“The Architecture of Bad Dreams”: The Sentient House in Australian and Canadian Literature, and Five Floors of Basement: A Novel

Suzette Mayr

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

School of the Arts and Media

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

December 2016

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Surname or Family name: Mayr

First name: Suzette Other name/s: Rosel Vernita

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School: Arts and Media Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences

Title: “The architecture of bad dreams”: the sentient house in Australian and Canadian literature, and five floors of basement: a novel

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The “sentient house” is a sub-category of the “haunted house” literary genre that has received little creative or critical attention in Australia or Canada. Using four examples of Australian and Canadian “sentient house” literature – Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye, Daniel David Moses’ Big Buck City, and Andrew Pyper’s The Guardians – the research dissertation examines the ways in which Australian and Canadian writers have “renovated” the Euro-American sentient house genre within their respective national contexts. For example, writers such as Pyper and Cleven import the Euro-American trope of the “haunted castle” into their work, but challenge the normative assumptions associated with race and/or gender inherent in most Euro-American gothic horror narratives. Alternatively, Lindsay’s and Moses’ texts reveal the subversive qualities that a sentient house can have in its material aspects such as its building materials and faulty construction. Lindsay, Cleven, and Moses also demonstrate that the sentient house trope can operate as a tool to interrogate residual colonial influence in countries such as Australia and Canada that are “haunted” by Indigenous dispossession of land. The houses are all – as space theorist Christine Wilson proposes – “unruly” spaces that also operate as uncanny, revelatory spaces that expose the oppressed and the hidden. The creative writing component, Five Floors of Basement, is a sentient house novel that centres on a university professor named Edith who works at the fictional University of Inivea, in Alberta, Canada. Her office is in Crawley Hall, a building that produces “sick-building syndrome” in its residents. Five Floors pushes the notion of a “sick” building beyond metaphor and into the literal: Crawley Hall is alive and “sick” – in every sense of the word. The novel follows Edith’s mental and physical disintegration as she tries to determine if she is being overwhelmed by too much university bureaucracy and asbestos renovation, or if she is being affected by Crawley Hall’s inherent evil. Ever concerned about her place within her “university family” in her home away from home, Edith struggles to balance the precarious relationship between her increasingly unhappy work life and her life outside of work.

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ii Abstract The “sentient house” is a sub-category of the “haunted house” literary genre that has received little creative or critical attention in Australia and Canada. Using four examples of Australian and Canadian “sentient house” literature – Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye, Daniel David Moses’ Big Buck City, and Andrew Pyper’s The Guardians – the research dissertation examines the ways in which Australian and Canadian writers have “renovated” the Euro-American sentient house genre within their respective national contexts. For example, writers such as Pyper and Cleven import the Euro-American trope of the “haunted castle” into their work, but challenge the normative assumptions associated with race and/or gender inherent in most Euro-American Gothic horror narratives. Alternatively, Lindsay’s and Moses’ texts reveal the subversive qualities that a sentient house can have in its material aspects such as its building materials and faulty construction. Lindsay, Cleven, and Moses also demonstrate that the sentient house trope can operate as a tool to interrogate residual colonial influence in countries such as Australia and Canada that are “haunted” by Indigenous dispossession of land. The houses are all – as space theorist Christine Wilson proposes – “unruly” spaces that also operate as uncanny, revelatory spaces that expose the oppressed and the hidden. The creative writing component, Five Floors of Basement, is a sentient house novel that centres on a university professor named Edith who works at the fictional University of Inivea, in Alberta, Canada. Her office is in Crawley Hall, a building that produces “sick-building syndrome” in its residents. Five Floors pushes the notion of a “sick” building beyond metaphor and into the literal: Crawley Hall is alive and “sick” – in every sense of the word. The novel follows Edith’s mental and physical disintegration as she tries to determine if she is being overwhelmed by too much university bureaucracy and asbestos renovation, or if she is being affected by Crawley Hall’s inherent evil. Ever concerned about her place within her “university family” in her home away from home, Edith struggles to balance the precarious relationship between her increasingly unhappy work life and her life outside of work.

iii

Table of Contents Page

Publications Arising from the Work v Acknowledgements vi

Chapter 1. Introduction: “Born Bad”: The Sentient House in Australian and Canadian Literature

1.1 The “Haunted” House vs. the “Sentient” House 1 1.2 The Origins of the Sentient House 6 1.3 The Sentient House and the Uncanny 10 1.4 Comparing Australian and Canadian Literature 15 1.5 Four Examples of Sentient Houses 16 1.6 Methodology 19

Chapter 2. The Fall of the House of Appleyard: The Misfit 24 House in Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock

Chapter 3. “This Shit House”: The Abject House in Daniel 40 David Moses’ Big Buck City

Chapter 4. “VERY UNHAPPY HOUSE THIS ONE”: The 59 Unhappy Houses in Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye

Chapter 5. “Man of the House”: The Homosocial House in 78 Andrew Pyper’s The Guardians

Chapter 6. Conclusion: “House Rules”: The Sentient House 100 and its Renovations

Five Floors of Basement: A Novel 104

Works Cited 303

iv

Publications Arising from the Work “Concrete Swans (an excerpt).” Taddle Creek Magazine 35 (2015): 24-27. Print. “Helen Bedford.” Rusty Toque 9 (2015). Web. 04 Dec. 2015. “House of Mirrors: The Sentient House as Homosocial Space in Andrew Pyper’s The Guardians.” Horror Studies 8.1 (2017). In press.

v

Acknowledgements A huge thank you to my supervisor, Associate Professor Anne Brewster, whose wisdom, patience, and encouragement were invaluable while I explored my sentient houses. She hauled me in when my sentences – both literal and figurative – meandered out of control, gave me keys to doors I never knew existed, and most importantly prodded me into exploring attics, crawlspaces, and hidden rooms I was too afraid to venture into before. Thank you to my co-supervisor, Dr. Christopher Danta, for his unwavering support, encouragement, and Sloterdijk. Thank you to Professor Helen Groth for her wonderful advice. Thank you to Debra Lynn Dudek for throwing open those intimidating front gates, and for saying the four magic words, “Why the [bleep] not?,” that started me on this PhD journey in the first place. Thank you, Deb, for being such a brilliant friend, flatmate, scholar, sounding board, and sprinkler of a-ha sparkling fairy dust. Thank you especially for the buckets of Australian wine and cream cheese-stuffed Cheezels, the maggots, the meticulous QTFR meeting reports, and the love stories. Thank you to the team of women who let me lob my half-baked PhD ideas at them but who as fellow writers and editors always threw back fully- baked loaves and sent me straight back in: Nicole Markotic for her demented genius and refusal to acknowledge facts like gravity, Rosemary Nixon for her gentle sadism, Robyn Read for her gift of diplomatically pointing out the obvious and connecting my dots, Nancy Jo Cullen for her pragmatic wildness, and Catherine Fargher who one day over tea jimmied open the lock to the research question dungeon and set me free. Thank you to the following people and organisations who answered my questions with such grace and generosity: the Australian Horror Writers’ Association, James Doig, David Carroll, Cameron Trost, Kyla Ward, Brett Savory and Sandra Kasturi of ChiZine Publications, Hilary Griffith of the Castlemaine Historical Society, and Kate Patrick of the UNSW Library.

vi Several people were a tremendous help and don’t even know it: Troy Potter, Jonathan Ball, Pat Sheil, Aislinn Hunter, Christine Wiesenthal, Stephen Slemon, Dorottya Fabian, Michael Tavel Clarke, Angie Abdou, and Graham Livesey. Thank you to Jonny Flieger who talked corpses, and granted me permission to use the word “heaped.” Thank you to the Australians who made me feel so at home: Michael Sutjiadi, Sue Murray, Oscar, Vivianne Vandenberg, Maria Barbagallo, Ann Duffy, and Joy Phillips. Thank you to my parents and my brothers – in particular Friedrich, the family horror aficionado who got me hooked in the first place. Lastly, thank you times infinity to my beloved wife, Tonya Callaghan – my inspiration, model, and muse – who never doubted me for a minute, and who always kept the home fires burning brightly.

The phrase “the architecture of bad dreams” is from page 143 of the haunted house short story “Fallowfields” by Canadian writer Virgil Burnett in The Oxford Book of Canadian Ghost Stories. References to dinner with Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall (and the dropping of their names) in Five Floors of Basement derive from the article “This is What Happens at Dinner with Prince Charles & Camilla” by Mia Freedman. The clip art image by jcartier on the cover page of Five Floors of Basement is titled “building 1” and can be found at www.openclipart.org.

vii Introduction “Born Bad”: The Sentient House in Australian and Canadian Literature “I think that the concept of certain houses as unclean or forbidden – perhaps sacred – is as old as the mind of man. Certainly there are spots which inevitably attach to themselves an atmosphere of holiness and goodness; it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad. Hill House, whatever the cause, has been unfit for human habitation for upwards of twenty years. What it was like before then, whether its personality was molded by the people who lived here, or the things they did, or whether it was evil from its start are all questions I cannot answer. . . . No one knows, even, why some houses are called haunted.” “What else could you call Hill House?” Luke demanded. “Well – disturbed, perhaps. Leprous. Sick. Any of the popular euphemisms for insanity; a deranged house is a pretty conceit.” – Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

1. The “Haunted” House vs. the “Sentient” House In February 2010, journalist Ellen Lutton of The Brisbane Times reported on the lingering stigma associated with the former site of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) headquarters in Toowong, a Brisbane suburb. As the article reports, between 1994 to 2006, sixteen female ABC employees developed breast cancer, and when a seventeenth woman contracted the disease, ABC abandoned what many in the media called a “sick building” (Miles)1. Even though the workplace was most likely responsible for the cancer, the cause of the cancer remained untraceable – multiple tests on the building and the land revealed nothing wrong. Still, experts quoted in Lutton’s article call the site “blighted” and a “poisoned chalice,” and in the article’s online comments section, a writer identified only as “Nathan!” from “Graceville!” attributes the building’s

1 Section 6.4.1 of the 7th edition of the MLA Handbook states that in the case of non-print sources such as web publications that have no pagination “it is often preferable to include in the text, rather than in a parenthetical reference, the name of the person (e.g., author, editor, director, performer) that begins the corresponding entry in the works cited list.” As a result, when I am unable to refer to the author or authors in the text for stylistic reasons – in this case Janelle Miles and Brian Williams – I refer to them in parentheses immediately following the quotation.

1 problems to the supernatural, writing, “I know the builder that built the building, he said the site was an old Aboriginal Burial Ground. I wont [sic] be going near the joint. Bad mojo.” The Toowong ABC building is not unique in its label as a “sick building”; buildings around the world have residents or workers who suffer from “sick-building syndrome” (Redlich and Sparer 1013), the poor health resulting from flawed building design or unknown causes such as those allegedly contaminating the Toowong ABC building. As distressing as “sick” buildings may be, however, the attribution of sentient qualities such as “sickness” to inanimate buildings conjures a topic ripe for horror fiction.2 In spite of the frequent occurence of “sick” buildings nevertheless relatively little fiction has been written in Australia or Canada about “sick” or sentient buildings, and consequently even less scholarship has focused on this kind of fiction. This dissertation examines a particular sub-category of the haunted house genre that depicts a house similar to “sick” buildings, namely, the “sentient” house; that is, the supernaturally-inflected house that is not haunted by ghosts, but which – to borrow a phrase from American horror writer Shirley Jackson – is itself a “live organism” (Jackson ch. 1).3 This dissertation will examine the ways in which sentient houses in Australian and Canadian literature are presented – to use space theorist Christine Wilson’s phrasing – as subversive, “wild” (“Haunted” 203) and disruptive spaces. These sentient or “animated” (Wilson, “Ever” 151) houses are not “literal wilderness,” but are “spaces of animation, unruliness, and often desolation” (“Haunted” 201). They are also, to paraphrase haunted house fiction scholar Rebecca Janicker, “revelatory” spaces (12) – they expose and reveal the oppressed and the hidden. The notion of a sentient or “animated” house as a “revelatory” space of “unruliness” or disruption provokes numerous questions when considering the sentient house within Australian and Canadian literature: what, for example, constitutes a sentient,

2 I would like to thank Dr. Robyn Read for first pointing out this connection to me. 3 The 7th edition of the MLA Handbook indicates in section 6.4.2 that when citing from an electronic document that does not have stable page numbers such as an ebook, the section, paragraph or chapter number rather than the page number should be indicated in parentheses.

2 “unruly” house in the context of Australian and Canadian literature? How is the “unruliness” of sentient houses defined when experienced separately by Indigenous or non-Indigenous inhabitants in occupied nations? Lastly, is it possible to live in an “unruly” space such as a sentient house and ever feel at home? My argument in this study will ultimately be that, whether revealing the nature of the “unruliness” associated with issues as varied as gender, race, and/or class in the context of Australian and Canadian postcolonial identity, the sentient house aggressively revolts against occupation by its prospective inhabitants. The sentient house demonstrates that the home or space can be disruptive in numerous ways – each dwelling’s own particular sentience is symptomatic, and as I will show, the reason for a sentient house’s “unruliness” is part of the complex, unknowable origin of the house in question. To sum up: while the haunted house can stand in as an easy metaphor for numerous concerns such as the “haunted” nation, the sentient house, on the other hand, disputes the metaphorical value of “hauntedness.” Haunted houses can be exorcised; sentient houses cannot. For many postcolonial scholars, the haunted house as a metaphor is attractive when discussing postcolonial nations such as Australia and Canada. Expanding on ideas put forward by postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture, postcolonial scholars have often used the haunted house as a metaphor to represent “uncanny” (Gelder and Jacobs 22) nations such as Australia and Canada, where the “spectral figure of . . . colonialism return[s] to ‘haunt’ the present and solicit our recognition” (O’Riley 7). Australian critic David Crouch in “National Hauntings: The Architecture of Australian Ghost Stories” contends that “haunted houses provide a precise figure for an unsettled country” (94), while Canadian postcolonial theorist Rita Wong begins an article titled “Troubling Domestic Limits” with the sentence, “I live at the west entrance of a haunted house called Canada” (109). However, the inherent problem in many scholars’ equation of the haunted house with an “unsettled” nation such as Australia and Canada is that the metaphor too easily encourages the idea that Indigenous people are spectral presences or “ghosts” that haunt

3 “us” – the metaphor inadvertently contributes yet another example of what Emilie Cameron points out is “a long-standing practice of relegating Aboriginality to the immaterial and spectral past” (“Reconciliations” 151). In the case of Wong, not only Indigenous post-contact history haunts “us,” but the horrors of the Canadian Japanese internment haunt “us” too. Furthermore, the haunted-house-as-nation metaphor also implies that pre-contact Australia and Canada were completely “unsettled”– it erases the fact that Indigenous nations and “settlings” occurred, albeit not of the colonial kind.4 In essence, the postcolonial haunted house metaphor often overlooks the multiple meanings of “settled” and “unsettled,” “home” and Homi Bhabha’s paraphrasing of Freud when Bhabha refers to the condition of being “unhomed” (“World” 141) in terms of different constituencies. Indigenous peoples in Australia and Canada are and were also “unsettled” or “unhomed” by European colonial invasion and its legacies. While Indigenous dispossession often serves as a source of the uncanny for non- Indigenous inhabitants in Australia and Canada – “they” (Indigenous people) haunt “us” (non-Indigenous people) – this dissertation will investigate, in its study of sentient house literature, examples of non- Indigenous people and culture as the source of the uncanny and “unsettling” in Indigenous-centered texts. In so doing, I will show how a concept such as the unheimlich, otherwise known as the “uncanny” or “unhomely,” can have different meanings for different groups. The limitations of the “haunted house” as a model prods this dissertation into venturing beyond the notion of “haunting” of the nation, and borrows from American horror scholar Dale Bailey the idea that sentient or animate house novels “like good sonnets, deploy their

4 In this case I use the word “settle” in its loosest sense, drawing from the Old English origin of the word setl meaning “a place to sit.” “A place to sit” as a concept allows inclusion of the nomadic and semi-nomadic Aboriginal peoples in Australia and Canada. For example, in their book Postcolonial Ecocriticism Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin note that “In pre-invasion Australia, the nature of the environment had dictated nomadism as the only way of life for both people and animals, but native North American groups needed to be only partially nomadic. Indian cultural groups occupied particular territories, and there were semipermanent settlements where the women cultivated corn, although hunting forest animals provided the Indians with their vital sustainable base” (9).

4 conventions in startling ways. . . . [A]t their very best, they present deeply subversive critiques of all that we hold to be true” (6). This dissertation proposes that the “sentient” house is a necessarily more complicated model than the “haunted” house, because the sentient house can be “deeply subversive” in ways so numerous and particularised that it cannot function as a tidy metaphor for the nation the way a haunted house often does. As I will go on to show, while “haunted house” operates as a useful umbrella term for both haunted and sentient houses, a “sentient” house is indeed different from a “haunted” house. This study will focus on four Australian and Canadian sentient house texts, recognising that the houses in these texts are not inanimate dwellings but that their sentience makes them a species of monster – “monster” because, as Wilson describes, “[t]hey are animated but wholly other at the same time; they are not humans, plants, or animals, but something else” (“Ever” 156). They are also monsters in the sense that Jeffrey Jerome Cohen describes the monster, recalling the etymological roots of the word “monster” by noting that “monstrum is etymologically ‘that which reveals,’ ‘that which warns’” (4). The houses that are the focus of this study “reveal” and “warn” of numerous anxieties – subverting the desires of their symbolic or actual owners, both Indigenous and non- Indigenous, as the desires manifest in the quest for “normal” lives, whatever “normal” might look like. In Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, for example, the fundamental anxiety that the monstrous house reveals is the main character Miss Appleyard’s unease with Hanging Rock and the “surrounding bush seething with chaotic flora and fauna” (Tilley 13) just outside her house’s walls – that is, Australia’s natural world and what it represents. Miss Appleyard attempts and fails to tame and transform her Australian-made, “misfit” (ch. 1) house into a European, microcosmic bubble in order to shield herself and her students from what she regards as the alienating otherness of Australia. In Daniel David Moses’ play Big Buck City, the house belonging to characters Jack and Barbara Buck is meant to reflect the Bucks’ willing assimilation to white dominant culture with the house’s placement in a “nice neighbourhood” (Moses 32) populated by racist white

5 people. However, the house at the centre of the play literally implodes as it participates in exposing the Bucks’ anxieties around their Indigenous identity and attempts to become culturally “white” in Canada. Andrew Pyper’s novel The Guardians reveals the limits of Canadian, white, heteronormative middle-class liberalism in its depiction of a house that deliberately “queers” the main characters’ friendship and demands a gendered self-awareness the male characters seem unwilling to experience. Lastly, in Vivienne Cleven’s novel Her Sister’s Eye, the Aboriginal characters live in fear of a Queenslander house – its sentience attributable to the violently racist white owners who have terrorised local Aboriginal townsfolk for generations. Possession and symbolic ownership of the Queenslander by marginalised characters, however, reveal the strength that comes when the disenfranchised characters band together to defeat the awful legacy. While the group of writers whose texts I examine in this dissertation appears eclectic, all their texts negotiate the changing meaning of terms such as “uncanny,” “anxiety” and “monster” – and even Wilson’s notion of “wild” and “unruly” – in ways that reveal how the sentient house as a recurring trope does different cultural and psychic work in the hands of different writers from different groups. Different constituencies have different anxieties, and sentient houses warn of and reveal these anxieties to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers and writers.

2. The Origins of the Sentient House In order to understand the trope of the “sentient” house, it is first necessary to know the origins of the larger category known as “haunted” house fiction. Haunted houses recur throughout British, North American, and Australian fiction, and most Gothic5 scholars agree that Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto would qualify as the first haunted house novel because its key setting is a haunted castle. David Punter and Glennis Byron assert that “[i]f there is such a thing as a general

5 A thorough discussion of the definition of “Gothic” occurs in section 1.3, “The Sentient House and the Uncanny.”

6 topography of the Gothic, then its central motif is the castle” (259). Otranto’s importance is underlined by Bailey in American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction where he concurs that Walpole “formulated a set of conventions which . . . have dominated the literature of terror ever since” (3). In spite of Walpole’s “invention” of the first fictional haunted building, however, Bailey argues that only when American writers Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne “relocated” the haunted castle to America did the haunted house as it is now known come into being. Bailey writes, “by transforming the Gothic castle into a mere house (however grand), Poe and Hawthorne planted the seeds which, in the hothouse environment of contemporary paperback fiction, blossomed into the haunted house formula visible in books ranging from The House Next Door to The Shining” (7).6 And notwithstanding his significant impact on American horror literature, Poe’s influence is obvious in Australian and Canadian horror literature as well – his “embryonic haunted house” (Bailey 20) short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” in particular having lasting effect on writers ranging from Australia’s Hume Nisbet and his 1894 short story “The Haunted Station,” to Canada’s Michael Rowe, author of the 2014 novel Wild Fell. While “Usher” helped shape the haunted house “sub-genre” (Bailey 5) Bailey and other Gothic horror scholars note that one other American text has also profoundly influenced haunted house fiction: Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House. Hill House set a precedent for the “sentient house” as a specific type or sub-category of haunted house because of the book’s representation of Hill House as an aggressive, “live organism” (Jackson ch. 1). Jackson’s house is unique in that while Poe’s “House of Usher” is one of the first known fictions to describe a house that possesses “sentience” (Poe 198), Jackson’s novel pushes the concept of a house’s

6 Critics such as Carol Margaret Davison and Adam W. Sweeting disagree with Dale Bailey on the point that Poe “introduces . . . the haunted house motif in American Gothic Fiction.” They contend that American writer Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland is an “earlier antecedent” (Davison 72). In terms of Poe’s influence on “sentient” houses, however, I will be guided by Bailey’s argument as Poe’s and Hawthorne’s stories are far better known, and thus much more influential.

7 “sentience” further by making the house a “major character” in the novel because Hill House is unambiguously “alive” (Wilson, “Habitability” 200). In The Haunting of Hill House, the house’s evil sentience is starkly presented in the oft-quoted opening sentences of the novel, narrated by an omniscient narrator who matter-of-factly refers to the house as a biological entity that has gone mad: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more” (ch. 1). Jackson’s explicit rendering of the house as “alive” became a feature that countless writers would go on to imitate and “that would influence the genre for the next fifty years” (Wilson, “Habitability” 200). So, to clarify: a living or “sentient house” is different from a standard “haunted house” because, as Bailey explains, in “sentient” house fiction “the supernatural focus of the text [is displaced] from the figure of the ghost – the revenant spirit of a human being – to the house” (21). A “sentient house” is “intelligent” (Pallejá-Lopez 48); the house is a character with a “personality,” and ghosts may or may not be present. In a conventional “haunted house” fiction, on the other hand, the house itself is inanimate, and merely backdrop or setting for ghosts and ghostly activity. As I mentioned earlier, my research indicates that neither Canada nor Australia has many examples of locally-set, sentient house fiction. While Canada has only two or three relatively prominent examples of Canadian-set sentient house fiction such as Andrew Pyper’s The Guardians (the topic of Chapter Five), Australia has even fewer. The rarity of Australian sentient house or even conventional haunted house fiction is discernible in the Australian anthology Dark House: Stories Compiled by a Master of the Macabre, edited by Australia’s “master of the macabre” Gary Crew. Dark House sports a cover blurb that asks “What is it about old houses that stirs the imagination?” but then contains a collection of stories in which fewer than half the stories contain houses – suggesting that Crew could not find enough haunted house stories to fill even one short

8 anthology. Moreover, as part of my research for this dissertation, I contacted the 2014 vice-president of the Australian Horror Writers Association, Cameron Trost, and he could not think of a single haunted house novel set in Australia and written by an Australian, writing in an email message to me: “I can't think of or find any haunted house novels written by Australians and set in Australia - terrible, isn't it?” That said, a small number of Australian non-horror, book-length examples come to mind: Tim Winton’s novel Cloudstreet contains a sentient house which I will touch upon in Chapter Four, and in this dissertation I examine at length the Australian novels Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay, and Her Sister’s Eye by Vivienne Cleven. I can only speculate that this rarity of Australian-set sentient house fiction may be because Australian writers are more concerned about the “haunting” of land than of buildings. The relative rarity of sentient house fiction in Australian and Canadian literature could also be because the haunted house genre as a whole has fallen out of fashion. In a review of Andrew Pyper’s The Guardians, book reviewer Robert Wiersema praises Pyper for not succumbing to what Wiersema determines are the too-familiar conventions of that “hoariest of tropes, the haunted house novel.” In addition, in the entry under “Haunted Houses” in the 2005 Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia, S. T. Joshi notes the drop in production of haunted house novels written in English in “the past three decades,” suggesting that fiction about haunted or sentient houses is no longer relevant to contemporary readers’ experiences, and therefore “implausible” (528). Joshi muses: Recency of construction of most modern dwellings, a population rapidly shifting locales as time and circumstance warrant, and the absence of generations dwelling either consecutively or simultaneously in the same residence make it difficult to envision a particular structure, whether residential or public, as the victim of a specific spectral manifestation. (527-528) So what might Australian and Canadian writers contribute to this allegedly declining and unfashionable tradition? Christine Wilson

9 paraphrases Fred Botting in his book Gothic when she unequivocally includes haunted house narratives in the “Gothic tradition,” and observes that Gothic texts are . . . generally read as either subversive or symptomatic . . . . If they are treated as subversive, critics claim that the Gothic is a genre that critiques both conventional social structures and dominant literary paradigms. If they are treated as symptomatic, one reads them with an eye toward the anxieties these texts manifest, usually regarding conventional social structures and dominant literary paradigms. (“Haunted” 210) I argue that in all the texts I examine in this dissertation, whether they belong to the Gothic mode or not – Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Daniel David Moses’ Big Buck City, Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye, and Andrew Pyper’s The Guardians – the sentient house trope works to critique, subvert, or at the very least to recognise (or symptomatise) contemporary anxieties. As a subversive trope, the sentient house in Picnic, Big Buck, and Her Sister’s Eye can operate as a postcolonial critical tool to interrogate residual colonial influence. The fourth text, The Guardians, figures the house’s sentient nature in a way that is symptomatic – hinting at the existence of a destructive, homophobic, misogynist subcurrent in Canadian white, heteronormative, middle-class culture while not overtly critiquing it. Additionally, each of the primary texts I examine portrays the house as a body in different states of abjection. Indeed, in these particular texts the sentient house is not only an abject space but also sometimes a space or home for the abject, contributing further to the “unruliness” and uncanniness of these houses. As such, the sentient house genre in Australia and Canada encourages its readers to investigate the uncanniness of the places in which they live particularly when they believe they are at “home.”

