Once, in a Town Called Moth

by Trilby Kent

  Tomorrow, they would start again.

  There was music everywhere in the city: blasting from cars, thrumming through stores, jangling out of cell phones, the tinny remnants buzzing out of people’s headphones. Always caught in snatches. And always, to Ana, the sound of it seemed intrusive, imposed. Not a part of the world. Not a part of her.

  In Colony Felicidad, there had been singing in church, always unaccompanied. “The human voice is the purest instrument with which to sing God’s praise,” said Mr. Harms, her favorite minister. And Ana had loved the sound of the voices corded together like tall stalks reaching for the sun, the simple beauty of it, and the feeling that she could be a part of it too. Suvi talked about bands and singers as though it was all code for something—what was cool, what wasn’t cool—but the voices in church didn’t need translating.

  “My Life Is a Pilgrimage.” “How Great Is Your Almighty Goodness.” “As the Deer Panteth.” Those were Ana’s favorites, the ones she would still catch herself humming unawares, the ones she would allow herself to sing when she was sure her friends wouldn’t hear—as she cooked dinner, as she washed her hair. Perhaps Mr. Harms had been right about the human voice. It was something you could take wherever you went. No matter how far, it was always possible to sing yourself home.

  Mischa sang too. “Old stuff,” Suvi called it, because a lot of the songs were by dead composers or in dead languages. It seemed fitting, then, that Mischa’s parents ran a home for old folks in a neighborhood full of tall, brick Victorian houses. Mischa and his parents lived on the top floor, and the old people lived on the second and third floors. Downstairs there was a kitchen and a dining room and a living room, which they called “the parlor,” and a TV room with a pool table that the old men used to rest their canes against. The house smelled like Lysol and old flowers and backed onto a graveyard.

  “Actually, it’s called a necropolis,” Mischa told her. “It means city of the dead.”

  Ana wondered what it was like for the old people to look out their bedroom windows and see the very place they would probably end up in the relatively near future. She and Suvi and Mischa were sitting in Mischa’s tree house, overlooking an undulating plain of neatly tended headstones and tree-lined footpaths. School would start in two days—something that neither seemed to excite or bother Suvi or Mischa. So Ana too had to play it cool, repressing the urge to ask a hundred questions about what she should expect.

  “It’s called a necropolis if there are actual tombs,” Mischa was saying. “With bodies in them. Above ground.” He brushed some brownie crumbs off his shirt and crawled over to the edge of the platform where a rope ladder hung. “Come and see.”

  They followed him past weeping angels and crosses and urns with shrouds draped over them until they reached a headstone made of what looked like red marble. It was divided into two halves, left and right. On the left, the name Henry Wilson Crombie, followed by the dates 1937–2010. On the right, Jane Erin Crombie—but no dates.

  Was Jane Erin Crombie still alive? wondered Ana. What if she’d changed her mind? What if she no longer wanted to be buried next to Henry Wilson Crombie? In an instant, Ana’s pity shifted from Jane—poor, haunted Jane—to Henry. Jilted, betrayed Henry, left waiting for all eternity.

  “What if she remarried?” she said to Suvi.

  “That would be kind of ironic.”

  “Ironic?”

  “Irony. You know, like, different from what you hoped for. Like the guy who invented poison gas in the First World War dying in the gas chambers in the Second World War because he was Jewish. That’s kind of ironic. Or Captain Hook being the bad guy and also Wendy’s father—”

  “Is that really in the story?” asked Mischa.

  “Different from what you hoped for,” repeated Suvi with a shrug. “But in a kind of bad way.”

  Colony Felicidad

  When the police asked, we didn’t tell them that Papa had been there the night it happened. Aunt Justina shot me a look that told me not to answer their questions, and while she didn’t lie outright she left out a few details that could have made things different for us.

  It was unusual for the police to come all the way out to Colony Felicidad. It was unusual for them to take any interest in us at all. Judging by reports we heard from some of the older boys after their trips into town, the police had more than enough to keep them busy in Santa Cruz. The latest story doing the rounds was about a gang that was orchestrating illegal adoptions of Bolivian kids and making a heap of money along the way. There was even a rumor that one baby had been smuggled out of its village inside a watermelon.

