Mad Hope (2 page)

Yes, science could offer some answers, but there were phenomena you smelled without realizing, situations you simply absorbed through your very pores.
I went to the University of Life
, Susanna once heard her father say. She had filed this away, along with, That's Life in the Big City, and You Can't Always Get What You Want. In the schoolyard, Susanna kept quiet throughout much of the speculation, but in her heart she knew
she
would be the one to finally, glamorously dig up some obscure, invaluable piece of evidence. What she had was good instinct.

In fact, there were already clever life things she was learning to do, secretly. That very lunchtime, Susanna had dropped her knapsack in the school toilet by mistake, right down there into the pee. It didn't matter that she rescued it quickly, it was still dripping. It would smell. Jill was there too, and called in to her, ‘Are you okay?' But Susanna did not panic. ‘I'm okay,' she called back. ‘out in a minute. You go ahead.' She stayed calm and used her head, reasoned it out, quickly flushing, then waiting for the tank to fill before she pressed the lever again and dunked the bag into the clean second swirl. Outside of the stall, she clicked the hand dryer on, allowed it to fill her head with its heat and noise. She held the bag up to the nozzle until it was dry.

Brianna

Once home, Brianna helped Frances make cookies – there was some bother with a plastic measuring cup whose lines had worn away, but Frances had a feel for ingredients and quantities, and in this regard Brianna trusted her – then she went to her playroom to tell stories to her dolls.

She sat down on the floor and surveyed the set-up. Her dolls were piled in a heap on an old plastic serving tray her mother had given her, and she had arranged her racing cars in the form of a flower directly opposite the tray. The cars looked like humped metallic insects waiting for something exciting to happen. Something exciting
would
happen. World Creation. She picked out two of the dolls, laid them out before her, stripped off their clothes and pushed them down, squashing the soft plastic of their tummies.

‘You are now part of the earth,' she said. Then she scrabbled them up out of the soil, blew on them two times each. ‘Out of thin air,' she said. ‘Man and woman.' They began to stir and come to life, pushing their limbs out, yawning excitedly. Then the girl doll walked over to the racing cars/insects and woke them up with a wave of her hand. But next to the racing cars was a flying spindle that sprung up and pricked the girl doll's palms.

‘Help,' said the girl doll weakly, ‘I'm bleeding.'

‘We will have to hang you up on the cross,' said the boy doll. ‘You are a sacrifice. Sorry.'

‘I don't think so,' said the girl doll.

‘It doesn't matter what you
think
,' said the boy doll.

The girl doll whistled and a silver pony came galloping in from the hinterlands.

‘We have not yet created ponies,' said the boy doll.

‘I don't care,' said the girl doll, and when she touched the pony with her palms her wounds healed and the pony whispered he would hide her at the top of the
CN
Tower.

‘Goodbye!' called the girl doll.

‘You can't leave,' said the boy doll.

‘You better believe I can,' said the girl doll.

Then the boy doll got very angry and said he would punch her in the vagina.

‘BE QUIET OR I WILL PUNCH YOU IN THE VAGINA!' Brianna shouted.

And then there was Frances, her face gathering force in the doorway like a thundercloud. ‘
What
did you say?'

‘Sorry,' said Brianna, because sometimes saying sorry got people to stay quiet and smile with their lips closed.

‘Well,' said Frances. ‘Watch your tongue.' She picked up one of the racing cars and turned it over carefully in her hand. Then she looked at her watch. ‘Where's that sister of yours?'

Alana

Alana took her sister Brianna to the park, their fingers interlaced in a kind of lock.

‘We're trying the big-kid swings today, whether you like it or not.'

‘Not,' said Brianna, and Alana looked at her, impressed, but still hoisted her up onto the black rubber band and gave a tiny push.

‘Too scary,' Brianna whispered, her voice stolen by the sensation of so much wind whooshing around her midsection.

‘Okay,' said Alana. ‘Corkscrew, then.' She began to twist the chains of the swings together. Brianna was silent, holding on.

Alana looked around. Where this afternoon there had been only fall – trees all lacy with leaves, the night creeping in with the cold, Zoe shifting from foot to foot in her miniskirt, cursing September – there was now something else. He would come, she thought. It was like fate, or, again, a movie. Or he would not come, but only because his mother was sick, or he'd been hit by a car. Then she would help him, be his one and only helper. They would maybe go on a trip together – somewhere with a desert and strange mounded homes. But then she remembered his hand on her skin. She was not skinny. If he'd noticed? Put a little pressure on the pudginess there?

Brianna looked small, all wound up in there. It didn't seem so long ago she was a baby, feet curled into themselves like little crullers. She was so easy to love then. There was something about smallness. Even today in homeroom Alana had slipped into a daze at the sight of Zoe's box of mini butterfly clamps. She found she could not stop staring into their tiny, shiny maws, flapping their metal wings back and forth, squeezing to feel the built-in resistance. What it did – playing with small things – was make you feel like a god.

‘Ready, Freddy?'

‘Not Freddy,' Brianna mumbled, hunched over under the chains.

‘I'm letting go.'

‘'Kay.'

It was always super slow, the initial unwinding, then there was a moment where the momentum took over, and, voila!, you were out of it, free, listing lazily in the other direction. Brianna looked like she might puke.

‘Again,' she said.

Alana began to twist, but then she noticed something at the periphery. A flash of red near the fence, rounding the corner. She turned her head quickly to make sure.

‘Don't stop twisting, 'Lana.'

‘Rocket-pod time, Brianna. One small step for man, a giant step for girls like you.' Alana grabbed Brianna under the arms so she had no choice but to cling like an orangutan.