3. The Sentient House and the Uncanny When discussing the notion of the uncanny house or nation, Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay, “The Uncanny” is indispensable for

10 postcolonial and Gothic horror scholarship. Indeed, Freud writes in “The Uncanny” that “some languages . . . in use to-day [sic] can only render the German expression ‘an unheimlich house’ by ‘a haunted house’” (241), underlining the interconnectedness between the uncanny and the house in particular as the originating source of the uncanny. Freud’s essay explicitly defines the unheimlich or the uncanny as “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (220). That a house or home – a space associated with comfort and security, what Freud would refer to as the heimlich (homey) – could be transformed into the unheimlich is what is so unsettling in haunted house fiction, since every house that is haunted or sentient is, in essence, an unheimlich house. The known is the unknown, the stranger is the self. As such, “uncanny” texts such as Picnic, Her Sister’s Eye and Big Buck City, for example, set within countries such as Australia and Canada, invite a postcolonial Gothic investigation, the postcolonial Gothic understood as “a mode of writing [that] furnish[es] writers with a means, in narrative and idiom, to expose and subvert past and continuing regimes of power and exploitation, and to reinscribe histories that have been both violent and repressed” (Rudd 2). The sentient houses in Picnic, Big Buck City, and Her Sister’s Eye all expressly highlight in their own ways the lingering aftereffects of European invasion. For the main characters in these novels, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, literal and/or figurative “home” is or becomes unheimlich and strange. To begin to understand the connection between house and home, I turn to Elizabeth Ferrier’s article “From Pleasure Domes to Bark Huts: Architectural Metaphors in Recent Australian Fiction” in which Ferrier points out the importance of the house as a trope in Australian fiction, arguing that Houses and other structures we inhabit put up boundaries around the self and give protection from the environment. . . . In a colonial culture, feeling at home may be held as an ideal which indicates cultural adjustment, and the house often embodies the fulfilment or failure of that ideal. (40)

11 What does one do, however, when one’s “home” or house is haunted? Postcolonial scholars in both Australia and Canada assert that these countries are “haunted” because “illegitimate appropriation of Native lands comes back to haunt the Canadian settler-colonial state” (Sugars and Turcotte xiv). I am intrigued by Ken Gelder’s suggestion that Australia (like Canada) has a particular “context” as far as ghost stories go, “a context that places the newness of Australia for whites alongside another, older, but already radically dispossessed – inhabitation. . . . [W]hite settlement in this country is . . . fundamentally unsettled” (“Introduction,” Oxford xi, italics in the original). To elaborate on the topic of ghosts, Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx writes that “haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” (37). In terms of my argument then, one could argue that the “haunted” or “unsettled” nation serves as a backdrop to the sentient houses I examine, even though I do not examine actual fictional “haunted” houses. Sugars and Turcotte elaborate on Derrida’s call to “readers to learn to speak with ghosts – to acknowledge the shrouded and the silent – and to move towards a collective sense of redefinition and reconciliation” (xiv). But contra Gelder’s argument, I assert that Indigenous people in both Australia and Canada also live in an uncanny space and the physical land masses that make up Australia and Canada, their homes, have been rendered “unhomely” by the arrival of settler-invaders and their descendants even as Indigenous people continue to live in these countries. This dissertation will specifically reject the premise of a ghost or ghosts as the cause of a house’s sentience: I am interested in the house itself as a conscious and wilful character in these texts, not merely as an eerie structure inhabited by disembodied ghosts. But just as Derrida refers to ghosts in a metaphorical sense in Specters, I cannot ignore the fact that ghosts sometimes occur in a metaphorical way in the texts I examine in this dissertation. The importance of ghosts is particularly apparent in a novel such as Her Sister’s Eye in which the character Raymond Gee, a living man who essentially lives as the ghost of his dead childhood friend, seeks relief from the torturing pain of a scar on his head and the submerged, horrific

12 memory inflicted by a white racist who murdered his sister. He secretly craves “redefinition and reconciliation” (Sugars and Turcotte xiv) even while the other inhabitants of the town of Mundra are more preoccupied with battling unheimlich houses and contaminated land. Although this study explores the role of uncanny, sentient buildings in Australian and Canadian literature, therefore making postcolonial theory and postcolonial Gothic theory in particular the natural theoretical and modal lenses with which to view this literature, the concept of the “Gothic” itself is complex and problematic and less straightforwardly relevant to this study. One might even say that while the haunted house or castle seems to be a “major locus” (Botting, Gothic 2) of Gothic literature, the Gothic house should in fact be considered only a sub-category of the haunted house narrative. “Gothic” covers such a vast array of literature that the term verges on being too general. For example, Gothic scholar Fred Botting highlights the broadness of the term “the Gothic” when he points out, These days it seems increasingly difficult to speak of “the Gothic” with any assurance. The definitive article offers the illusion that there is a well-defined genre to discuss, but between article and noun (once commonly restricted to adjectival usage) adjectives often need to be inserted to supplement the indefinition of the category. (“Preface,” Essays and Studies 2001: The Gothic 1) Botting goes on to list numerous variations on the term including “‘Victorian Gothic,’ ‘modern Gothic,’ . . . ‘postmodern Gothic,’ ‘female Gothic,’ ‘postcolonial Gothic,’ queer Gothic.’” The list is so expansive he even speculates (tongue-in-cheek) that at some point in future literary study it might be necessary to have a category for “gothic Gothic” literature (1). And according to Gerry Turcotte, “Gothic” as a term is applicable to literature that is fascinated with those forces outside the “centre” – the odd, the unaccepted, the unknown. It is a literature which has sought to represent or to criticise the margins; conversely, its probing eye has penetrated the outskirts, the excluded, often to show . . . how inextricably “related” is the margin to the centre, thereby blurring

13 the very basis upon which such fraudulent polarities are established. (Peripheral 22) But Turcotte’s definition is broad enough to encompass queer literature, disability texts, and other identity-focused materials. Indeed “Gothic” is a label that has been used to describe texts as various and dissimilar as Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the realist short stories of Canadian Nobel Prize-winner Alice Munro,7 Australian Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies,8 Alexis Wright’s novel Plains of Promise,9 and the work of American “Southern Gothic” writer Flannery O’Connor.10 Because of the broadness of Gothic theory as a category, I borrow from Gothic theory only in a broad and general way in my readings of the primary texts that are the focus of this study. I employ a bricolage of theories such as postcolonial theory, masculinity theory, and thing theory in order to analyse the divergent “personalities” of the different sentient houses. In spite of its expansiveness, the Gothic as a theoretical “mode” (Sugars and Turcotte, “Introduction” xv) does provide useful analytical tools, especially when narrowed down to “postcolonial Gothic” theory when comparing texts from Australia and Canada, and “Gothic horror” or “global Gothic” theory when accessing texts such as Canadian horror writer Pyper’s The Guardians, which follows more faithfully the American-style sentient house model used by writers such as Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. The Gothic theoretical mode is helpful because, as Sugars and Turcotte identify, the Gothic is a mode that is “preoccupied with the fringes, the unspoken, the peripheral, and the cast aside. It is populated with monsters and outcasts, villains and victims, specters and the living dead” (xv). As I mention earlier, in virtually all the primary texts I examine in this study, the sentient house is aligned somehow with the monstrous, the “peripheral” and the abject. The sentient house possesses subversive force in how it serves to highlight and

7 See The Gothic Elements in the Early Fiction of Alice Munro by Jennifer Evans, as just one example. 8 See Gerry Turcotte’s Peripheral Fear. 9 See Françoise Kral’s “Postcolonial Gothic as Gothic Sub-Version: A Study of Black Australian Fiction.” 10 See Jing Li’s “Flannery O’Connor’s Gothic Art.”

14 often critique the forces that push subjects, including the main characters in these texts, to the “fringes.”

4. Comparing Australian and Canadian Literature Why compare Canada and Australia? Canada and Australia are obviously very different geographically, but they are similar in their settler- invader histories, their distinctly British imperial connections and residues, their literary-historical connections, and the themes underlying a significant amount of the literature produced in these countries. Gerry Turcotte in Peripheral Fear notes that Canada’s and Australia’s respective search for national identity is only too well-known, and is commonplace of each country’s social as well as literary commentary. Moreover, each country’s obsessive attempt to impose neo-classical tenets of order on the early “chaos” of the land is also well-documented. (61) And while Canada is a much closer neighbour to the United States, more than one critic has suggested that in the United States national “uncanniness” or “unsettledness” stems more from the history of African slavery than from European invasions of Indigenous cultures. Marlene Goldman in Dispossession proposes that whereas both Canada and the US share the concept of the frontier and the trauma and guilt concerning our treatment of the indigenous people as Gothic subjects, the latter perhaps has dealt more profoundly with the particular haunting from within associated with the legacy of slavery . . . It is an open secret and a central concern in American Gothic literature and criticism. (9) That said, it must be noted that Canada also has a history of African slavery, but the slavery of African people was confined to particular areas of the country, and did not last as long or have as wide a reach as slavery in the United States. Perhaps a significant similarity between Australia and Canada is best summed up in their naming: in Postcolonial Gothic Fictions, Alison Rudd

15 points out that one key characteristic of Canadian Gothic literature is “an instability of identity . . . often expressed through a haunting sense of absence. Indeed, one derivation of the word Canada is from the Spanish ‘Aca nada,’ meaning ‘here nothing’” (70). Alternately, in her chapter on the postcolonial Gothic and Australian literature, she reminds the reader that “Australia’s identity remains unfixed, a terra nullius, or empty land, upon which a number of possible futures could be written” (104). Both countries have at one time or another been considered mythologically, literally, and legally “empty” by the Europeans who invaded them, but at the same time they have obviously always been populated by Indigenous present/ce and history and so not empty at all. Gillian Whitlock in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English also argues that the two countries share a “literary sphere” in their production of “comparable frontier” literatures, commenting that “perhaps most importantly, a deliberate effort to bring together the two literatures in the 1950s became a crucial precursor of Commonwealth literary studies.” She goes on to describe the efforts of Australian critic Brian Elliott, the 1950-1951 Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Dominions Project, and the resulting and important “academic exchanges” as a result of the program, and the 1986 Australian-Canadian Badlands conference assembled by Australian Alan Lawson and Canadian Charles Steele in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The comparative study of the two literatures has a long and established history, and both countries’ historical “uncanniness” suggests a complementary pairing. The significant lack of sentient house literature (especially as compared to American and European literature) within Australian and Canadian literature is also a common feature that provides grounds for bringing the two literatures together in this dissertation.

5. Four Examples of Sentient Houses In this dissertation, I examine four primary texts in detail – two Australian and two Canadian – in order to determine the nature of the sentient house and its use as a trope within the postcolonial literatures of

16 Australia and Canada. The texts feature a range of examples of sentient houses with different “personalities.” The Guardians by Canadian Andrew Pyper is a popular horror novel that borrows more obviously from Jackson’s sentient Hill House model; Picnic at Hanging Rock by Australian Joan Lindsay is not typically considered a horror novel, but its house has sentient features depicted within an uncanny narrative; Big Buck City by Delaware First Nation playwright Daniel David Moses is about an urban, Indigenous family living in a sentient house in Toronto, Canada; and Her Sister’s Eye by Kamilaroi writer Vivienne Cleven includes a Queenslander house afflicted by the “white shadows” (Althans, “White” 140) of dominant white culture. When compared, these four texts possess intriguing overlaps and differences. For example, Cleven and Moses approach the uncanny in a way that appears to be unique to Indigenous writers who are aware of the frequent and stereotypical gothicisation of Indigenous people and culture in Canadian and Australian cultural products. These texts position dominant white culture as far more insidious and dangerous than any uncanniness of Indigenous origin. Canadian scholar Warren Cariou points out that for Indigenous “readers and writers, there is no reason . . . that Indigenous ghosts should be frightening” (727). Correspondingly, the Indigenous characters in Cleven’s and Moses’ texts show that the nature of each house’s monstrousness is not that of the conventional “Aboriginal Burial Ground” – a ubiquitous cliché that I will examine in some detail in Chapter Four when I discuss Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye. Pyper and Cleven use a similar writing strategy in that they both import Euro-American Gothic tropes into their work – in this case, the forbidding Gothic edifice – but challenge the assumptions associated with race and/or gender that are inherent in most Euro-American Gothic horror narratives. Meanwhile, Lindsay’s and Moses’ texts reveal the subversive qualities that a sentient house can have in its material aspects such as building materials and faulty construction. Lindsay, Cleven, and Moses also demonstrate in their texts that the sentient house trope can operate as a tool to interrogate residual colonial influence in countries such as Australia and

17 Canada that are putatively “haunted” by Indigenous dispossession of land – these writers problematise and complexify this cliché. As I explain in more depth in Chapter Two, Dale Bailey’s American Nightmares is based on the premise that American sentient house fictions11 all follow a “formula” (5). While this formula is useful for reevaluating non- American texts such as Picnic at Hanging Rock which are not usually regarded as sentient house fictions, I would argue that the other Australian and Canadian sentient houses I discuss in this dissertation test and challenge Bailey’s formula. Indeed, I find Christine Wilson’s theory that haunted houses are “unruly” spaces as more fitting for Australian and Canadian sentient houses. Wilson contends that in haunted house narratives – in particular sentient house narratives such as Jackson’s foundational novel Hill House – the houses are “unnaturally natural. They defy the boundaries between domestic and natural space, the wild and the domesticated, subject and object, and the animate and inanimate. They are, as Jackson so memorably says, ‘born,’ not made” (“Haunted” 201-202). The four texts I discuss in this dissertation all present the sentient house as a type of “wild” space, either figuratively or literally as in Pyper’s Guardians. In the texts I examine, the houses’ “unruliness” is often a reaction to a central unhappiness or lack in the lives of their symbolic or actual “owners.” That is, the “owner” or “owners” encounter a house that threatens them in ways that acknowledge and exploit their most significant vulnerabilities. When the owners do attempt to dominate and control the house, whether on a personal or broader level, they usually fail. This dissertation investigates the nature of that failure (and the occasional success), and shows that all houses or spaces of the kind I examine have “revelatory functions” (Janicker 12).

11 Interestingly, Bailey mistakes Susie Moloney, author of the sentient house novel The Dwelling, as an American writer who is transforming the genre. Moloney is from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and while she has lived in homes in both Canada and New York, she is primarily based in Canada.

18 6. Methodology In my examination of these four texts, I structure my arguments in a broad way according to the postcolonial Gothic theory presented in the comparative studies Peripheral Fear: Transformations of the Gothic in Canadian and Australian Fiction by Gerry Turcotte, and Postcolonial Gothic Fictions from the Caribbean, Canada, Australia and New Zealand by Alison Rudd. I refer to Ken Gelder’s work on horror and Australian Gothic, as well as Jane M. Jacobs and Gelder’s Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation when I discuss the issue of the uncanny in Australian literature, particularly when I analyse Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye. To date there have been six full-length studies dealing with the topic of Canadian Gothic, the more recent examples including Cynthia Sugars’ Canadian Gothic, Marlene Goldman’s DisPossession: Haunting in Canadian Fiction, and Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte’s Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic. While these texts are useful, they concentrate on Canadian Gothic, so I privilege Turcotte’s and Rudd’s comparative studies over them. I also draw from the Gothic horror field known as “global Gothic” studies, in particular Dale Bailey’s American Nightmares, and the work of Gothic horror critics Ken Gelder, Fred Botting and Barbara Creed – specialists in the field of popular literary and cinematic horror. Because the “case studies” in this dissertation involve four very different kinds of sentient house texts, I use additional critical theory to supplement the Gothic horror theory and postcolonial Gothic theory. So, for example, in Chapter Two, “thing” theory in addition to postcolonial theory helps me analyse the “personality” of the stone house in Picnic at Hanging Rock. In this discussion of Picnic, I begin by outlining the features and “formula” of the sentient house as proposed by Dale Bailey in his American Nightmares. I show that even though Picnic is not a typical horror novel, the house featured in Picnic – Appleyard College – is for all intents and purposes a sentient house, similar to the one in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” This chapter will employ thing theory as defined by Bill Brown and Elaine Freedgood in order to investigate the ways in which

19 the geological origins of Appleyard College’s Castlemaine stone construction colludes with Hanging Rock in order to undermine the house’s owner, Mrs. Appleyard, and her colonial agenda. While Appleyard College fits quite neatly into Bailey’s “formula” of the sentient house, this novel also challenges Bailey’s formula because even though the house “wins” in the defeat of its owner Mrs. Appleyard, the “misfit” (ch. 1) house subsequently loses when it is destroyed in a bushfire following her death. The house in Big Buck City by Daniel David Moses – the topic of Chapter Three – is similar to Appleyard College in that the house also undermines its owner through its supernatural lack of structural integrity. Continuing in the mode of the “subversive” house as established by my discussion of Picnic, this chapter will draw on the studies of Aboriginal and Métis literary scholars such as Kristina Fagan and Warren Cariou, and will highlight how some Indigenous writers portray a different understanding of what constitutes “haunting” and the “uncanny” vis à vis a postcolonial nation such as Canada.12 In Big Buck City, the house is subversive because of its supernatural plumbing. The house’s agenda is also to reveal to the main characters the parts of their lives and heritage they have suppressed in their attempts to assimilate to dominant white culture: they want to be like their white neighbours, the Joneses, but at a terrible cost. I should go out of my way here to note that Big Buck City is a play and not a novel like the other three texts I analyse in this study. Since it is a play, it consequently should be analysed as a text that is performed rather than read. As a literary critic, I would ideally like to approach this text not as a script on a page, but as a performance on a stage. Unfortunately, as I point out in Chapter Three, Big Buck City is a play that did not achieve as high profile as its prequel Coyote City as a staged production, and so was not widely reviewed. The reviews that do exist were not particularly enthusiastic. Few records related to this play’s live production exist outside of the few reviews and the published script. As a result, my analysis of Big

12 It is important to note that some Indigenous writers in North America do not believe in the “post” in “postcolonial.” Writers such as Thomas King have written at length about the continuing colonisation of Canada by settler-invaders. See King’s 1990 essay “Godzilla vs. the Post-colonial.”

20 Buck City will revolve strictly around the play as written script. Even though it is a play and not a novel like the other primary texts I discuss in this dissertation, this play must be included with the other primary texts I examine in this dissertation because of the play’s unusual and insightful treatment of the sentient house as a trope in Canadian literature. Excluding Big Buck City from of this study would result in the exclusion of an –if not the – essential Canadian sentient house text. Chapter Four will examine Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye, which like Big Buck City, features Indigenous dispossession and its legacies as an important subtext. I will begin by examining the clichéd trope of the uncanny house in popular fiction and culture, and mostly non-Indigenous writers’ frequent attributing of houses’ “haunting” to the house being built on Indigenous burial or otherwise sacred ground. The problematic politics inherent in Indigenous burial or sacred ground as a reason for land being “bad” is investigated by Colleen Boyd and Coll Thrush in Phantom Past, Indigenous Present, and Ross Gibson in Seven Versions of an Australian Badland when Gibson suggests that “no-go zones” in “colonial societies” are more about invader-settler guilt than actual haunting and allow colonial cultures to “simultaneously acknowledg[e] and ignor[e]” past violences against Indigenous peoples (15). Unlike most “Aboriginal burial ground” clichéd texts, however, Her Sister’s Eye is told from an Aboriginal perspective, and the “no-go zones” and the unheimlich qualities of the Queenslander house in the book appear as a result of what postcolonial scholar Katrin Althans labels the “white shadows” (“White” 140) of dominant white culture rather than stereotypic, vengeful, Aboriginal ghosts. The white shadows appear in what one character calls the “shying” (Cleven 22) of the Queenslander, and its surrounding infertile grounds. Cleven turns the tables on Gothic horror convention by exposing “dominant culture” as the “Gothic other” (Turcotte, “Spectrality” 10). In the case of Her Sister’s Eye, the Queenslander house belonging to the powerful, white Drysdale family is the epicentre of dominant culture’s hold over the Aboriginal people who have been forced to live on the fringes of the town of Mundra. Like Andrew Pyper’s The Guardians – the subject of the Chapter Five –

21 Cleven’s novel imports the Euro-American horror trope of the forbidding Gothic mansion, but she adapts it to fit an Australian context, and flips the trope on its head. Chapter Five focuses on a novel that belongs to the so-called “popular” horror or “global horror” genre, The Guardians, partly because it is a sentient house fiction set in Canada, but also because I want to analyse a text that otherwise has not received scholarly attention because of its supposedly “non-literary” or “commercial” genre categorisation. By including The Guardians in this dissertation, I not only analyse a text that includes a sentient house and so is appropriate for this study, but I also acknowledge Ken Gelder’s observation that when they shift from the politico-economic to the cultural, [postcolonialist scholars’] cultural tastes are routinely middle-brow to highbrow; which means that, even as they plunder its paradigmatic tropes, horror never features as a site of analysis in the kind of work that has, over the years, given postcolonial studies its definition. (“Global/Postcolonial Horror” 35) In spite of (or because of?) his reputation as “Canada’s scariest writer” (CBC Airplay) and Canada’s best-known writer of horror fiction, Andrew Pyper and his work have garnered little scholarly attention in Canada. This dissertation seeks to break with this scholarly practice of designating Pyper’s supernatural fiction as not worthy of literary analysis, and uses The Guardians as an important “site of analysis.” Indeed, in numerous critical works about the postcolonial Gothic, many Australian and Canadian critics behave as Gelder describes, eschewing popular fiction in favour of “middle- brow to highbrow” literature even while flagrantly using terms borrowed from the horror genre. Canadian critic Marlene Goldman, for example, dismisses outright all “global Gothic that deals in pulp fiction featuring haunting, possession, vampires, and zombies” as “not at all consciously political” (13) and therefore, presumably, not worth investigating in her book about ghosts and haunting in Canadian literature, DisPossession: Haunting in Canadian Fiction. I believe this dismissal of so-called “popular” writing is short-sighted and verges on reckless scholarship,

22 relying as it does on scholars cherry-picking examples that conveniently fit their particular thesis or world view.13 My examination of the Canadian novel The Guardians will show the ways in which Pyper – like Cleven – imports the Euro-American sentient house model but in this case to small town Ontario, Canada, and in doing so tentatively interrogates the political conservatism of the horror genre, even as he reestablishes the white, heterosexual male as the “natural” protagonist. I have mentioned that Fred Botting proposes that Gothic literature is either symptomatic or subversive: subversive texts such as Her Sister’s Eye actively critique the dominant culture, while symptomatic texts such as American Jay Anson’s sentient house novel The Amityville Horror merely notify the reader of anxieties within “conventional social structures” (Wilson, “Ever” 150) such as the nuclear, heteronormative family and middle class home ownership. The Guardians is different from the other three texts in this study because while it announces itself as a purportedly subversive text, proposing a re-visioning of masculinity and male friendship that embraces a more complicated model of platonic love between heterosexual and (closeted) homosexual male friends, ultimately the novel’s subversion is only at the surface level because the house is destroyed, and heterosexual masculine convention restored. Chapter Five will draw on “monster theory” as presented by theorists such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, and investigate the psychological impact of the house on the book’s main characters using as a spring-board French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s theories regarding “topoanalysis” in The Poetics of Space.

13 Classifying texts and authors this way can also lead to strange critical dilemmas, and ignores some writers’ work and cross-pollination in multiple genres. For example, L. M Montgomery, author of what might be Canada’s most famous, middle-brow, “literary” export Anne of Green Gables, also wrote horror stories. She published a short story in Weird Tales – a pulp magazine famous for publishing the work of horror and speculative writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Stephen King. As a matter of fact, during her lifetime Montgomery managed to write and publish enough grim and supernatural stories to fill a posthumous anthology titled Among the Shadows: Tales from the Darker Side. As another example, American writer Shirley Jackson is now known as a horror writer because of The Haunting of Hill House, but during her lifetime she was perhaps even more popular as a women’s magazine writer of “witty autobiographical sketches” (Miller, “Introduction”) about being a wife and mother.

23 Chapter 2 The Fall of the House of Appleyard: The “Misfit” House in Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock In issue number one of Studies in Weird Australian Fiction, critics James Doig, Patrick Lee, and Brett McKenzie debate the impact of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock on Australian “weird” fiction, and concede that while the novel is not a conventional “horror” novel, it is a work of “pseudosupernatural horror” (173). For these critics, the pseudo- “horrific” aspect of the novel lies primarily in the mysterious and unexplained disappearance of four characters while they visit the unusual geological formation named Hanging Rock. However, I would suggest that although the characters’ disappearance on the Rock is disturbingly “pseudosupernatural” and central to the novel, the house that serves as one of the settings in the novel – the boarding school dubbed Mrs. Appleyard’s College for Young Ladies – is a sentient house that is also a source of “pseudosupernatural horror.” Using “thing theory” I will demonstrate in this chapter that as a physical house Appleyard College possesses a number of uncanny or unheimlich qualities that put Picnic at Hanging Rock on par with Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a sentient house fiction. Like the House of Usher, Appleyard College is “alive” and has a House of Usher-like connection with and antagonism towards its owner, Mrs. Appleyard. Like the House of Usher, the “huge, ugly house” (Lindsay ch. 1)14 in Picnic at Hanging Rock “reveals” and “warns” (Cohen 4) of its owner’s anxieties. For example, while one could argue that the house enjoys an intangible connection with Mrs. Appleyard that is more intimate than the one she had with her late husband, the house also undermines her in her quest for a sheltered, “ordered” (ch. 7) life and the questionable compromises her “ordered” life requires. I will also argue that the house’s uncanniness lies in its “wild” (Wilson, “Haunted” 203) geological origins,

14 As previously indicated in Chapter One of this dissertation, the 7th edition of the MLA Handbook indicates in section 6.4.2 that when citing from an electronic document that does not have stable page numbers such as an ebook, the section, paragraph or chapter number rather than the page number should be indicated in parentheses.

