The Girl in the Wall (2 page)

There was an unspoken rule in the house: don't bother the mother. Even Morven, who didn't get a lot of things, got that. There were no unspoken rules about the dad. He was approachable enough when he was around, but that wasn't something that could be counted on with any sort of regularity, like
Walt Disney Presents
on Sunday nights. Some days they barely saw him.

George and Morven grew up asking nothing of the mum and very little of the dad: money for a new baseball glove, say, or a signature on a report card. Sometimes George did that last one himself. Morven's reports were less than stellar and he saw no reason to bother their dad with them.

Help in the big house came in the form of Mrs. Campbell, who got off the Coniston bus on Highfield Street five days a week at 7:45 to aid in the running of the household. She left late in the afternoon after getting supper ready for the family. When the children were very young she usually stayed with them till their father got home, but as George grew older she took to leaving a little earlier. She had her own family's supper to put on the table.

There wasn't much in the way of rules in the Rankin house aside from the unspoken one about not bothering their mother. That one, however, covered a lot of territory: don't raise your voice, don't clomp up or down the stairs, don't slam doors, if you listen to the radio do so quietly, don't watch the television unless you're prepared to leap up and turn down the volume on the commercials. Most of the wide reach of the unspoken rule had to do with their mother's ears.

Morven thought it would be good if her mother went deaf. Good for everyone. She spent a month or so trying to figure out ways she could make this happen, with thoughts of sharp pencils and other pointed objects, but she couldn't come up with anything that wouldn't cause pain and get her into trouble.

Finally she mentioned it to George.

“No, God, no. You can't be thinking those kinds of thoughts,” he yelled.

They were at the river, so he could shout. Not loudly — George was never loud — quietly, as though that same stuffed animal was having a small amount of success with making itself heard.

He could see that he had alarmed her with the ferocity of his reaction.

It was late spring, nearly three years after the knife incident. George was twelve; his sister was eight, in grade two. She had failed grade one, couldn't get the hang of things. Mostly she gazed out the window or stared at her classmates and teacher. She didn't manage much better the second time around but it was decided that she should move ahead anyway. They couldn't keep her in grade one forever.

“I hate myself, Georgie,” Morven said now on the bank of the river.

“No, you don't.”

“Yes, I do.”

“It's not good to say that even if you think it,” said George.

“Why not?”

“It's a sin.”

“What's a sin?”

“Something that's wrong.”

“Who says what's wrong?”

“God, mostly.”

“It doesn't count then. God's dumb.”

“Don't say that, Mor.”

“What can I say? All the things I want to say you tell me not to. What am I supposed to say? What am I supposed to think? Everything I think is wrong too.”

George stood up and retrieved his glove and baseball from where he had left them in the sparse shade of a young oak tree.

“Let's play some more catch.”

“Can I tell you something?” said Morven. “Please?”

“Is it about hating yourself or deafening our mother or something equally as horrible?”

“No.”

“Okay, then. I guess so.”

George sat down again on the long grass beneath the tree.

“Come into the shade,” he said. “Your face is getting baked.”

Morven plunked herself down and put her hands to her sunburned cheeks.

“A girl at school invited me to play,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I told her no. I said, ‘I've already played.'”

“That was a stupid thing to say.”

“I thought so.”

George took his baseball out of the glove by his side and examined it.

“What's her name?”

“Gloria.”

“Let's go and call on her and ask her to come out and play with us now.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know where she lives.”

“She lives up on Coniston in one of the poor people houses.”

“I don't want to.”

“Maybe if we called on her and asked her to play with us you wouldn't hate yourself so much.”

“No, I hate myself more than that. Calling on Gloria won't help.”

“It might.”

“No. It won't.”

She stood up and walked toward the edge of the riverbank. She walked so close that George hurried to join her.

“Her face turned sad when I said it,” said Morven. “It looked like it might start to cry.”

He wanted to tell her that Gloria's face was a she and not an it. But he bit his tongue to keep from speaking.

