The Girl in the Wall
Alison Preston
© 2011, Alison Preston
Print Edition ISBN 978-1-897109-56-4
Ebook Edition, 2011
ISBN 978-1897109-61-8
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason, by any means, without the permission of the publisher.
Cover design by Doowah Design.
Photo of Alison Preston by Tracey L. Sneesby.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council for our publishing program.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Preston, Alison, 1949-
The girl in the wall / Alison Preston.
I. Title.
PS8581.R44G57 2011 C813’.54 C2011-905928-2
Signature Editions
P.O. Box 206, RPO Corydon, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3M 3S7
www.signature-editions.com
Contents
PART 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
PART 2
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
PART 3
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
About the Author
Also by Alison Preston
for Bruce
PART I
1949
1
Morven Rankin was born dead.
It ran in her family. Her mother, Frances, had been born dead twenty-one years earlier — Frances’s mother twenty-four years before that. In the grandmother’s case, an astute nurse banged the baby into shape before there was a serious lack of oxygen to the brain.
Frances wasn’t so lucky. She went through her life with the label given to her as a young girl: not quite right in the head. Her parents didn’t know what to do with her. When Mr. Rankin came into her life, she was just twenty years old. They gave him their blessings when he asked if he could marry her. They couldn’t believe their luck; Frances didn’t know what to believe.
You’d have thought by the time they got to Morven they would have been on the alert for the birthing emergency, considering the family history. After all, it was 1949; the bikini had been invented. But no one, least of all Frances, thought to mention it. Perhaps the grandmother didn’t think it was the type of thing that ran in families, or maybe she just didn’t think.
When Morven looked as though she’d be taking her time coming, the doctor stepped out for a smoke. Then out she slid with the umbilical cord wrapped around her tiny neck; she was blue from head to toe. The attending nurses were as quick as their predecessors had been in 1904 dealing with the grandmother’s difficulties. One nurse snipped the cord, another pumped oxygen into the baby’s lungs and brought her to life, and a third ran for the doctor.
“Good work, girls,” he said as he entered the room.
Mr. Rankin had had another family before he started his new one with Frances. It had consisted of a wife named Bess and a boy named George. Bess died soon after her son turned two. She choked on one of the peppermints that she kept at her bedside for her middle-of-the-night cravings.
Her husband had gone to use the bathroom and then continued on downstairs for a glass of water. He paused to look out the front window at the snow falling in big soft flakes — the first big snow of the winter of 1947. He thought about the new life growing inside his wife and he smiled to himself. It would be about the size of her fist at this point. That’s what the doctor had said at the last appointment. Not too small to love: that’s what he himself had said.
When he came back to the bedroom Bess was dead. He knew as soon as he saw her that it was too late for anything but a phone call.
He had thought highly of his wife but it was the fist-sized being that he mourned the most. In his heart he knew it was another boy. He buried his wife in Brookside Cemetery with the unborn child inside her. No one else except Bess’s doctor knew that she had been pregnant. It had been too early to tell folk. So he didn’t have to deal with that part of it, what to him was the biggest part, outside of his own head.
George was too young to understand, barely two years old. His mother was simply gone when he woke up on that blanketed December morning; he had slept through the whole thing.
He stood stunned at the graveside of his first mother.
“Mummy?” he asked in the weeks and months to come.
He asked it, not just of his father, but of anyone who came by.
Before long his only recollection of her was a vague sense of having once been held close — close enough that there was safety inside the memory, a solid core of protection.
Friends and neighbours were attentive to the little family after the death. They invited George and his father over for meals and dropped stews and baked goods off at their front door. It was at one of those neighbours’ homes that Mr. Rankin got to know Frances, the woman who would become Morven’s mother. He’d seen her, of course. She lived just two streets over on Ferndale, but he hadn’t spoken to her except for the odd hello. He’d known her parents for years in the way neighbours do: nice day, good job on the garden, how’s the world treating you?