24 and its kinship with the mysterious Hanging Rock. Finally, in its role as a “sentient” house, Appleyard College contributes to a continuing debate about what it is to be at “home” for Europeans and their descendants in a postcolonial country such as Australia; the house’s emerging strangeness reveals the precariousness of Mrs. Appleyard’s British imperial agenda during a time when Australia was beginning to detach itself from British rule. To sum up the novel briefly, Picnic at Hanging Rock begins in 1900, the year before the establishment of the Australian Constitution. The novel revolves around the mysterious disappearance of three female boarding school pupils and their female mathematics teacher on Valentine’s Day while on a picnic field trip to Hanging Rock, described in an excerpt from an unnamed 1913 Melbourne newspaper in the novel as “a spectacular volcanic uprising on the plains below Mount Macedon, of special interest to geologists on account of its unique rock formations, including monoliths and reputedly bottomless holes and caves, until recently uncharted” (ch. 17). The book focuses in particular on the consequences of the students’ disappearance on the Rock (with no apparent family or friends, the mathematics teacher is forgotten by everyone except for the owner and headmistress of the college, Mrs. Appleyard), and the attempts by various individuals to track and find the teens. A volunteer searcher on the Rock discovers one of the lost pupils, Irma Leopold, without her corset, but still alive and “unblemished” (ch. 8), yet unable to remember what happened to her. The reputation of the school subsequently declines because of the disappearances, and the parents of the remaining pupils gradually withdraw their daughters from the school (with the exception of one girl, Sara Waybourne, who is found dead of unknown causes on the school grounds). All the members of the College’s teaching and domestic staff quit or leave, and Mrs. Appleyard commits suicide by throwing herself off Hanging Rock. A bushfire then destroys Appleyard College “the following summer” (ch. 17). In order to analyse Appleyard College’s character as a sentient house, I turn again to Dale Bailey’s American Nightmares for a working

25 definition. Bailey uses the terms “haunted house” and “sentient house” interchangeably throughout his book, but there should be no mistaking that Bailey is referring exclusively to sentient house examples in the book even when he uses the term “haunted house.” Bailey is explicit about the sentient requirement of a proper “haunted house,” stating that an essential ingredient of a conventional sentient/haunted house story is that “the house [in the story] is alive. It possesses its own malign will” (22). For Bailey, a conventional “haunted house” fiction is merely a ghost story, and features an inanimate building that contains ghosts; a “sentient” house fiction, on the other hand, features an animate house, and “dispenses . . . with ghosts” (Bailey 5) as a focus. His definition of a “sentient” house applies to my formulation of the trope of the sentient house. Furthermore, according to Bailey, sentient house fictions also follow a particular “formula” (5) – stories and novels about sentient houses such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for example, follow several specific conventions and plot points. According to Bailey, a “sentient” house fiction’s formula plot is as follows: Most modern [sentient] house tales adhere . . . to a rigid formula wholly distinct from the psychological ghost story. . . . [The] formula opts for a flatly prosaic description of the supernatural in which the house itself is sentient and malign, independent of any ghosts which may be present (and very frequently none are). Into this setting, comes a family – real or symbolic – which is skeptical of the house’s dire reputation. Subjected to gradually escalating assaults, they are simultaneously forced to confront the fault lines in familial relationships. While some of the central characters survive to fight another day, the formula sanctions two endings for the house. In the first, it is destroyed; in the second, it survives to await fresh victims. (5-6) Bailey is referring exclusively to sentient houses in American literature, but aside from the lack of an explicit “prosaic description” of Appleyard College as “malign,” the house in Picnic at Hanging Rock fits the numerous criteria of Bailey’s “formula” almost perfectly: the enterprising English

26 widow Mrs. Appleyard moves into a “misfit” and “anachronistic” Australian mansion, unconcerned that the “forgotten” first owner sold the house after only “a year or two” (ch. 1); she populates it with a symbolic “family” in the form of her students and employees; “fault lines” appear in the “family” with the mysterious disappearance of the mathematics teacher, Greta McCraw, and three students Miranda, Irma, and Marion while on a picnic at the nearby Hanging Rock; and because of “gradually escalating assaults” – including the discovery of a dead pupil in the garden – at the end of the novel Mrs. Appleyard commits suicide, and the house is destroyed in a bushfire. Bailey might argue that Picnic at Hanging Rock is not a sentient house novel because the house is not what he would consider a principal “antagonist” (though, interestingly, there is no obvious antagonist in the novel, just the suggestion of one in the form of Hanging Rock); and I would agree that Appleyard College is not even necessarily “malign.” The “sinister” (ch. 7) Hanging Rock itself is far more threatening in its role in the four women’s disappearance. Other studies of the novel by Alison Rudd and Elspeth Tilley tend to concentrate on the “nightmare” (Tilley 72) represented by Hanging Rock or the contrast between the Rock and the “exquisitely ordered” house (Lindsay ch. 7) rather than the house itself, except insomuch as the house is part of Mrs. Appleyard’s attempts to “impose a replica British culture on the new country of Australia” (Rudd 117). But in spite of its lack of obvious “malignancy,” the house is just as “alive” as Poe’s House of Usher because the house actively participates in Mrs. Appleyard’s and her students’ ruin, failing as it does to protect her and her “family” from the menace of Hanging Rock, and perhaps even colluding with the Rock. Although Bailey does not discuss haunted houses’ physical features, I have noticed that in many what I would label “uncanny” house fictions – whether of European, American, Australian or Canadian origin – a house’s hauntedness or sentience is often signalled in the physical description of the house. The house in these fictions is frequently described as possessing human attributes that the reader may choose to interpret as examples of

27 pathetic fallacy or which may be descriptions of what is actually there, thereby reinforcing the possibility that the house is a character rather than simply setting in a given story. Examples abound: the “eye-like windows” of Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher coupled with Roderick Usher’s belief in the House of Usher’s “sentience” (Poe 198); the “lifeless silence” that “brood[s]” over the house in Australian writer Hume Nisbet’s “The Haunted Station,” a silence that makes the narrator “murmur” to himself that “‘Yes, it looks like a place upon which has fallen a curse’” (111). Joan Lindsay’s portrayal of Appleyard College also uses unnerving physical descriptions similar to those of Poe and Nisbet to suggest the College’s uncanniness, attributes such as the “heart” beat sound of the College’s grandfather clock (ch. 15). As in Poe’s and Nisbet’s stories, the house is a key actor in the characters’ downfall. And the house’s subversiveness, its very sentience, are best understood through the use of thing theory, highlighting the perception of Appleyard College as not merely an object, but as a “thing,” instrumental in the “pseudosupernatural” demise of Mrs. Appleyard and her school. Using “thing” theory, I will demonstrate how the “thing” qualities of the Appleyard College make the house and the stone that composes it rise above being purely setting, and make the house an enigmatic and potentially subversive force in the novel, much like the house in Poe’s “House of Usher.” The work of thing theorists Bill Brown and Elaine Freedgood is most useful in establishing the difference between objects and “things,” and will be helpful later on in my discussion of Appleyard College as an actor rather than merely setting in this “pseudosupernatural horror” fiction. An excerpt from Bill Brown’s foundational 2001 essay “Thing Theory” outlines the key elements of thing theory: We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject

28 and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation. (4) In her book-length study The Ideas in Things, Elaine Freedgood revisits novels such as Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre specifically in terms of “things.” She describes her study of wood furniture such as mahogany dressers, deal tables and walnut panels in Jane Eyre and calico curtains in the novel Mary Barton, for example, in the following way: Each of these objects is mentioned repeatedly, often at crucial narrative moments, but with no attendant indication that it has meaning beyond the limited or weak metonymic function that many functional objects are typically “allowed” in the usual literary reading of the Victorian novel . . . . These objects are largely inconsequential in the rhetorical hierarchy of the text – they do not ascend to metaphorical stature; they suggest, or reinforce, something we already know about the subjects who use them. But each of these objects, if we investigate them in their “objectness,” was highly consequential in the world in which the text was produced. (2) In other words, for Brown and Freedgood, “things” in novels do not simply reflect a metaphorical concentration for the characters; rather, they thrust readers into a relationship with objects that foregrounds their utilitarian nature, so that invoking certain objects invokes explicit consequences. And I would suggest that although it is not a novel written during the Victorian period, Picnic at Hanging Rock’s Victorian setting and object-cataloguing descriptive style lend it exceptionally well to a thing theory study, given the tendency of thing theorists to concentrate on Victorian novels since the “Victorian novel describes, catalogs, quantifies, and in general showers us with things: post chaises, handkerchiefs, moonstones, wills, riding crops . . . – cavalcades of objects threaten to crowd the narrative right off the page. . . The mid-Victorian novel is a particularly rich site for tracing the fugitive meanings of apparently nonsymbolic objects” (Freedgood 1, 4). So how can thing theory inform the reading of a novel such as Picnic at Hanging Rock? When or how does Appleyard College transform from “object” into “thing”? How does a reading of the house’s “thingness”

29 contribute to a reader’s understanding of Picnic as a sentient house novel? To begin, re-examining Mrs. Appleyard’s College for Young Ladies as an object and in terms of the objects it contains helps establish just how many objects populate this novel. Appleyard College is described as an “Italianate mansion” (ch. 1) portrayed in terms of its grounds, its architectural features, and its interior decoration, beginning with its mantelpieces: [S]uch mantelpieces! Two in the long drawing-room of white marble, supported by pairs of caryatids as firm of bust as Madam herself; others of carved and tortured wood embellished with a thousand winking, tiddling mirrors. Appleyard College was already, in the year nineteen hundred, an architectural anachronism in the Australian bush – a hopeless misfit in time and place. The clumsy two-storey mansion was one of those elaborate houses that sprang up all over Australia like exotic fungi following the finding of gold. Why this particular stretch of flat sparsely wooded country . . . had been selected as a suitable building site, nobody will ever know. . . . However, built it was, and of solid Castlemaine stone, to withstand the ravages of time. The original owner, whose name is long ago forgotten, had only lived in it for a year or two before the huge ugly house was standing empty and up for sale. . . . The hideous Victorian furnishings were as good as new, with marble mantelpieces direct from Italy and thick piled carpets from Axminster. The oil lamps on the cedar staircase were held aloft by classical statues, there was a grand piano in the long drawing-room and even a square tower . . . from which the Union Jack could be hoisted on Queen Victoria’s birthday. To Mrs. Appleyard, newly arrived from England with a considerable nest-egg and letters of introduction to some of the leading Australian families, the mansion, standing well back from the Bendigo Road behind a low stone wall, was immediately impressive. (ch. 1) As mentioned earlier, most critical discussions of Picnic tend to discuss the house in passing, only as an obvious representation of Mrs. Appleyard’s attempts to “replicate” England both physically and metaphorically in the

30 Australian bush. There is indeed, to use Freedgood’s phrasing, some “metaphorical stature” awarded to the house in the explicit identification between the house and Mrs. Appleyard herself both physically and in terms of what the house represents about her – the association between the “busts” of the mantelpiece caryatids and Mrs. Appleyard’s bust is just one example of how the house is identified with Mrs. Appleyard. And so thing theory can only be used to a certain extent when examining the symbolic impact of the house in the novel because the house is not in fact “largely inconsequential in the rhetorical hierarchy of the text” (Freedgood 2). Nonetheless, the careful detailing of the objects in and around the house attracts a thing theory reading in spite of the house’s important metaphorical significance. The objects described within the house, the garden that is in “wonderful order, thanks to Mr. Whitehead the English gardener” (ch.1), juxtaposed with the surrounding, menacing Australian landscape, the “flat sparsely wooded country, . . . crouching at the foot of the mount” (ch. 1) serve to underline what critic Elspeth Tilley suggests is a recurring contrast between safe, familiar, humanised spaces, and the looming, unknowable spaces just beyond [Appleyard College’s] fence [that] build the narrative[’s] disequilibrium . . . . In Picnic, compared with the “exquisitely ordered world” of the text’s settler gardens, “Hanging Rock and its sinister implications were a nightmare” . . . . The contrast confirms Appleyard College’s anachronistic position as a bastion of order within a surrounding bush seething with chaotic flora and fauna . . . and dominated by “the powerful presence” . . . of “the Rock itself.” (13) But if Tilley emphasises that Hanging Rock is a nightmare, I would suggest that the house itself, with its incongruous objects, on more than one level is also a kind of waking nightmare. Although English-like in terms of its curriculum (“The College was already, despite its brief existence, quite famed for its discipline, deportment and mastery of English literature” [ch. 1]), its interior decoration and its immediate surrounding gardens, the narrator clearly identifies the house and its “low stone wall” as being made of Castlemaine stone. Interestingly, Castlemaine is an Australian city in an

31 area occupied by the Dja Dja Wurrung people prior to European occupation – a city that came into being because of the extensive goldfields, gold mines and Australian gold rush fever. The narrator compares Appleyard College to the “exotic fungi [that follow] the finding of gold”; Mrs. Appleyard is also a gold prospector or miner of sorts, but her “gold” is young, rich, Australian girls and their families. Even Mrs. Appleyard remarks indulgently to herself at one point how even though it is so early on in the history of the school, “[a]lready the College was paying handsome dividends,” suggesting that Hanging Rock may not be the only “sinister” or dangerous presence regarding the College’s pupils. The sinister tone comes to the fore with pupil Sara Waybourne’s death.15 As in the description of the house in Picnic, Poe’s “House of Usher” also makes mention of the stones that form the house. The character Roderick Usher is convinced that his own house’s unnatural sentience is connected . . . with the grey stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones – in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around . . . above all in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement. (198) Appleyard College also has strange stones, although the stones’ origin rather than their “collocation” is what is noteworthy. The narrator states, for example, that the Castlemaine stone of the house is “solid” and able to “withstand the ravages of time” (Lindsay ch. 1). Hilary Griffith, the Castlemaine Historical Society Research Coordinator, defines Castlemaine stone as “a sandstone [. . .] which has been used as a building material in this district since Europeans arrived in this area. It is the reef bedrock

15 For example, Sara Waybourne’s dead body is discovered in the garden after Mrs. Appleyard has determined that Sara’s guardian cannot or will not pay her tuition. A causal relationship between Sara’s death and her inability to pay tuition is never conclusively verified in the novel, but the positioning of Sara’s body in the hydrangea flowerbed right next to the house at the bottom of the tower suggests that she either committed suicide by jumping because of her grief over her good friend Miranda disappearing at Hanging Rock, or she was pushed out of the tower by Mrs. Appleyard because Mrs. Appleyard would no longer be receiving money from Sara’s guardian. The French and Dancing mistress, Dianne de Poitiers, deduces from a photo on a mantelpiece in Sara’s room and her own intuition that Sara was murdered.

32 through which the gold carrying quartz veins found their way” (Griffith). A 2002 Geological Survey of Victoria report corroborates Griffith’s statement, determining that within the Castlemaine area, the “oldest rocks are Palaeozoic deep marine turbidites of the Castlemaine Group. The Castlemaine Group forms most of the basement in Castlemaine and consists largely of thick-bedded turbidites and mudstone, with occasional black shale units” (7). The Geological Survey report and Griffith’s email suggest the fictional house is likely made of an impure sandstone of “turbidite” origin, turbidite referring to the rhythmic sequence of rocks which have been laid down by geological “catastrophic events” such as submarine debris flow (the underwater equivalent of landslides on land). And, significantly, the College’s location is at the foot of Mt Macedon, within horse and buggy driving distance of Hanging Rock, Hanging Rock described on the official Macedon Ranges tourism website as “one of the best examples in the world of a volcanic feature known as a mamelon (French lit. nipple). [The mamelon] was formed six million years ago when a particularly stiff type of magma formed a rounded pile of layers on the surface as it was squeezed through a narrow vent in the earth.” Given the ubiquity of Castlemaine stone as the bedrock and building material of the area, the “Castlemaine stone” of the house, then, is composed of a sequence of catastrophic events, and is exactly that kind of stone would be broken up by volcanic events and magma intrusions such as the mamelon that composes Hanging Rock: in geological and “thing” terms, the narrator of Picnic must be speaking with tongue firmly in cheek since “solid Castlemaine stone” will not “withstand the ravages of time” (Lindsay ch. 1). True, it has been millions of years since the last magma disturbance, but Hanging Rock’s magma metaphorically “intrudes” into life within Appleyard College on Valentine’s Day in the year 1900 when the Rock claims three of the College’s students, and later lures Mrs. Appleyard into leaving her house and venturing onto the Rock for her first and last time. It is deeply ironic that Mrs. Appleyard essentially tries to use geologically traumatised Australian materials to keep out the Australian bush, to protect herself and her pupils from Australia. The house’s fallibility

33 is only further underlined when, at the end of the book, the house expires in a bushfire – a not unusual occurrence in the area, but an extinction that suggests even further the fragility of Mrs. Appleyard and her colonial English sanctum; a destruction that is reminiscent of the collapse of the sentient House of Usher once its owner Roderick Usher dies, or the uncanny house struck by a “zigzag flame” (125) upon the death of its symbolic owner in Nisbet’s “The Haunted Station.” In all of these examples, the identification of the house with its owner is obvious in how when the owner dies, so does the house “die,” reproducing Dale Bailey’s “formula” which sanctions only two possible endings for a sentient house, one of which is the destruction of the house. The disturbing consequences of the terrible picnic overflow and play out in the course of the narrative, but while the house and its objects do not change and the house is not haunted by literal ghosts, “ghosts” of a kind do begin to appear: for example, even before she has died student Sara Waybourne “flit[s] restlessly from room to room like a little ghost” (ch. 5); junior mistress Dora Lumley is described as a figurative “ghostly presence of the little figure in brown serge” after her death by fire in a Melbourne hotel (ch. 15). The house also starts to be interpreted differently by the narrator and by the house’s staff, and takes on uncanny qualities, the domestic servant Alice commenting about student Sara Waybourne’s room, “‘A bit spooky in here, isn’t it?’” (ch. 15). As more and more families withdraw their daughters from the College, Mrs. Appleyard complains to herself that “[t]he College was already being talked about as haunted. . . . Only yesterday Cook had mentioned quite casually to Minnie, that ‘they’ were saying in the village that strange lights had been seen moving about the College grounds after dark” (ch. 13). After the last student has been withdrawn by her parents from the school because of the school’s bad reputation following the Hanging Rock disappearances, Mrs. Appleyard herself is portrayed as though she is a frightened, vulnerable stranger in her own house: The clock on the stairs had just struck for half past twelve when the door of Mrs. Appleyard’s room opened noiselessly, inch by inch,

34 and an old woman carrying a nightlight came out on to the landing. An old woman with head bowed under a forest of curling pins, with pendulous breasts and sagging stomach beneath a flannel dressing- gown. No human being – not even [her late husband] Arthur – had ever seen her thus, without the battledress of steel and whalebone in which for eighteen hours a day the Headmistress was accustomed to face the world. From the window at the top of the staircase moonlight fell upon the row of closed cedar doors. . . . The woman with the nightlight stood listening to the tick-tock, tick-tock, coming up out of the shadows below. (ch. 15) The house is witness to her in her most vulnerable state, one her late, beloved husband never even saw in all their years of marriage. Without the corset, her “fortress of steel busks” (ch. 1), she also loses a feature that the narrator earlier in the book uses to identify her with the house: she loses the quality of being “firm of bust” (ch. 1) just like the caryatids. Just as she is no longer firm of bust and in control of her body and physical façade in this scene, so is she is no longer “firm” in her control of the house. She is losing control of her “fortress,” and the corseted, “gold” prospector fiction of herself as a savvy businesswoman possessing an “excellent head” (ch. 16) and the “financial genius” (ch. 4) to run a successful school. Furthermore, just as the one surviving pupil Irma Leopold is found without a corset on the Rock (a state of undress that the gardener’s wife Mrs. Cutler finds shocking), in this scene Mrs. Appleyard is also without her supporting undergarments, suggesting that like the original disappeared pupils, she is also in danger of disappearing among the “monoliths and reputedly bottomless holes and caves” of Hanging Rock. But the “holes and caves” (ch. 17) in this case are in her own, suddenly unfamiliar, “shadowy” haunted house. The “subject-object relation” (Brown, “Thing Theory” 4) between her and the house has shifted. As the house empties of the pupils and employees that constitute what Dale Bailey might call Mrs. Appleyard’s “family” (Bailey 5), Appleyard College transforms from an inanimate object, a bustling

35 domicile, into an unnervingly empty building with a beating clock “heart,” the sound of the College’s grandfather clock, “so loud” it sounds “like a heart beating in a body already dead” (ch. 15) – its owner Mrs. Appleyard, like Roderick Usher, unhappily sensing its hostile “sentience.” The house has become as enigmatic as the “sinister” Hanging Rock. To return to “thing” theory, and to very roughly paraphrase Heidegger in his lecture “Building Dwelling Thinking,” when is a building not a dwelling? When is a house not a house? One useful marker for identifying the uncanny house in literature is identifying when a house no longer functions properly as a house. To borrow Bill Brown’s phrasing: a house is “broken” (“Thing Theory” 4) and therefore can be read as a “thing,” when it no longer functions as it should: a house is “broken” when it no longer houses. Appleyard College’s forgotten original owner “only lived in it for a year or two,” a subtle warning that goes unheeded by Mrs. Appleyard when she buys the house. And all of the house’s inhabitants abandon it, including Mrs. Appleyard despite her initial interpretation of the house as “impressive” (ch. 1) and despite her close self- identification with the house. The house is no longer an object, or simply a setting – its “thingness” as another kind of “unique” Australian geological entity like Hanging Rock spotlights the precariousness of Mrs. Appleyard’s whole colonial enterprise. The house stops being an object and starts becoming a “thing” when it stops housing, that is, stops holding the “nightmare” bush outside and ensuring that the inside is “safe, familiar, [and] humanised” (Tilley 13). As mentioned earlier, although characters such as pupil Sara Waybourne and Mrs. Appleyard most definitely become ghost-like – Mrs. Appleyard looking “white as chalk and breathing like a steam engine” (ch. 15) and Sara Waybourne “doomed” from as early as Chapter Three – the house is not haunted because it contains people who are like ghosts, but because it is unheimlich: it has become unhomely. Just as Ken Gelder says that “white settlement in [Australia] is . . . fundamentally unsettled” (“Introduction,” Oxford xi), so too is the house’s “misfit” status unsettling, so too does the unsettling of Appleyard College expose its inability to maintain Mrs. Appleyard’s colonial fiction.

