Annabel (14 page)

This was what all houses built by missionaries must be like, Treadway thought now, no matter where they were in the world. The Moravian missionaries’ wives had built drills and terraces all around the sides and back of this house and had grown crops no Labrador settler in his right mind would plant. Parsley and sugar snap peas and summer savory, cucumbers and frilly European lettuces, even tomatoes. They had tried to turn their handkerchief-sized piece of Labrador into a little piece of Europe, and had almost succeeded, using cloches and cold frames and other tender and intricate devices. They had grown sweet peas, for goodness’ sake — a flower that grew into a pod that had no culinary function — and had tied them to six-foot-high stakes with pieces of ribbon. It had worked for as long as the Moravian women were present and vigilant.

When the Grenfell missionaries took over, they had put an end to herbs and sweet peas. The men tended the gardens, with what Treadway considered a trifle more good sense than the Moravian women had. The men had put in carrot, cabbage, beet, and potato, but then they had gone and brought in a cow, reasoning that a local supply of milk would give greater health to Labrador babies. A cow, in Labrador. You might as well put a cow on the North Pole and expect it to live. Again, with hot water bottles and blankets and God knew what other foolishness, the Grenfell missionaries managed to keep the cow and its daughter alive for five or six years, but then the brutal grandeur of the real Labrador took over. They didn’t call this place the big land for nothing. It was big in a way that people who came in either respected and followed or disdained at their peril. You could live like a king in Labrador if you knew how to be subservient to the land, and if you did not know how, you would die like a fool, and many had done. What Thomasina was doing in this guest house, Treadway did not know. She had started out sensibly enough, as a Labrador woman who knew how the big land breathed, but something — Treadway reckoned it was the death of her husband and daughter — had caused her to forget, and act like a stranger.

“The windows are painted shut,” he said. No one living in a normal house in Croydon Harbour would have been able to stand this.

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“It’s unhealthy.”

“I don’t have a wood stove like you.”

He had a screwdriver in his shirt pocket, and he started chipping away at the painted seam. “Have you got a thin-bladed knife?”

Thomasina opened the cutlery drawer and hunted through knives and forks the Grenfell Society had put there. They were not the quality you would buy for yourself, but she found him a knife. He slit the paint, and the knife slipped, and he stuck his bloody finger in his mouth and sat down.

He couldn’t say a word to her about Greek gods with breasts and beards. He might as well have tried to bring up the subject of his own nakedness. “This,” he said, “is an awfully bare room.” He saw a bottle of Scotch on her shelf and Thomasina took it down and poured them each a glass. When they had drunk a second glass, she asked him, “Does Jacinta know you’re here?”

“It’s likely by now that she does. It’s the homework I’m here about. Wayne’s homework. It’s — God, Thomasina. What — I don’t know if you’re trying to give him some kind of hint or what . . .”

“You don’t want him to have any idea of who he is.”

“Have you got some kind of chip on your shoulder?”

“What?”

“Some kind of mental problem that came from losing your own family?”

“If you look at the school board curriculum you’ll see everything I’m teaching is in there. I didn’t make the curriculum up. And I didn’t make Greek mythology up either. It happens to be in the school program, and your son is in my class.”

“Right. Don’t — just . . .”

“Are you ever going to tell him?”

“I’m not. Why should I? No. I’ll tell you something, Thomasina Baikie. It’s all right for some people to go around psychologizing, but the rest of us have to live in the real world. Wayne has to live in the real world. I would prefer it if you didn’t go giving him colouring books with half-men, half-women in them. To me that’s interfering. It’s more than interfering.”

“He isn’t like the other boys.”

“It’s interfering in a big way.”

“Can you see it?”

“I don’t believe — no. What . . .”

“You hope you can’t. He’s not like them at all, Treadway.”

“Who says so? Is — has anyone said a word to him at that school? Has Roland Shiwack’s son said something?”

“I was thinking I might say something.”

“The hell you will.”

“I was thinking I might tell him my version of the way things were at his birth.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because his hair is soft. He has two tiny breast buds. And no Adam’s apple to speak of at all.”

