Hellgoing Stories Part 14

Bernie couldn't stand it. Bernie wasn't hamstrung by his pa.s.sion for me the way Michael was; my arrogance infuriated him. "But she was beating up David!" he wailed.

"Bernie!" said Mr. Hope. Michael dropped his gaze abruptly to the ground as if willing himself unconscious.

"She was punching David Culligan!"

I don't remember the motion of what happened next, the actual activity. I just remember blinking and then absorbing the new tableau: Bernie had been spun around and Mr. Hope was squatting in order to stick his white face into Bernie's red one. Michael and I glanced at each other - allies in panic.

"You are a puke," said Mr. Hope directly into Bernie's face. "Did she hit somebody? Did the little girl hit somebody? Oh no. Ohhhh noooooo!"

Bernie winced - Mr. Hope was shrieking this.

"You chase a girl around, you little puke, you little worm - and you hold her down - you HOLD DOWN a LITTLE GIRL -" (and we knew, by the way he said this, that it was the worst thing of all in his mind, so sickening that it had transformed a hitherto innocent nine-year-old boy into something vile, a thing entirely corrupt - a worm, a puke). "And you have the gall" (this was the first time I'd ever hear the word gall) "the sheer gall to try and tell me..."

Mr. Hope could only flail his hands for a moment. Looking back, embroidering the tale from my adult perspective as I have been all along, I'm tempted to say that he was doing everything within his power to keep from uttering the word f.u.c.k.

"To TATTLE ON HER!" Mr. Hope finished in a baritone eruption.

Bernie's ducts were all open, flowing freely. Tears, snot, spittle. Michael wasn't looking at me anymore. He would never really look at me again.

ONCE YOU GOT the kids talking about their private parts, there was no shutting them up. Miss McInnis? This one time? I was in the park? With my friend? And this man? He came up to us? And he touched my private part.

All the stories ended with that sentence - it almost started sounding to me like They lived happily ever after. My supervisor had told me not to worry about this kind of yarn unless the kids were actually talking about their family members. The "stranger in the park" was just your garden-variety boogeyman. Once you lay the good touch/bad touch stuff on them, she explained, the kids kind of get into it. They hear it like a fairy tale, like a story they have to learn by heart, and pretty soon they figure out what the most important part of the story is. It's like the car chase in a movie, or the shootout, or the big kiss at the end.

They need to practise it, my supervisor explained. It's a kind of compulsion. Just let them tell it to the parrot.

So I'd lean down and extend my hand, upon which Gordie perched.

Would you like to tell Gordie about the bad touch? I would ask.

And the kids would all nod eagerly, repeating everything verbatim.

Awk! Gordie would exclaim in response. Was that a bad touch? Or a good touch?

It was a bad touch, Gordie!

Awk! But how did you know? How could you tell?

Because I just knew! Because I could feel it! Because I . . . trusted my feelings!

This was the real trick to s.e.xual abuse prevention. It wasn't the actual s.e.xual abuse thing - that was easy. If someone puts his hand here, or here, kiddies, it is s.e.x, which you are not supposed to be having. They got that in the first five minutes. What they didn't get was how they were supposed to feel about it. What you had to teach them was that when something seems weird, when you're a kid, you can reject it. You can turn away; you can say no.

I was supposed to lead the kids in a call-and-response at the end of every session to help entrench this idea into their pink, undeveloped psyches: You have the power! I have the power! You have the power! I have the power!

Here's the problem with that for me, though - the idea that you can turn away from anything that feels obliquely wrong or unsettling - say No, thank you to the weird and walk home. If my memory is at all accurate, that is.

(And I'll tell you something about my memory. It isn't like memory at all. I don't have to reach back. It's all just there. Everything just settles in behind my eyes, acc.u.mulating into a giant clot.) So here is the five-year-old me, obedient in her desk, absorbing the vibrations of the future, the admonitions being shouted in her cla.s.sroom fifteen years later by her parrot-brandis.h.i.+ng self.

The problem for her is that everything seems weird; everything seems wrong. And everything just keeps on seeming weird, and wrong. A little bit at first, and then more, and still more. Starting from day one. Starting with Mr. Hope.

BY GRADE FIVE, Bernie Heany was no longer taller than everyone and neither was I. I was girl-sized, he was boy-sized. We were all starting to balance out, become average. Bernie, I noticed, was now an inexplicable target for teachers - a natural magnet for their anger. It was not that he was "bad," from what I could see. It wasn't that he acted up any more than the other boys. He'd just taken on a sort of invisible status somehow - a mark of Cain.