  The police came back a few days later, when Papa was in. That time they asked to speak to him. I sat on the other side of the wall with Susanna’s little sister Eva, making shadow puppets with my hands over a piece of paper so that she could trace the outline with her pencil. We did a bird, a donkey, a dog and a woman in a full skirt before the door opened and Papa asked me to go and find Gerhard so the police could speak to him.

  The next day, he told me to pack my bag and said if anyone asked our surname was Rempel. That was my mother’s maiden name. Later, I learned that Picasso had taken his mother’s maiden name too, but for different reasons. Had I known this then, perhaps it would have seemed exciting and even a bit romantic, to say that from now on my name was Ana Rempel. But it was different then, and not in a good way.

  Toronto

  AT LAST ANA HAD GOT the hang of the washing machine. It was ancient and noisy, and jolted and shimmied and rumbled a good four feet across the concrete floor each time she ran it—it always had to be pushed back afterward, into the dark corner shared with the boiler in their basement—but their clothes came out smelling OK and usually the right color. There wasn’t a dryer, and it was too dank and crowded in the basement to hang things there, so Ana had to wait for dry days to pin things on the washing line outside their back door. Perhaps it was the soap they used here, or the water, but everything always dried stiff and crusty; she had to shake and roll and tussle their clothes just to make them wearable. Towels dried like cardboard on good days, sandpaper on bad.

  Once, when she’d gone to the washroom at Suvi’s house, Ana found herself idly opening a slatted wooden door next to the bathtub. Inside were shelves and shelves of perfectly folded towels: bath towels, hand towels, face cloths, beach towels, a couple of spare bath mats. Ana had touched one gingerly to see if it was as soft as it looked. It was.

  Justina used to help Ana with the washing at Colony Felicidad, and their towels had been like this. Blankets too had been plain, but soft. They felt of home. There was nothing of her own scratchy, rigid laundry drying on the line behind Mrs. Fratelli’s house that felt of home.

  Without thinking, Ana pulled one of the large beach towels from Suvi’s airing cupboard and shook it out. It was blue, with a hot pink and green striped trim. The cupboard was warm; the towel smelled of lavender. Ana wrapped it around her shoulders and pulled the corners up to her nose. Cradled in its embrace, she crouched on the edge of the bath and began to cry.

  “Everything OK?” said Julie, poking her head round the bedroom door as Ana emerged from the bathroom.

  “Yes, fine. Thanks.”

  Julie dropped whatever it was she was busy folding onto the bed and stepped out onto the landing.

  “I’m so glad you guys have become friends,” she said. “It’s nice for Suvi to have a girl to hang out with. There aren’t any other girls your age on the street, and so many of the kids go away in the summer. I think you’re a very good influence on her. Steadying, I mean.”

  Ana nodded.

  “You’ll let us know if there’s ever anything you need, right? You and your dad too.”

  “I will. That’s very kind of you.”

  Julie stretched out her arms and pulled Ana into a tight hug. At once Ana felt the tides begin to pull at her chest again; her eyes, just splashed with cold water a minute ago, began to burn. How long had it been? She was
aware that she was clinging to Julie’s shoulders—tight, tight, like a buoy bobbing far out to sea—but she didn’t care. Just as long as Julie didn’t see her cry.

  At last, when she felt she could trust her voice not to waver, she pulled away.

  “Suvi’s good at lots of stuff, but hugs aren’t her forte,” smiled Julie. “They’re on the house here whenever you fancy.”

  “Thanks,” said Ana. “I’ll remember.”

  The town of Moth didn’t exist for thirty years, because in 1920 the people at National Geographic messed up and left it off the atlas. It had always been a small town, but over the course of those thirty years it got even smaller. The National Geographic thing shouldn’t have made a difference—just because a place doesn’t show up on a map can’t mean that the people who live there just stop working and getting married and having kids—so maybe that was a coincidence.

