah! A Klimt opus.”

  From afar it was a peaceful scene. Closer, the woman seemed tense and there were skeleton faces behind her. The painting was called Hope I.

  “Under this there’s a happier picture,” he went on. “She stood with her husband in a bucolic setting. Then Klimt’s infant son died. So he painted over the tableau and added the faces of death.”

  I left my
father with Hope I and continued on, halting at a smaller picture—Portrait of a Young Man by George Frederic Watts, circa 1870. With his pensive expression and deep-set eyes, he was the spitting image of Liam.

  I stretched my arm to touch his cheek. When a security guard blew a whistle, Henry led me away, through room after room of paintings and sculptures.

  He told me we wouldn’t see the most glorious works of art because they were unheard of. The same went for the best poems and novels, which sat in drawers. He said these masterpieces existed someplace but it was doubtful we’d ever experience them, like those worlds inside the paperweights.

  I knew he was referring to his own stuff. He’d offered up his paintings to the Gallery, on each occasion receiving a polite note of decline from the head curator. He’d also applied to be a custodian and security guard there and had been rejected.

  He took me to the gift shop. I bought the postcard of the Young Man in his white blouse, wide open at the chest, still captivated by his uncanny resemblance to Liam.

  Then we passed through courtyards hidden among the rooms of art. One of them enclosed a shallow square of rippling water. I saw my moon-faced reflection in the pool. I threw a nickel at it, wishing I looked more like my sister, but without the shaved head.

  My father left me at the garden court and went to find Viv and Constance. In the plot of trees and tropical flowers, I wrote my postcard to Liam. You have to come see this place, I told him. You’re already here.

  I took in the stillness and the sense of relief the gallery spaces gave me. I had a premonition I’d be back. I dreamt my sister’s paintings would be on the walls, and I would be their caretaker.

  FIFTEEN

  VIV GOT TOO SKINNY. Her complexion faded and she coughed a lot.

  One Saturday morning, she and Constance had a screaming match over a pack of cigarettes that dropped to the floor from Viv’s biker jacket. Until then Constance hadn’t noticed Viv was smoking because the smell was all around her anyhow.