36 The “Italianate mansion’s” sentience is in its dead but still beating, “tick-tock” heart; its geologically catastrophic, Australian (rather than European) origins; its “shadowy” unknowability and complicity with the dangerous Hanging Rock in the house’s refusal to keep its residents “safe” from Australian realities. As Peter Pierce suggests in The Country of Lost Children, in Picnic at Hanging Rock Joan Lindsay plays “to the anxious suspicion that Europeans do not belong in this country; that therefore they should go back to England, or escape into another time, or simply vanish” (164). Hanging Rock and the sentient house that is Appleyard College both work to ensure that England and its representatives cannot grab absolute hold in this land they have invaded. Bill Brown writes in the introduction to his book A Sense of Things that thing theory “concerns the slippage between having (possessing a particular object) and being (the identification of one’s self with that object). [Thing theory deals with] the indeterminate ontology where things seem slightly human and humans seem slightly thing-like. In other words, this is a book about humans and things that tracks the metamorphosis of the one into the other” (A Sense of Things 14). Picnic at Hanging Rock, then, is not only about the disappearance of three teenagers and a mathematics teacher, it is also about the metamorphosis of the inanimate into the animate, Appleyard College transforming for Mrs. Appleyard into a “body already dead” but which still has a ticking heart. The house becomes “wholly other” (Wilson, “Ever” 156): a monster that is not animate, not inanimate, but as space theorist Christine Wilson suggests, one of those spaces of “animation, unruliness, and . . . desolation” (“Haunted” 201). And in a way Mrs. Appleyard literally becomes a physical feature of the Australian landscape that finally draws her from her already once-abandoned, haunted house – to the dreaded Hanging Rock. She leaves her unreliable shelter and throws herself off Hanging Rock, her life tumbling to its end: the final image the reader is given of her is her head in its “brown hat” violently “impaled upon a jutting crag” (ch. 16). The animate Mrs. Appleyard made inanimate. Like the House of Usher, the House of Appleyard is intimately connected to its owner, even though the relationship for both homeowners is

37 or becomes a disturbing one. Both houses self-destruct with the death of their owners: the House of Usher splits in a “zigzag” (Poe 207) and sinks into the tarn, and Appleyard College goes up in flames in a bushfire in spite of its promise as a dwelling that will “withstand the ravages of time.” Appleyard College is different from the House of Usher however, in the College’s relationality with its Australian context. While the stone that makes up the “Italianate mansion” that is Appleyard College is indeed made from Australian geological materials, the Castlemaine stone is not indigenous to the area, unlike the stone makes up the geological formation of Hanging Rock, and presumably the stone that forms the House of Usher. It seems only appropriate that the mansion is “renovated” by a bushfire, commonplace in that region of Australia, and reduced to its most fundamental components so that it is no longer a dwelling suitable for Mrs. Appleyard’s “misfit” agenda for duplicating her beloved England in a place that is not England. In Peripheral Fear, Gerry Turcotte points out the tendency of characters in numerous examples of Australian and Canadian fiction to try to adapt their “new” countries to fit “old,” European ways. He writes, Characters, disoriented in their new, unfamiliar landscape, are often displayed attempting to bring into alliance the separate worlds that inform their “vision.” Traditional concepts of seeing do not permit vision in its strictest sense, since the new land is not ordered according to learned systems of codification. (63) The “system of codification” that Mrs. Appleyard imports from England fails her in Australia. In spite of her attempt to co-opt the “misfit” house into imposing new meaning – her meaning – on “the new land,” the house’s very composition thwarts and “disorients” her. In her reluctance to accept Australia, to attempt instead to “impose order on ‘a chaotic environment’ which, strictly speaking, exists largely in the mind” (Turcotte, Peripheral 63) she is ill-equipped to deal with that perceived “chaotic environment.” This lack of knowledge physically appears at the end of the novel as she leaves her house and climbs Hanging Rock, unused to and too sensitive to the terrain:

38 at last, after a lifetime of linoleum and asphalt and Axminster carpets, the heavy flat-footed woman trod the springing earth. . . . She who had lived so close to the forest had never felt the short wiry grass underfoot. Never walked between the straight shaggy stems of the stringy-bark trees. . . . To the right a narrow ledge overhung a precipice at which she dared not look. To the left, on higher ground, a pile of stones . . . on one of them a large black spider, spread- eagled, asleep in the sun. She had always been afraid of spiders, looked round for something with which to strike it down and saw Sara Waybourne, in a nightdress, with one eye fixed and staring from a mask of rotting flesh. (ch. 16) Ever fearful and suspicious of Australia, by the end of the novel Mrs. Appleyard now can no longer distinguish between the formerly ordered “interior” represented by the house and the “chaotic” exterior outside the house that she tried to shut herself and her students away from. In the blurring of the once “safe” and “humanised” inside and “looming, unknowable” outside (Tilley 11), and in the throes of what Peter Pierce labels European settlers’ “anxious suspicion” of Australia, she conflates the student Sara Waybourne’s dead body with the body of a sleeping spider. Immediately following this hallucination, she jumps from the rocks. Unlike Roderick Usher’s family, Mrs. Appleyard did not build her house, and she is the first and last generation of her family line to settle in Australia. Like other Australian settlers, she settled into her “house” or country and claimed it as her own without acknowledging the house or the country’s prior history, its pre-existing “vision,” not understanding that the “collocation . . . of stones” (Poe 198) that make up her house, and the land, can never truly be owned. The sentient house as motif within Picnic at Hanging Rock asks that readers consider the complicated nature of Australia’s “uncanniness” for Australians of non-Aboriginal heritage – the unhomely nature of the home that is Australia.

39 Chapter 3 “This Shit House”: The Abject House in Daniel David Moses’ Big Buck City In his 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud endeavours to define the unheimlich or the “uncanny,” and discuss the difference between the “uncanny” and the more straightforward category of the “frightening” (219). He posits early on in the essay that the uncanny is “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (220), but at the same time he acknowledges the inherent elusiveness and contradiction within the word unheimlich and the concept it represents: “among its different shades of meaning the word ‘heimlich’ exhibits one which is identical to its opposite, ‘unheimlich,’” that is, “the word ‘heimlich’ is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas . . . . [O]n the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and out of sight” (224-5). While much study has been done of the Governor General’s Award- nominated play Coyote City – the first in playwright Daniel David Moses’ “city plays” (Walker) tetralogy – the play’s immediate sequel, Big Buck City, has been eclipsed by Coyote City in terms of attention from literary scholars and reviewers. For example, reviews of the 1991 production of Big Buck City in The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star are at best guarded, at worst tepid.16 The play has not been performed very often, and so access to the play as a performance and information about the play as performance are limited, unfortunately. But twenty-five years later, Big Buck City is still worth reconsidering because of how the play reconceives the haunted house trope and its use as a metaphor to describe so-called “haunting” in settler cultures. Perhaps more than any other primary text I examine in this dissertation, Big Buck City thoroughly embodies the contradiction inherent in the notion of the heimlich or unheimlich house. The house in Big Buck City presents itself as a “typical” home, that is, a site that is the safest, most

16 See Chris Dafoe’s “Theatre Review: Big Buck City,” published in The Globe and Mail, and Vit Wagner’s Toronto Star review, “We’re Farced to Want the Bucks to Stop.”

40 “agreeable” and most familiar of spaces to its inhabitants. On the other hand, because the home is a safe, “familiar,” and private space, it is also a potential treasure trove of the “concealed” and hidden. Freud refers later in the essay to philosopher Friedrich Schelling’s “definition of the uncanny as something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light” (241, my italics) suggesting that the exposure of the “concealed” in the familiar is what constitutes the uncanny. Big Buck City exploits this double meaning inherent in the unheimlich – the heimlich inside the unheimlich – by incorporating in the play a sentient house that is the owners’ home and source of pride, but which actively exposes what “ought to have remained hidden” about its owners. The house enacts what space theorist Christine Wilson would regard as the disruptive, “unruly” tendencies of fictional sentient houses. In the case of Big Buck City, the uncanny house disrupts the lives of its owners and participates in exposing the absolute in terms of the “hidden”: its homeowners’ excrement, both literal and figurative. The house in the play gestures towards the unheimlich and the abject in the lives of its inhabitants, working to unhide the “hidden,” and literally bringing the house’s family into the “light,” specifically the spotlight of a “green, searching spirit light” (Moses, Big 11). The animacy of the house in Big Buck City is expressed primarily via its supernaturally bad plumbing; and as I will go on to show, the plumbing’s disintegration simultaneously reflects the disintegrating “plumbing” in several characters’ physical bodies, as well as in the relationship between the owners Jack and Barbara Buck, their extended family, and various Christmas Eve visitors. This connection between the Buck house and the Buck family is perhaps best summed up in DisPossession: Haunting in Canadian Fiction, where Canadian postcolonial literary critic Marlene Goldman suggests that in Gothic literature, “the concept of the house refers both to a building and a family line” (29). Essentially, just as the physical collapse of the Usher mansion in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” mirrors the demise of the family that lives within it, so does the “shitty,” structurally imploding house in Big Buck City mirror Jack and Barbara’s problems in dealing with their

41 emotional, familial, and moral “shit.” The house’s irregular bowels and uncanny but intimate connection to its family thereby place the house in Big Buck City within the literary tradition of the fictional “animate” or “haunted” house. With reference to the play’s explicit and repeated references to excrement, later in this chapter I will discuss how philosopher Julia Kristeva’s theory of the “abject” can work to help a reader or audience member appreciate Big Buck City, particularly the way that abjection touches specifically on excrement as a “polluting object” (Kristeva 71). Examining shit in the play will unravel the ways in which the literal and figurative instances of shit and the Bucks’ “shit house” (Moses, Big 92) contribute to the breakdown of distinct, concrete and symbolic “border[s]” (Kristeva 3) that Jack and Barbara Buck have erected around themselves in order to prop up their own collective “subject ‘I’” (Gelder, “Introduction” 51). In essence, the Bucks seek stability in their social status in terms of class and feigned nuclear family normativity, and in terms of their allegedly superior, urban, adopted and aspiring “whiteness” compared to Barbara’s “bush Indian” (Moses, Big 17) relatives. Fundamentally, the Bucks’ house operates as more than setting – it symbolises their aspiring, upper middle- class social status, but it is also a principle, unsettling, uncanny apparatus in exposing Jack and Barbara Buck’s racist, classist, materialistic and generally self-destructive, shitty hypocrisies; that is, the parts of their lives they believe “ought to have remained hidden.” As Homi Bhabha suggests in The Location of Culture, it is in the “banalities that the unhomely stirs, as the violence of a racialised society falls most enduringly on the details of life: where you can sit, or not; how you can live, or not; what you can learn, or not; who you can love, or not” (21). In the case of the Bucks the unhomely “stirs” within the “banality” of their house’s faulty pipes but also in the Bucks’ thwarted attempts to fit into their white, “nice” neighbourhood (Moses, Big 32). In view of the fact that this play’s script was published by a small Canadian publisher almost 20 years ago and is currently out of print (therefore making access to copies of the play likely difficult), I will provide

42 a brief background to the play in terms of context, and then summarise its salient events in some depth. The second in a tetralogy of plays by Daniel David Moses known as the “city plays” (Walker) – Coyote City, Big Buck City, Kyotopolis, and City of Shadows: Necropolitei – Big Buck City concerns the attempts by the comfortably well-off and “upwardly mobile” (Wagner D3) married couple Jack and Barbara Buck to celebrate Christmas. The relatively small amount of literary criticism written about the city plays tends to concentrate on the first play in the tetralogy, Coyote City, an urban ghost story of sorts that revolves around the characters Boo and her sister Lena who has been contacted via telephone by the ghost of Lena’s murdered lover Johnny. Big Buck City is the sequel to Coyote City and focuses on Lena and Boo’s aunt Barbara and Barbara’s husband Jack, with a pregnant Lena (who has possibly been impregnated by the ghostly Johnny) appearing in a supporting, rather than central, role. Set on “Christmas Eve” in the “living room and the adjacent entry and front porch of a perfectly renovated house in an old neighbourhood of the city” (9), Act One of Big Buck City opens with the sound of jingle bells and “a green, searching spirit light enter[ing] through a window, . . . and then exit[ing] into the basement” (11). Clarisse Chrisjohn, described as “an Indian woman, formerly a hooker, now a lay preacher” (9), knocks at the front door of Jack and Barbara’s house because “Holy shit,” she says, “I got you tidings of great big joy” (11). Barbara has been out Christmas shopping and wishing for a “white Christmas” (21), and when she arrives at the house she shoos Clarisse away, and opens the mail. Much to Barbara’s distress, it bears the news from her fertility doctor that she is incapable of conceiving. Meanwhile, Barbara’s sister Martha – staying with the Bucks – has hidden the phones, refusing to leave the upstairs area because she is afraid her daughter Lena is dead, and that dead Lena might try to phone her collect. Martha also “likes the sound of running water. . . . It sounds like the river at home” (82) on the reserve where she normally lives, and so Martha (a character who never physically appears) flushes the upstairs toilet regularly, the flushes punctuating the conversations of the other characters throughout the play’s two acts. Barbara’s greedy real-estate agent husband Jack arrives

43 home shortly after Barbara, starts drinking more than he can handle, and gives her a gold necklace which she returns to its jewellery box and places under the Christmas tree so that she can show it, and possibly give it, to Martha later because Jack didn’t buy a Christmas present for Martha. Martha’s other daughter Boo arrives with a Christmas tree, and the Bucks and Boo leave for Christmas Eve dinner at an Italian restaurant. While at dinner, Boo’s friend Ricky Raccoon, described as “an Indian street kid” (9), breaks into their house through a basement window, and proceeds to arbitrarily interfere with objects in the house: he drinks from Jack’s bottle of expensive scotch, “pockets” Barbara’s new necklace, and places Jack’s scotch bottle in the manger under the tree. Lastly, he dresses himself in Jack’s Santa Claus costume. He then invites in lay preacher Clarisse, who has returned accompanied by Lena, Martha’s missing daughter who was presumed dead. Lena is heavily pregnant and she goes into labour. Act Two begins with Boo and the Bucks’ early return (Jack accidentally ripped Barbara’s dress while helping her out of the car), and Lena heading into the late stages of her labour, while Clarisse insists that the baby is the messiah because “No living man had touched [Lena]. He17 died and rose again from the dead” (79). Upstairs, Lena gives birth to a healthy baby girl, and Barbara decides that she would make a better parent than Lena because she and Jack have money and therefore can “give it a home. Everything we never had” (89). She talks Jack into agreeing. Barbara tries to take Lena’s baby for herself, but in an offstage moment Martha (Lena and Boo’s mother) grabs the baby first and shuts the two of them in the upstairs bathroom – Barbara later reporting to Jack that Martha called her a “pale face” (97) and accused Barbara of trying to steal the baby. Lena is losing a lot of blood so while Jack is outside trying to flag a taxi to take Lena to the hospital, Ricky Raccoon locks Barbara into a closet, sneaks the baby away from a sleeping Martha, and flees the house. Jack returns with a taxi, and frees Barbara from the closet. Clarisse departs with Lena in the taxi cab but returns shortly afterward, saying that Lena died in the cab before reaching the hospital. Disappointed that Lena’s baby is a girl rather than a male

17 “He” presumably refers to Lena’s murdered lover Johnny.

44 messiah, Clarisse leaves the house. Barbara has an emotional breakdown, rejecting all of Jack’s expensive Christmas gifts, accusing him of being too controlling, and bemoaning what a terrible housekeeper she is: “I can’t even keep track of a baby” (103). The Christmas tree bursts into flames, and Jack uses the Christmas presents to put out the flames. Snow starts to fall – fulfilling Barbara’s earlier wish for a “white Christmas” – and she decides to follow through with an earlier desire to go to the midnight service at church. She comments that when she returns from church, she’s “going to walk the long way home. Snowflakes, icicles, everything” (109). Strangely contented by the snow, Barbara leaves for church. Jack picks up his briefcase so that he can do some real estate business in the basement, and opens the basement door to a “green glow” that makes him “cover . . . his nose and mouth against the reek” (108). “Holy shit,” he says, and the play concludes with “A shake of jingle bells in the darkness” (110). One of the play’s epigraphs quotes an observation made in Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being that shit has “onerous theological” importance, and that the “responsibility for shit . . . rests entirely with [God], the Creator of man” (Kundera qtd. in Moses 5). Accordingly, Big Buck City is bookended with characters exclaiming “Holy shit,” (11, 109), and Christian elements of the play such as Clarisse the lay preacher / self-proclaimed messenger angel, and the manger under the Christmas tree are repeatedly undermined or mocked by Ricky Raccoon and the “shit” of the house’s rupturing pipes. At the beginning of the play, the green spirit light enters the basement, and later Ricky Raccoon breaks into the house through the basement window: this leads one to guess that perhaps Ricky and the light in the basement – which takes over the house’s pipes and erupts into a green, glowing shit pool – both work toward the same end in that they are almost allies in the ways they contribute to the ruin of the Bucks’ Christmas. As I will investigate later in this chapter, if the character Ricky Raccoon and the spirit light can be interpreted as

45 “trickster”18 figures and the house has been possessed by the “trickster,” then the play makes a very specific statement about the relationship between the Christian-based “Christmas spirit,” and what Moses’ contemporary – playwright Tomson Highway – might refer to as the trickster’s focus on the body’s excesses, the trickster’s anus being just one example. I shall argue later on that the house’s diarrheic animacy and imminent “sewer-cide” (87) are the effect of the enigmatic, “green, searching spirit light” (11) that has entered the house and brought the house’s intestines to life, and is directly linked to the character Ricky Raccoon, the “street kid.” Barbara Buck eventually blames her household and marital troubles on him before she completely caves in psychologically: “That kid,” she says, “That kid in our Santa suit. He did it. He did it all” (104). Shit is a fact of life in a home – it is “familiar” to quote Freud – but it is also a non-Christian, divine force in this play. It animates the house, and aims to reconnect the Bucks with those elements of their private lives that they have tried to repress and “conceal”: in other words, the house and its shit are both heimlich and unheimlich. As the play progresses, “shit” takes on more and more “onerous” importance literally, figuratively, and linguistically: for example, Jack describes the plumbing in the house as “old” (82), but this turns out to be an understatement when the pipes in the basement erupt due to supernatural forces. The word “shit” and its variations (“shitty,” “bullshit,” and “poop”) appear approximately 73 times in the total 110 pages/minutes of the play. Shit’s importance in the play is derived from the house’s obviously deteriorating plumbing, and in part from the characters’ escalating unhappiness while parts of the house begin to smell more and more “like a sewer” (87). “Shit” even interrupts in terms of sound: near the beginning of Act Two the “sound of the toilet flushing mak[es] an ugly noise in the pipes down to the basement” (71); on page 80 the stage directions tell the reader that the “toilet flushes and another more horrible noise travels the pipes to the basement”; later the pipes “protest . . . all the way to the basement” (82);

18 The “trickster” in Canadian literary criticism has a troubled critical history both as a word and anthropological concept so I will discuss the term and Moses’ specific use of the concept of the “trickster” at length later in this chapter.

46 and twice by the end of Act Two the “toilet flushes and the pipes scream” (100) whenever Barbara’s depressed sister Martha flushes the toilet. Jack Buck is a real estate agent who specialises in selling houses that have bad “pipes” (82) – his habit of selling houses with bad plumbing is made clear while he is on the phone with a colleague and discussing his sales strategy: “Okey-dokey. Oh now we’re talking green stuff. . . . I love the look of the place. And none of them yuppies are going to look into the plumbing. We fumigate it and all we got to do is go in for the kill. It’ll be mouth watering” (20-21). Is the Bucks’ current house one of Jack’s “bad” houses? Perhaps, perhaps not, but let us consider then the family’s shit on a metaphorical level. Jack bluntly refers to Barbara’s infertility as her “plumbing [being] screwed up” (30); and one could argue somewhat crassly that Lena’s “plumbing” is also “screwed up” because she is able to get pregnant by a ghost, and because she bleeds to death after giving birth. And the Bucks’ marriage is already rife with unsound “plumbing” – even without the intrusion of unwelcome family members, Christmas Eve guests, and green spirit lights. Barbara desperately wants a baby, but has received confirmation from her doctor saying she cannot conceive; her disappointment signals a central unhappiness in her life because not having a baby keeps her from being able to “show” (89) or prove to the neighbours that she and Jack can also have a family. She also remarks to Jack “how happy we used to be” (90), never pinpointing what capped the happiness, but her outburst in the latter half of the play telling Jack that he’s “so in control it hurts” (101) suggests an angry inequality, a disconnect in their relationship. Her craving for a “white Christmas” seems to be less a craving for snow than a craving for a more elusive and make-believe happiness. She marvels at of the “glow” (23) of a gold necklace Jack gives her as an early Christmas present at the beginning of the play, saying: “This is the Christmas spirit, Jack, this glow” (23). Barbara longs for a solution to “[w]hat’s wrong with the world” (24); she longs for the habitual routine of church on Christmas Eve, in spite of the Christian church’s atrocious record regarding the treatment of Aboriginal people in Canada, and even though

47 when Clarisse approaches her with “glad tidings,” Barbara’s decidedly un- Christian response is “For Christ sake, it’s Christmas! Can’t you people give us a break. Leave us alone. Peace on earth!” (13). What Barbara ultimately longs for is an unattainable and consumerist-based, white nuclear family, “keeping up with the Joneses”-type illusion. Barbara’s idea of a perfect “white Christmas” seems more in line with the “green” Christmas Jack wishes they could have. Furthermore, Barbara’s longing to fit in with the Joneses (65) next door, and Barbara and Jack’s (especially Jack’s) continuous racial slurs suggest that both Jack and Barbara also would prefer a “white,” as in Caucasian, Anglo-Saxon Christmas. For example, Jack’s nickname for Barbara is “Pocahontas” (14), he jokingly calls her a “bush Indian” (17), he refers to himself as “Big Chief of the Tipis in the Big Smoke” (40), and when Jack asks Barbara if they have reservations at a restaurant, she promptly answers, “Like all good Indians” (20). What Barbara gets for Christmas instead is the cuckoo clock from Ricky – the cuckoo clock Jack bought with money from his very first house sale. Ricky hands her the clock and says cuttingly, “This is really what you’re getting for Christmas. . . . This is what you get for being such a good little Indian . . . You’re cuckoo, lady. You can’t own babies” (99). In his turn, Jack indeed receives a “green” Christmas, a basement full of his coveted “green stuff” – “green stuff” or money being what he desires even at the expense of his integrity as a real estate agent – but also the substance in his house’s basement. Barbara loves money as much as Jack does, and this contributes to some of the bad “plumbing” in the marriage. While Jack is more obvious in his infatuation with money – he repeatedly mentions his love for the “green stuff” – Barbara is significantly invested in what the money can give them: acceptance in a nice neighbourhood by neighbours such as the aptly-named “Joneses” next door, and a desire to have the perfect home. When her expectant niece Lena starts early contractions and bleeding, Barbara’s first reaction is to worry about the mess the birth will make: “What? Oh not on my rug!” (68), she frets. Later, however, when Barbara decides she is going to take Lena’s baby and raise it herself, she tells Jack “I’ll be smiling

48 dollars” (89) if he helps her steal the baby, her justification being “We’ll show the whole neighbourhood we can raise a family too” (89) and that she and Jack are the best parents for the baby because they can afford to give the baby nice things. For Jack and Barbara Buck, being able to afford “stuff” is synonymous with love, with “be[ing] somebody”: BARBARA: To have stuff. Not to go without. To be really loved. JACK: To be somebody. To be able to have what you want. (90) Of course, it is not difficult to parallel the Bucks’ questionable justifications for why they would be better parents than Lena with the rationale the Canadian federal government historically used when taking Aboriginal children away from their parents – because the government believed that “this was the right thing to do” (Government of Canada, “Residential Schools”) – and forcing the children into residential schools “established across Canada by the Catholic, United, Anglican and Presbyterian churches in partnership with the federal government” (Government of Canada, “First Nations”) beginning in 1883 and ending as recently as 1996. According to the entry “Residential Schools” on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada website, residential schools “were set up to eliminate parental involvement in the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual development of Aboriginal children. . . . . [M]ore than 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were placed in these schools often against their parents’ wishes.” Barbara’s sister Martha points out the similarity between Barbara and the Canadian government as we see when Barbara reports back to Jack that “I think she knows. She called me a pale face. She said I wasn’t going to steal any babies” (97). Both Jack and Barbara are so concerned with how they appear to the neighbours, and are so invested in “being somebody,” that they are ultimately willing to put themselves ahead of the welfare and well-being of their family. Their dysfunction and the house’s “screaming” pipes; its green glowing, “reek[ing] basement”; and finally the emotional disintegration within the family signal their dwelling is an unheimlich house, while highlighting the consequences of their greed.

49 And Barbara is not the only character in Big Buck City who shittily longs for a neat and tidy Christmas. Clarisse Chrisjohn also has a particular Christmas “story” in mind when she arrives as a kind of messenger angel, Barbara’s niece Lena in tow, at the play’s beginning: the “story” of the birth of the messiah. Lena’s giving birth to a girl rather than a boy throws her completely off course: “It’s supposed to be a boy,” she says, “This shit house. It’s not supposed to go this way” (92). Just before she leaves the house (and the play) for good, she remarks, “I don’t know how the story’s supposed to go” (107). Clarisse’s dismay with the “story” going the wrong way illuminates the “plumbing” problems of Christmas as a Christian holiday, and the “plumbing” problems of Christianity, full stop. Christianity’s patriarchal insistence on the privileging of boys and men over girls and women in the Christmas story, just as one example – the pregnant Virgin Mary as merely a “vessel” of the Lord in the New Testament; pregnant Lena as a “Handmaid of the Lord” (51) in Big Buck City – also suggests that as far as women’s rights go, Christmas as a religious celebration has many “plumbing” problems. The overlapping of Freud’s discussion of the uncanny as the revealing of that which “ought to have remained hidden” with philosopher Julia Kristeva’s theory of the “abject” is very useful when looking at the ways in which the literal and figurative appearances of shit and the Bucks’ “shit house” contribute to the breakdown of distinct “borders of the body” (Kristeva 71), whether the biological bodies of the characters or the “body” of the house in the play. In her description of abjection and “polluting objects,” Kristeva observes that it is “not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). Kristeva selects excrement as one of the more important examples of abjection, along with food loathing and the corpse because “[t]hese body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live” (2-3). She writes further: “Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection,

50 disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by the outside, life by death” (71). Ken Gelder in The Horror Reader interprets Kristeva’s description of abjection as “that improper, unclean Other which disturbs the identity of the subject ‘I.’ . . . [I]t threatens the subject with dissolution, blurring the boundaries which are conventionally and often ritualistically drawn between human and inhuman, clean and defiled. The result may provoke disgust, as well as fascination” (Gelder, “Introduction to Part Two” 51), and I would suggest the violating of borders, the unintended revealing of the “concealed,” is not unlike the occurrence of the unheimlich – Kristeva herself asserting that abjection is a “massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness” (2). The characters in Big Buck City wrestle with the “borders” that separate them from the “waste,” and the Bucks in particular worry about the “disturbance” of their “subject ‘I’”: the unreliable metal pipes as a type of border between the Bucks and their excrement in their otherwise “perfectly renovated” (3) house disturbs them; as do the house’s unreliable doors and windows that allow in intruders such as the spirit light and Ricky Raccoon, and the intrusion of Lena’s messy and unwieldy body. The obstacle of Barbara’s infertile body, and Jack’s excessive drinking also “do not respect borders, positions, rules” in terms of how the Bucks see themselves as superior to Barbara’s relatives. Ricky Raccoon in his thievery, unsolicited truth-telling, and baby-stealing certainly does “not respect . . . rules.” The faulty “plumbing” – in every sense of the word “plumbing” – “disturbs identity, system, order,” and it is the “in-between, the ambiguous, [and] the composite” that Barbara and Jack Buck find unbearable and untenable, such as their fragile social status as Indigenous people in a white urban setting where they want to blend in. For example, when Jack insists they call the police to apprehend Ricky for breaking and entering, Barbara feels obliged to tell Jack, “You know how they look at us” (70) when referring to the police, and she worries how they will appear to the neighbours if a police car parks in front of their house, and how it will affect “property values” (72). She says, “Jack, I just want to make friends. They like the house now.”

