The Girl in the Wall

by Alison Preston

  The temptation to lie down in this cool and different season was almost overpowering but she resisted. The ground was dirt. No sun broke through the tall hedge to nurture grass like in the other yards in the neighbourhood.

  She found herself back out on the sidewalk and felt like Alice might have, coming through the looking glass, back through, that is, to regular life. She squinted and her sweat started up again. She glanced behind her through the narrow opening and wondered why she had never noticed this place before.

  Not for the first time in her life she felt like she was remembering something before it took place. She wondered if there was a word for it. She didn’t suppose so.

  A woman walked toward her from the direction of the river. Morven waited for her without wondering why.

  “Are you all right, dear?” the woman asked. “You look a little pale.”

  She couldn’t answer but the woman didn’t seem to mind.

  “I’m Mrs. Beresford,” she said. “I live in the corner house.”

  She pointed, but Morven didn’t look.

  “You’ve had a scare, haven’t you? It’s this old house. It has a ghost.”

  “Who lives here?”

  “It’s not who lives here now that matters,” said Mrs. Beresford, “but who used to live here. It was a man who died by his own hand.”

  Morven pictured a giant hand with a mind of its own attached to a normal-sized wrist, wielding itself back on its owner and causing his death by crushing him to a pulp.

  “That’s the secret then,” she said. “I knew there was a secret.”

  “Do you like secrets, dear?” Mrs. Beresford asked.

  Morven didn’t like the question so didn’t answer it.

  Again Mrs. Beresford didn’t seem to mind.

  “This house doesn’t have a hope,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” said Morven.

  “Sometimes a house can’t get out from under. It can’t escape what it’s become through no fault of its own. It’s doomed, I guess you could say.”

  Morven began to run and changed her mind about going to the church. She needed to get home to George. Mrs. Beresford hadn’t been mean to her but there was something about her that she didn’t like. Morven was almost certain she would never walk down Lloyd Avenue again.

  George wasn’t home, but it was after supper so she went straight to bed and hoped for sleep. She wanted badly to be free of this day.

  “Georgie?” she said when she got up late the next morning.

  He sighed. It was the voice his sister used when she was going to say something bad enough to wreck his day.

  “Yes?”

  “I hate waking up in the morning.”

  George continued to spread butter on four slices of white bread. He was making brown sugar sandwiches.

  “Even during the summer holidays?” he said. “What’s to hate?”

  “Everything?” she said in her small wreck-the-day voice.

  “Do you hate brown sugar sandwiches with lots of butter?” he asked.

  He put them on bread and butter plates and sliced them in half. He handed her one and they headed outside to the patio, where they sat on lawn chairs in the shade of the elm tree.

  “No. But….”

  “Hot summer days?” he asked. “Do you hate those?”

  It had rained early that morning and the soaring heat had pushed the temperature up into the eighties already. It was headed for the nineties.

  “A little bit,” she said. “I sure don’t like it when I sweat.”

  From far off they could hear the shouts of kids at the wading pool, kids with the sense to involve cool water in their day.

  George knew he was asking the wrong questions but he didn’t know what the right ones were.

  “What about me, Mor?” he said. “Do you hate me?”

  Morven started to shake when he said that. She shook so much she dropped her still unbitten sandwich onto the ground.

  George picked it up for her and carefully removed the particles of patio dirt.

  6

  “I don’t want to live,” said Morven.

  She said this on a sunny Friday afternoon, the day after she turned thirteen. It was the fall after the summer when she had passed through the looking glass into the cool season on Lloyd Avenue. She was in grade six at Nordale and George was in his final year at Nelson Mac.

  “Don’t say that.”

  George’s response was automatic, without thought. When he did stop to think about it he understood how it could be true of his little sister.

  “Why not?” she asked. “Why the heck shouldn’t I say that?”

  “Because it’s wrong to think it, let alone say it.”

  And spoil the day for those around you, he thought, but he didn’t say that part out loud, not wanting to further lessen her desire to live.

  “How can it be wrong if it’s true?”

  “Wrong things are often true,” said George, thinking of the neighbourhood kids and the way they taunted her. “People think things that are wrong all the time.”

  “This isn’t just a thought, Georgie. I’m not just thinking it. It’s a feeling, a ’motion. I’m expressing it.”

  By this time Morven had been to doctors who had talked about emotions and how she didn’t seem able to express them. It was all because she had been born dead; something had gone wrong on the right side of her brain.

  “I’m expressing a ’motion,” she said again, a little louder this time. “Those doctors are full of pork and beans. I can do it.”

  “An e-motion you mean,” George said.

  It was all he could think of to say.

  “Emotion then,” she said. I’m having one.”

  George was scared, but he didn’t know what to do. He figured he should talk to a grown-up, but he didn’t know which one. None of the grown-ups in their lives seemed very useful or even available.