  People always pointed out that Moth isn’t a very Spanish name, or even a Guaraní one. The town was founded in 1859 by a man called Tomas de Molli, who dreamed of starting a porcelain works on the border with Chile, using the sodium nitrate mined from the saltpeter fields to make beautiful ceramics to be sold all over the world. He thought he’d get all his friends and family from Europe to move there with him, but most of them found that living in the middle of a saltpeter field wasn’t all that old Tomas had cracked it up to be, so a lot of them left. The town was supposed to be called Molli, but the first person to record it in the census or deed poll or mapping project or whatever it was made it look as though the first “L” was a “T,” and the second “L” and the “I” joined up to look like an “H.” So Moth was born.

  Ana had never been to Moth, although it existed in her imagination more vividly than the house she had grown up in until the day Papa said they were leaving Colony Felicidad. In her mind, Moth was a village of sugar-cube houses set in the middle of a vast, flat, salty-white plain. There was a palm tree growing in front of each house, so that the families could sit outside and still be shaded from the harsh sun. There was a well in the town square—little kids threw marbles and kicked a soccer ball up against it—and a church with a bell tower. In her mind, it was always 1859 in Moth, and Tomas de Molli is often to be seen making his rounds, trailed by a little Guaraní boy whom he has adopted as his son. Tomas de Molli is a wiry, tightly coiled man with a black beard and hooded eyes. He wears a broad-brimmed straw hat and a white peasant’s shirt tucked into trousers that spill over the top of dust-coated boots. The little boy who follows him is called Popi; the dog that follows Popi is called Sue. Tomas and Popi and Sue go everywhere together.

  The only reason Ana had heard of Moth was that it was used in the colony as a shorthand for getting in over your head, finding yourself in a sticky situation without means for escape. “He’s gone to Moth” is what people would say if they saw a cat stuck up in a tree, or if they were listening to one of the boys try to explain his way out of skipping school, weaving one lie out of another until he couldn’t be sure where his story started or ended.

  When Ana was eight, she had been surprised to spot a bus barreling down the main road with “MOTH” spelled out in flip-down letters on its destination window. A few years later, she heard it mentioned as a place where convicts sometimes gave themselves up to the police—not on purpose, but because it was the last town before the Chilean border, so it was where a lot of police chases ended up.

  That information didn’t agree with the picture Ana had built up of the sugar-cube houses and the church tower and Tomas de Molli making the rounds with Popi and Sue, so she tried to bury it. She didn’t know then how impossible this would be.

  Toronto

  WALPOLE SECONDARY SCHOOL was one giant cinder block: ungainly, beige. Along the front and sides the concrete had been sculpted into modernist ribbing, leaving slits for windows. A long, flat-roofed extension on the east side was the middle school, where Suvi and Mischa had gone for the last two years: Suvi pointed it out before steering Ana towards the high school entrance at the front of the main building. The back wall was solid stucco, apart from a fire exit leading from the gym. There was a parking lot, and off of it a basketball court that was virtually identical to the parking lot, only without cars or yellow lines. There was a field of flattened yellow grass with football posts and a broken picnic table.

  It should have looked nicer than this, set as it was on a tree-lined street, flanked by houses with baby-carrier bike attachments chained to the front gates, SUVs discreetly parked in the laneways behind. Houses like Jonty and Ben’s.

  “Jonty and Ben go to Upper Canada College,” said Suvi, when Ana asked why they weren’t walking to school together. “They get a ride there with their dad on his way to work.” Then she added, as if to stop Ana from envying them their fancy private school, “They have to wear uniforms.”

  Ana would have killed for a uniform. Uniformity was what school in Colony Felicidad had been about. But then school in Colony Felicidad had also meant only twenty children in a one-room schoolhouse. Chickens clucking in the doorway. Wood-framed slates for practicing sums and handwriting. The Bible, hymnbooks and a few yellowing and dog-eared primers collecting dust on a window ledge. Afterward, kringel with Susanna and Eva and the Hamm sisters and their cousin under the tipu tree, which bloomed with yellow flowers at the start of the school year.