They sat with their legs hanging over the abrupt edge where a chunk of earth had broken away from the bank.

“I hate my face,” she said. “I hate my whole head, really, except for my eyes.”

“Well, at least you don't hate your eyes,” George said. “That's good, I guess.”

“Yeah. I hate my glasses but I don't hate my eyes. Without them, I wouldn't be able to look at people.

“No.”

George kept a firm hold on his tongue. He wanted to remind her again not to look at people so closely and he wanted to do a better job of explaining that if she wanted to feel better about Gloria she would have to do something more than just tell him about it, but he didn't think now was the time for another of his stern reminders. It was hard for him to know where to take things from there. He no longer felt like tossing the ball around; Morven wasn't the best of catchers or throwers. So he steered her home and settled her in the yard with her family of dolls.

They were a strange group. The dad was a kewpie doll that George had won at the Red River Exhibition. His name was Air. The mum was a soft rabbit with no face. It used to have one but Morven had removed the sewn-on features one rainy day last summer. George watched her do it but was too tired to stop her or even ask about it. The rabbit had no name. The brother in the family was a boy doll dressed like a prince; he even had a crown. His name was George. The little sister was a troll — a scary monster named Muck.

Morven didn't play with the dolls; she just stared at them.

George wondered if she would play with them if she had someone to play with — Gloria, say. He wouldn't play with dolls himself; he drew the line at dolls.

Lush hot summers passed into cool grey autumns, frozen winters into watery springs. Morven tried her hand at skating and swimming and tap dancing lessons at the Norwood Community Club — activities that had no teams or partners. But it never worked out. It wasn't that she was so bad at these occupations as much as just uninterested. She didn't know why she was putting herself through it except that other people like George and Mrs. Campbell thought she should.

She said as much to George.

“Why do people skate?” she asked.

“Well,” said George, “when skating was first invented I imagine it was to get from one place to another more quickly than walking during the winter months when you had a river you could skate on. You know, in the olden days, when there weren't cars and you might have been too poor to have horses.”

“Yeah? And how about now? Why do people skate now?”

“Because it's fun,” said George and he left the room.

“I don't think it's fun. It makes my ankles tired.”

He heard her but he didn't respond. He kept on walking right out the back door, grabbing his parka from its hook in the hall and not even bothering with his galoshes.

Morven drifted from one grade to the next, failing again, this time grade five. But holding her back didn't seem to alter anything for the better, so the schools, first Nordale and then Nelson McIntyre, decided just to shift her along. The sooner she was shifted the sooner they would be rid of her.

George was six years ahead of her in school now because of her failures. He would be out of Nelson Mac before she set foot in the place and he was grateful for that though he didn't say so out loud.

She continued to upset her brother with her quiet announcements.

“Don't care if I die,” she sang so low he barely heard her.

“Jesus, Mor, don't say that.”

“I wasn't saying it; I was singing it.”

“What?”

“It's a song, Georgie, about fly balls and flipping around and dying too. Listen.”

Sure enough, from the kitchen radio came the tinny sound of Jerry Lee Lewis or someone belting it out: “Flip, Flop, and Fly.”

George chuckled. “I don't think he's singing about fly balls.”

“What then, Georgie?”

“I don't know for sure.”

“It's fly balls, like you hit when you're playing Work Your Way Up.”

“Okay. Fly balls. Sure, fly balls.”

At least she was singing, even if it was about dying. George turned up the sound on the radio and opened the fridge to see about an after-school snack.

“Let's do that thing,” said Morven, “where you take deep breaths and then squeeze each other's chests till you pass out.”

“No! Don't you know that's dangerous? Jesus, you could not wake up from doing that. I heard about that happening to a kid somewhere. He died from doing it with his friends.”

“Where?” she asked. “Where did that kid live?”

She wanted to play with people who weren't afraid of dying. But maybe when she met them they would disappoint her and be just like other kids and not want to have anything to do with her but poke fun.