  Their mother spent most of her time in bed and when she did get up she seldom dressed in more than her faded chenille housecoat. She had a closet full of clothes that had been there for as long as either kid could remember, but she didn’t wear them. They hung there on hangers like in a department store, unused, unfamiliar — many inside plastic for safekeeping or sporting tags that proved they had never been worn. She was a limp container of aches and pains. Her good days were those when she made it as far as the lounging chair by her bedroom window. There would never be a day good enough for the conversation George had in mind.

  And their father was rarely home. He worked all day at the stockyards, sometimes into the evening. He was a big shot there: something to do with the business aspect of cattle. George wasn’t interested in knowing about his dad’s job; in fact, the less he knew, the better. There was another kid in the neighbourhood whose dad worked at the yards in a more hands-on capacity — on the killing floor, as the kid said with a swagger in his voice. That dad came home from work stinking to high heaven. George’s dad would sometimes stink too, but not as bad. He was protected some by the walls of his office.

  From time to time, he brought men home, with their big cigars and perspiring bodies. They’d sit around the dining-room table talking about cattle and other farm animals, drinking whiskey from small glasses. George and Morven would be in their beds before the men left. Sometimes there would be explosions of laughter that were too loud for the unspoken rule of the house and both kids would cringe as they imagined their mother with her eyes wide open staring at the ceiling of her bedroom.

  Most nights their dad went to meetings; that’s what he said. He usually came home first to bathe and change his clothes. That was when George managed to catch him for a few minutes on the day Morven said that she didn’t want to live.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, George, what is it? Where’s Morven?”

  “She’s upstairs in her room right now. I’d like to talk to you about her if you’ve got some time.”

  “What about, George? I’m in a bit o
f a hurry. I suppose you can talk to me while I’m in the tub. Just give me a few minutes to get settled.”

  “Okay.”

  The house was big enough that the dad and mum could have separate bedrooms. The dad disappeared into his. George left, came back in a few minutes, and knocked on the bathroom door.

  “Come in, George.”

  His dad was in the tub with the shower curtain pulled across.

  “It’s just something she told me today that has me a little worried,” George said.

  “Just a second. I want to add a little hot water here. I wanted lukewarm but not quite this luke.” A chuckle escaped from behind the curtain.

  The dad had a jovial way of talking. It meant that people liked him right off the bat. It made him seem approachable.

  Water came thundering out of the tap and then stopped.

  “Okay now, George. Who said what? Hand me a washrag, will you?”

  George opened the linen closet and took a clean cloth from the neat pile left there by Mrs. Campbell. He reached around the shower curtain to hand it to his dad.

  “Dad?’

  There was no answer for a moment and then with a noisy swoosh his dad broke the surface of the bath water. The sound reminded George of a turtle he had seen down at the river. It was about the size of a manhole cover. It slipped into the brown water from its resting place at the river’s edge and made barely a ripple — unlike his dad.

  “Ah, that feels good after…oh thanks, George. Since I’ve got you here, how about scrubbing the old man’s back for him?”

  George didn’t want to scrub his father’s back. He didn’t want to see him naked even if water and bubbles covered most of his body. There was always a chance that his dick would poke its ugly head up through the suds. He left the bathroom and closed the door quietly behind him.

  “George?”

  He heard his dad calling out to him as he walked down the stairs.

  To George’s way of thinking his dad counted on him way too much for the running of the household. His life was unlike that of any other kid he knew. Oh sure, there was Mrs. Campbell. She came in five times a week to clean and launder and cook some. She even saw to the mum in a no-nonsense kind of way. And if her grocery lists weren’t followed to the letter she took a strip off one side of his dad and down the other. But even so. There was people stuff to be taken care of, like the problem of his little sister wanting to die.

  “It’s too much for me,” he said aloud.

  He wondered if he should mention it to Mrs. Campbell. She was due to come in a couple of days. He didn’t want to. She was so matter-of-fact and she tended to talk about things being out of her jurisdiction, like if there was no laundry soap for instance.

  “It was on the list. I wrote it myself,” she had said when this happened. “There’s no excuse for there not being any. How am I supposed to do the wash today? Tell me that. Shopping for detergent is way out of my jurisdiction. Way out.”

  George felt sure that she would think preventing his sister’s impending suicide was even farther out of her jurisdiction than buying soap.

  There was one teacher at the elementary school, Miss Rainbird, who was nice, but he hadn’t spoken to her since he was in grade two. He didn’t even know if she was still there, still alive even. It seemed to him that most of the other teachers were strict, verging on mean. He knew they yelled at Morven sometimes. She had told him that Mrs. McFee yelled at her so loud once that her neck went stringy and two of the other girls in the class started to cry.

  Or else the teachers’ heads were in the clouds, pondering their own troubles, he supposed, and they just ignored her because she was hard to understand and they felt she disrupted their plans. Their plans didn’t include a strange little person whose stares had developed such an intensity that they frightened people; they had lost their former blankness.

  So George went to the guidance counsellor at his own school. He made an appointment on Monday morning as soon as he arrived and then almost ran off later that same day as he waited on the uncomfortable wooden chair outside Mr. Cantwell’s office. He wondered if the chair was uncomfortable on purpose, some former principal’s idea of one more way to torture the students.