51 Jack responds, “You see [the neighbours’] eyes glaze over every day. . . . Babsy, we shouldn’t care about those buggers” (70). This commitment to appearing “normal” to “them,” to the Bucks’ investment in “renovating” themselves and appearing “successful” and worthy of high property values – even if it means giving into racist discourse and hegemony – warps their marriage in the end into a marriage with bad “plumbing,” and not of love for each other, but of love for money and appearances. Big Buck City is written by a playwright who is part of the Delaware Nation, and who was raised on Six Nations land in Ontario (Moses, “Biography”). The characters in the play are labeled as “Indian.” As such, I should make some mention of the ways in which Indigenous culture inflects this play where the sentient house sub-genre is concerned. In Chapter Four, I describe the stereotypes associated with the presence of Indigenous people and the “Gothicising” of Indigenous people in both Canadian and Australian fiction. “Haunted house” fiction as an umbrella genre has some particularly regrettable – and, unfortunately, famous – examples of this in the overused cliché of a house that is sentient or haunted because it stands upon Indigenous burial or sacred ground. Famous and influential American examples of this cliché are Stephen King’s novel The Shining and its Overlook Hotel, and Jay Anson’s “true” story The Amityville Horror, the house in the film version of Amityville being particularly memorable for its bleeding walls. Australian novelist Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet borrows from this trope in that the animate, “queer” house (Winton, ch. 9) in the novel, referred to as “Number One Cloudstreet,” was once a mission house, now haunted by the ghosts of a suicided Aboriginal girl, and the grasping white woman who owned the mission. However, some writers such as Daniel David Moses are capable of taking a unique approach to what constitutes horror or even the uncanny in the context of the sentient house sub-genre. Big Buck City, rather than being a text containing what Dale Bailey labels a “formula” sentient house, is an excellent example of the ways in which Australian and Canadian writers have taken the haunted house horror genre and uniquely transformed it to suit their own contexts and purposes. I would furthermore suggest that

52 Moses loosens and broadens the parameters around what constitutes “horror” when he gestures toward the “natural horror” (Carroll 12) of historical, genocidal abuses perpetrated on Indigenous people living in Canada and the legacy of this violence and invasion in the scene where Barbara is labeled a baby-stealing “pale face” by her sister Martha (97), and in the private hopelessness Barbara and Jack feel when contemplating their lack of acceptance by their racist white neighbours. This broadening of parameters is alluded to by Canadian literature scholar Warren Cariou who suggests that some Indigenous writers have a different way of approaching “spirits” in their writing: for Native readers and writers, there is no reason . . . that Indigenous ghosts should be frightening. Native people already have plenty of evidence in their daily lives of how the legacies of colonialism have been passed down through the generations; they do not need to summon specters to fulfill that function. Native writers do represent spirits in their work nonetheless; it is just that these spirits are not necessarily figures of uncanny terror. They may be malevolent beings such as the wihitiko or the skeleton-spirit Pahkakos, but they may also be figures of healing, ceremony, or political action. Or they may simply be ancestors. And while many such spirits do seem to address the transgressions of the colonial past, they usually do so as part of a call for some kind of redress or change in the present. (727- 8) In Big Buck City, the green “spirit light” – a supernatural entity specific to this play – that animates the house and helps ruin the Bucks’ Christmas is certainly not a source of conventional “terror”: the “spirit light” contributes to some of the most obvious examples of comedy in the play, and is a repeated source of punning in that the “green stuff” (20) Jack repeatedly refers to is both the money he wants to make even at the expense of the holiday time he “owe[s]” (27) his wife, and the “green stuff” he doesn’t know is slowly obstructing his house’s bowels. Because of the frequent instances of comedy and the truths Jack and Barbara are forced to confront toward the play’s end, I would posit that the green “spirit light” and the

53 uncanny, imploding house operate less as figures of terror for Jack and Barbara, but instead have “revelatory functions” (Janicker 12), and are more “a call for some kind of redress or change in the present,” as Cariou suggests. By forcing an uncanny situation upon the Bucks – an exposure or “com[ing] to light” of the “hidden” (Freud 241) among the “familiar” (Freud 225) – and a Kristevan violating of borders, the green light and the uncanny house force the Bucks to contemplate “change in the present.” As far as a “change in the present” goes, however, Big Buck City explores not only the unhappy marriage of two fairly unlikable people, but also the repercussions of repressed horror: the “horrific” legacy of racism, genocide and assimilationist policies regarding Indigenous peoples in Canada. Because while the house in this play is definitely possessed by a green spirit light and is made animate by this light as the light courses through its shitty innards, the characters of Jack and Barbara Buck are also possessed by unspoken shame about their Indigenous heritage as they seek to abandon their heritage and family, and dangerously embrace the racist implications of mainstream, North American, capitalist values as articulated in a typical North American, “white” Christmas. By trying to keep up with the Joneses, they compromise the integrity – both spiritual and structural – of their “house” (Goldman 29). Theatre reviewer Vit Wagner suggests that in the play Daniel David Moses’ “larger point [is that] materialism has alienated the Bucks from the traditional values of native culture” (D3). This interpretation has some merit, but I do not want to suggest that the shallow and unhappy Barbara Buck just needs to return to “tradition” or the “bush” in order to find happiness when it is obvious she is capable of rare moments of sympathy for her distraught sister Martha. But what the Bucks do need is to reconsider what is “important”; for example, should they care about their niece Lena having a stressful birth less than they care about keeping Barbara’s rug clean? Even though he’s had a lot to drink, should Jack really say or even think, “Fuck, Babsy, we’re in luck. Lena’s dying. We’ll have to take care of the kid” (98)? Should Barbara say and believe, “Fuck Martha. I’m the one whose house this is. I make the decisions here” (90) when Jack suggests

54 Barbara’s sister Martha might have objections about Barbara taking Lena’s baby for her own? These kinds of choices aren’t even necessarily about “traditional values of native culture,” but more that the Bucks have let their own selfish desires get in the way of maintaining meaningful relationships with members of their “house.” I hesitate to refer to the green “spirit light” and Ricky Raccoon as “trickster” figures because of the problematic academic history of the “trickster,” as pointed out by Kristina Fagan who reminds us that in Canada in the late 1990s: Focusing on the trickster seemed to appeal to literary critics as an approach that was fittingly “Native.” The trouble was that the trickster archetype was assumed to be an inevitable part of Indigenous cultures, and so the criticism paid little attention to the historical and cultural specifics of why and how particular Indigenous writers were drawing on particular mythical figures. (3) However, as Fagan goes on to indicate: “The work of many Indigenous writers in Canada – including such influential figures as Thomas King, Tomson Highway, Beth Brant, Daniel David Moses, and Lenore Keeshig- Tobias – has included mythical figures that could be described as tricksters” (3-4). In addition, Moses’ inclusion of an epigraph to the play that is an excerpt from Lenore Keeshig-Tobias’s poem “Running on the March Wind” in which she writes, the others said LOOK there goes Santa Claus

that’s not Santa Claus i said that’s Nanabush (5) suggests that Nanabush does indeed have a presence in the play as a disguised Christmas figure. Moses also has a very particular understanding of the “trickster” in his writing of which he makes overt usage, as he clarifies in his description

55 of how he came to be a co-founder of the artistic “strategic body” known as the “Committee to Re-Establish the Trickster.” Co-founded by Moses; musician, playwright and novelist Tomson Highway; and “writer/storyteller” Lenore Keeshig-Tobias (107), the Committee was established to show a “different literature” (Moses, “The Trickster’s Laugh” 110), to counter the “official government ‘Indian’ label . . . stereotype.” Moses elaborates in his essay “The Trickster’s Laugh”: “How seriously can you be taken as a human being or an artist if people think you are heroic or stoic or romantic or a problem? We want people beside ourselves to be dissatisfied with those stereotypes” (109). The Committee’s understanding of the Trickster transforms the Trickster into a provocative muse figure for these three writers. Moses clarifies their position vis à vis the “Trickster” in a 1994 interview with Wanda Campbell in the following way: We’re all from three very different communities, but we found that the image of the trickster was one thing that we could agree on . . . in the way we were approaching writing as opposed to what our mainstream contemporaries were doing. . . . And the very name . . . we took from anthropologists; it has nothing to do particularly with native communities, but it’s a word anthropologists have used to describe a figure that exists in most of our literatures . . . that I don’t think is necessarily as nasty as a word like “trickster” would make you think. We decided it was important to put quotation marks wherever we could around characters that were tricksters that seemed to be this oversized embodiment of some of the extremes of human passion, and point out to people that you could actually learn what it is to be human by watching the trickster and often doing not what he does. (qtd. in Campbell 6) Because Big Buck City contains within it a character who dons a Santa suit and creates chaos, one could easily argue that Ricky Raccoon is likely the “Nanabush” figure referred to in the epigraph. But the green spirit light also causes havoc; perhaps it is even because of the spirit light that Ricky Raccoon and the rest of the havoc enter the house. So while the house shows signs of being “haunted” by a “spirit light,” the haunting is of a

56 different quality from the other texts in this dissertation because the haunting is not necessarily “malign” (Bailey 5) but is instead tinged with the playful echoes of jingle bells, Christmas “spirit,” and a particular kind of “Committee to Re-establish the Trickster” “extreme.” And most importantly, shit. Shit’s involvement in the play can possibly be justified by Tomson Highway’s explanation of how Highway envisions the “trickster” as “a very sensual character – making love, eating – all those bodily functions, he celebrated them, he lived for them. The Trickster’s most frequent conversational partner was his anus” (qtd. in Wigston 8). Given Moses’ alliance with Highway (and Keeshig-Tobias) in the “Re-establish the Trickster” committee, it would not be too far of a stretch to assume that the trickster Moses envisions as the force behind the green spirit light in Big Buck City is also a force that talks to its own anus, and would use shit as a teaching tool for Barbara and Jack Buck. Ultimately, I would argue that in the case of Moses’ Big Buck City, the narrative that the unheimlich house and the character Ricky Raccoon subvert is that of Barbara’s “white Christmas” and all of its attendant meanings. Indeed, this play is more of an “anti-Christmas” play.19 Moses reappraises the “Christmas” miracle of the Virgin Mary’s immaculate conception by having Barbara’s niece Lena appear on Christmas Eve, possibly pregnant by the ghost of her murdered boyfriend Johnny, and accompanied by her Angel of the Lord, Clarisse Chrisjohn. By extension, this would suggest that the Bucks’ house is nothing more than a shitty barn, no matter how much money they might use to “renovate” it. With this play, Moses makes a statement about one of the central and damaging stories that “haunt” capitalist western culture: that money can (and should?) buy anything and everything. Unlike the three other primary texts I focus on in this dissertation, Big Buck City is comical and satirical – sending up the hazards of rampant capitalism at the expense of some of the intangibles that money cannot buy – and so it does not fit that neatly into Dale Bailey’s haunted house “formula.” The Bucks’ house also does not “frighten” in the way that most

19 Thank you to Nicholas McCormick for this observation.

57 uncanny or unheimlich houses normally do. Nevertheless, I would suggest that this play is one of several examples of the potential for the sentient house sub-genre to expand beyond the “formula” and complicate the “haunted house” metaphor I discuss in this dissertation’s Introduction. In this play, the house is not merely a stand-in for a nation formerly inhabited by Indigenous people. Instead, the house is an unpredictable, farting body that can stand in as a metaphor for the nation made uncanny and abject for present-day Indigenous people because of invasion and the expropriation of Indigenous lands. The house in Big Buck City also serves as an indication of how unchecked consumerism and capitalism can create the “monstrous,” not only in the form of imploding houses, but also in terms of inter-family relationships. By the play’s end, the house has participated in the revelation of unbearable truths about Jack and Barbara’s “shit”: their unhappy family relationships, the way they believe money is the solution to everything, their racism towards other Indigenous people including family members, and the internalised racism apparent in their attempts to suppress or “hide” their own Indigenous roots. In the very last scene of the play, the house’s basement overflows with supernatural shit, revealing that if one does not accept the heimlich and the unheimlich, if one unhealthily chooses to suppress or hold in one’s “shit” – whatever form that “shit” might take – one’s metaphorical toilet will, inevitably, overflow.

58

Chapter 4 “VERY UNHAPPY HOUSE THIS ONE”: The Unhappy Houses in Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye In their introduction to the book Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence, Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush recall the recurring nature of the “Indian burial ground” (vii) cliché in popular culture. As Boyd and Thrush see it, the Indigenous burial ground as the rationale for a piece of land being uncanny or haunted has become “a tried-and-true element of the cultural industry” (vii). Boyd and Thrush argue that possessed, sacred Indigenous territory or the “Indian uncanny” (ix) remains one of the most common explanations for the supernatural attributes of a house or other physical site in texts produced in settler colonies such as Australia, Canada, and the United States, “[w]hether . . . the haunted house down the dirt lane, the spectral woods behind the subdivision or the seemingly cursed stretch of highway up the canyon” (Boyd and Thrush vii). While many of the texts Boyd and Thrush refer to in their introduction are written by non-Indigenous North American writers, this chapter will examine one Aboriginal writer’s appropriation and subversion of the “Indigenous uncanny” formula for her own ends. Using an Australian-influenced Gothic building as its “major locus” (Botting, Gothic 2), Kamilaroi writer Vivienne Cleven’s novel Her Sister’s Eye features a sentient Queenslander house that symbolically insists that Aboriginal history and concerns are continuing, contemporary and crucial, rather than more conveniently relegated to an easily evaded, spectral past. I will use as a springboard postcolonial critics Kathrin Althan’s and Gerry Turcotte’s arguments that a writer such as Cleven rejects the cliché of supernatural, uncanny “darkness” and replaces it with a model that proposes that non- Aboriginal white Australians are a more likely source of “uncanny” fear, supernatural and otherwise. In their introduction which I refer to above, Boyd and Thrush are referring specifically to American horror fiction such as Jay Anson’s bestselling “non-fiction” The Amityville Horror, but the “tried-and-true”

59 nature of the “Indian uncanny” genre is apparent in several examples of haunted house fiction by non-Aboriginal writers set in Australia and Canada as well. Accordingly, before I examine Her Sister’s Eye, I will discuss two examples of contemporary Australian and Canadian “Indian uncanny” (or what I will from now on refer to as “Aboriginal uncanny” in order to incorporate Australian examples of this genre) – Australian Tim Winton’s novel Cloudstreet, and Canadian Simon Strantzas’ short story “Dwelling on the Past” – in order to show some ways in which Indigenous people and culture have been characterised as the frightening Other in contemporary Australian and Canadian fiction. As I will go on to show, texts such as Cloudstreet and “Dwelling” follow a Gothic horror tradition that Cleven writes against. Winton’s Cloudstreet features a house that is sentient and regarded as a “queer joint” (ch. 9) because it was once a mission house for Aboriginal girls. Its current non-Aboriginal inhabitants – the Lamb and Pickle families – are disturbed by the house’s animate qualities (it breathes, for example), and the ghosts of an Aboriginal girl who committed suicide by drinking ant poison, and the grasping white woman who ran the mission. Strantzas’ story “Dwelling on the Past” does not take place in a conventional house, but is about a contested – and supernaturally murderous – land site in Canada that also happens to be an ancient underground abode for an unidentified, vengeful entity affiliated with the First Nations band, Six Nations of the Grand River. In both texts, non-Indigenous characters must battle malevolent supernatural forces of Aboriginal origin in order to claim their non-Aboriginal, physical or symbolic territory. In the case of Cloudstreet, the territorial claim is successful: the Lambs and the Pickles “possess” the house in every sense when they manage to drive away the house’s mission ghosts and, therefore, eliminate the house’s “queerness.” The families are thereby able – disturbingly – to completely disassociate themselves and the house from the lingering memory of Australian history and crimes perpetrated against Australia’s “Stolen Generations.” In contrast, in Strantzas’ “Dwelling” the shadowy “creature” that possesses the ancient, underground home and was “brought forth to serve [the band’s] vengeance”

60 (138), preys on the main character’s emotional vulnerabilities (he regrets mercy-killing his gravely ill daughter) and orchestrates his murder. The home literally kills the main character when he is trapped and buried alive in excavation dirt. In invoking the stereotype of the “mystical” (Goldie 128) and/or dangerous, supernatural Indigenous person rather than presenting Indigenous people and culture as real and living today, Winton and Strantzas seem to echo the reactive “resentment” (Gelder and Jacobs 17) or unease of some non-Indigenous Australians (and Canadians) around Indigenous sacred sites and land claims as discussed in Gelder and Jacobs’ Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. The problematic politics inherent in Aboriginal burial or sacred ground as a reason for land being “bad” is remarked on by Ross Gibson in Seven Versions of an Australian Badland when he suggests that “no-go zones” in “colonial societies” are more about invader-settler guilt than actual haunting and allow colonial cultures to “simultaneously acknowledg[e] and ignor[e]” past violences against Indigenous peoples (15). By, on one hand, recognising Indigenous dispossession and non-Indigenous violence against Indigenous people, but on the other hand simultaneously and disingenuously relegating the violence and any instances of Aboriginal power exclusively to small physical spaces such as houses and a tidy and long-ago past, writers such as Winton and Strantzas effectively suppress and mute Indigenous people’s historical and contemporary concerns. Winton and Strantzas create fictional, Indigenous “prohibited space[s]” (Gibson 15) only in order to identify, contain, and – in the case of Winton – conquer the space and by extension the disenfranchised people the space represents. Meanwhile, Strantzas’s story serves as yet another example of how allegedly “frightening” and vindictive First Nations people are when their sacred spaces are intruded upon by non-Aboriginals. Lastly, both fictions imply that the “settled” life of non-Indigenous settler-invaders outside these “unsettled” spaces continues unaffected and immune to the dangers of Indigenous presence.

61 In short, texts such as “Dwelling” and Cloudstreet reinforce Jacques Derrida’s assertion in Specters of Marx that “haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” (37). That is, in this case, in order to have properly “settled” peoples within the context of Australia and Canada, the “settled” need to have spaces in which the “unsettled” is safely contained, or controlled within “prohibited space” in order to help maintain the illusion of predominantly “settled” space. According to Gibson, “prohibited space” shows that a history of savagery can be encysted even if it cannot be eliminated. A badland20 can be understood as a natural space deployed in a cultural form to persuade citizens that unruliness can be simultaneously acknowledged and ignored . . . . In a culture unconvinced of its sovereignty in the landscape, a badland is mythic and far from useless. (15) Cloudstreet and “Dwelling” primarily emphasise that Indigenous people and culture are – at best – the nature-bound, mysterious Other. “Dwelling” and Cloudstreet perpetuate stereotypes about Indigenous people. This is borne out by an observation made by Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman in their book After the Celebration, in which they point out that all of the Aboriginal characters in Cloudstreet, “are cast as non-real, spectral, ethereal” (31). Further to this, David Crouch in the article “National Hauntings” notes that “Winton only conjures the Indigenous past, the prior occupation of the house or the county, as something shadily other, suppressed, and belonging to some unearthly haunted realm” (99). In these texts by Winton and the lesser-known Strantzas, Indigenous people occur only to make land “bad,” and frighten the white Australians and Canadians, sometimes to death. Vivienne Cleven’s novel Her Sister’s Eye, the subject of this chapter, takes place on dispossessed Australian land, contains uncanny buildings, and features murdered Aboriginal characters, but unlike “tried- and-true” fictions about uncanny dwellings such as “Dwelling on the Past,”

20 In his usage of “badland” here, Gibson is primarily referring to land that is “bad,” as in evil or possessing a violent history, rather than a particular type of outdoor terrain.

62 Cloudstreet, and Amityville Horror, Cleven’s novel re-interprets the “Aboriginal uncanny” by being told from an Aboriginal perspective. The unheimlich and sentient nature of the primary “scary house” (52) in Her Sister’s Eye also springs not from predictable, vindictive Aboriginal ghosts, but from what postcolonial scholar Katrin Althans labels “white shadows” (“White” 140), in other words, the horrific effects generated by racist, violent white people and their actions. In particular, the Queenslander house featured in Her Sister’s Eye is a house that derives its unwelcoming, sentient attributes, its – to quote space theorist Christine Wilson – “animation, unruliness, and . . . desolation” (“Haunted” 201) from the white Australian Drysdale family who has lived in it for generations. Gerry Turcotte proposes a similar argument to Althans’ “white shadow” premise in his article “Spectrality in Indigenous Women’s Cinema,” but without using the colour coding of black and white. I prefer Turcotte’s analysis and its lack of colour coding rather than Althans’ position, because while Althans’s arguments are extremely useful, she assumes that all settlers and readers of these texts by Aboriginal writers are white and of European extraction.21 Turcotte does not discuss Cleven specifically, but suggests that in the work of other Australian Aboriginal artists – filmmakers Tracey Moffatt and Beck Cole and writer Alexis Wright – “it is the dominant culture which is refigured as the Gothic other – the rapacious, the bloodthirsty and, in some cases, the dispossessed” (10). I would apply this same argument to Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye: Cleven “revers[es] majority constructions” (Turcotte, “Spectrality” 10) by writing a novel with Gothic undertones from an Aboriginal perspective in which the white dominant culture is figured as the source of the frightening and uncanny. To use the wording of Ashcroft, Griffiths’ and Tiffin’s foundational text The Empire Writes Back, Cleven “writes back” against the traditional, colonial-Gothic modal binary that represents darkness and the indigenous as negative, and lightness or whiteness as positive. As Kathrin

21 In fact, historically and to this day, both Australia and Canada have received and continue to receive non-European settlers of colour who are positioned economically and in other ways into the non-Indigenous, “dominant” or “mainstream” culture.

63 Althans notes, using her black/white symbolic terms, writers such as Cleven reject the “dark,” stereotypical features of colonial Gothic horror writing and “turn . . . the dark shadows of the Gothic white as a sheet” (“White” 151). Of course, reading a book such as Her Sister’s Eye as a Gothic text needs to be done with caution, as using a Gothic filter can potentially lead to counterproductive, interpretive traps for a non-Aboriginal scholar. For example, in her article “Learning to Talk with Ghosts,” Canadian Gothic scholar Jodey Castricano raises the difficulties of using a “Western Gothic model” to discuss the work of Indigenous writers in Canada, and points out the risks of non-Indigenous scholars reading this work inadvertently “doing the work of empire.” In her article on Haisla writer Eden Robinson’s novel, Monkey Beach, Castricano expresses her concerns about “how to read . . . without slipping into the ‘received ideas’ about the Gothic, without doing the work of empire by framing the novel and its concern with the spirit world in terms of what might be called ‘psychological colonialism’” (807- 808). While it might be dangerous to read Her Sister’s Eye as a novel that incorporates Gothic conventions or what Althans refers to as elements from “conventional European Gothic tales,” I would argue that Cleven in effect invites the reader to see conventional Gothic imagery or motifs in her novel in order to – as Althans asserts in Darkness – “distort those very conventions” (122) and reject the familiar Gothic example of the “dark” Other, the “Aboriginal uncanny,” as the singular source of what constitutes horror. The “scary house” in Her Sister’s Eye – a decrepit Queenslander belonging to the murderous and depraved Drysdale family – is the epicentre and symbol of white townsfolks’ hold over the Aboriginal people who have been forced to the outermost edges of the fictional town of Mundra. But as an example of how Cleven “distorts” European Gothic convention in the novel, its “unruliness” and “scariness” emanate not from “darkness” but rather from the lasting influence of the late Edward Drysdale – the former “big honcho” (145) of Mundra. He was leader of the infamous, racist vigilante group, “Drysdale’s men,” composed of a “group of men dedicated

64 to keeping black fellahs out of town” (224), according to Aboriginal elder Vida Derrick (otherwise known as “Nana Vida”). The house is also, at a later time, home to Edward’s son Reginald, and Edward’s adult grandson Donald. And, while throughout the novel the Drysdales’ Queenslander is interpreted by particular characters as having sentient characteristics, and is definitely presented as generally uncanny for the majority of the novel, its sentience is transitory. At the end of the novel when the house ceases to belong to the Drysdale family bloodline (Caroline Drysdale married into the family and “never really fit in the town” [184] or the Drysdale family) and so disconnects from the town’s dominant, racist culture, it effectively ceases to be uncanny and loses its sentient qualities. The house’s sentience evaporates when the effects of the “white shadows” of the Drysdale men, the Drysdale family line, and the town’s violent history sadly conclude with the deaths of characters Raymond Gee and Sofie Salte – the only remaining, living Aboriginal characters in the present day who still suffer from the direct effects of the Drysdale family. Another explanation of the house’s transformation in the novel from sentient “scary house” to insentient haven is that the house ceases to be unheimlich when those who inhabit the literal and figurative abject “borderland positions” (Turcotte, Peripheral 185) in Mundra claim literal and symbolic ownership of the house. At the end of the novel, characters who in most conventional Gothic fictions would belong to the province of the frightening rather than the frightened take over the house and its grounds: namely, Murilla Salte, an Aboriginal woman, and Reginald Drysdale’s widow Caroline, a white woman who is also regarded as the local “madwoman.” To summarise the novel, Her Sister’s Eye opens from the perspective of drifter Archie Corella as he arrives in Mundra, where he has returned “without even realising” (215) it was once his home and the site of a major trauma in his childhood that he has blotted from his memory. The novel begins with Archie’s recollection of how he “first” arrived in Mundra as an adult, and took on work as a handyman and gardener for the Drysdales at their Queenslander. Archie in reality is actually Raymond Gee, but Archie has forgotten that he was born Raymond Gee: when Raymond was a child

65 he witnessed the deliberate shooting death of his sister by Edward Drysdale, and when Raymond tried to shoot Edward in revenge, Edward “flogged” (214) Raymond with the butt of his rifle and scarred his face for life. Traumatised both mentally and physically, Raymond left Mundra as a teenager to “wal[k] the roads” (215) and later assumed the identity of his best friend Archie, who died when he was young after being kicked in the head by a horse. The novel revolves around various interconnected characters: Archie/Raymond; Murilla Salte who works at the Drysdales’ as a housekeeper; Murilla’s sister Sofie Salte; and Caroline Drysdale (née Hughes), Reginald’s wife and Donald’s mother. Following Archie/Raymond’s arrival each of these characters uncovers and comes to terms with the town’s buried history in her or his own way. Specifically, the novel focuses on the aftereffects of Edward Drysdale and his company of white, “Drysdale’s men” in driving all the Aboriginal people of Archie/Raymond’s and Murilla’s parents’ generation to Mundra’s outer limits on the banks of the Stewart River, and one night opening fire on them, in the process killing Raymond’s sister Belle. Additionally and more recently, the Drysdale family’s “mean streak [that] goes back generations” (165), manifests in Edward’s grandson Donald – a man with whom one could easily link the “white shadows” because of his “milky-white chest” (100) – who rapes underage “black girls white girls” (60) of the town and keeps their clothing in a shed on the Drysdale property. One of the girls Donald raped as a child is Murilla’s younger sister, Sofie, an eerily skilful swimmer who, as an adult, leads Donald to his drowning death in the Stewart River. The “Drysdale’s men” also have a female counterpart in the socio-economic fabric of the town – the Red Rose ladies – an allegedly philanthropic women’s committee made up of “skirt-wearing Hitlers” (166), that is, women either allied with or married to members of Drysdale’s men, who, as reviewer Sonia Kurtzer describes it, “reserve” their “benevolence and charity . . . for those who are ‘white’ and who agree with the town ethos of keeping all the blacks out of the town” (325).