Treadway was taken aback by this. He had seen Wayne’s breast buds the day he had tried to tell his son the facts of life. But he had hoped no one else had noticed. Treadway had to go on his trapline now. He had come here to clue things up, not to open new questions he had no time to answer. He put his glass on Thomasina’s table and walked back out under Orion, who glittered brightly, except for the dying red star that marked the hunter’s left foot.

13

Spin the Bottle

W
AYNE HAD GOT USED TO HIS
feet peeling. He decided there must be a lot of layers of skin on the bottoms of everyone’s feet, because a layer of his came off every day and it didn’t hurt. It didn’t seem to matter, and he did not mention it to his mother again. Seven layers, eight, ten. The layers must be growing at the same rate at which they are peeling, he reasoned. He monitored the other new thing about his body: the ache in his abdomen. It was like the pulled muscle he once got doing sit-ups in gym, only this was deeper inside and did not hurt as much. He figured he would let this go away on its own along with the peeling, which was the more interesting condition of the two in his mind, so long as his feet did not bleed.

Wally had not come to see Wayne since Treadway destroyed her music. Wayne missed her like crazy and wanted to show her his diagrams of Thomas Telford’s bridge and tell her about his peeling feet. But he did not have the guts to go and get her or tell her he was sorry for what his father had done. He felt it was his fault, and he did not know how to make her forgive him.

By the time school started, Wally Michelin had turned into a stranger to Wayne. She was taller and skinnier. No one but Wayne seemed to remember that from grades one to six she had been strong, brave, and independent. It was as if she were an awkward new girl. She did not possess one article of clothing from the catalogue, and she kept her hair in two ponytails with elastic bands. By the first day of grade seven Donna Palliser was the undisputed queen of the class, and no one remembered the time before Donna, when everyone had loved Wally.

Donna Palliser’s parties had grown more numerous and elaborate each year. At her Hallowe’en party her mother had decorated the house with bats and cobwebs. Donna had come to the door to greet each guest with a plate of shortbread cookies shaped like severed thumbs and fingers with red icing. There was a haunted house on the mantel, with diabolical laughter coming out of it. Donna had Remembrance Day parties, Christmas parties, New Year’s Eve parties, Valentine’s Day parties, Easter parties, and Summer Holiday Eve parties, and if there was a lull between these she had sleepovers for selected girls and pizza parties for both girls and boys. Throughout grades five and six she had these parties and had not invited Wally Michelin, the Groves twins, or Gracie Watts, who continued to wear the same wool sweater every day, and Wayne had not told his father about the parties so had managed to avoid them. But in grade seven Donna Palliser changed her definition of a party, and her new tactics entrapped him.

For the first party of grade seven, which Donna called her Junior High Fete, Donna invited those she usually left out. Wayne saw Donna hand an invitation to Wally Michelin at recess, and he hoped she would not go. Anyone could see Donna had something planned for the unpopular people. He vowed not to go, and threw his invitation in the cafeteria garbage. Gracie Watts saw him do it and came over.

“Donna Palliser told Tweedledum and Tweedledee you’re trying to decide which one of them you want to go out with.” Wally Michelin and Wayne were the only students who did not call the Groves twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

“I’m not going.”

“She told them you want to French kiss both of them and then decide.”

“Fat chance.”

“Donna will tell everyone that proves you’re a fairy.”

“I’m not kissing the twins.”

“French kissing. You should say you can’t pick either of them because you want to go with Wally Michelin.”

“I don’t want to go with anyone.”

“But everyone knows you want to go out with her.”

Wayne felt sick. He loved Wally Michelin the way he loved constellations, or leaves, or king eider ducks.

“Wally Michelin is going to the party. Everyone is. And you have to go with someone or you’ll have to French kiss Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” Gracie took an Oh Henry bar out of her lunch bag, started biting the peanuts off it, and left him beside the garbage can.

Donna Palliser’s mother had laid out a cut-glass bowl of Cheezies and a matching punch bowl with cups on hooks. There was a plate of toothpicks stuck with Vienna sausages and bread-and-butter pickles, and there was orange Jell-O made with Carnation milk and shredded coconut. The party was in the rec room. There was a bar, a pool table, and a corner chest bulging with stuffed animals.