Around Grade Five is about the time when children begin to intuit each other's status, based mostly on the cues they get from teachers. No one talks about it - some kids just start getting laughed at, while others get followed around. Bernie seemed to be getting laughed at a lot. The other boys had noticed how teachers yearned to yell at Bernie, so they provoked him in cla.s.s, whispering insults until he turned and shouted at them to f.u.c.k off. "f.u.c.k off" was still a dangerous, novel expression in Grade Five - it didn't get unholstered very often. It became a game to get Bernie to yell "f.u.c.k off" and watch what happened to him next.

Just the fact that Bernie was so willing to yell "f.u.c.k off," I realize now, was indicative of his status. He was always alone at recess. He and Michael didn't hang out together anymore. Michael himself had become excellent at some point; was getting 100s on all his tests and winning first place ribbons at track and field. Eventually, I had to admit to myself how badly I wanted his attention. The next thing I had to admit was I had nowhere near the status to get it.

In Grade Seven, we moved from the school near the water to the one by the highway and Mr. Hope moved with us. I remember the shock of seeing him standing wide-legged and cross-armed in the hall of the new school. Shock because at some critical point during the summer I had managed to convince myself that all of childhood was a dream. The dream had started out pretty good until an occasional ogre appeared and then things just got progressively darker and angrier until, finally, I woke up: a real person in the actual world. Now I just had to get on with it, which I was willing to do. But n.o.body said anything about Mr. Hope following me out of my dreams.

By Grade Seven, I hardly loved anybody - certainly not teachers. Mr. Hope struck me as more physically hideous than ever. There was no way I was hugging his D again. It was not exactly that so much had changed, but that the bad-dream side of childhood had entrenched itself, had calcified. For example, my brother and I were now simply enemies, a relations.h.i.+p that mirrored that of our parents exactly. It wasn't interesting anymore; it wasn't a battle. We couldn't be bothered to physically fight. We just stuck to our own sides of the house and wished each other ill.

Over the summer, I had been obsessed with the possibility of changing my status, of getting what I wanted. What I wanted was Michael Elleman to be in love with me again, but properly, wakefully, now that the stupid dream of childhood was over.

A girl I met on the beach that summer told me what to do. She was, in many ways, a terrible girl. She told me stories. "I saw this movie once," she would begin. "And there was this man. And he started going out at night and looking into people's windows. And there were these girls, having a sleepover together ..." Or, "I was watching TV really, really late one night. Like I got up in the middle of the night and turned it on after everyone was asleep. And there were these two people alone in a room, a boy and a girl. And they were naked!" Or sometimes she had read the story, she told me, in a book that she'd come upon deep in the middle of the woods. Or in a lonely magazine she'd somehow rescued from "the bottom of a dried-up well." As if there were wells in the real world, along with fairies and gingerbread houses.

I found the girl creepy, for reasons I understand now but didn't then. I knew she wouldn't do for a regular friend; that she would have to be a secret friend, a beach friend. I wasn't about to reject her friends.h.i.+p outright, however. I was too fascinated by what she had to say.

I hunted Michael Elleman for a few days that summer, and once I got him alone I told him my own version of the stories the girl from the beach had told me. He listened, but he still wouldn't meet my eyes. When I finished, he just stood there looking spooked.

By the end of the summer, I knew I had secured Michael's attention. So when I started Grade Seven I was feeling sort of smug and triumphant. But I was still waiting to see what it all would amount to.

In the hallway, I tried to get past Mr. Hope unnoticed. I felt so changed, I was almost convinced he wouldn't recognize me.

"Greta," came the low horn.

The feeling was like a lid being closed above my head.

He was our history teacher now. We had to sit in a cla.s.sroom with him every other day. Even though it was our first experience of World History, it was clear that Mr. Hope's approach to the subject was by no means standard. Instead of teaching us units on Ancient Egypt and Julius Caesar, his units were called things like: MEGALOMANIACS AND UNDERDOGS - always all-caps, scrawled across the centre of the chalkboard when we arrived - ADULTERER-KINGS: THE BIGGEST Wh.o.r.e WINS.

Now that childhood was over, it didn't seem right that Mr. Hope was still able to mess with us like this. It had always struck me as wrong, but now it felt distinctly wrong. For one thing, it wasn't happening only once in a while anymore, on a subst.i.tute teacher's schedule. It was every other day. Which meant it didn't feel like play; like Mr. Hope just fooling around, experimenting. But maybe it had never been play. Maybe I'd a.s.sumed it was play, simply by virtue of being a kid. Grown-ups played with kids, had been my kid-a.s.sumption, they didn't bother with them otherwise; didn't enlist them in their grand obsessions or personal schemes.

I decided to try telling my parents about Mr. Hope.

"Mr. Hope," I told them one night, "said 'wh.o.r.e' in cla.s.s."

"About you?" my brother jeered.

"No," I said. "About all the world leaders."

"All of them?" said my mother.

"Only the really successful ones," I said.

