Hellgoing Stories Part 13

Eventually he flung open the flap of the tent and sat in the opening with his guitar, belting "Dear Prudence."

Dear Prudence! Open up your eyes!

Dear Prudence! See the sunny skies!

She thought: When I open my eyes, I bet you he'll be naked.

Hart was naked. The sun streamed in behind him.

MR. HOPE.

I remember Mr. Hope from when he brought the boy with an eyeball falling out to be gawked at by our Grade One cla.s.s. The two of them stood up there side by side, saying nothing for a good while as the life seeped out of us - our childish noise becoming less and less. I don't know about the rest of Grade One but, personally, I had been riding high up until that moment. Earlier that same day, for example, I had discovered I could read inside my head. Everyone else in my cla.s.s could only read out loud, and not even very well. When the teacher told them: Now read quietly, to yourself, they would start to whisper the words, mouths in motion. Only I knew what she meant. I gasped: Teacher, look! And held up the book to my face and said nothing.

I'm saying that up until the moment Mr. Hope strolled into our cla.s.s with the mangled boy, school had been fine for me. It was exciting. I'd discovered that I was smarter than almost everyone else. I followed instructions better. I knew what the teacher was talking about - I always caught on. I was good, also, at being obedient. When the teacher left the cla.s.sroom for whatever reason teachers sometimes left, I didn't go ape like the rest of my cla.s.s. I just sat there in the chaos, contemplating whether or not I should tell on the others upon the teacher's return, rolling the power around in my mind like a marble in my mouth.

"This is Teddy," grunted Mr. Hope after a long time of standing up there with the boy. Then he let there be even more silence, as we took the newly identified Teddy in and allowed this alien idea to settle over us. The idea that an eye, on a person, could come out.

Mr. Hope was our school's vice-princ.i.p.al. Over the years I have come to know a handful of men like him, but this was my first encounter with such a man. My mind, which I had lately been so proud of, grappled with him; tried to feel its way around him and settle on something - some kind of soft spot - that would allow it to relax.

"Teddy," said Mr. Hope, his voice like a very low horn, "was. .h.i.t in the eye by a rock."

He was monstrous to me. Not Teddy, whose face my gaze had bounced off once and refused to come back to, but Mr. Hope. Monstrous because he was doing this to us, but also in the way older grown-ups often are to the very young. Mr. Hope's eyes were unspeakably blue. He was shaped something like the letter D. A pot-belly would have been okay. My dad had one of those and it was okay. But Mr. Hope was all belly, all outward thrust. And his skin seemed to hang off his face the way Teddy's eyeball hung from its socket.

"A rock thrown in the schoolyard," said Mr. Hope.

You think I am breaking Mr. Hope's dialogue up for stylistic effect, but this is a pretty accurate rendering of the pace at which he addressed us. He flopped one p.r.o.nouncement down after another, always pausing to let whatever he'd said just sit there stinking for a moment like a fresh carca.s.s. I'd never experienced someone using silence that way before. People who speak to five-year-olds typically speak fast, never letting there be silence, casting the line again and again in the hopes of hooking their tiny, elusive attention spans.

Here was the crux of my dilemma when I was five years old - here's how the problem presented itself: Is this a nice man? Or is it a mean man?

"This is what can happen," said Mr. Hope. "If you throw a rock in the schoolyard." He glared around at us, like every child in the room was likely carrying such a rock - in our pockets; our hearts.

You'd think there would have been crying. But I don't remember any crying.

All the people I had encountered in my five years of living had, up to that point, been nice. Men were nice. Women were nice. Some children weren't nice, but children didn't count - who cared about children? School was nice. School was still new; I loved it. Everyone to do with school had immediately become my family in my mind. My pillowy teacher, whom I adored so much I actually prayed to her at night. The princ.i.p.al, who drove a pickup truck (this startled me when I learned of it because I'd thought the princ.i.p.al would be driven to school in a limousine). The librarian, the crossing-guard. The canteen lady and the janitor - who I a.s.sumed, for some reason, were married. I packed all these people away in my heart. They would be, I decided, mine.

But whose was Mr. Hope?

He subst.i.tuted in our cla.s.s sometimes, over the next couple of years. Some days we'd come to school and our sweet-faced grandma-teachers would be gone, replaced by Mr. Hope with some colourless sweater pulled over his D, the collar of a dress shirt always poking out from underneath. Also corduroy pants that bagged in the seat, where there existed no actual b.u.t.tocks that I could discern. This was the uniform of Mr. Hope.