The Pallisers’ rec room had a dartboard and a hockey table, the kind where you shift handles to make the players dart around. There was a shelf with a copper Aladdin’s lamp on it, a set of ruby shot glasses, and a scrimshaw hunting horn. The ceiling was stucco with silver flecks. The Pallisers had a beagle, and the beagle blocked the bottom stair leading up to the kitchen. It had an orange rubber ball in its mouth, slimy and bitten to show rubber the colour of the Vienna sausages.

Brent Shiwack and the other boys took turns smoking Rothmans and sticking them out the window. The girls gathered around the punch bowl. Donna had put rum in it. The bar had Tia Maria, Baileys Irish Cream, crème de menthe, and some almond liqueur no one had ever opened, that Donna said was made by monks. Donna had floated a tub of pink ice cream in the punch. The boys argued about who was better: Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix or CCR. Wayne was on Pink Floyd’s side, but that was not what he listened to at home. He listened to “Across the Universe” by the Beatles, and “Song Without Words” by Tchaikovsky, and late-night radio.

There was a downstairs toilet, a tiny cubicle with a bolt on its door, and that was where you went for spin the bottle if the bottle pointed at you or if you had spun it. Donna announced it was time for Casey Kasem’s top forty, and “The Tide Is High” came on, and all the girls sang in falsetto with Donna doing the harmony. Carol Rich went in the cubicle with Archie Broomfield and they came out in fifteen seconds. Bruce McLean went in with Donna, and Mark Thevenet started counting on his second hand.

“Whoa,” he said as they came out. Donna’s hair was all over her face and their heads dipped as if ducking a shower of confetti. “You guys took six minutes!”

The bottle was an old wine bottle with Hungarian writing on it, and it knew where to point. It put Chad White in the cubicle with Ashley Chalk, and it pointed at couples as if it had intelligence. It did not put a popular girl with an unpopular boy, and it never put a popular boy with a girl who wasn’t pretty. It did not point at Wayne or the Groves twins or Wally Michelin or Gracie Watts at all for a long time. Gracie had new clothes on tonight, a pair of pants no one had seen. They were elephant pants like the popular girls wore, but Gracie did not look like a popular girl in them. She looked like an unpopular girl in a popular girl’s pants. She looked as if she didn’t own them. The rest of her was the same as usual: bony wrists and a nylon cardigan and a ten-karat gold signet ring. The other girls wore lip gloss and scarves and earrings. Ashley Chalk had a new silk headband every day; Gracie Watts wore elastic bands that broke her hair. Wayne suddenly knew this was who the bottle would choose for him, and it did. Donna Palliser might have planned something for him and the Groves twins, but the bottle had Gracie Watts in mind. The bottle cared about no one’s plan but its own. Wayne was prepared to go in the cubicle with Gracie Watts if he had to. He did not have to kiss her.

But in the cubicle she stood waiting. “I’ve kissed lots of people.”

Had kissing been going on among his classmates all the time? Was he the only one who had no clue? Had people been kissing each other behind the school Dumpster where they smoked? But Gracie Watts didn’t smoke. She got eighties and nineties.

“Lots?”

“I’ve been kissing since I was four.”

“Four?”

“I kissed Duncan McQueen in his father’s garage when I was four, and I kissed Brent Shiwack in the woods when I was only seven.”

“Brent Shiwack?”

“I kissed Kevin Stacey in his backyard tent hundreds of times, when I was eleven.”

“I haven’t kissed that many people.”

“Have you kissed anyone?”

“I don’t want to kiss people. I don’t want to go out with people.”

“Do you fall in love with boys?” She stood close and he was interested in her lips, but not in kissing them. He was interested in how the two peaks at the top were so sharp and the scoop in the middle had freckles in it, three, like stars behind the Mealy Mountains. He wanted to get a nice sharp pencil and draw that part of her lips. He got the idea she didn’t want him to kiss her at all, not really. He got the idea she wanted someone to talk to.