"Hah!" shouted my father around a cud of food. "Well, G.o.d bless Mr. Hope."

I decided that maybe the trick was not to be interested in school - that is, to make my lack of interest as clear as possible to all concerned and not be my usual pa.s.sive self about it. Explicit non-interest. Mr. Hope called on me one day not long after I'd made this decision. I was busy looking at Michael Elleman at the time. Michael was the one thing in the world I did not feel pa.s.sive toward. And I hadn't acted pa.s.sive toward him either. My victory with Michael over the summer had made me feel sort of emboldened about life in general.

Michael always knew when I was looking at him, but still he never looked at me. He would brace himself on the edge of his desk and his earlobes would turn red like someone had bit them. I became addicted to this ritual - doing something to Michael with a look; a look not even returned or otherwise acknowledged.

"Greta."

n.o.body ever commented on the fact that he called me Greta. Not even teachers. n.o.body thought it was strange, or had a problem with it. I turned away from Michael.

"Cleopatra," I drawled.

It wasn't a completely out-of-the-blue thing to say. We'd covered Cleopatra last week, Mr. Hope explaining that while Cleopatra was an example of an especially successful wh.o.r.e, her reign had come to an end because she wasn't, ultimately, the biggest or the best. She just couldn't sustain it.

But just then Mr. Hope had not been talking about Cleopatra. She'd committed suicide in last week's cla.s.s. She was dead and buried, taking her glittering empire with her, and history had moved on.

"I beg your pardon, Greta?"

"Cleopatra. That's my answer."

"I haven't asked you a question yet."

"Oh," I said, playing dumb. "Sorry."

The other children t.i.ttered edgily at my tone. Explicit non-interest.

Mr. Hope allowed the t.i.ttering to continue for a moment or two before silencing every one of us with his response. His response was that he lit up - he actually set himself ablaze - in a terrible grin. All burning eyes, long teeth, recessive gums.

He even clapped his hands together like a child.

"Insubordination!" boomed Mr. Hope. "Right on time, Greta. Congratulations on your garden-variety adolescent rebellion."

He beamed at me. He batted his eyelashes.

"You're welcome," I answered. It was an incoherent answer, upon which Mr. Hope pounced.

"Oh, I'm welcome!" said Mr. Hope, his pitch crawling up toward the grotesque octave he'd used on Bernie Heany in Grade Five. "Am I welcome? I'm welcome to all this? He spread his hands, taking in the cla.s.sroom, the highway outside our window, the squatting town beyond. "Thanks so much, Greta. What largesse. What riches you offer."

The implication being that I was the highway, with its gravel shoulder full of cigarette b.u.t.ts and Styrofoam shreds. I was the squatting town, huddled on either side of the highway, leaning into it offering takeout coffee and a free oil change and 2 litres of no-name cola for only 99 cents. I was it and it was me and we were of a piece - inextricable and indivisible. Forever.

The even worse implication - that I had thrown open my arms. I had made myself so ridiculous as to throw open my arms and say: You're welcome.

IN GRADE NINE I became pregnant about halfway through the year. I wrote my midterms in a fog of nausea and stupidity-hormones, and did poorly, even in my best subjects. I'd become an idiot - "stunned" was the word my brother used, as in "What areya, stunned?" Because I could no longer, for example, remember the words for things - once I called my toothbrush "the kitchen" and my slippers "foot tunnels" because it was the best I could come up with. One day, at the height of it, sitting in the back seat of the car with my brother one Sat.u.r.day afternoon on the way to the mall, I forgot his name. I sat there laughing in disbelief as he stared at me. "It's on the tip of my tongue!" I a.s.sured him. It didn't matter, because nothing mattered when you were that stupid. I gloried in my new-found imbecility, knowing I was helpless anyway, that no one could blame me for it any more than they could blame me for barfing up my morning egg before it had even travelled halfway down my esophagus.

I should say it was not uncommon to be a pregnant fifteen-year-old in my hometown. Not that it went unremarked upon, but at the same time, the community wasn't exactly rocked.

History, Mr. Hope lectured us in Grade Nine, is about giving up. And learning how even those famed for their unwillingness to give up eventually have giving up thrust upon them. They stockpile gold in the path of giving up. They blockade that path with armies. They soak the path with the blood of those armies. Ozymandias. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. History tells us there is no real might. Might is illusory - do we understand the word illusory, people? It's transitory. You don't know that word, look it up, I don't have time to define everything for you. Those are the two things might is - illusory and transitory. Might is not right, people, or wrong for that matter. Because might is not real.

Well, I remember thinking with the compost I had left for brains, that's good, I guess. All the invading, civilian-killing armies, the kings chopping heads off wives - they didn't really exist. Or they did, but they died. So they might as well not have.

