Monkey Beach (15 page)

I walked past him, saying nothing. I stopped in the doorway and waited. Mom handed me a plate.

“If you get a cold,” she said, “I’m not going to feel sorry for you.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Just go change, Lisa.”

Dinner that night was quiet. Uncle Geordie started coughing. Aunt Edith was knitting

“You in the doghouse too?” Mick whispered when Mom went into the kitchen.

Uncle Geordie was going back early to Kitamaat in the speedboat to see about an engine part. I told Mom I was sick and wanted to go with him back to the village. She frowned at me, placed her hand against my forehead and agreed with me, telling me how it was my own fault for running around in the cold without a coat.

Later, Aunt Edith told me about the accident they had on the way back from Kemano. They were towing the punt. Since it was empty, it was rolling in the waves. She was watching it, so when a wave hit it the wrong way and it slid under the water, she called out a warning. The troller tilted, stern pulled down, as the punt sank. Mom tried to work the knot free, but it had tightened as the punt pulled at it. Mick slid beside Aunt Edith, brought out his knife and cut them free, but Mom said that during those few seconds that she was thinking they were goners, she saw porpoises playing around the punt and knew they were going to be all right. But for a moment, she said, the porpoises looked like people, and she screamed.

The greengage tree was covered with a fishing net. The greengages were almost ripe, so Dad had put the net on
to keep the crows from raiding our tree. Crows are clever, though, and find the holes or simply go under the net. I don’t like ripe greengages, anyway. I like them tart and green, hard enough to scrape the roof of my mouth.

White feathers tumbled down from the half-eaten chickens caught near the top of the tree, where the hawks had dropped them. The chickens were still alive. They flapped wings, kicked feet, struggled against the net. Their heads had fallen to the ground like ripe fruit. Their beaks opened and closed soundlessly, and their eyes blinked rapidly, puzzled and frightened.

I can’t find my cigarettes. I’ve ripped my room apart and nothing. I had a full carton. I couldn’t have gone through it so fast. I had a full pack right there in the bottom of my purse. I have more, I know I have more. I can’t have just three cigarettes to my name. Damn. I’m going to have to make a trip into town. I light the first one. Eyes are closing again. I collapse into my bed. Never fall asleep with a cigarette in your mouth. No, no, no. I regretfully stub it out, saving the rest of it for later. Funny how you never appreciate a cigarette fully until you know it’s one of your last.

Morbid thoughts. Try to avoid morbid thoughts. Staring at my ceiling. Flat expanse of white. Easy to space out. Tired. My clock says 2:47 a.m. Rain blowing against my window. More than a half-kilo metre under the surface, the ocean is perpetually dark, and even artificial light is obscured by the blizzard of
falling particles from decaying animals and plants. They fall like snow against the unending darkness. At a depth of one kilometre, the temperature is only a few degrees above freezing. Less than one hundredth of a per cent of the deep sea has been glimpsed; astronauts have flown 384,000 kilometres to walk on the moon, but no one has actually set foot on the deepest ocean floor.

The crows are squawking in the greengage tree. Ma-ma-oo told Jimmy that feeding crows brought you good luck, so he tried it before a swim meet. It was the first time he won. He also likes to leave them things to steal. Before he went out fishing on the
Queen of the North
, he left an old run-down pocket watch on our porch. It was snatched up by one of his favourites, Spotty, who looks like she’s been splashed by bleach. Spotty pecked at it for a long time before bringing it to the road and leaving it there.

“Watch this,” Jimmy said to me. “She’s going to haul it up in the air, then drop it until it busts open. They do that with clams too.”

Spotty did no such thing. She waited patiently by the side of the road, preening in the early-morning sunlight and occasionally screeching. Jimmy tried not to look disappointed. I was about to go inside when a car drove by, missing the pocket watch completely. Spotty hopped over and moved it two feet to the left, so that when the next car came along, it ran right over the watch. Jimmy and I looked at each other, then back at Spotty, who picked at the exposed innards of the pocket watch. She gathered up some of the pieces and flew away.

“If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes,” I said, “I’d never have believed it.”

Jimmy looked so pleased, you’d have thought Spotty had joined Mensa.

Some swimmers spat in their goggles, some shaved their bodies, but Jimmy used to feed the crows. Every morning, early, he’d be on the back porch. He would wait a moment before he began to rock in his chair. The porch would creak like an old ship. The crows were attracted to the creaking, they knew it meant food. He’d break the bread into small pieces while the crows settled into place, squawking, flapping and pecking each other. The crows covered our porch in a shifting black mass. He’d toss the bread languidly, as if he were a king granting favours. The crows are so used to this ritual that they keep coming back to the porch, arguing over the best place to wait.