He was the only man who ever taught us, and he presided over cla.s.ses in the same way he introduced us to Teddy. He'd grunt a p.r.o.nouncement, glare blue fury until he could be sure it had sunk in, then move on to the next tenet of the lesson.

By Grade Three I had arrived at the cautious determination to love him as I did all the other grown-ups in my life. Mr. Hope, I'd decided, was also mine. If only for the sake of consistency.

He always called me Greta. Greta was not my name. Greta was a girl whose name had been in the register on the first day of Grade Two, but who failed to ever materialize in our cla.s.s. Who is Greta? Everyone wondered. It was a weird name. We were a school of Lisas and Cathys and Heathers where the girls were concerned. So we were instantly curious about her. Greta's name sat there in the register, disembodied, but after the second week our teacher stopped calling for her and we stopped speculating. Then Mr. Hope subst.i.tuted one day and called her name.

We all jumped, because we'd forgotten about Greta. Our curiosity was rekindled at once - Greta! We'd almost let her disappear! I think I must have jumped more than anyone else, because Mr. Hope pinned me with his terrible eyes.

"Greta?" he said.

"Sh.e.l.ly," I replied. The whole cla.s.s gulped a breath. I heard the whoosh of it and did the same, understanding why. Because I had contradicted Mr. Hope. I hadn't even given it a second thought, I just opened my mouth and p.r.o.nounced him wrong.

He was scowling; but he was always scowling, that was his face. He blinked at me once, scowled less, then nodded.

"Greta-Sh.e.l.ly," he said, turning back to the register.

Something happened then. Our relationship, clicking into place.

By Grade Four, I had become enormous. I came back from summer vacation taller than everyone else, boys as well as girls. It angered and disoriented me and I wanted to show them. I wanted to throw my weight around.

I didn't feel like the smartest person in the world anymore - that had gone away. Everyone else in my cla.s.s knew how to tell time and I couldn't yet. I just wasn't interested. It didn't seem like something I'd ever need. Then one day my teacher, who up until then I had dutifully loved, discovered this. She stopped what she was doing and brought me up to the front of the cla.s.s and made me face the clock. "You'll learn this now," she said. "Because it's easy. It's just too easy for you not to learn. Right, cla.s.s?" All the other students watched me for lack of anything else to do. Every time the teacher asked me if I understood, I told her no. "Sh.e.l.ly," she said. "You do so. You do so know the multiples of five." I told her no.

At lunchtime, I would roll into the schoolyard like a tank, kids fleeing in my wake. I was looking for either David Culligan or Andre LaPointe. David Culligan had too many freckles and Andre LaPointe was French. They were natural targets. At the same time, however, I had to be wary of Michael Elleman. Michael Elleman, like almost everyone else, was smaller than me, but he had recently acquired a big friend with white-blond hair named Bernie.

Michael Elleman humiliated me every day with declarations of love. He would pucker his lips, I would bolt, and Michael would give chase. I kicked him in the stomach one recess after he'd managed to corner me in the stairwell, and after that he started showing up, lips still very much puckered, but with his new friend Bernie acting as a kind of romantic enforcer.

So every day, once we were let free from school, my goal was two-p.r.o.nged: stomp either David Culligan or Andre LaPointe; avoid Michael Elleman and Bernie.

Life had turned itself into war sometime around the end of Grade Three. I sat around hating my older brother much of the time, wondering how I could ever learn to hurt and insult him as effortlessly as he did me. Not long after he entered Grade Six he'd stopped being my friend. He only played with me when he had no boys to play with. When he played with me, he would sit on my head or chase me around with his hockey stick screaming, "Slapshot! Slapshot!" I had no stick to pick up in my own defence. I threw a jar of blackberry jam at him, which exploded onto the walls, floor and drapes. Every night my parents would hear me screaming from the downstairs TV room, "I'll kill you! I'll kill you!"

David Culligan and Andre LaPointe did not complain to the princ.i.p.al or teachers about my terrorizing them because I was a girl. So I was safe in that regard.

Michael Elleman and Bernie remained a concern.

It was my own fault, getting caught. They took advantage of my weakness: the blank-minded zeal that overtook me one recess after I had successfully nabbed, and was preparing to pound, David Culligan. I had him trapped against the chain-link fence. David had tried to lose me in the trees at the edge of the schoolyard but encountered only fence beyond, and now he was done for.