Frances was twenty at the time of Bess’s death and she was still living with her parents. She didn’t have a job or any real interests outside of her home. Her folks got into the habit of inviting George and his father for Sunday dinner. Frances did the cooking and that impressed Mr. Rankin even though it was the same thing every week: tomato juice to start, roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, mashed potatoes, gravy. The only thing that varied was the vegetable. She rotated peas, corn, and carrots, which were Mr. Rankin’s three favourites. He didn’t even have to tell her that. For dessert they had chocolate pudding.
Mr. Rankin looked forward to Sundays and the regular roasts and the clear eyes of Frances Dobbs. Her eyes seemed to hold no secrets and he liked that about her. He began to love that about her.
They were married the following December, one day after the anniversary of his first wife’s death.
George was almost four when his stepsister arrived.
It wasn’t until a couple of years after she was born that anyone spoke out loud about Morven being a little odd in some of her reactions or, to be more precise, her non-reactions. For instance, she hadn’t smiled yet, not that anyone had seen. And she rarely cried. When she did, it was more of a lowing sound, like a calf that needed something, but not very badly. She shed no tears.
Those were just two of the things that made her different from other toddlers.
George was the first to notice because he spent so much time with her, more than either of his parents. He didn’t talk about it though. He would wait for the grown-ups to do the talking.
When she got a little older, when walking was no longer a major producti
on for her, he took her on what he liked to call field trips around their neighbourhood, the Norwood Flats. They lived in a grand old house on Monck Avenue and they set out from there to take in the sights.
“Look at that, Mor!” he said, pointing to a dog rassling with an old shoe.
“Smell this!” he cried out, thrusting a sprig from a lilac bush under her nose.
But she did not react. She stared — not at the dog or the shoe or the lilacs — but at the people they passed. And that got both her and her stepbrother into trouble.
“Teach your sister some manners,” said Mrs. Willard, the woman from across the street and two doors down.
“Tell her that staring isn’t polite,” said Mr. Charlie Tompkins, the grumpy man from Crawford Avenue. They were walking by his pristine front lawn and George was trying to interest his sister in the lushness of the grass.
It was the people that seemed to interest her — their faces — even when they were twisted with distaste and pointed directly at her.
“Stare, stare, like a bear. I can see your underwear,” sang the local children.
“Take a picture; it might last longer,” they heard more than once on their travels around the neighbourhood.
No matter how hard George tried with her, she would not learn to keep her stares to herself.
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to look at people,” he said. “You’re not doing anything bad.”
He worked hard at keeping any nuance of criticism out of his voice.
“It’s just that it makes people uncomfortable,” he said. “If you could just look at them for shorter periods of time, maybe, and sometimes say something pleasant while you look, like ‘hello’ or ‘how are you?’”
George had difficulty coming up with the right words to explain the difference between casual looks and stares.
“I don’t get what you’re talking about, Georgie,” Morven said when he tried to explain.
He sighed and grew quiet, even at the age of eight sensing the long road ahead. His half sister, among other things, couldn’t or wouldn’t understand the difference between looks and stares. He hoped it was couldn’t; he didn’t want to blame her.
Their dad yelled sometimes, thinking that she chose not to grasp certain things, like the business of staring.
“I don’t think she chooses it, Dad,” George said when he was alone with his father. “I think she truly doesn’t understand.”
2
“Tell me the story, again, Georgie. Tell me about how I was born dead.”
It was the summer of 1955. Morven would be six in October and George was a tall nine-and-a-half-year-old. They were sitting at the counter at Wades’ drugstore drinking milkshakes: George had chocolate, his sister vanilla. She hadn’t wanted one at all — had asked for a glass of water — but George wouldn’t have it. It seemed far too bleak to him for her to want only water when she had a quarter in her pocket and supper was the length of a baseball game away.
He glanced over both his shoulders. He didn’t want anyone to hear this kind of talk from his sister.
“No,” George whispered. “I wish I had never told you in the first place.”
People had enough crazy ideas about her already with her quiet ways and blank stares. He was sure the ears of the boy behind the counter, the one who made their milkshakes, twitched towards them when he heard what she said.
“Why are you whispering, Georgie?”
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
He didn’t want to argue about anything, least of all whether or not he had been whispering.
“Please, Georgie. Please tell me again.”