For our first sex-education class, the girls and boys were split up and sent to different rooms. Tab picked a spot at the back, and we wrote notes back and forth while our teacher explained the mysteries of a uterus. As she moved on to menstruation, she passed around some pads and tampons for us to look at. She said that our bodies would start to go through many changes, and that we would become women. “If you see blood on your panties, don’t be afraid to tell your teacher or your parents. Let them know, and they will help you get the right equipment.”

She started to explain birth control. Whenever she
said “sex,” a wave of nervous giggles washed through the class. She started to say “intercourse” instead, but we all knew what she meant, and the giggles continued.

I couldn’t really imagine having sex with a boy. From the look on Tab’s face, I could tell she felt the same way. According to every
True Story
I’d ever read, sex led to misfortune. Girls in our class had become very silly, standing around the playground and whispering about this boy or that. I was glad I didn’t have to be a part of it.

After school, we went to Tab’s house and snuck into her room. It was hard to concentrate on playing cards, because Aunt Trudy had her stereo blasting. Tab could ignore the blaring Creedence Clearwater Revival and Aunt Trudy’s sing-along drinking buddies, but I played with one hand against my ear. When we went upstairs to get chips, Aunt Trudy invited us to sit with her. Josh had his arm around Trudy’s shoulders and was rambling on about his fishing season. The other two men were singing and waving their beer cans to the beat of the music. When we didn’t join them, she called us stuck-up snobs and asked Tab over and over if she thought she was better than her mother. The cigarette smoke made the ceiling a blue haze, and the yeasty smell of beer on everyone’s breath combined with the noise to make me sick. Aunt Trudy started asking Tab if she was fucking around, who she was fucking around with and if she thought she could get away with it.

“Don’t think I don’t know,” she said. “I’m on to you. I know what you’re doing. You can’t get anything past me, girly-girl.”

Tab just looked at her mother. My eyes bugged out. I expected Tab to break down and cry. The longer Aunt Trudy went on, the madder I got. Tab stomped on my foot each time I was about to open my mouth, but I finally spoke up.

“You’re being really mean,” I said. Tab kicked my ankle under the table, but I kept going. “She doesn’t even like boys.”

Aunt Trudy’s glazed eyes switched from Tab to me. She blinked, and stared at me as if I’d just appeared. “Miss High-and-Mighty, aren’t we? Miss High-and-Mighty.”

“Let’s go,” I said to Tab.

“You think you’re so good. You think you’re so special. Don’t you? Don’t you have a special friend, girly-girl?”

“Mom,” Tab said. “Stop it.”

“Shut up, you whore,” Aunt Trudy said to Tab.

I stood up. “Shut up, you drunk.”

Tab gave an exasperated sigh. “Lisa …”

I couldn’t believe she was taking her side. “She can’t talk to you like that.”

“You think I’m a drunk,” Aunt Trudy said. “I’m not half the drunk your precious uncle Mick was.”

I stood in Aunt Trudy’s kitchen and couldn’t make my mouth work. Aunt Trudy grinned. “All dried up now, is he? All sober and clean. Oh, he was a horny dog when he was a drunk.”

“He was not!”

“Mom, we’ve got homework,” Tab said. “Come on, Lisa.”

“Panting after your mother.”

“You’re a liar!”

Aunt Trudy laughed, which woke up Josh, who’d passed out on his chair. He blinked at us, then asked Aunt Trudy for a beer.

“Fridge’s right there,” Aunt Trudy said.

“Some fucking host you are,” he said.

While they were arguing, Tab tugged on my sleeve. When we were back in her room, she told me to ignore her mom.

“How can you let her talk to you like that?” I said, still furious.

“She’s just drunk. She won’t remember a thing tomorrow,” she said.

I sat on her bed and hugged a pillow. “I can’t believe she says things like that. What a liar.”

Tab gave me a pitying look. “Why do you listen to her?”

The next day, I went back over to Tab’s house.

“Come in, come in.” A shakily sober Aunt Trudy led me into the kitchen and offered me juice, then laughed and said she’d just sent Tab to the store to get some. “You can have coffee or water. I don’t think you drink coffee yet, do you?”

I shook my head. I watched her for any hidden resentment, any clue that she was still mad at me for calling her a drunk, but she seemed genuinely glad to see me. She cupped her mug of coffee, squinting when the sun poked through the clouds and lit the kitchen.

“How’re your mom and dad these days?” she said.

“Okay,” I said, racking my brains for a clever way to bring up Uncle Mick that would make her tell the truth.