(I always seem to be telling stories about chain-link fences, it occurs to me now. Maybe because they're a thing belonging to the implicit troublemakers of this world: children and prisoners trying to get out; would-be criminals trying to get in.) I'd landed a single shot to David's stomach that I instantly felt awful about when someone pulled me backwards by the arms - and next thing I knew Michael Elleman was in front of me, mashing his face against mine.

I cried all the way to the school office, and it was Mr. Hope who was waiting there to comfort me.

"Calm down, Greta," he told me in the low horn of his voice.

I was calming down already. The school office was secret and official, a sanctuary of grown-up rules and swift justice. It smelled like typewriter ribbon and coffee that had been boiled to a tarry stain at the bottom of the pot.

Can I break the rules a moment here? I mean even more than I already have? Because I want to say that now, remembering the school office, I concurrently remember something ten years in the future from that day: I come back to this school at the age of twenty to teach a s.e.xual abuse prevention workshop. It's hard because I still don't quite consider myself a legitimate adult, fit to mix with other grown-ups. On my first day of work, I present myself at the office - this same office, with its very same carpet and hunting-lodge colour scheme - take a big breath before announcing to the secretary: "Hi. I'm Sh.e.l.ly? I'm here to teach s.e.xual abuse." But once I'm with the children in the cla.s.sroom - my old cla.s.sroom, the cla.s.sroom where I gawked at a boy with his eyeball hanging out - I relax again. I am back in my element. I could almost slip into my old desk and wait for the cafeteria worker to deliver our milk. I remove the puppet from my s.e.xual abuse prevention kit - a parrot named "Good-Touch Gordie" - and the children flock to me, enchanted. Awk! I squawk in my parrot voice. Good touch! Awk! Awk! Bad touch! And I point at the relevant places on the body chart. The body on the chart has no s.e.x, is neither boy nor girl.

"I didn't want him to kiss me," I hiccuped at Mr. Hope. "I didn't ask him to. Bernie pinned my arms."

Mr. Hope was sitting beside me on the black leather couch in the main office. The couch frightened and comforted me all at the same time, because that was where you had to sit when you were called to the office for breaking the rules. But it was also where you sat if you were sick and waiting for your mother to come and take you home. And it was where I was sitting now, beside Mr. Hope, who grunted: "Michael and Bernie will be punished."

I think about that now - that grunting p.r.o.nouncement takes my breath away still. Not: I'll speak to Michael and Bernie, or: Michael and Bernie will be getting a good talking-to, don't you worry. No euphemisms. Just the stark invocation of justice.

Were Mr. Hope and I friends? Suddenly I thought of something weird that had happened in Grade Three. It seemed like decades ago, but it was just the year before, back when I still loved everybody. Something strange had happened that day - something was off. Our grandma-teacher had some kind of crisis, needed to leave for the second half of the morning. Mr. Hope came in looking distracted. We were in the middle of making Easter baskets, cutting out countless pieces of coloured paper into egg shapes - we easily could have been kept busy until lunch. But Mr. Hope made us put our baskets aside, gave us to understand that he had come to cla.s.s not merely to babysit until the bell, but to impart a very special lesson.

He glared at us until we settled, just as he had done in Grade One, and once all the noise and motion had been driven from the room he blinked and scowled and asked us: What is love, people?

Hands shot up. We could play this game - easy. We were children. We knew all about love.

Mr. Hope called on a few of us. He didn't know anybody's names, so he gave us nicknames.

"You: ponytail."

"Love is when you love your mommy."

"No. That's not what love is, that's something you do with it. Try again. You: eyebrows."

"Love is when you feel your heart -"

"I'm not asking for examples of love. When you say 'love is when this, love is when that,' you people are just giving me examples. Do you know what examples are? Do you understand the difference? If I ask you what is a rock, you don't say: 'A rock is when you throw a rock and hurt somebody.'"

Teddy's face materialized in my mind; his mutilated face. And I remember thinking: But that's exactly what a rock is. In that particular case. And next thing I knew the rock was in my chest - in it and on it, making it difficult to breathe because it was becoming clear that there was something in me that was always rising in opposition to Mr. Hope - that I was doomed to disagree with him no matter how much I wanted to appease.