66 When Archie first beholds the Drysdale Queenslander, he has immediate trepidation about the house and its inhabitants, interpreting the house as “a place with its own shying” (22). A “shyer” according to Archie is someone like Donald Drysdale, a man who “[s]hied himself away, like a snake when he feels the vibration of a man’s footsteps approaching – hiding away, curling up in a hollow log, all the while watching with cunning eyes, ready to strike” (12). The house with its “cunning” qualities, its uninviting and unnatural features, appears to Archie as a “living thing”: Archie looked across at the run-down Queenslander. It crouched forward out of the undergrowth as though it was exhausted from weathering too many storms. Moss-green shutters hung carelessly from large fly-screened windows. Embracing the house like a protective arm was a white rust-speckled, wrought-iron verandah. The iron was fashioned like a delicate lace petticoat. The rotting, worm-bored steps had two planks missing from the bottom and the once cream-coloured walls were skinned and blistered, the timber exposed. Up near the roof, the gutters hung precariously, water dripping steadily from their rusty mouths. And the door looked down from this sad vista, glaring back at him. The house seemed to buckle and sweat underneath the sweltering sun. Archie could almost hear the wood expanding, as though the house was a living thing, crying in protest. (9-10) Archie resolves to enter the house as infrequently as possible, believing that “something was rotten in the house of Drysdale” (98) and that it is a “chapel of grief and hurt” (101). The house’s sentience is registered even more fully by Murilla’s sister Sofie who names the house “the scary house” (52) and regards the house and its objects as animate, the hallway in particular a “wild” space: “Sofie scans the musty smelling room. Wooden chairs cry, creeaak n grrooann. Tick tock, the tall clock yells. . . . Dark n cool as river water the hallway opens its mouth” (62, italics in the original). Finally, the house’s “shying” is underlined by the condition of the grounds that surround it because the land the house stands on is weirdly “barren” (107). Roses that Archie plants in Caroline Drysdale’s garden do

67 not flourish, and as the Drysdales’ housekeeper Murilla observes when she looks out the window, no vegetation associated with the house ever grows: The skeletal trees bend in death, their gnarled branches reaching skyward like the grasping talons of a witch. Everything that was once alive and green died a long time ago. Nothing will grow in the yard now. The dirt seems to have some sort of sickness. It’s as though when Reginald Drysdale died he took something away. Took part of life with him into death. (38, italics in the original) In addition to its “shying” and “cunning” features, infertile gardens, and unnerving interior, the house carries a trait that marks it as a traditional Gothic house: a woman unwillingly trapped within. As Althans points out, Caroline Drysdale, the wife of the most recent owner, embodies several characteristics that at first glance make her belong to the tradition of the “Gothic heroine” (Althans, Darkness 122) for whom the house is a prison rather than a home. For example, Caroline’s husband and son work hard to portray her to guests and the rest of town as “a crazy woman” (118), or the kind of “madwoman” character highlighted by critics such as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their ground-breaking text The Madwoman in the Attic. In her article, “Can You Forgive Her?: The Gothic Heroine and Her Critics,” Kate Ferguson Ellis, author of the influential monograph The Contested Castle, explains that “the task of the classic Gothic heroine is to escape from the castle that has become her prison, to preside over its demystification, a process that usually requires its violent deconstruction, and to claim the fortune and lineage that the villain has sought to make his own” (463). Caroline Drysdale initially fulfills the criteria of the typical Gothic heroine in terms of her “tasks.” While living in the Queenslander under the rule of her husband and son, she is trapped because she is agoraphobic, physically and psychologically abused by her husband, and emotionally manipulated by her son. She knows that her position is not a good one, but she feels incapable of defending herself – once when Reginald has beaten her so severely that she cannot talk, she hands Murilla a

68 note that reads, “VERY UNHAPPY HOUSE THIS ONE” (111), and urges Murilla to quit her job as housekeeper and leave. Caroline is also not welcome in town or into the Red Rose ladies committee because she was born into the Hughes family, a family that according to a member of the Red Rose ladies, Tamara Dalmaine, carries “[m]adness. . . . Her parents were crazy as old man Cleaver.” Tamara elaborates by adding, “All of the Hughes had that in them. . . . [T]hat’s why they never really fit in the town” (184). In truth, Caroline’s parents’ “madness” is considered such, not because they were mentally ill, but because they were friendly with Lillian Gee, Archie/Raymond’s mother, and because Hughes family members have always been sympathetic to the plight of Aboriginal citizens of the town. As Aboriginal elder Vida Derrick says of the Hughes family, “not all the white fellahs were whatcha call bad people. No, there was some that was good” (145). Compounding Caroline’s psychological incarceration in the house, Caroline also cannot “find” herself: she laments to Murilla that she lost herself when she married Reginald, “What happened to Caroline Hughes?” she asks rhetorically, “I lost her when I came to this place. Lost everything, everyone” (105). In fact, as Caroline tells Murilla, Caroline is only one in a long succession of “staff and wives” who have been “control[led]” (188) to their detriment by the men of the “house” of Drysdale. The Drysdale Queenslander is not the only house in Her Sister’s Eye affected by the “white shadows” of Edward Drysdale and his group’s violence – numerous houses in the novel feature uncanny characteristics, even if the uncanniness is not as obviously spelled out as the Queenslander’s “shying” sentience. In an intriguing reversal of the “Aboriginal uncanny” motif, the Aboriginal characters and their one white ally, Caroline Drysdale, are the only ones in Mundra forced to battle the “shadows” in their homes – other white characters do not. But they do not fight malevolent Aboriginal “shadows” – instead they are forced to cope with houses and land contaminated by “white shadows,” that is, the land’s memory of the evil of men such as Edward Drysdale and his taking “part of life with him into death” (38). Edward the “big honcho” is not explicitly

69 present as a ghost, but the mystery of his son Donald’s death lingers much as a ghost would, and his and his biological family’s residue has still tainted Mundra’s land and many of the buildings that stand upon it. Mundra was literally a “prohibited space” (Gibson 15) for Aboriginal characters in the novel before Edward died and he and his men determined with guns and intimidation who could and could not enter Mundra. After Edward’s death, characters such as Murilla and Archie are able to live physically within the town limits, but Mundra is still a “prohibited space,” only this time, supernaturally. When Aboriginal characters such as Murilla, Archie, and their parents and relatives do occasionally have access to homes, their houses are always unheimlich whether in the literal sense of the houses being “unhomely” because they are inhospitable and unfit for human habitation or because the house rests on supernaturally barren land. For example, for the earlier generation – such as Murilla and Archie’s parents – Aboriginal- owned houses and house-like domiciles such as the “shacks, tents and humpies” are often flooded by the Stewart River out by “the dump road” (144) and are consistently precarious locales of desperation and futility. They are in essence “chapel[s] of grief and hurt” (101). In the present day, Murilla and Sofie’s house is “mouldering” (24) and threatened with bulldozing, and Vida Derrick needs to grow her chrysanthemums in “rusted copper tubs” (71), because they won’t grow when planted in the ground. Archie Corella’s house is described by the narrator as being like “a picture- book cottage” (128), but the yard “looks like the wasteland of an abandoned mine claim, with great piles of dirt and unusually deep holes dotted across the yard. Along the fence are countless pots of withered rose plants “ (128- 9). The reason Archie has dug so many holes in the yard is because “[t]he dirt won’t give to him; he can’t grow roses at all, they always die. But he reckons the deeper he digs, the more chance he’ll have of one taking root, surviving” (129). The nature of the Queenslander and other unheimlich (although not necessarily sentient) houses in the novel suggest an interesting recasting or revision of the “Aboriginal uncanny” genre and Ross Gibson’s

70 conceptualising of “bad” land. In Her Sister’s Eye, rather than white characters being terrorised by Aboriginal history and having to negotiate “bad” land, it is the Aboriginal characters who are confronted with “white shadows” and relegated to the “bad” land. The white citizens of Mundra (with the exception of Caroline Drysdale, the “madwoman”) do not suffer while living on the “bad” land of the town of Mundra; rather, they experience largely untroubled access to and ownership of houses, and none of them experience unheimlich homes or guilty consciences. They not only own structurally-sound, insentient houses with thriving gardens, but some even own multiple houses (196). But nevertheless they still feel threatened by Aboriginal presence – they establish committees and groups dedicated to keeping the white “ethos” of the town intact. And even when one of them is ostensibly defeated and robbed of her home – as Red Rose lady Polly Goodman is when Sofie inadvertently burns down her house – they are never truly homeless or “houseless.” Sofie overhears one of the bystanders suggest that Polly can stay in her second house “on Mary Street” (196) while recovering from the fire. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin note in The Empire Writes Back that “the position of groups such as the Maoris, Inuit, and Australian Aborigines is a special one because they are doubly marginalised – pushed to the psychic and political edge of societies which themselves have experienced the dilemma of colonial alienation” (144). In Her Sister’s Eye, the Aboriginal inhabitants of Mundra are relegated by white Australians and “white shadows” to every “edge” imaginable: psychic, political, and geographical in terms of their uncertain “home” site at the end of the “old dump road” (142) on the outer limits of Mundra, and in their unsettled and disintegrating houses located in Mundra proper. Archie’s picture-perfect house is never “root[ed]” (129) enough for him to evade his memory of Belle’s death, and when he finally recalls his true identity and Belle’s murder, in anguish he throws himself in the river and drowns. For Archie, if his roses “take root” they will “survive,” but the same applies for himself and other the Aboriginal characters in the novel. Nana Vida echoes the sentiment when she remarks that “Fellahs gotta have roots” (141). Archie,

71 and similarly characters such as Murilla, Sofie, Doris and their elders, struggle throughout the novel to “take root” physically and psychically, and belong fully in Mundra. “Taking root” in Mundra is not easy even for those misfit white people such as Caroline Drysdale or the peripheral character Jenny Anne Cleaver. According to Vida Derrick, Jenny Anne was married to Tom Cleaver, one of Edward Drysdale’s friends, and “didn’t have a place in the town, on no committees or such. . . . [S]he just looked lost all the time. Like she don’t belong anywhere” (150) to which her relative Doris replies, “Yeah, Nana, a bit like us, eh” (152). Jenny Anne is friendly with Raymond’s mother, Lillian Gee, and treats her as an equal when she lets Lillian hold her new baby, but in doing so dooms herself to become Mundra’s second “Gothic heroine,” albeit one who remains forever a victim. According to Vida Derrick, Jenny Anne mysteriously disappears after revealing her friendship with Lillian: “No one saw her again. I reckon Cleaver kept her locked up in that stinking little house by the top paddock” (152). As mentioned earlier, Caroline is also attempting to “take root” throughout the novel, but is unable to do so because, like Jenny Anne, she is unable to “really fit in the town” (184). But the “shying” house that, on one hand, operates as home and headquarters for the evil Edward Drysdale, ringleader of Drysdale’s men, and is the prison in which Reginald Drysdale confines Caroline, also becomes a “revelatory” space (Janicker 12) – the site where, as Murilla notes, numerous things “finally [come] to an explosive end” (186). Using the Drysdale Queenslander, Cleven fully and explicitly rejects the notion of the “Aboriginal uncanny,” and I would suggest also rejects the black/white, mutually exclusive binary proposed by critic Kathrin Althans. This is because when Caroline finally decides to fight back against Reginald, it is in the Queenslander that she commits the act, and in doing so she begins the gradual process of expunging the “white shadows” from the house, and turning the house into a more heimlich site for herself and for Murilla. Caroline poisons and kills Reginald in retaliation for his decision to fire Murilla after Murilla, out of sympathy for Caroline, deliberately pours

72 hot sauce on Polly Goodman, Red Rose lady and Reginald’s secret lover. This “explosive end” marks a turning point in Caroline and Murilla’s relationship – even though Murilla may question Caroline’s mental health and the ethics of killing Reginald (190), Murilla’s public humiliation of Polly Goodman and Caroline’s murder of Reginald because of his threat to Murilla demonstrate that no longer are Murilla and Caroline merely employee and employer: they have become accomplices and allies. In the concluding chapter of Her Sister’s Eye, titled “Corella’s Roses,” Murilla and Caroline’s connection as allies is re-emphasised. Murilla and Caroline plant recently-deceased Archie’s withered roses in the Drysdale house’s garden, an act that Carole Ferrier writes “suggests a symbolic transformation of the earlier dominance of the Red Rose ladies” (“Disappearing” 45). The women “work side by side” (Cleven 232) to plant the roses, and Caroline believes that this time the roses will grow in the house’s garden with its perpetually “bad” (231) soil, and her conviction is reinforced by Murilla agreeing with Caroline that the rose plants “just might but we have to keep an eye on things” (232). The apparently trouble-free, equal-seeming relationship between the women and the general contentedness of the scene are significant for a number of reasons. Even though Murilla is still Caroline’s employee and is subject to Caroline’s whims – for example, helping Caroline plant Archie’s roses in the garden – there is little obvious sense of an imposed racial hierarchy or power differential between the women in this final scene, especially compared to the first time Caroline appears in the novel in a scene where she is yelling at Murilla to do senseless tasks such as clean imaginary stains out of a carpet (26). Secondly, planting Archie’s flowers on the Drysdale grounds suggests a symbolic, Aboriginal “taking root” in formerly dispossessed land contaminated by “white shadows.” The women’s apparently easy alliance and familiarity with each other is further reflected in the first line of the novel’s final paragraph: “The garden soil scrubbed from their fingernails, waiting for the kettle to boil, the two women sit before the window as lightning dances across the sky” (232- 233). Their seeking shelter in the house as the storm approaches – a

73 desirable storm because it makes it a “[g]ood time to be plantin” (232) according to the character Treacle – and their waiting for the kettle to boil, suggest an evenly matched co-residency of the space that is the house. There is no indication that Murilla has to serve and cater to Caroline as she did at the beginning of the novel. The “waiting for the kettle to boil” suggests that they will both drink the beverage made from the boiling water in a kind of communion or sharing. Murilla sits “before” the front window with Caroline like she belongs in the house – and they are both spectators rather than one spectating as the other works. Murilla’s symbolic co-possession and co-ownership of the Drysdale house with Caroline represents a claiming of the town for both Aboriginal and white townspeople. And even though the women seem different, they do have a similarity in their “madness,” that is, their active resistance to male domination. Earlier in the novel Murilla utters a “shriek like a madwoman” (9) when Donald Drysdale attacks her – but in this final scene, I would argue the two “madwomen” have come down from their figurative attics and peacefully claimed the entire house and grounds. The former Gothic castle/prison has transformed into a comfortable home in which to “take root” and “survive,” with a garden destined to prosper. The ending of Her Sister’s Eye provides an interesting contrast to other Australian novels such as Winton’s Cloudstreet and Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth. I have already discussed how Cloudstreet incorporates the “Aboriginal uncanny,” but the effects of Winton’s doing so become even more marked when compared to McGahan’s White Earth, which also relies on the “Aboriginal uncanny.” Both novels conclude with a statement of sorts regarding the relationship between whites and Aboriginals, and their claim to a house on land that has been forcibly taken from Aboriginal people. But while Cloudstreet and White Earth propose that Aboriginal people and white Australians have never lived and likely will never live peaceably together in the houses in question, Her Sister’s Eye suggests another possibility. To elaborate: in After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989- 2007, Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman provide a brief comparison of

74 Cloudstreet and White Earth specifically regarding how the novels engage with Aboriginal dispossession and the place of white settlers in Australia. To begin, Gelder and Salzman point out that the pre-Mabo era22 Cloudstreet seems to advocate for a symbolic and transparent handing-over of Australia to white Australians by Aboriginal people. In Cloudstreet, the ghosts of the suicided Aboriginal girl and the white woman who is indirectly guilty of her death are exorcised by the birth of a white baby in the room where the girl and woman both died. As numerous critics such as David Crouch, Nathaneal O’Reilly, and Gelder and Salzman have noted, Cloudstreet seems to suggest that with the birth, the two white families that live in the house – the Lambs and the Pickles – and who are both biologically linked to the new baby, have finally managed to truly claim the house as their own home space23. Gelder and Salzman emphasise that the character Sam Pickles is even told by a mysterious “black man” that, “You shouldn’t break a place” (Winton ch. 10) and urges Sam not to sell the house. Gelder and Salzman argue that, This is a novel . . . which has a spectral Aboriginal character effectively hand over property to the non-Aboriginal characters who have moved in, giving them his blessing into the bargain. Native title isn’t even an issue here, as the novel leaves its Aboriginal characters behind in order to chart a fully realised non-Aboriginal form of belonging. (31, italics in the original) In essence, Aboriginal people have no claim, no place, and belong nowhere in the new world represented by the house in Cloudstreet and its non- Aboriginal owners. The house that was once “prohibited space” for the white Australian characters, has now in effect become “prohibited space” for Aboriginal people.

22 Eddie Mabo was one of four Meriam people of the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait whose activism led to the “Mabo decision” – eventually culminating into the 1993 Native Title Act. 23 O’Reilly cites an interview between Winton and Teri Shore in which Winton “has acknowledged that the house is a metaphor for Australia, and . . . the Lamb and Pickles families are forced to move into it, rather than choosing it for themselves, just as the convicts were taken from Britain to Australia against their will” (O’Reilly 121). By laying claim to the house, the Lambs and Pickles thereby represent white Australians’ claim to Australia.

75 In contrast, McGahan’s White Earth was written after the Mabo decision, and so Gelder and Salzman suggest that McGahan consequently does not follow as readily Winton’s untroubled and slightly bizarre “solution” to land claim issues in Australia. White Earth’s penultimate chapter seems to argue for the legitimacy of Native Title, but then the epilogue reinscribes the concept of terra nullius when the house that is on contested ground, Kuran Station, burns to the ground, and the character Ruth concludes that the land associated with Kuran Station “belonged to no one” (374). In none of Ruth’s ruminations about whom the land could now belong to does she think about possible Aboriginal owners of the land. Gelder and Salzman argue that McGahan – unlike Winton – seems to advocate that opposing white and Aboriginal land claims cannot or will not be settled because the land belongs to neither group. But once again, Aboriginal people have no place and no claim. To continue with Ross Gibson’s argument regarding “prohibited spaces,” in the case of White Earth space is “prohibited” for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. The ending of Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye suggests an intriguing third alternative to Winton’s and McGahan’s propositions in their respective novels. By concluding Her Sister’s Eye with a scene in which Caroline and Murilla companionably sit inside the front room of the Queenslander together with Murilla “keeping an eye on things” the novel seems to suggest that while white and Aboriginal communities might not necessarily have a guaranteed easy and equal friendship, the two communities can certainly be allies, and they can co-exist in the house and on the land together. True, Raymond/Archie and Sofie have recently died, but with their passing so has the last remaining physical, bodily evidence of the violent clash between white and Aboriginal people in the town finally been laid to rest. Their history remains, but as Nana Vida reminds her audience and the reader, “Funny thing, is history. If you remember what others went through to get ya here then all is not lost. . . . There’s hope. Always hope” (229). Fittingly, and what I interpret as a gesture of “hope” for new beginnings and a recognition of historical wrongs, Caroline arranges to have the shed

76 adjoining the Drysdale Queenslander – the shed in which Donald stored the clothing of the girls he raped – bulldozed, and its physical traces eradicated. In summary, in Her Sister’s Eye, the tentatively happy ending is when two alleged madwomen who only have each other for company – the white misfit Caroline, and characters who live on the fringes represented by Murilla – easily live within the Drysdale house, historically the “scary house” at the “dead end of the line” (231). The women’s symbolic and apparently untroubled possession of the house as a haven of possibility and hope at the novel’s end suggests that with the end of the Drysdale family line, the inevitable and imminent demise of the Red Rose ladies (the ailing Polly Goodman is the only surviving Red Rose lady), and the deaths of the remaining people who represent the last, direct traces of the Drysdales’ horrible legacy – Raymond and Sofie24 – the house’s grounds and the land in Mundra will once again be fertile. The house, and possibly the town, have become a larger kind of “borderland,” a “revelatory” space rather than a barren, secretive, “prohibited space”: a meeting-place between those white settlers who claimed the town and river as their own, and the Aboriginal people who were forced from the land and were once relegated to the literal and metaphorical “fringes” (144) but who have now returned. To return to this chapter’s opening and Turcotte’s observations in his article “Spectrality,” it is indeed “the dominant culture which is refigured as the Gothic other” (10) in Her Sister’s Eye. Cleven “interrogates” and “exposes” the “systems of meaning” (Turcotte, Peripheral 185) represented by Drysdale’s men, the Red Rose ladies, and the whole concept of white “ownership” in the town of Mundra, and perhaps more broadly, in all of Australia.

24 Raymond, who was beaten and whose sister was murdered by Edward Drysdale, and Sofie, who was raped by Donald Drysdale, have tragically died by this point in the novel because of Raymond throwing himself into the Stewart River and taking Sofie with him.

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Chapter 5 “Man of the House”: The Homosocial House in Andrew Pyper’s The Guardians In The Poetics of Space, French philosopher and “dreamer of houses” Gaston Bachelard suggests that “[t]he house, even more than the landscape, is a ‘psychic state’” (72) and that “the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind” (6). Bachelard pays particular attention to the childhood house, more specifically, “the house we were born in” (15) because he believes that it is with this “first” house (Bachelard 13) that one’s body establishes a permanent “passionate liaison,” arguing “the house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting. We are the diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particular house, and all the other houses are but variations on a fundamental theme” (15). Canadian writer Andrew Pyper’s 2011 horror novel The Guardians features a house – named the Thurman house – that is in many ways a “first” house for a group of young Canadian boys who name themselves “the Guardians.” Unfortunately for the boys, however, the Thurman house is sentient and malevolent, and, as the boys’ de facto “first” house, has special access to the boys’ emotional vulnerabilities and what Bachelard would term their “intimate lives” (8). While this chapter’s examination of The Guardians is not a thorough “topoanalysis” – Bachelard’s term for the “systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives” (8) – of the Guardians and their relationship with the Thurman house, nevertheless, Bachelard’s theories help unravel the complex, “intimate,” psychological and physical connections between the Guardians and the Thurman house. To summarise the novel briefly: set in the fictional “farming town” (ch. 4) of Grimshaw, Ontario, The Guardians is about four men – Ben, Carl, Randy, and narrator Trevor who records events from their past in his “Memory Diary” entries. As 16-year-olds in 1984, the boys discover the battered corpse of their music teacher Heather Langham in the cellar of their

78 small town’s local “haunted” (“Memory Diary: Entry No. 3”) 25 house, the Thurman house. They bury the body in the cellar after two of the boys get into a fight and one of them bleeds on the body, thereby linking his DNA to the murder he did not commit. Based on a premonition of Ben’s, they determine that the coach of their Grimshaw Guardians hockey team killed Langham and, when they abduct the coach and tie him up in the basement of the Thurman house in order to extract a confession, he escapes into an upstairs room and commits suicide, blaming the house for Langham’s death. 24 years later, Ben – the one Guardian who never moved away, writing in his journal that the house needed to be “guarded” – commits suicide, ostensibly because of the house. Now in their 40s, the three remaining Guardians return home for Ben’s funeral, and when another young woman named Tracey Flanagan mysteriously disappears, they suspect the house. The men are forced to confront the house one more time, resulting in the house’s ghostly possession of Randy, and Randy’s death in the burning down of the house. The Thurman house is a distinctly abject space in the town – the house has been empty for years, and is full of garbage and graffiti. Trevor comments that the house is where teenagers go to drink and do things “with their clothes off” (“MDE 2”). As children, the four main characters who become the Guardians challenge each other to confront its scariness, “daring each other to see who could look longest through its windows without blinking or running away” (ch. 1). The house’s sentience is made apparent early in the novel when the narrator Trevor reflects on the nature of the Thurman house’s character. The house itself appears to be “no different” from “the other squat, no-nonsense residences” (“MDE 7”) in its neighbourhood. But while other citizens of Grimshaw might consider the house as simply derelict, throughout the novel Trevor and his friends regard the house as a “living thing,” and after Ben’s funeral when Trevor and Randy momentarily survey the house, Trevor says

25 Alternating chapters in the novel are excerpts from the narrator’s diary, and have numbered titles such as “Memory Diary: Entry No. 2,” “Memory Diary: Entry No. 3,” and so forth. From this point on, I will refer to the “Memory Diary” chapters with the abbreviation “MDE” followed by the number of the diary entry.