George finally obliged, but only against his will and better judgment and only when they were on their way home so no one else could hear their conversation.
After he had wrapped up the tale this time, she said, “I wish I was still dead.”
“No, you don’t,” he said.
“Yes, I do.”
He was afraid to let her out of his sight.
George had heard of grown-ups who wished they were dead, but not kids who had yet to reach their sixth birthdays. A man on Lloyd Avenue, Mr. Silk, had killed himself on purpose. He went into his garage in the middle of the night and closed the door behind him. He fastened one end of a rubber tube to the exhaust pipe of his brand new Meteor and stuck the other end through the small triangular window on the driver’s side. He cranked the window as closed as he could get it without squashing the tube. Then he got inside the car, turned it on, and waited for exhaust fumes to fill up the small space. He waited to die.
Mrs. Silk found him the next morning and went screaming down the street toward the river.
They said there was an empty bottle of rye whiskey on the car seat beside him. They said he left no note but it was suspected that the Second World War had something to do with it. He was German, after all.
The details of the death spread through the neighbourhood and took on a life of their own. At first there were gross exaggerations of nakedness and murder and missing limbs, but as time went by and the excitement settled down, the basic facts took their grim place in the history of the community and when people told the story they began to leave out the parts that they knew deep down weren’t true.
Mrs. Silk moved away and a new family moved in. They heard what had happened, of course, so the father tore down the garage where the desperate deed had taken place. He announced that they were going to “start from square one.” People whispered for all of a summer and part of a fall about his proclamation and what it might mean and then they seldom spoke of it at all. Other stories came along with greater immediacy and Mr. Silk was all but forgotten. The only substantial things that remained of the event were the expression “pulling a Silk” which meant killing yourself by means of carbon monoxide poisoning and a new two-car garage, the first in the neighbourhood. It was almost as big as the house.
The family that was starting from square one didn’t last long — two years at most — and then someone else moved in. They still lived there as far as George was aware but there was no good reason for his awareness to take in the little house on Lloyd.
He knew that Morven wouldn’t have the wherewithal at her age to pull off a Silk or anything that complicated, but he worried nonetheless. He pictured her doing dangerous things, like jumping off the Norwood Bridge or cutting into herself with sharp knives.
The knife thing wasn’t so far-fetched. Recently they had been making tomato sandwiches — squidgy sandwiches they called them because they got soggy from the juicy tomatoes on the soft white bread pre-sliced from the bread man — and Morven had taken a butter knife and run it across the palm of her right hand. She drew a thin broken line of blood.
“What are you doing?” George asked, his soft voice raised a notch or two.
“I just wanted to see,” she said. “They seem like such dull knives. I just wanted to see.”
That wouldn’t have been so odd in itself, but she did it again a few days later.
“The knife looks so smooth and fat,” she said this time. “I couldn’t believe it would actually cut me.”
She stared at the row of tiny red dots, on her left hand this time.
“But…but you’ve done it before!”
George’s voice was a quiet wail, as if a stuffed animal were trying to scream. He was always conscious, no matter what, of disturbing his mother.
“Yeah,” she said, “but still.”
“Still what?”
George snatched the knife from his sister and rinsed it in the sink.
“I don’t know, Georgie. Still nothing, I guess.”
When they got home from the drugstore on the day of the milkshakes Morven said, “Let’s play toss the ball,” and she offered the slightest smile imaginable. It was as big as her smiles got.
“Okay, let’s,” George said.
He went off to get his softball. It was never far away. He threw a gentle underh
and to his sister. She was very small. He would rather have lost the fingers on his throwing hand than hurt her in any way.
3
There was an unspoken rule in the house: don’t bother the mother. Even Morven, who didn’t get a lot of things, got that. There were no unspoken rules about the dad. He was approachable enough when he was around, but that wasn’t something that could be counted on with any sort of regularity, like Walt Disney Presents on Sunday nights. Some days they barely saw him.
George and Morven grew up asking nothing of the mum and very little of the dad: money for a new baseball glove, say, or a signature on a report card. Sometimes George did that last one himself. Morven’s reports were less than stellar and he saw no reason to bother their dad with them.
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