  A secretary finally guided him in and sat him on another wooden chair. It was equally uncomfortable and George blamed Mr. Cantwell for this one.

  “What seems to be the problem, George?”

  The question came from across a wide expanse of desk. He hadn’t realized before that Mr. Cantwell talked in such a high-pitched voice. His head didn’t feel calm enough at the moment to hold that voice, to interpret it. It was an insect voice, one to be avoided.

  George’s eyes wandered around the room and landed on a framed photograph on the desk. It faced outwards toward George as though Mr. Cantwell didn’t want to look at it anymore and thought he’d give his visitors a turn with it.

  It was a picture of a not very pretty woman with a downright homely toddler seated on her lap. Neither of them was smiling.

  “George?”

  “My sister said that she doesn’t want to live.” He blurted it out.

  Full minutes seemed to go by and he wondered if it was possible that he hadn’t spoken yet. He also wondered if it would be possible for him to slip out without being stopped — if Mr. Cantwell would play along with pretending that none of this had happened. It didn’t seem too far-fetched.

  He shifted in his chair with this thought at the forefront of his mind.

  “Have you spoken to your parents about this, George?”

  “No.”

  “I think that’s who you should be speaking to first. Maybe they could set up an appointment with your sister’s pediatrician.”

  “She does have a doctor that she sees, but she doesn’t like him very much.”

  “Does she go to this school, George?”

  “No. She’s still at Nordale. She’s just in grade six.”

  “Ah, the little staring girl,” said the high-pitched voice. “Is that who we’re talking about?”

  George was stunned into silence. Surely she wasn’t that famous.

  “Son?”

  The voice didn’t seem to notice that it had shocked the boy.

  George nodded.

  “Maybe you could speak to the school nurse at Nordale,” squeaked the voice. “That might be helpful. But really, George, this is first and foremost for your parents’ ears.”

  “The school nurse is only there once in a while,” George said.

  He remembered that from his elementary school days. He hadn’t known her name then and he didn’t know it now. It could be a totally different person.

  “I suppose I could give that a try,” he said. “My parents…”

  He looked again at the hopelessly unattractive pair in the photograph on the desk and sighed.

  “Your parents?”

  George stood up.

  “Thanks, Mr. Cantwell. I’ve got a class now.”

  He looked at the clock on the wall. He had thirty-five minutes to get to his class.

  “Latin,” he added uselessly.

  When he thought about the conversation later all he could remember was the mention of his parents’ ears. He saw his dad’s sticking out like Alfred E. Neuman’s and his mum’s, tiny, too small for the size of her and pressed flat against her crazy head like they were sewn on. His parents’ ears were too private to be talked about by Mr. Cantwell.

  He let it go.

  7

  Morven wasn’t stupid and she wasn’t touched in the head, as some of the kids were fond of saying; she was just a little askew. In fact, when she took an IQ test in grade seven, she was near the top of the class. She knew this because certain of her classmates rifled through the results when Miss Horning was out of the room and then they sang about it: the ree-tard’s not retarded, she’s actually kind of sma-art.

  She wondered then why children always sang their mean statements. They never just stated them outright; a li
ttle tune had to be devised to go with them. The tunes didn’t vary much.

  Miss Horning yelled at her about being smart.

  “You’d think for someone with a half-decent IQ you’d be able to concentrate on your arithmetic problems long enough to solve at least one of them!”

  Morven came to think of IQs as things that were overrated. A high IQ was just one more reason to get yelled at. She didn’t even remember writing the test or what the questions had been about. And she didn’t know why, if the results were supposed to be a secret, everyone was shouting about them.

  She told George what Miss Horning had said.

  They were sitting in the flood bowl after school had let out for the day. It was late September. George was in his first year at United College, taking a mishmash of arts courses: English, anthropology, political science, history, and psychology. He didn’t know what he wanted to be. All he knew for sure was that the sciences didn’t agree with him and he didn’t want to work at the stockyards.

  “I hate Miss Horning, I think,” Morven said.

  “Well,” said George. “She certainly shouldn’t have hollered at you but hate’s a pretty strong word to use against her.”

  Hate made George uneasy. He couldn’t have said where he picked up the notion, but he had come to believe that it was dangerous, even little sister-sized pockets of it floating about. It could escape very easily and come back and bite you in the rear end if you let it get away on you. He didn’t want his sister being bitten any more frequently than was absolutely unavoidable.

  “What would be the right word,” she asked now, “if not hate?”

  “You could be mad at her without hating her, I guess.”

  They were sitting behind one of the baseball diamonds watching a game of Work Your Way Up.

  “Hey, George!” someone shouted. “We could use another player.”

  It was Frank Foote.

  George had his glove with him. He still carried it everywhere except to university. Morven had hers too, but she wasn’t asked to play. There were no other girls today. Sometimes there were and she still wasn’t asked but she had no expectations.