79 he “can feel Randy wanting to say something along the lines of my own thoughts, a comment at how unbelievable it is that the four walls and buckling roof before us could be mistaken for a living thing. But I don’t want the house to hear him” (ch. 16). Additionally, the house has resident “ghosts” in the form of the dead, 16-year-old Roy DeLisle, and naked apparitions of Heather Langham, Elizabeth Worth – who was murdered by Roy Delisle in 1949 – and the still-living Tracey Flanagan. However, I would suggest that Roy is not actually a ghost but that he and the female ghosts are apparitions projected by the house to seduce the Guardians and others such as the coach into doing its will. Roy and the naked female apparitions who intermittently appear in the windows and the living room resemble what or who the house thinks the Guardians desire and are mobilised by the house in order to manipulate the Guardians more easily. While the four Guardians seem convinced the house’s sentience is a result of Roy’s ghost, the novel indicates otherwise, that the house has its own consciousness. Trevor notes while in the house that “[t]here was something in here with us. Not Randy. . . . Not even the boy [Roy]. But something else altogether. A presence that had yet to let itself be known, but was aware of us. Saw endless possibilities in our being here” (“MDE 7,” italics in the original). The “something else” is never identified, not even by the novel’s end, but examples of the house’s propensity to take on or adopt different forms abound such as when Trevor asks the possessed coach, “Who are you?” The coach answers, “Whoever I need to be . . . [to] [k]eep you here” (“MDE 12”). Additionally, Ben as an adult is coaxed into suicide by the apparition of his long-dead father on the Thurman house steps (ch. 13). Like Hill House in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, the Thurman house is a “live organism” (Jackson, ch. 1) that manipulates and torments its visitors. To add to the house’s menace, Roy’s physical similarity to the four boys makes him what Trevor calls a “dark twin” (“MDE 7”), who indulges in what the boys secretly want to indulge in – the most obvious example being sex with a ghostly Heather Langham or with an apparition of the disappeared girl Tracey Flanagan. This physical resemblance, I argue, as

80 well as Roy’s sexual actions, are what make him so easy to identify with as far as Trevor is concerned, in spite of Trevor’s apparent and outward discomfort with Roy’s actions. Roy does sexually what Trevor seems to wish he could do. Roy’s physical “twinning” of the Guardians tricks Trevor into believing at least at a subconscious level – in a dream of Roy having sexual intercourse with Tracey Flanagan, and later in a vision of himself having sexual intercourse with Heather Langham in the house’s living room – that he is capable of doing whatever Roy does. Using Roy as lure, the house pushes at Trevor the illusion that he can sexually acquire any woman he wants. While The Guardians is ostensibly about a group of men battling as children and later as adults with a “malign” house (Bailey 6), simply put, the Thurman house is a freeing space for the men in which the concept of “Being a Man” (Pyper, ch. 4) is revealed to be an artificial, damaging practice that only serves to isolate and create distance between men as a group. “Being a Man” – that is, being a man who fits into the hegemonic masculine model Trevor invokes in comparing himself and his friends to “warriors” (ch. 16), “soldiers” (“MDE 9”), or even American superhero Superman26 – precludes the possibility of “a more sensitive and intimate masculinity” (Hammarén and Johansson 3). The house’s freeing quality is that in spite of its malevolence, the house allows the Guardians, albeit temporarily, to explore a different kind of male, same-sex, homosocial relationship: what the narrator Trevor calls a ”rare” and “fierce love” (ch. 1). However, though the house burning down in the novel’s “formula,” quasi-“happy ending” certainly results in the destruction of the house’s evil influence, I would argue that the house’s destruction also, sadly, marks the destruction of the repressed “fierce” love between the men. The remaining men are obligated to assume a stereotypical masculine friendship and lose their short-lived freedom to express what masculinity scholars Hammarén

26 Trevor’s assertion that the boys must fight for “Truth. Justice” (“MDE 9”) is highly reminiscent of the slogan associated with DC Comics’ Superman who fights for “The never ending battle for truth, justice and the American way” (Reid).

81 and Johansson describe as “horizontal homosociality” (5), that is, a “nonprofitable form of friendship” between members of the same sex that is “based on emotional closeness [and] intimacy” (5). Following the destruction of the house, the novel succumbs to portraying a friendship between men that is regulated by homophobia and “homohysteria” – the fear of being perceived as homosexual because of ostensibly feminised or gender atypical behavior (Anderson 80) – common in depictions of male friendship in contemporary North American culture.27 Bachelard’s “passionate liaison” between the house and the boys reveals itself early in the novel even though, as mentioned, Trevor and the other Guardians are not literally “born” in the Thurman House. Its identity as a surrogate “first” house is reflected in the house’s resemblance to Trevor’s childhood house, “an unloved version of the one in which I lived” (“MDE 7”). The house in fact occasionally functions as a proxy parent: when eight-year-old Ben learns of his father’s suicide, for example, Ben’s first impulse is to run from his mother straight into the Thurman house, “the darkest place he knew” (ch. 16). The rest of the boys follow and together the four have their first moment of intense sharing and sympathy: “Without a look between us, we knelt and took Ben in our arms” (“MDE 2”). Lastly, in this “first” house the boys lose their collective innocence: not during a sexual encounter, but in the discovery of their teacher’s corpse and their manipulation by the house into burying it in the cellar. The house forces key rites of passage on the boys within its walls, marking them for life as they evolve into their unhappy, conflicted adulthoods. Throughout their lives the boys’ “passionate liaison” with the Thurman house dogs them. The novel opens, for example, with Trevor as a 40-year-old man having moved away from Grimshaw years ago, but still carrying the house’s imprint because he cannot progress beyond the death of Heather Langham: he sees her reflected behind him as he looks in his Toronto condominium bathroom mirror, “[Dirt caked] in her hair, darkening

27 Even “bromances” are not immune from reinforcing the heteronormative status quo – see Elizabeth J. Chen’s article “Caught in a Bad Bromance” in Texas Journal of Women and the Law.

82 her lashes. The bits of earth that refused to shake off when she rose from it” (ch. 2). That Heather Langham was the Guardians’ first significant teenage crush – the boys were all “instantly in love with her” (“MDE 3”) when she first came to teach music in their high school – and that 24 years later she is still caked with dirt from the Thurman house’s cellar floor suggests the intertwining of the Trevor’s “first house” with his “psychic state” (Bachelard 72). Trevor cannot forget Heather Langham and, considering that her apparition in the condo mirror is covered in the dirt from the Thurman house’s cellar dirt floor, I posit that the apparition is also a visitation by the house via a projection of Heather Langham. But while the Thurman house is witness to the boys’ grief, and is the instigator of their major transgressions, the house also reflects their unresolved anxieties as 40-year-old men in terms of being “real” men. Trevor explains the house’s persistent hold over the boys, now men, when he writes in his diary that the house “messed all of us up in different ways. Addiction. Professional failure. Emotional amputations.” (“MDE” 4). In this way the house is truly the Guardians’ “psychic state,” having “engraved within [them] the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting,” so that they are incapable of properly “inhabiting” anywhere else (Bachelard 15).

This figure of the “messed up” man in Pyper’s fiction is not unique to his novel The Guardians. In a review of The Guardians in the Canadian literary magazine Quill and Quire, James Grainger comments on the predominance of “traditional masculinity” as a theme in Andrew Pyper’s works, pointing out that The Guardians is no exception to Pyper’s usual practice in his fiction. Grainger writes: Pyper’s work is infused with persistent anxiety about the place of traditional masculinity – with its codes of duty, restraint, loyalty, even chivalry – in a rootless, postmodern world that rejects notions of objective morality, truth, and identity. Pyper’s male protagonists . . . at heart [are] old fashioned men seeking a cause capable of dragging them from their moral and emotional quagmires. . . . The question of how to be such a man in a world that does not recognise

83 or reward those virtues generates much of the underlying emotional tension in Pyper’s . . . novels. Trevor, Ben, Carl, and Randy as the Guardians endeavor to be “old fashioned men,” but according to Trevor they are without adequate masculine models; they only have inferior examples such as the homicidal coach. The “dads” in The Guardians are also all literally or figuratively absent. Trevor laments in his diary, “We were boys, so you’re supposed to look first to our dads in having a hand in making us the way we were” (“MDE 3”), but Trevor’s father is an alcoholic accountant (“MDE 3”); Ben’s father kills himself; Carl’s father is “chased out of town” (“MDE 9”) by debts and arrest warrants; and Randy’s father is the model for “the loony salesman caricature” (ch. 17) in ads for Krazy Kevin! car lots. The boys are basically parentless28 and only have each other (and possibly the house) as a fraught and fragile “family.” While Trevor and the other Guardians certainly find the house frightening, another feature Trevor finds unnerving is the house’s gender ambiguity. Unlike other kinds of sentient houses discussed in this dissertation, the Thurman house has explicit, sexually ambiguous characteristics – it is completely Other to the white, male, presumed heteronormative identities of the Guardians. The metaphors Trevor uses to describe the house depict the house as an embodiment of troubling sexuality: he describes “the leer of the house’s darkened eyes” (ch. 8) directed at Heather Langham as she walks past, the “leering wink of a stranger” (ch. 9) the house gives Trevor, and a pedophilic impulse he believes the house emanates: “I could feel the plaster ceilings and paneled walls closing toward me in a suffocating embrace, the too-long hug of a creepy uncle at the end of Thanksgiving dinner” (“MDE 10”). Elsewhere in the novel, Trevor observes during one evening that the house “preferred darkness for the same reason old whores do. It allowed for the possibility of seduction” (“MDE 11”), and later on he describes the house’s “emptiness”

28 With the exception of Ben’s mother Betty McAuliffe, the boys’ mothers are hardly mentioned in the novel at all.

84 and “vacancy” as “unnatural,” like “a sign of disease or threat, like a pretty girl standing alone at a dance” (“MDE 7”). In comparing the house to a lecherous voyeur who “leers” (whether male or female), a possibly pedophilic uncle who hugs too long, an “old whore” who represents a predator rather than a victim, and a “pretty girl” who presumably invites attention just by being pretty but who is a “threat” in her solitariness and therefore a trap of some kind, the house is depicted as a sexually abject, predominately feminised, “abnormal,” and gender- “contradictory,” categorically-slippery monster (Carroll 32) of the kind described by Noël Carroll in his book The Philosophy of Horror. The house both repels and attracts Trevor – it is a dangerous pretty girl and “old whore” possibly trying to seduce him into a pedophile’s embrace. But the threat is not just in the house’s ambiguous, predacious sexuality. As mentioned in this dissertation’s Introduction, space theorist Christine Wilson posits in her article “Haunted Habitability” that sentient houses are threatening because while not “literal wilderness” they are still, in effect, a kind of “wilderness” and “spaces of animation, unruliness, and often desolation. . . . They defy the boundaries between domestic and natural space, the wild and the domesticated subject and object, and the animate and inanimate” (201-2). Wilson’s thesis of the haunted house as a “wild” and “unruly” space resonates with Pyper’s use of the natural imagery incorporated in the Thurman house: an old carpet in the house is “patterned with cypress trees” (“MDE 7”); Trevor describes Roy’s ghost as exuding a smell like “something mossy and fungal” (“MDE 12”). And near the end of the novel, Trevor looks out a Thurman house window into the house’s backyard, reflecting that the indoors of the house is far more “wild” than the outdoors: “the backyard looks limitless and wild in the dark. . . . But when I turn away from the glass, . . . now looking into the house instead of out, I have the same sensation, only stronger” (ch. 17). The Guardians’ struggle is to “tame” the “wildness,” “domesticate” the unruly lawlessness of Roy and the Thurman house – but for them, the only way they can do this is if they are able to understand their own place in a “rootless, postmodern world” (Grainger). Wilson makes an interesting

85 point when she writes that within haunted house fictions that use the “wilderness trope,” the “hostility these texts portray toward wilderness spaces rivals that of early American pioneers, who believed that wild spaces were liable to produce immorality in its inhabitants” (203). The Guardians also uses this portrayal of the haunted house as a place that encourages “immorality”; this novel proposes that the only way men can find their place in such a “rootless” world is if they behave as “old fashioned men” in the immoral space of the house, even if “old fashioned” also risks the connotation of retrograde “pioneer.” The central challenge for the character Trevor – and possibly for the other Guardians – is to figure out how to be “good guys” when “good guys” purportedly no longer have a place, and are often ineffectual. Trevor reinforces Grainger’s reading of Pyper’s oeuvre when Trevor laments about how the Guardians are unable to defeat the house: “We were good guys. Unquestioned loyalty. A soldier’s duty. This is what the coach, our fathers, every hero we’d ever watched on the Vogue’s screen had told us. . . . Standing up for the fellow wearing the same uniform as you, even if it made little sense” (“MDE 6”). The house’s menace lies in how it hovers between the animate and the inanimate and so is “categorically contradictory” (Carroll 32), but also in how it repeatedly and easily wins the “battles” in which the Guardians believe they must fight like other “good guys,” such as “soldiers.” The house actively works to undermine the “goodness” in “good guys,” preferring as it does to encourage and host atrocities such as abduction, rape, murder, and suicide within its walls. As the coach tells the boys during his strained murder confession, the house’s danger is that it encourages the men who enter it to enact their most basic and violent – what the possessed coach downplays as “naughty” – desires. He says to them, You know those naughty little whispers that you hear all the time, but that you’re able to hold down. . . ? Well, those naughty whispers . . . told me nothing really counted. Not here. . . . You have to guard against places like this. Against people like me . . . . That’s what’s

86 really dangerous, what’ll surprise you. The things that have nothing inside. (“MDE 12”) The house in its emptiness, its “pretty girl” loneliness, brings out the worst in the men who enter it, but the “worst” it brings out is what is already present in the men, what masculinity theorists R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt would call the “toxic practices” (840) sometimes apparent in hegemonic masculinity. To return to the Thurman house as “psychic state”: I speculate that the house brings out the “worst” in the men associated with it in its emptiness and loneliness – a loneliness that each of the men experiences his own way following the terrible winter of 1984 – and in its invitations to them to indulge in their repressed, misogynistic desires. While the house does not directly kill anyone itself until the book’s end, just before he shoots himself the coach explains in his confession that “what this place gives us is a licence to act. It’s a stage, but a bare one. A theatre without sets, without a script. And most important, without an audience!’” (“MDE 12”). This suggests that while the house is not the direct agent in the murder of Heather Langham or the rape and murder of Elizabeth Worth, the house does provide a freakishly lawless and immoral zone. The house is a “wild” space (Wilson, “Habitability” 202) that gives men the freedom to “act” in the most villainous ways possible: Roy DeLisle when he murders his foster-sister Elizabeth Worth in 1949, Roy’s guardian Paul Schantz in the same year when he murders Roy in retaliation, the Guardians’ coach when he murders Heather Langham in 1984, and a house-possessed Randy when he kidnaps Tracey Flanagan and tries to kill Trevor in 2008. That the nefarious deeds committed by the men are rooted in the men’s desires, and reflect what the men already want, rather than what is imposed on them by the house is borne out in an interview with author Andrew Pyper when Pyper claims that the Thurman house acts as a “house of mirrors in that you will see in it horrific things, but those horrific things ultimately come from yourself. They’re distortions, they may not be true, but they are all self-generated” (qtd. in Colbert). Pyper goes on to state that Roy Delisle is “bad,” but is also similar to the other Guardians: he claims

87 that Roy is “someone who enacted thoughts: that’s what ultimately made him bad. And I think the living boys in the novel have probably similar thoughts to those of the boy. The difference is they don’t enact them. . . . I see the boy as another Guardian. He’s one of them, but he is the one who went all the way.” This notion that Roy is just one of the Guardians – albeit one who has gone “all the way” – supports monster theorist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s assertion about monsters such as the Thurman house that “when contained by geographic, generic, or epistemic marginalisation, the monster can function as an alter ego, as an alluring projection of (an Other) self” (17). For Pyper, going “all the way” indicates that men who feel the compulsion to protect (or guard) also, by extension, feel the compulsion to kill and cause sexual harm. In this case, Roy – or Roy as the house’s projection – is an “alter ego” of the heterosexual members of the Guardians, an “alter ego” that “enact[s]” their “naughty” (“MDE 12”) murderous thoughts about young, sexually desirable women. I would suggest that the house is “seductive” as a “theatre,” but it seduces in a way that is ultimately detrimental to the notion of the “old-fashioned,” chivalrous man; it operates as a kind of motor for perversion – a place where “boys will be boys” in the worst possible way. Trevor uncomfortably identifies sexually with the dead rapist Roy DeLisle, who appears in Trevor’s dream and invites Trevor to have sex with the woman Roy is already in the midst of sexually penetrating: [Roy] leans to the side to reveal his face over Tracey Flanagan’s shoulder. Enflamed, gloating. He is more interested in me than whatever mark he means to leave on Tracey. Hey there, old man. It’s been a while. The boy’s lips don’t move, but I can hear him nonetheless. You want a piece of this? Come inside. It’s his voice that prompts me to move. To get up and run away. (ch. 10, italics in the original) So while Roy’s sexual use of Tracey apparently horrifies Trevor, this dream still touches on Trevor’s suppressed attraction to Tracey (the twenty- something daughter of a former school-mate). The dream also quite possibly

88 indicates Trevor’s attraction to Roy, in the way that pioneering queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire suggests an “erotic rivalry” is enacted where “the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved: that the bonds of ‘rivalry’ and ‘love,’ differently as they are experienced, are equally powerful and in many senses equivalent” (21). Roy and Trevor might be “twins,” but their shared erotic interests makes them more than just doubles. Even though Trevor does not touch Tracey Flanagan, in his dream Roy and Trevor are erotically entwined in a way that suggests that Roy has designs on Trevor, “is more interested” in Trevor than the woman he is having sex with. Trevor, by extension, does not flinch from Roy’s gaze until Roy invites him “inside” Tracey Flanagan, and “inside” the forbidden and dangerous, “wild” zone of the house. The house’s perverted “house of mirrors” qualities are again apparent mid-way through the novel when as an adult Trevor looks into the house’s living room where he sees a man having sexual intercourse with a ghostly Heather Langham in the same way he has seen Roy have sex with the female apparitions in the house and in his dreams; but when the man turns his head around so Trevor can see his face, Trevor sees that the man is himself. Roy frightens Trevor, but on some level Trevor also identifies with, and sees himself in Roy. The effect for Trevor, then, is that he can posit himself as a “good guy” by “running away” from Roy, yet also obtain vicarious pleasure from Roy’s words and actions. The house is a “vile other” (“MDE 12”) that in its projection as Roy beguiles the “vile” in Trevor. But what is Pyper suggesting about the Guardians – and about men in general – when he says that the house is a “house of mirrors” and that Roy is “one of [the Guardians], but he is the one who went all the way”? Is Pyper suggesting that all men are potential rapists and murderers, or that at their very best they secretly want to degrade women sexually? Is Pyper suggesting that Trevor subconsciously wishes he could rape and murder women, but it is only the cultural “order” and “culture’s standards of

89 normality” (Carroll 199) that have so far prevented him from fulfilling such desires? And if Roy is also a Guardian according to Pyper, then what are the Guardians actually guarding? Based on Pyper’s comments in interviews and the behaviours of the male characters in the novel, the novel seems to suggest that the house provides a weird sanctuary for the expression of a violently heterosexual, masculine, id-like liberation embodied in the coach, Roy DeLisle, and Trevor’s mirrored self. And in succumbing to the house’s persuasions to be “bad” and to their fear of the house, the house ensures over and over again that the Guardians fail to be “real” men or “heroes”: for example, even though they lust after Heather Langham and watch her every day from Ben’s bedroom window, the boys fail to save her; they concoct a flawed plan to kidnap the coach, and fail to get a proper confession from him before he kills himself; the Guardians fail to prevent the disappearance of Tracey Flanagan in the present day; and all the boys fail in that their emotional lives remain incapable of developing past the moment they discover Heather Langham’s body in the cellar. Until the very end, the Thurman house always undermines the “good guys.” The Thurman house is a monstrous “guardian”/parent that refuses to let the “children” leave, that does not want “its” boys to grow up. Indeed, 40-year-old Trevor has a moment of regression in the house – he turns back into a boy – when he contemplates going into the cellar to search for Tracey Flanagan and rescue her: “I’m a boy again. A sixteen-year-old boy. Or even younger, for the whimper that escapes my lips is the sound an abandoned toddler makes in a supermarket aisle.” Only when he resolves to be “the man of the house” as he phrases it, is he capable of summoning enough courage to “start down the stairs” (ch. 17). But taking on the role of “man” allows these characters to act in ways they see as heroic, even if those ways can lead to harm for women. Perhaps the boys’ dilemma can be unpacked in part by examining the role of patriarchy in men’s relationships within a patriarchal culture. In Between Men, Sedgwick paraphrases Gayle Rubin when she writes that “partriarchal heterosexuality can best be discussed in terms of one or another form of the traffic in women: it is the use of women as

90 exchangeable, perhaps symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the nods of men with men” (25-6). This is corroborated by Connell and Messerschmidt when they argue that “women are central in many of the processes constructing masculinities” (848). Throughout The Guardians women are “trafficked” by men, and/or are key to them “being men”; when they appear they appear strictly in relation to men: as the victims of men, the girlfriends or wives of men, the mothers of men, or as in the case of Elizabeth Worth – whose rape and murder are avenged by her foster-father’s murder of her foster-brother Roy – as an object fought over by men. Tellingly, in The Guardians, women’s sexuality is often depicted as destabilising and always on display for the “male gaze.” As mentioned earlier, naked, ghostly women appear in the windows of the Thurman house; Trevor and Randy scrutinise internet photos of the missing Tracey Flanagan, whom Trevor calls “beautiful in her nakedness” (ch. 10); Trevor cannot help comparing the disturbingly alluring, dead face of Heather Langham to the faces of the “sluttiest girls at school” (“MDE 7”). Within the “vile” shelter of the Thurman house, and in the lives of the Guardians, young women’s bodies almost always “invite” violation, and sex in general is almost always portrayed as belittling or unequal for at least one of the partners. Even in the larger context of the book, when Trevor the narrator is with his sexually assertive female partner Sarah Musgrave – his former girlfriend from high school – Trevor repeatedly feels some kind of shame or inadequacy. For example, in the present as a 40-year-old adult, Trevor is at a sexual disadvantage. Because of his Parkinson’s tremors, he needs help taking his belt off, and when talking about sex with Sarah he refers to it euphemistically as Sarah “proceed[ing] to help me in other ways too” (ch. 11). What this seems to suggest is that within the novel, any man who is not in command of the sexual event is in a position of vulnerability, and that women are somehow in control. I would even go so far as to suggest that the men in The Guardians – or, at the very least, Trevor – find their own sexuality and desires troubling, and so as Guardians, what they have to “guard” when they ostensibly

91 “guard” the house/body/prison that contains Roy DeLisle, is themselves and their own potentially extreme sexual desires. The house as the boys’ “psychic state,” operates as a judgmental, moralistic force with regard to sex – warping and killing those who have sexual desire – much as the house seems to encourage the “naughty” (“MDE 12”) and the “wild” in these boys trying to be “real” men. In her discussion of horror cinema, film theorist Barbara Creed in The Monstrous Feminine makes an important observation that applies to The Guardians when she suggests that although most monsters in films are “male,” “woman is represented as monstrous in a significant number of horror films” (7). She draws on Stephen Neale’s observation in his book Genre that it is in fact women’s sexuality that is considered “monstrous”: most monsters tend, in fact, to be defined as “male,” especially in so far as the objects of their desire are almost exclusively women. . . . In this respect, it could well be maintained that it is woman's sexuality, that which renders them desirable - but also threatening - to men, which constitutes the real problem that the horror cinema exists to explore, and which constitutes also and ultimately that which is really monstrous. (Neale qtd. in Creed 5) A lot of popular cinema then, uses women’s sexuality as the monstrous threat for which female victims must be punished. The male antagonist attacks, while a male protagonist protects. Thus, female characters are necessary to invoke desire and to suffer male aggression, but – far more importantly in such narratives – male characters at either side of the good/bad equation are necessary for each other. In The Guardians, young female characters are written so that they are always on display, and as though they invite violation; their youth and attractiveness create the monstrousness in the men who want to have sex with them. So in order to restore the “normal,” Trevor must work to resist the temptation of women’s bodies and the “seductiveness” of the sexually abject house, because it brings out the “toxic” in him and his friends. But for a man to not want to have sex with a woman is also something to be hidden and ashamed of; in The Guardians to prefer only the company of men is also dangerous, and the

92 house encourages the close bonding of men – an issue I will address later in this chapter. For Trevor, another unsettling quality of the Thurman house is that it refuses to be observed and be object – it insists on always being the subject. As a sometime-voyeur used to doing the looking rather than being looked at, Trevor is curiously disturbed that “Every time you looked into [the house], it looked into you” (ch. 5). Just as the house is characterised by Trevor as a “whore” (“MDE 11”) or a “pretty girl” (“MDE 7”) wearing the perfume of grotesque “old ladies” (ch. 17), Trevor’s discomfort with the house could lie in its sometimes feminine gendered associations. Trevor’s (or Pyper’s?) position is not unlike Freud’s in the essay “The Uncanny” when Freud characterises the uncanny as feminine. Jane Marie Todd observes in her article “The Veiled Woman in Freud’s ‘Das Unheimliche’” that when Freud gives examples in the essay to illustrate the uncanny, he uses “the central figure of woman in many of his examples and the related theme of seeing and being seen” (521), and argues that for Freud “[i]t is women who are unheimlich” (527). One also cannot help but think of theorists such as Laura Mulvey who in her highly influential article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” observes that [t]he determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire. (19)29

29 Of course, numerous critics have written counter-arguments to Mulvey’s theories around the gaze since “Visual Pleasure” was originally published, pointing out the heteronormative assumptions inherent in Mulvey’s theories. Tim Edwards’ Cultures of Masculinity, for example, is a more recent text that provides a succinct history of the criticism concerning Mulvey’s article, citing scholars such as Kenneth MacKinnon who critiques Mulvey for assuming that “the spectator is always male or masculinised,” for overlooking the possibility “of a feminised male object and the role of masochism as a form of pleasure for both men and women,” and for “Mulvey’s neglect of female or feminine spectatorship” (105). Barbara Creed also points out how the presence of the “monstrous feminine” in

93 Trevor repeatedly looks at: the first line of the novel is “We watched them come” (“MDE 1”), referring to the Guardians watching through the curtained windows of Ben’s house as the police arrive at the Thurman house to discover Heather Langham’s body. And Trevor most importantly treats women as spectacle throughout the novel; he implies that pretty women are meant to be looked at: as teens, he and the Guardians in Ben’s attic bedroom watch Heather Langham walk home from work every day; immediately after her death and again 24 years later, he sees or thinks he sees different naked women pressing their hands against or clawing at the insides of the windows of the Thurman house, and he insists that “The house . . . wanted me to watch” (“MDE 11”). But for he himself to be looked at rather than doing the looking is deeply unnerving for Trevor; his intentional or unintentional voyeurism is also an act that Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure” determines as the sexual pleasure that “come[s] from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other” (17). The house also seems to have intimate knowledge of Trevor’s propensity for looking at and objectifying women, and works to mock Trevor for his voyeuristic impulses, blatantly “looking back” at him as often as it can. Although the closeness of and loyalty shown between the Guardians in the book seems to celebrate the love of close male friendship, and reinforces the importance of not being “empty” (“MDE 7”) or “alone” like the house, the novel “corrects” itself in the message it presents at its conclusion when it shows that, for the men in this book, truly close male friendship can only occur under extraordinary circumstances. Throughout The Guardians, the boys repeatedly engage in intimate acts that are not normally considered “masculine,” such as group hugs and hand-holding. horror movies “challenge[s] the view that the male spectator is almost always situated in an active, sadistic position and the female spectator in a passive, masochistic one” (7). For the purposes of this chapter, however, I will continue to draw on Mulvey’s original article as The Guardians involves many examples of the heteronormative, male-centered “looking” Mulvey addresses, and does suggest that the male gaze operates as a component of patriarchy, regardless of the gender or sexuality of the character doing the looking. That is, if the house looks back, then the monstrous feminine asserts a male persona, for example, and if Trevor is being looked at by his girlfriend, he must, then, be in the position of “object.” And if the boys all secretly stare at Heather Langham together, then Carl cannot be homosexual.