  Standing in front of Walpole Secondary School, Ana thought of Popi, the little Guaraní boy she once imagined had been adopted by Tomas de Molli. She thought of him living alone in the bush—perhaps his parents had died of plague or in a blood feud—and spying a tall bearded man through the pampas grass one morning. Popi would never have seen skin so white or a beard so long. The man’s hat would have looked silly, and yet Popi would covet it.

  The kids flowing into Walpole Secondary School were white, black, Asian, South-Asian—different from each other but most of all different from Ana in the way they walked, the way they shouted, the roughhousing of the boys and the slouching sly looks of the girls. Ana was transfixed: fascinated and terrified. This school was a new country, and she was an interloper.

  “Remember your combination,” said Suvi, testing the lock with a shake. “Write it in sequence on three different pages in your agenda in case you forget.”

  What Ana wanted to say was, Why do we need to keep schoolbooks and lunch bags and gym socks and pictures torn from magazines locked up in a metal container?

  Instead, she said, “I don’t have anything that valuable.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Oh, and the school can check your locker at any time. Lots of kids think they have to ask permission, but they don’t.”

  What are they looking for? Ana wondered. And, as if she’d read her mind, Suvi said, “Weed, man, weed. Some doofus gets caught every year.”

  “Hey, cutie. Talk to me!”

  Both girls looked up as a locker slammed shut behind them. Across the corridor, a boy in a gray hoodie stood smirking at his phone. He slid it into his back pocket and hauled his bag over one shoulder before sloping off toward the fire exit.

  Suvi rolled her eyes. “Justin Cook.”

  “Did he say something?”

  “That was his ringtone. His girlfriend’s voice. Karen brings him his lunch every day—in middle school it was always a six-inch sub from the Belly Buster across the street.” Suvi picked up her bag. “Makes me barf. If it wasn’t for Karen, he’d be cool. He has a band called, like, Diamond Fraction. Or Diamond Divided, or something.” She nudged Ana with her elbow. “Irrelevant information, dude. He’s not our type.”

  There were two classes before lunch. Suvi delivered Ana to English after showing her the shortcut to her math class. Surrounded by noisy strangers, Ana had never felt more alone. She was relieved when the teacher walked in and placed an overstuffed bag on the desk. She managed to regulate her breath and thumping heart while course outlines were handed up and down the rows, reading lists distributed, literacy test forms explained. The information sailed past her
in a blur; she would have to get Suvi to explain it to her later.

  The bell that rang to signal the end of the lesson made her jump noticeably enough that a couple of girls in the row next to her exchanged looks and sniggered. There was a surge of bodies at the doorway. The teacher escaped ahead of her students. There was no dismissal, no thank-yous, no orderly lining up.

  In math, the desks were organized in groups. The teacher, when he arrived, wanted this changed. At first Ana thought he must be the caretaker, or perhaps the principal, because she assumed that the same woman who had them for English would teach them everything. Not so. The students were rowdy as they heaved the desks into rows, laughing and chattering. Ana was glad of the delay; she knew that math here was taught differently, that she would be far behind. There was comfort in physical work, shifting desks and chairs, collaborating with the others without having to say a thing. She began to relax.

  She was relaxed enough to pay attention to the lesson. It was another language to her. Once again, the teacher was gone before she could ask him how she was supposed to complete the homework. It was something else to ask Suvi, who was advanced at math.

  The clock on the wall said 11:50 when the double bell rang for first lunch. Ana’s stomach had been so tightly clenched all morning that she had forgotten to be hungry. Now, though, it was as if her body realized that she hadn’t eaten since dinner last night. She scooped the plastic bag of corn muffins and cured sausage from her locker and waited.

  “It’s like some people got the memo that we’re in high school now in giant capital letters,” said Suvi, sliding her lunch tray onto the table and climbing over the bench. “Like: WE MUST BE DIFFERENT NOW. Have you noticed that, Meesh?”