‘I need you to stay here, in the pod, and be on lookout duty.' Alana had secured her inside the bars of the small dome. Brianna was sitting with her knees drawn up, face blanched. ‘Don't be scared. Maybe one day you'll be an astronaut. You could be that, you know. You could be anything in the world.'

‘Not an armadillo,' said Brianna, and Alana knew she was off the hook.

‘See you later, armadillo.'

Jordan was right there, near the swings, fiddling with an unlit cigarette, waiting for her. He looked good, better than before, away from the street, away from the others. She had forgotten how tall he was, how his hazel eyes darted and understood.

‘Can we go somewhere to talk?' he said, and Alana was amazed. She showed him how to scale the aluminum siding that bordered the car lot and they wandered amidst the cars, thumping them insolently with their open hands. On the border between the car lot and the parking lot someone had planted some overgrown shrubbery and two spindly trees and dragged a small picnic table into the patchy shade. When they sat down, the picnic table rocked over the uneven ground like a tugboat. They kissed. Jordan pushed his hand under Alana's shirt, and she let him. He kissed her neck behind her ear, and slid his fingers under her thin bra. Alana felt worried. How to reciprocate? Under his shirt was flat and uninteresting. He pushed her hand downwards. She unzipped.

They kissed and kissed, slackening their jaws, using tongues. Then Jordan bent her head so she could see exactly what he had below. She kneeled on the ground in front of him. There was a Mars bar wrapper under the picnic table, and some pine needles, which was peculiar, since there were no pines nearby. Jordan took off his jacket, then draped it over Alana's head and shoulders and his poked-out penis. It was the beginnings of a puppet show. His T-shirt was bunched up under his arms. Above Jordan's belt were two long muscular indents, as if he were made of smooth clay and someone had picked him up carefully by his hip bones. The indents ran on either side of a trail of small black downy hairs. But Alana could not see where the hair led; the trail was obscured by white boxers that puffed out of the fly of his jeans like Kleenex. She touched one of the indents with her fingers and her heart began to beat between her legs. The skin was so soft and tight! Jordan made a sound, and Alana understood. She put her lips around his penis, then worked them down so that her mouth was full. She did this several times – up and down, trying not to let her teeth get in the way. Jordan placed his hand on her head and made another sound that was almost a word. Jordan's whole body shook. Alana gagged, then swallowed.

Then it was over, and the thing itself – the lovely indents, her migratory heart and the almost-word – was gone, shoved down into the deepest drawer of her self, but Alana had already trapped and tidied the
story
of it in her head thousands of times. There was an unstated currency in these happenings; the value would be in the timing of the revelation, the payoff would be in the exact spin she put on the thing.

Susanna

In order to find all the pertinent information, Susanna knew it would be necessary to return to the scene of the crime. ‘The Return,' she said to Sunny, who licked her wrist. She decided to take the dog with her for protection. It could be the murderer had an accomplice, lurking. She gathered some supplies: a magnifying glass from her science set, a plastic bag to collect evidence, an apple for provisions, another plastic bag for Sunny's poop. Then she hooked the dog on to his leash, closed and locked the front door with her key, and began to walk up the street, stopping to let Sunny sniff and snoop in other people's gardens. Susanna recognized the shape of each fading flower bed, the particular means the cracks in the sidewalk had for accommodating crabgrass and dandelions.

It was strange how well she knew her way around here, how everything came to her automatically, like her heart knowing how to pump, and when. It was a kind of memory, she thought, like the monarch's. Monarchs, who flitted around in the backyard in August, settling on blossoms to feed, then swooping and flirting. They were better than a whole circus. But this was not the most amazing thing. When it was time – how did they know? – the whole lot of them began a journey south, across the border, through the States, alighting on a few hilltops in Mexico. There, masses of them bent tree boughs with their weight. It took a long time, months, for them to get there, surfing updrafts of warm air, but if they got tired and died, it didn't matter, their sons and daughters had the maps in their minds' eyes; it was a memory that was inherited. Susanna has seen pictures of them clustered around Mexican tree trunks. This was all it took – one giant flapping, delicate creature – to prove how very little we know of the world. And if whole troops of scientists could not solve the mystery of the monarch, how could Susanna discover the depths of a stranger's soul?

What would ever make you so angry you'd want to kill your very own mother? ‘Your own flesh and blood!' she said, then pinched some skin on her forearm to reinforce the idea. Monarchs could avoid most predators because of a poison in their bodies that birds and frogs, animals with backbones, could not stomach – cardiac glycosides. People were not always so lucky.

Sunny began to pull at his leash.
Squirrels
, he barked. They had reached the park's outer edge, and he wanted to run. But Susanna had other plans. ‘C'mon, Sunny,' she said, ‘we're going to check out the makeshift grave.' She tugged him gently. But then something stopped her; when she considered the grave, the thud as the body fell, all her objectivity was supplanted by a terrible billowing sensation in her chest. It was as if her breath had lost its way, as though everything her body ever knew had evaporated. She cut through the parking lot and spotted an old picnic table next to some bushes. ‘I think we need to sit down,' she said to Sunny, who didn't agree, but was beholden. Seated, she bent over and put her head between her knees. Under the bench was a Mars bar wrapper and some pine needles, which was peculiar, since there were no pine trees nearby. Susanna sighed. Then she noticed one of the pine needles was moving. An ant was carrying it! The source of the pine needles was metres away, but the ants were determined to make a nest here, under the table. Incredible!

She remembered something then, from the day in question, although it would not be worth any reward. It was her mother's voice. (Then the three of them
had
been at the park. Curious!)

‘BriannaSusannaAlana!' her mother had called. ‘Don't make me send your father up there!'

Why not, Susanna wondered, and it was a credit to her innocence and her father's oblivious, kindly nature that she honestly could not imagine the answer to this question.

Brianna