A great hoot went up, and Mark Thevenet called out, “Seven minutes!” Gracie and Wayne went back to their places in the circle.

“This is from Key West.” Donna wrapped a sarong around her head and put a glass ball on the floor where the bottle had spun. “You’re going to tell me your dreams, and I’m going to interpret them.”

“That’s only a weight for a fishing net,” Mark Thevenet said.

“You have no imagination. I’m an excellent dream interpreter. I learned how to do it from a kit I got for my birthday when I lived in Riverside, New Brunswick.”

“I’ll go,” Wally said. It was the first interest she had shown in anything at the party.

“You’ll have to wait your turn. The ball is telling me Tweedledee has to go first, and then Wayne Blake, and then Tweedledum. We’re going to split up Tweedledee and Tweedledum for once in their lives. That’s what the ball wants.”

“Fuck,” said Brent Shiwack. “I need a smoke.”

“Which one of you is Tweedledee?”

“Does it matter?” Brent asked.

“Who here knows which twin is which?”

“Everyone knows,” Wally Michelin said quietly. “Except you. Their names are Agatha and Marina. Agatha is shyer than Marina but she smiles more. She wants to be a travel agent. Marina makes things. She makes jewellery out of old copper pipes. Agatha and Marina aren’t identical. We all know that. How come you don’t?”

“Which one,” Donna stared Wally down, “is Tweedledee? That’s all I want to know. And which one is Tweedledum? Can you tell me that?”

“No,” Wally said. “I can’t. Because Tweedledum and Tweedledee aren’t their names. They don’t correspond to one or the other. Those are names people call the twins as a unit.”

“Does anybody else here think there’s anything wrong with that?”

Wayne said, “I think the twins probably like it better if you use their real names.”

“Do you?” Donna looked at the twins, who sat with their chins buried in the collars that peeped out of their cardigans. Both wore necklaces Marina had made. Everyone waited. Agatha directed one of her shy little smiles at the loops on the carpet.

“Do you mind us,” Donna said in a louder voice, as if the twins could not hear, “calling you a friendly nickname like Tweedledum or Tweedledee?”

“We don’t care,” Marina said.

“See?” Donna gave Wally a great big smile. “They don’t care. Why should you care if they don’t care themselves? Who made you the great authority? Come over, both Tweedles. Tweedledum, tell us the dream you had last night and I’ll interpret it. I might even be able to tell your future.”

Wally sat apart. The rest of the group nudged closer to Donna and her glass fishing weight.

“I didn’t have any dream,” said Agatha.

“Close your eyes.” Donna put on a wavery, occult voice. “Try to remember.”

“I know I didn’t have one because I didn’t sleep very good last night.”

“But surely you dreamt between your moments of wakefulness. Think back. We can only work with material you provide. We can’t cheat.”

“Maybe you could go on to someone else.”

“Do you ever have flying dreams?”

“I love those. But I never had one last night.”

“What happens in your flying dreams?”

“I move my hands at first, real fast.”

“Do it for us.”

Agatha flapped her hands. Everyone laughed.

“Then what?”

“Then I flap my whole arms.”

“And do you fly?”

“It takes a long time.”

“I dare say it does.”

“After I flap my hands, and then my arms, I start to float, then I’m up over the street. I’m over the houses and the telephone poles. Sometimes I look down and there’s a gull flying lower than me.”

“That must be amazing. Is Tweedledee ever up there with you?”

“No. When I fly in my dreams, I don’t have a twin. It feels strange.”

“I guess it is strange. Four hundred pounds floating over Croydon Harbour. I hope none of us is ever down on the road if you decide to fall. Do you ever fall?”

“No.”

“That’s good. Do you weigh four hundred pounds?”

“The nurse measures us in kilograms. We’re on a reduced carbohydrate diet. We have to have gall bladder surgery.”

“So my interpretation of your flying dream is this. Which one are you again? Are you Tweedledum?

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll say you are. You’re alone. You’re weightless. You’ve had your gall bladder surgery but one of you has died. It must be the other one. It must be Tweedledee. When are you supposed to have the surgery?”

“Next August,” Agatha said, near tears.