Around the room, children's hands began to droop like unwatered flowers. If we weren't allowed to give examples of love, we were at a loss for how to explain it.

One dim-witted girl in the back of the cla.s.s had not absorbed the point. She kept her arm erect in the air, straight and certain.

"You: gap-tooth."

"Love is when you hold a puppy."

Mr. Hope slammed his fist against our sweet-faced grandma-teacher's desk.

"LOVE IS NOT," he bellowed, "WHEN YOU HOLD A PUPPY."

Behind me, I could hear someone's breath hitching rapidly in and out and I tried to shush whoever it was as quietly as I could.

"Where is it?" Mr. Hope demanded to know. "What is it? Think about that, people. You're all so sure about this thing and you can't even answer the question. I'm not asking you when is it. A rock is a small round hard thing. Okay, that's not great, but at least it's a start. So what kind of thing is love? Big or little? Hard or soft? Black or white? Or coloured?"

"Red," whispered someone.

"Why?" demanded Mr. Hope, whirling on the child who whispered. "Because hearts are red? Because you colour hearts red on Valentine's Day? Those are hearts, people. Paper hearts. That's all. Representing what? Representing what exactly?"

It was dawning on me that this was the second instance of Mr. Hope doing something to us - something deliberate; deliberately improper.

My hand went up. He hooked me with his eyes and said: "Greta."

"It's big," I told him, knowing it was important to hold his eye.

He loomed closer, moving imperceptibly like a cloud. "It's big? Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"What makes you so sure?"

"Because," I said. "You feel it big."

Mr. Hope backed up a couple of steps and rested his non-existent b.u.t.tocks against the same desk he'd just hammered with his fist.

"You feel it big," said Mr. Hope. "Okay," he said. "Now we're getting somewhere. So if you feel it big - like Greta says, people - doesn't it follow that we can start by defining love, supposing it exists, as 'something you feel'?"

He turned, picked up a piece of chalk and wrote on the board: 1. Big 2. Something you feel Waves of relief. Like the group of us children made up a single muscle, a bundle of tendons releasing all at once.

It went on, the strange lesson, until lunchtime. The specifics of the memory get hazy for me after that moment - the moment of tension released - but I do remember working and thinking very hard the whole time. Mr. Hope kept looking to me for answers, like I was his only ally in the room, his teammate. But that's not what I felt like, exactly. There was a fairy tale I'd heard recently - something about a sultan and a storyteller, and the storyteller had to feed the sultan stories to keep him happy and from cutting off heads.

At one point Mr. Hope showed us his white, awful palms and appealed to the cla.s.s: "What about me? What about me, people? Who in this world is going to love me?"

It froze us. It was a serious question, because we couldn't imagine the answer. I ran to the front of the cla.s.sroom and wrapped my arms around his D.

Greta, I heard him say from deep inside his stomach.

Now here sat Mr. Hope and me together, side by side on the leather couch. And were we friends? I had hugged his D, but that seemed like centuries ago. Did he remember? Did he remember how I gave him the right answer? That I was the one who calmed him down just when we were starting to seem like a bunch of hopeless kids who wouldn't ever learn?

The bell rang, signalling the end of lunch. "Go back to your cla.s.s, now, Greta," said Mr. Hope.

I looked up into his eyes. I was getting used to looking into his eyes. Every time I did it, I understood it was the right thing to do, even as it terrified me. It was like rolling up your sleeve to get a needle, or climbing to a great height - courageous. A feat. There were adults who looked you in the eyes and didn't see you. Mr. Hope was not one of those people.

"Go back to your cla.s.s, now, Greta," he said again.

I went back to my cla.s.s. Ten minutes into the first period, the low horn sounded over the intercom.

Will Michael Ellemen and Bernie Heany please come to the office.

I looked around. Some of my fellow children were smiling to themselves bloodthirstily.

I waited. I couldn't concentrate on my reading. I turned one page after another and they may as well have been blank.

About thirty minutes later the horn sounded again.

Would Sh.e.l.ly McInnis please come to the office.

Notice: he always knew my name. He knew it perfectly well.

In the office, Michael and Bernie stood before me red-faced, slack-mouthed, puffy-eyed.

"Do you boys have something to say to Sh.e.l.ly?"

In a soul-shattered monotone, and in unison, they recited: "We're sorry, Sh.e.l.ly."

I regarded them. I c.o.c.ked my head, considering.

"Greta?" prompted Mr. Hope.