"All that's left is despair. That's the footprint, people. Let that sink in for a while."

We all sat and did. I stared at Mr. Hope's sweater-clad D and considered that I now had a D all my own. More of a lower-case d. And I remembered how I learned to print them both, side by side, in Grade One. Big D and little d. Nice and neat. One after the other. Never getting the little d confused with b like the other children, because I was so smart back then. I always remembered the way the big and little D faced off - they looked inward, toward one another, never away. That's how you remembered. I imagined running up to the front of the cla.s.s like I had as a child, but instead of wrapping my arms around Mr. Hope I would just stand there and face him and we'd compare Ds.

"Greta."

I raised my head. I had been gazing down at my d.

"Sleepy, Greta?"

It was a fair question. I had been falling asleep at school a lot since getting pregnant. Most of my teachers just told me to go to the office and ask to lie down when they saw me drooling onto my own shoulder. Mr. Hope, however, always woke me up. Sometimes he'd snap his fingers in front of my face. You're not getting off that easy, he would tell me.

"What if you throw a rock?" I asked then.

And why did I say that? Partly, it was the stupidity thing, where I just said whatever happened to be floating at the front of my brain, like kitchen instead of toothbrush. What was floating in the front of my brain at that moment was Grade One. The truth is, the stupidity was actually more like a sleep-state - that twilight between sleep and waking; balanced at the very top of the juddering chain-link fence that separates the dream of childhood from the rest of real life.

So Mr. Hope scowled more than usual, as thrown as I'd ever seen him.

"A rock, Greta? Okay. What if you did?"

"And it hits a guy in the eye and, like, his eyeball pops out."

I didn't mean for the cla.s.s to crack up the way it did - I had just been trying to make a vague point about consequence. First an eye is in, then it's out - that was all I had been trying to say. Ask Teddy: did the rock, hurled at you by the mighty - the Mighty Rock-Wielder - leave its mark on you or not? Was it illusory? Was it transitory?

Mr. Hope didn't take my point that way, however. He didn't even seem to remember about Teddy, whereas for me, because of the way my memory was, Teddy had never left Mr. Hope's side.

Mr. Hope wanted, he said above the laughter, to see me for a moment in the hallway.

We stood eye to eye, because now we were pretty much the same height. I remembered how important it was to hold his eye, but I couldn't quite remember why I had always believed this. He began slowly, once he could be sure he had my full attention. The man was a born communicator.

"I'm doing you a favour, Greta," he told me. "It's not my way to take people aside when they're acting up in cla.s.s. You know that. I like to settle things up front."

I stared at him, remembering my Cleopatra humiliation in Grade Seven. He saw me remembering it and knew I wasn't grateful.

"It's sad," he told me after we'd eyeballed one another awhile longer, "To witness a person actually choose to be garbage ... to watch her make that decision over time."

For a moment I just gulped air.

"You can't talk to me that way," I whispered.

"I can't?" He looked dramatically around, up and down the hallway, as if for the Gestapo. "And yet I am. And it depresses me, frankly, that no one else has bothered."

The tears I was willing out of my eyes were trickling into my nasal cavity and now I sniffed gigantically to keep them from escaping.

Mr. Hope made a swallow of distaste. "I remember you as a nice girl, Greta," he told me. "You were once a very sweet little girl."

"You think you can do anything," I said. From the depths of my stupidity and dreaming, I was impressed with myself for saying this out loud - it seemed monumental. But Mr. Hope didn't even seem to hear me.

"We were friends, I thought," he said, and folded his arms, almost pouting.

And because my perceptions were a soup that day, because my memory wasn't a memory so much as it was a kind of piling-up of incidents and apprehensions and I had no ability to distinguish here and now as opposed to then and there; because, perhaps, Mr. Hope struck me as not a man but an eternal principle, a planet around which I would revolve forever, my only thought was: Poor David Culligan against the chain-link fence.

I'd had no sympathy whatsoever for him back in Grade Three, when I pursued him across the schoolyard. I hadn't given poor David Culligan a second thought until this moment, six years later. David was just a victim, a forgettable casualty.

And standing there with Mr. Hope, I started blus.h.i.+ng. A delayed reaction from six years ago, in response to the awkwardness of that moment in the schoolyard, the excruciation of having trapped David Culligan against the fence. All I'd really been focused on up until that point was the chase. I can compare the feeling now (and I could in the hallway, too, standing and blus.h.i.+ng in front of Mr. Hope) to a s.e.xual encounter. The same tentative approach, the same self-conscious embarra.s.sment, which you know must simply be pushed through, and overcome, if you're to get anywhere.

I had bounced David against the fence a few times, liking the violent jangle of it. Ug, ug, ug, he grunted with each shove, freckled eyelids fluttering.