Mad Hope Read online

  ‘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 S
unny 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

  Brianna opened and closed her eyes rapidly, and swivelled her head around. This was called Taking Snapshots. In this way she didn’t have to see it all – the whole world – at once. She was very frightened. There was no climbing down from the pod. When she looked down at the patch of gravelly ground below, she realized what had happened. The pony had succeeded. But where was he now?

  ‘Tallest free-standing structure in the world,’ she said wistfully. It was likely she would be here for a few days, with no food or water, and wild animals pawing at the dirt, their teeth aglow. She didn’t mind raccoons so much, but squirrels were dishonest, and there were certain birds whose long beaks made their eyes appear smaller, like cruel glass beads. Maybe she could escape. What was it Alana had said? You could be anything in the world. She let go of the bar nearest her and extended one of her arms out, into the atmosphere. It was not so bad. She brought her arm in again, then dangled one leg down, swung it back and forth. But the actual means of escape confounded her; there was too much space between her body and the ground, too much room for disaster.

  She felt cold and hungry. She wanted her mother. She wriggled around and felt in her coat pocket. There were some crispy bits of something! Chips? No, old tangerine rinds dried to hard shards. She took them out, sniffed them, then placed them in her mouth experimentally. She would put the moisture back in with her tongue. But it didn’t work at all. It was a bit like the sign for the store called the Bay at the mall, with its large, strange symbol that meant B, but looked nothing like a B at all. Why did they have to do that? Make the connections so odd and tattered? She hated the not-B of the Bay with all her heart. She concentrated on this – hating the B – until there was a noise from overhead, flapping and throat-clearing. A crow landed over near the slide. It had come to keep her company. Or to peck at her head. Brianna began to search for her sisters.

  There they were – up near the apartment building, talking to a man with a shovel. Alana seemed to be yelling, and the man was bowing his head. Alana was getting the man in trouble! Or maybe the man was saying a prayer. ‘Our father,’ said Brianna, ‘who art in heaven, howled be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’ What was it like in heaven? Lime popsicles, Brianna thought. Kind-hearted wolves and old men with moustaches who were gods and angels. A few ladies with big skirts and kittens. All of them floating around howling and humming the songs that were the earth people’s lives. And if they stopped humming? Thy will be done. She held tightly to the bars.

  Whoopsy-daisy, she thought, and the world wrestled her down.

  It was the first time she had woken from an absence by herself, without the wild-eyed faces – of her parents, her sisters, Frances – glistening down at her. She was completely alone, up in the rocket pod, and she had come back. It came as a swift, welcome shock to her that she could do it; she could exist without them.

  Down on the ground, the crow was showing off, walking in wide circles around a pile of twigs and dog poo. Brianna could hear her mother striding up the street, calling out. She would be rescued soon. She realized she didn’t want to be rescued. Brianna, her father once said to her, you’re the kind of girl who Turns on a Dime, aren’t you? She wasn’t sure what he meant, but she thought she was doing it now, Turning on a Dime.

  All of a sudden something occurred to Brianna: a historical person from a poster at school. She liked the sound of the name; it reminded her of someone old-fashioned, raw-faced and strong, a washerwoman from a fairy tale.

  ‘Nellie McClung,’ she said to the crow, who cocked its head as if irked, ‘the first woman to get the vote.’

  Alana

  Jordan reached into his backpack and pulled out a bottle of water.

  ‘Want?’ he said, after he’d swigged some.

  She nodded, lifted the bottle to her lips and felt traces of his very self slide down her throat as she rinsed her mouth clean. There seemed very little left to do. Still, Jordan picked up her hand, released it onto the bench, then placed his own hand overtop of it.

  ‘Your hand’s so small,’ he said.

  Alana looked for her hand and could not find it, so she looked out into the evening, which was darkening, the whole sky shuddering with reds. Then she looked for her sisters.

  Brianna was still sequestered in the rocket pod, and now she could see her other sister, talking to a man with a shovel, a ­gardener maybe, over near the apartment building. Would it always be like this, the three of them linked like points of light in a lopsided constellation? Susanna was laughing at something the man had said, and he was leaning down to pat her shoulder, like they were in cahoots. That was the last thing Alana needed, for her sister to hook up with some old pervert in a granddad sweater. When they were younger they had played a game called Disappear, designed so that Alana could get some peace. But it was
not long before Susanna and Brianna caught on, came blundering in to whatever cocoon Alana had spun for herself, casting off their small squeals and powdery smells, convinced they had won something fantastic. It struck Alana that, of the three of them, she was the only one who truly understood the way things were, and she was overcome by an arrogant upswell of love for her sisters.

  Jordan had removed his hand from hers to root around in his knapsack. He hooked a wire and plugged up the ear closest to her, then held up the other earphone by its lead so it swayed in the air between them. ‘Want?’ he said again.

  ‘Sure.’ They sat there listening. Traffic surging and surrendering up on the main street, Drake doing his thing, Canada geese honking their way to some sunshiny shore. Alana felt something like happiness, but rougher. She could not be happy; she was alive, with tomorrows prickling up the back of her neck. On the hill, Susanna was still talking to the man with the shovel. She had pulled a notebook from her bag and was showing him something. Jesus, her homework? Alana could hear her mother’s voice soaring through the twilight.

  ‘Who’s that?’ said Jordan, jerking the earphones away. ‘Holy shit. That’s not your mother, is it? God, how old are you, anyway? She’s not coming up here, is she?’

  Alana shrugged. Of course. But she knew this first call was only a warning; there would be others, there were always others.

  ‘Fuck, bitch, are you even, like, listening to me?’

  Alana stood up on the picnic table to get a better view of Susanna’s pervert. He was bending down, gesturing towards something bunched at his feet. It was a bag of dry leaves. No, a sleeping bag made of plastic. He pulled the bag closer to where Susanna was standing. The bag was heavy – there must be rocks or tools inside. Or a body. Then the man tried to show Susanna what was in the bag, and it could be that Susanna saw.

  ‘I’m outta here,’ Jordan said, and shouldered his knapsack. And Alana ran. She zipped like a cursor between a row of gleaming parked cars, skirted the apartment building, came up over the crest of the lawn and lunged for Susanna. She pulled her away from the man, down the street towards home. When she was sure they were safe, she stopped and clamped her sister’s head hard into her soft tummy, saying, ‘It’s okay.’ And, ‘You’re okay.’ What Alana meant by this was something akin to what her father told her when she used to regale him with her schoolgirl sorrows and grazed knees, before she started curling her eyelashes and carrying tampons like switchblades in her back pocket. What she meant by this was: Buck Up, Kid. This Is Only the Beginning.