“I don't know where the kid lived. Omaha? I just heard some teachers talking about it once.”

“Are you scared of dying, Georgie? I'm not. I wonder if Gloria is afraid of dying.”

George closed the fridge.

“Maybe if you played with her you could ask her and find out,” he muttered.

He walked out the front door to the street. He was so tired of getting caught up in her questions.

During the school year he took himself away as best he could into basketball and curling and the United Nations Club. He looked after Morven; no one could say he didn't, but there were other things that he insisted on doing to keep himself from going off his rocker, as he put it.

Summers were long for George. The family didn't take holidays away from home like most others in the area. Their dad didn't take time off work the way most dads did, and their mother continued on in her usual way. There had been a time not so long ago when Mrs. Rankin still went for the occasional outing, always in the passenger seat of the car, never getting out of it, just going for a ride, as she called it, and insisting that the whole family come along. But no more, and George was just as glad. He hated the outings. They were tense and they smelled bad, like his mother's bedroom did when Mrs. Campbell had days off and wasn't there to help.

The streets were quiet and lazy in the summer and it was difficult to think up ways to pass the time. He found the odd game of Work Your Way Up in the flood bowl or in the school grounds, and there was always the riverbank to explore. It would have been different if he were a boy on his own. He could have scouted out the other boys who came and went from their holidays with their families and tagged along with his homemade slingshot and his baseball glove.

But he always had Morven with him and he knew better than to inflict her on the neighbourhood boys and vice versa. They made fun of her in the way that young boys do, and who knew how bad it could get if he wasn't there to shield her from their taunts? All the boys weren't like that: there were one or two that were nice to her, Frank Foote, for example, who usually made a point of saying hello. George liked Frank Foote, but he was quite a bit younger and it wouldn't do to cultivate a friendship with a little kid.

The length of the days didn't seem to trouble Morven. She found enough to do. She didn't need a lot, it seemed, and that was good as far as George could tell. It would be worse if she needed him to come up with ideas for her. She didn't have many of her own, but those she had took up a lot of her time, as she was opposed to hurrying. He got so he could trust her to do certain things by herself for limited periods, as long as she told him what and where and for how long.

Sometimes her ideas were a little off base, but she came to no real harm.

Morven turned twelve in early October of 1961. She wanted to bake a cake for her mum. Twelve years ago on this day her mother had given her death, which was quickly followed by birth because of the quick-acting nurses. It was the death part that interested Morven and that was why she wanted to bake the cake.

She planned to write “Happy Deathday” on it in green peppermint icing and puncture it with twelve candles. She wanted to march it in to her mother's bedroom while she and George sang “Happy Deathday” as quietly as possible.

But George walked in on her preparations and put the kibosh on them.

“Firstly, someone should be baking a cake for you, not for her,” he said.

“But she's the one it's about. She's the one who would remember the day it happened better than anybody.”

George took the flour sifter from one of her hands and a wooden spoon from the other.

“Where's Mrs. Campbell?” he asked.

“Gone home.”

“She shouldn't have. Sit down at the table. I'm going to finish this up.”

“But…”

“No ifs, ands, or buts.”

George got to work. It was going to be a chocolate cake. The recipe was out on the counter.

“What's secondly?” she asked.

“What?”

“You said, firstly someone should be baking a cake for me. What's secondly?”

“Oh. I guess there is no secondly.”

“That's disappointing,” she said.

“What flavour of icing do you want?” he asked.

“Seven minute and then green peppermint for the writing,” she said.

She told him about her plans for the wording of the message and for the song they would sing.

“We can't write that or sing that,” said George. “It's your cake now, not Mum's and we're not going to sing to her.”

His temples began to throb.

Their dad walked in just as he slid the cake into the oven.

When Morven left the room George confided in his dad — told him what she had said about “Happy Deathday.”

All the dad said was, “Imagine being the type of person who would think that was a good idea.”