94 For example, Trevor remembers a time when the “gang” comforted Ben shortly after his father’s suicide: “we held our friend – and each other – in a spontaneous show of comradeship and love. We were experiencing a rare thing (rarer still for boys): we were feeling someone else’s pain as acutely as if it were our own. Ben wasn’t crying, but we were” (“MDE 2”). The coach’s mockery of this moment years later as Ben with his “fairy-boy friends” (“MDE 12”) only serves to underscore the argument Sedgwick uses in Between Men when she writes that “homophobia [is] not most immediately an oppression of homosexual men, but [is also] a tool for manipulating the entire spectrum of male bonds, and hence the gender system as a whole” (16). The coach (while possessed by the house) gender- polices the boys by condemning them for comforting their friend, and so the coach forces the boys into what Sedgwick refers to as the male, “coercive double bind” (89) of loving their friend at the risk of “loving” their friend (Palmer 24), what Paulina Palmer describes as the way in which “patriarchy entraps the male; while insisting he should bond socially and form friendships and professional ties with other men, it forbids him to engage in sexual relations with them” (24). The boys are trapped by the “carefully blurred, always-already line” that separates being a “man’s man . . . from being ‘interested in men’” (Sedgwick 89). They comfort Ben, which shows their close ties to their friend and also their sensitivity, but they must only engage in such close physical acts during moments of extreme emotional crisis. To hug in this way for casual comfort would trigger their homohysteria, and “entrap” them inside an identity that their very friendship refutes. It is against this “oppression” (Sedgwick 16) and homophobic gender-policing that Trevor chafes when he seems to lament the rarity or lack of ability for men to express their love for each other in a way that could be “normalised” when he reflects on the “undocumented love” between close male friends: “There was a love between us too. A sexless, stillborn love, yet just as fierce as the other kinds. The common but largely undocumented love between men who forged their friendship in late childhood” (ch. 1). He also includes examples in his journal of the

95 Guardians showing their “fierce” love for each other in spite of their underlying homophobia or homohysteria, such as when the Guardians are burying Heather Langham’s body and Carl starts to cry: Trevor notes how “disturbing” it is, the “alien” sound of the crying. However, in spite of their initial attempts “to ignore it,” the boys find themselves giving in to their impulse to comfort Carl: “the alien sound of Carl’s grief sapped us of our strength, so that we could only kneel around him, our hands on his elbows, the sides of his head, as though we were holding him together” (“MDE 7”). But Trevor is careful to point out that their friendship is not based on their fondness for each other but can be attributed to or “blamed” on the horror that forces them together. Trevor insists, “What we shared made us friends. But here’s the truth of the thing: our loyalty had little to do with friendship. For that, you’d have to look . . . at the house” (“MDE 2”). Trevor seems to be trying to explain away these moments of physical intimacy between the boys and emphasise the utilitarian, “profitable” nature of the friendship, as though holding Carl is only out of necessity in the face of the house’s adversity, and as if close male friendship is so unusual that they can only attain it with the help of a malevolent house. By “blaming” the house for their closeness and these physical demonstrations of affection, the novel shies away from showing the full complexities of the Guardians’ love or “the continuum of homosocial desires and erotic expression” (Hammarén and Johansson 4). As an example of this “homosexual panic” (Sedgwick 89) and discomfort with homosocial closeness, throughout the novel Trevor repeatedly “checks” himself when he is too close to another male. The most telling example of this is when Trevor remembers the time he held Carl’s hand to draw Carl out of the house just after they tie up the coach in the cellar: “he held my hand as much as I held his. We let go only once the night opened wide around us outside. Thankful that the others had already headed home. It should go without saying that I never mentioned the hand-holding part to anyone ever again. Until today” (“MDE 10”). In spite of his apparent desire to embrace the concept of rich, platonic male love, Trevor repeatedly expresses “homosexual panic” – he is at pains to let his reader know that he is not

96 queer, and that being close to a man makes him uncomfortable in spite of the house as a site revealing otherwise. But Pyper as author at least seems to attempt to subvert the moments of “straight panic” that taint the boys’ closeness with each other by including a Guardian who comes out as gay in the novel. Carl – the one Guardian who demonstrates unambiguous homophobia when later in the novel he summons his friends by calling, “You faggots coming or not?” (ch. 13) – reveals to Trevor at the end of the novel that he has a boyfriend named Adam. Trevor’s reaction is a non-reaction: he is completely accepting of this revelation. Carl’s gayness and Trevor’s immediate acceptance are significant in this novel that is ostensibly about “old-fashioned” men because it suggests that while Trevor has had spells of “straight panic,” he is not homophobic, or at least not homophobic towards men with whom he feels a decades-long bond. Trevor’s acceptance also seems to suggest that he has no difficulty with the idea that he once held hands with a “fairy-boy” even though at the time he believed he was taking the hand of his heterosexual friend, something he calls at the time, “A weird thing to do” (“MDE 10”). However, I would like to point out that Carl only tells Trevor he has a boyfriend after the Thurman house is destroyed, and their common enemy is defeated; by coming out after they have permanently escaped the house, Carl and his queerness pose no threat to Trevor outside the house’s permissive, sexually licentious “wildness” that possibly impelled Trevor to take Carl’s hand, and could conceivably have compelled Trevor to enact a “wild” sexual response to Carl’s homosexuality. In this respect, Pyper undermines the novel’s depiction of a “sensitive and intimate” (Hammarén and Johansson 3) love between men, gay and straight. Indeed, I would argue that Pyper succumbs to “homosexual panic” on behalf of his characters. Pyper’s “homosexual panic” as a writer occurs when he pairs off and separates the two remaining Guardians immediately after the house evaporates as their shared enemy: in the novel’s final chapter the reader learns that Carl is moving into Trevor’s condominium in Toronto, and that Trevor has decided to leave Toronto and move in with his old girlfriend Sarah Musgrave and her son in Grimshaw.

97 Even though Trevor claims at the end of the book that he continued to battle the Thurman House for love of his friends - “I did it for love” (“MDE 16”) he writes in his diary – the “love” doesn’t seem to stand for much since Trevor and Carl are immediately “claimed” by romantic partners and geographically separated after the house has been defeated. The pairing off of Carl and Trevor to other people indicates that the risk of them ever being alone together again and holding hands as friends without the horror of the house as the excuse – that is, indulging in an unprovoked “horizontal homosociality” (Hammarén and Johansson 5) – is conveniently eliminated by their (presumably) monogamous romantic attachments to their respective partners. The novel “cures” their homosocial yokes by implying that each is now yoked to an “appropriate” partner. The separation of the two remaining Guardians only serves to underscore the novel’s subtext that to be a male and not be close to one’s male friends results in an unhappy life, but to be too close to one’s male friends is also dangerous. To be alone or “empty” like the house is an undesirable state, indicated when Trevor begs the ghost Roy to let him and Randy leave the house, and Roy tells Trevor, “I’ve been alone a long time. . . . And I don’t want to be alone anymore” (ch. 17). What Trevor faces is the lethal danger of being too much of a Guardian, a man whose only life is among his soldier “brothers.” Trapped in the burning house and holding hands with Roy DeLisle, Trevor reflects back to the time when he held hands with Carl in panic, “But unlike Carl’s, [Roy’s] hand is cold, and his grip is meant not to comfort but to hold me in place” (ch. 17). To eternally choose one’s male friends because of “fierce” love becomes unsustainable in “normal” circumstances, and it is only all right for Trevor to “love” men as long as he is at a distance, and firmly partnered with a woman. “Fierce love,” “horizontal homosociality” and its “creation of a more sensitive and intimate masculinity” (Hammarén and Johansson 3) have no place in the world of the “old fashioned” man. In this novel, the Thurman house follows the same fate as other “formula” sentient house fictions discussed in Dale Bailey’s American Nightmares in dramatic fashion when it goes up in flames: the burning

98 living room is described as “A widening throat of orange and black,” and outside the house “fire tower[s] over its roof like a crown” (ch. 17). The Thurman house self-destructs at the same time its “owner,” the ghost of Roy Delisle (in the body of the character Randy) is defeated by Trevor’s escape.30 In essence, The Guardians is an examination of the anxiety around the “crisis in masculinity” (Connell and Messerschmidt 840) and what constitutes the normative in terms of male sexuality and gender. For the men who are the Guardians, adhering to the codes of so-called “traditional masculinity” (Grainger) the way incomplete, hegemonic masculine models such as soldiers, warriors and superheroes do, is what “Being a Man” is all about. By resisting the house, and the “fierce love” or “horizontal homosociality,” the sensitivity, the intimacy that is encouraged by the house, Trevor and his friends “win” as the “soldiers” and heroes Trevor imagines them to be. But they – and the women around them – also lose the benefits that a “sensitive” male friendship could give them.

30 Carl pulls Trevor from the burning house, and Randy/Roy is left behind to die.

99 Conclusion “House Rules”: The Sentient House and its Renovations This dissertation concentrates on sentient house texts set within Australia and Canada, but some examples by Australian and Canadian authors set outside Australia and Canada stand out and deserve study. Additionally, some texts sit alongside those examined in this dissertation by being set in Australia and Canada but because of space limitations could not be included. Adelaidean Vernon Knowles’ 1925 short story collection The Street of Queer Houses and Other Tales features two short stories, “The House that Took Revenge” and “The Honeymoon Cottage” that obviously predate Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and take the sentient house in interesting directions. In the whimsical “Honeymoon Cottage” the house has a voice and sentimentally narrates the love story of a man and his undead wife, while the house in “The House that Took Revenge” literally jumps off a cliff with its evil owner inside it. Canadian writer Peter Norman’s 2014 novel Emberton takes place in a “live” office tower that has to be fed human limbs and bodies. Canadian Ian Rogers’ 2012 sentient house short story collection, Every House is Haunted, contains a short story titled “The House on Ashley Avenue” that proposes the existence of a group of eight particularly evil, sentient houses known as “the Eight” that require maintenance by a secretive group of paranormal experts, and features other stories that borrow directly from Jackson’s sentient house blueprint. Canadian Susie Moloney’s The Dwelling is a US-set sentient house novel that features a psychopathically murderous house that at the same time is also intriguingly infantile and loving. And while Australian writer Stephen M. Irwin’s focus in the novel The Dead Path is more on a supernaturally menacing forest than it is on the “oddly hostile” (ch. 6) shops on Myrtle Street in the fictional suburb of Tallong, the novel is engrossing in the way it reimagines Australian history, proposing that along with British convicts, the Green Man – an enigmatic, supernatural entity only ever portrayed through architectural ornamentation in European churches – was also transported to Australia’s shores.

100 But when looking at sentient abodes, why stop at houses? Rebecca Janicker, author of The Literary Haunted House, argues for a more expansive understanding of the “home,” arguing that “any space which is regularly used by, and thus bears the mark of human occupants can fundamentally be seen as a kind of ‘home away from home’” (20). She goes on to identify examples such as the evilly sentient 1958 Plymouth Fury of Stephen King’s novel Christine – the “hellish haunted house that rolled on Goodyear rubber” (King, Christine 433) – and “public versions of the home” (20) such as the Overlook Hotel in King’s novel The Shining as contemporary iterations of the haunted house or castle. Venturing beyond the earthly realm, one might consider sentient spaceships such as V’Ger in the film Star Trek: The Motion Picture, or the spaceship in Halli Villegas’s short story “Salvage” as examples of what Horace Walpole’s original “haunted castle” and Shirley Jackson’s Hill House have become. Even though writers and critics such as Robert Wiersema and S. T. Joshi may believe that the haunted house narrative is a genre whose time is over, I disagree, and the existence of a book as recent as Janicker’s 2015 Literary Haunted House suggests otherwise. Anecdotal observation also bears this out: while mid-way through working on this dissertation, I was riding the train from Sydney to Wollongong where I was living at the time, and in a very odd coincidence I noticed a young woman in the adjoining car to mine engrossed in a thick paperback library book. She was reading the Australian edition of Andrew Pyper’s The Guardians. It was 2015. Seeing a Canadian sentient house book being read on a rumbling Australian train made me feel right at home even though I was so very far away from my Canadian home. In my novel, Five Floors of Basement, I write about a “sick” building. I draw as inspiration the ABC Toowong building I describe in this dissertation’s Introduction, but I also draw from the story of a “sick” building on the University of Calgary, Canada, campus – the 50-year-old Craigie Hall, long-time home to the fine arts and languages departments. In 2011, a worker in Craigie Hall named Amelia Labbé, coordinator of the Spanish centre in the Department of French, Italian and Spanish, tragically

101 succumbed to pulmonary fibrosis, a scarring of the lungs, whose cause was unknown. But was the cause truly unknown? According to an article in The Calgary Herald by journalist Eva Ferguson, Labbé’s husband believed she died from inhaling too much dust and debris caused by earlier “asbestos management” renovations to the building. The article also notes that six women who once worked in the building contracted cancer in the ten years prior to Labbé’s death. The majority of the women, however, chose to be “private about their illnesses.” Also according to the Herald, faculty and staff who worked in the building regularly experienced “headaches [and] fatigue” for years and vigorously lobbied university health and safety officials to undertake a complete investigation of the building. The university officials’ report concluded that Craigie Hall is not “sick.” But rumours continue to circulate. Although a university or college campus building is not a house per se, a campus can resemble a home or home away from home. Elaine Showalter in her book Faculty Towers posits that “[most] of our universities act in loco parentis for students, creating a complete society on the campus, with housing, meals, medical care and social life all provided communally and institutionally” (1). And emailed memos from University of Calgary administration to faculty and staff during times of celebration or tragedy repeatedly use the phrase “university family” (Office of the President), proposing a familial cohesion and relationship among employees. But a campus will always be an incomplete “home,” no matter how vigorously a university administration might prevail on its employees and students to be a “family.” One need only walk a university campus late at night or during summer recess to witness buildings that are deserted or temporarily occupied only by support and cleaning staff. Any student residential housing is filled with, then emptied of a cyclically transient population. The university “home” is at best an uncanny one, and its “family” often dysfunctional, as attested to by a memoir such as Andrew Riemer’s Sandstone Gothic: Confessions of an Accidental Academic about the Sydney University English Department, and “campus novels” such as

102 the well-known Campus Trilogy by UK writer David Lodge and A Nest of Singing Birds by Canadian Susan Haley. Five Floors of Basement adds to the campus novel genre, but with a twist. I push the notion of a “sick” building beyond metaphor and into the literal: Crawley Hall is alive and “sick” – in every sense of the word – and I examine the effects of this “sickness” on members of the unhappy “family” that works inside it. While the humans in Five Floors of Basement may believe they are entering Crawley Hall when they walk through its front and back doors, in truth, Crawley Hall is entering them. With Five Floors of Basement, I embark on another relocation, renovation, and reanimation – like so many other creative writers before me – of a house “born bad.”

103

Five Floors of Basement: A Novel

[The architecture] was a style to be employed only where users had no say – in schools, where teachers and pupils could be counted upon to accept with meekness whatever designers said was good for them; in housing projects, whose inmates’ opinions were never consulted about anything; in public hospitals; in jails. – Alan Gowans, Styles and Types of North American Architecture

Imagine the iron rebar skeleton inside, the bones for this rugged flesh. – Mark Kingwell, Concrete Reveries

104

August 11th Edith dreads that scrubbed raw steel wool feeling in her stomach and chest when she’s filling out her Academic Achievement Overview. It’s not due until the second week of December, but she hates doing it at the last minute. She’ll need to login into her University of Inivea portal, click on the Academic Achievement Overview button, and upload her supporting documents. But even though she’s entered the University portal, and clicked the Academic Achievement link, when she clicks the Staff Hub button it just broods like a meatloaf no matter how many times or how forcefully she clicks, even when she tries the alternate option of the Employee Centre button. Which sits smug and as pointless as a used teabag. Which means she’ll have to phone Human Resources, and she can predict exactly what those pencil-heads in Human Resources will say: Try rebooting your computer, Dr. Vane. The washing machine dings in its tiny closet. She hates doing her Academic Achievement so much she could brain it with a hammer. She punches the Employee Centre button with a mouse-click one more time, like her index finger is a fist, and the button a tree. The washing machine dings again, clunks, sounds out three half- spurts, then clunks one more time. She pushes herself away from her desk, slings open the washing machine door. Her clothes gather in a soggy pile, scattered with chunks of undissolved laundry soap. She needs a new washing machine. She has no time to buy a new washing machine. She slams closed the washing machine. Resumes clicking the Employee Centre button. Clicks it exactly ten more times. Lifeless. Screw it. She scoops up her car keys. Rides the elevator down 30+ floors to the car park at the bottom of her building. She screeches off in her cracked- up red Ford Taurus to Bull Head Shopping Centre to buy a new machine.

105 Fifteen minutes later, Edith bypasses the endless escalator chain that leads to the household appliances floor, seduced instead by the starburst of perfumes and jewellery on the main floor. The perfume sample on her left wrist smells like vanilla pudding, her right wrist wooden petunias. She jams her purse into her armpit, bullets for the escalator. At the very last micro-second, she swerves.

Eighty-nine minutes later, Edith’s feet whine in their strapped shoes. Her shoulders slump. She stands, sixth in line, at the glass and white quartz counter in P. T. Madden, the new women’s clothing store to the left of the caramel popcorn stand at the south end of the shopping mall. To the right of the faux-Victorian lotion shop that sells hand lotion for $125 a gram. A part of the mall she never visits, but her mother’s birthday looms. Edith wants to buy hand lotion made from avocado, goat’s milk, and Bali sea foam to spoil her mother, her mother’s hands rough as Brillo pads from so many years as a hairdresser, and her mother agrees once a year at her birthday to indulge in a bucket of caramel corn even though she has to take her three false teeth out to do so. Edith noticed a professor from the School of Drama and Philosophy in Edith’s university was browsing in P. T. Madden so she zoomed in, sorted through hangers and geometrically folded stacks of clothing, then settled on three new blouses and the stiff cardigan slung neatly over her forearm while she waits in line. She knows the patterns are wrong, her mother’s always reminding her she doesn’t have the body type for patterns. – Your boobs turn patterns into porridge, Deedee, her mother reminds her. Frequently. When she was a teenager and she’d show off her new clothes to her father, he would tsk and down another cognac. – I’m not sure why . . . , he’d say, – you gravitate to clothes that make you look like . . . a dining room table. His daughter a porridgey, furniture-shaped disappointment. She shouldn’t be spilling money on clothes. She should be planted in front of her desk at home. Or in her office. Filling out her AAO. Or at the

106 very least writing a draft of a paper she has to give at the PULE conference, also in December. But Vivianne said she could shop. Said Edith should as a reward to herself. One blouse has tiny navy-blue flowers clustered all over, like in a rock garden in a murder mystery where someone is about to get smacked from behind with a rusty, dirt-crusted shovel. But you can’t tell they’re flowers, you can’t notice the petals, unless you’re up extremely close. She loves the flowers’ tediousness, the repetitiveness of their petals, stamens, leaves. She strokes the collar. The dry, textile fragrance. She deserves these clothes. For she is finally the author of a bona fide book. Her heart flutters, like the pages of a discarded paperback. It took her 13 years to write Taber Corn Follies: The Western Canadian Life Story of Beulah Crump-Withers, soon-to-be published by University of Okotoks Press, a William Kurelek prairie painting reproduction on the cover. Six years as a PhD student, seven as a professor, and just in time for this year’s AAO. The giant diamond that will sit in the platinum, Times New Roman setting of her AAO. Her book’s pages being folded and glued likely at this very second on a massive printing press. She can’t wait for the buzz of the intercom, the mail carrier in his or her smart uniform in her condominium lobby asking her to sign for the cardboard package, the flourish of her signature, Edith Vane, her slicing open the package with her Exacto knife to copies of her very own book with her very own name on it, the pages smelling of coastal forest and binding glue, the covers shiny and perfect, then moistened with her tears of elation and success. She hugs the new clothes to her chest. The cardigan will drape long, like a cape with sleeves. An author’s cardigan. Edith wonders if maybe she’d clicked the Employee Centre before trying the Staff Hub button she might have had better luck with retrieving her AAO. She has four months to complete her AAO, but still. If her mother were here, she would ambush Edith with armfuls of girly, blocky colours, perhaps trilled with lace or frills, and say, – Edith

107 Lynn, look at this! You should try it on! Pink makes a woman look youthful, fresh. Edith would say no, she doesn’t like girly clothes, and her mother would say, – What’s wrong with pink? Why are you so stubborn? You were a stubborn baby, and now you’re a stubborn adult who dresses like she’s sixty-five going on one hundred and two. The professor from Drama and Philosophy left the store almost forty-eight minutes ago, and Edith has no idea what she bought, but Edith estimates that all the other female professors who have published books wear long cardigans like this, or unstructured blazers that drop past the hips, or skirts that fall below the knee. Patterned blouses. She has never managed to dress au courant. Her outfits always morph into ill-fitting costumes once she rolls her car up to the university campus, sits through meetings, pontificates in classrooms. But this year will be different. This year she will look like everyone else. With a book, she will be like everyone else. This year will be perfect. She tugs a credit card from her wallet, deposits the ironed folds on the counter, their buttons ticking on the glass. Her watch bangs the glass too. 3:03 pm. This afternoon is drifting away from her. A pair of fake pearl earrings, each pearl the size of a knuckle, perches on a velvet bubble nest under the glass of the counter. – I’ll need those too, she says. She taps her credit card on the glass. – And this scarf. She twitches a scarf from a stand on the counter, it waterfalls into her hands. She could perhaps wear the scarf, an airy tulle thing with harlequin diamonds, around her neck. The pattern moves her, the cloudiness. But she never wears scarves. It will likely just go in a drawer. Or she’ll tie it around the handle of her suitcase. Back to school. She needs the proper clothes this coming September to start the academic new year right. Her new psychologist told her to try it. – They don’t call it retail therapy for nothing, said Vivianne. – Back to

108 school shopping isn’t just beneficial for children, she said, her voice rich and nutritious as a banana on the other end of the line. Edith has never met Vivianne in person, but she imagines her as an older black woman, with elaborate grey braids, round and wise as a fir tree. Silver drop earrings. Or old Roman coins. A stuffed owl on a perch in the background. A woman like Edith’s dead grandmother in her mother’s peeling album full of painfully staged family photos. Edith will finish her third course outline tonight. Start the edits on her paper for the PULE conference tonight. Next Edith will buy shoes from Hangaku even though they don’t look that comfortable, verging on too architectural for human feet. All the fashionable female professors wear Hangakus. The distinctive hour-glass shaped heels. Edith learned about them last year when she finally broke down and asked a history professor in line at the IT Help Desk what they were. – Clothing is how you want the world to see you, said Vivianne. – See me, your clothes say. Look at who I am. Edith will tighten up her marshmallow body too; she’s signed up for a Wednesday night, Ballet for Beginners class at a ballet studio near her house, and she will do some kind of exercise at least once a week. Vivianne suggested she try a scheduled, regular fitness class to encourage her to balance her work and life. When Edith told Vivianne she hated exercise, Vivianne told her to try a class that didn’t seem like exercise. Like a ballet class. Or scuba diving. Edith said, – I like watching ballet. I like to swim. Vivianne said, – Excellent! So swim your heart out. The negative ions in the water will stimulate your happiness centre. The University of Inivea has an Olympic-calibre swimming pool, so you could slip in a swim before or after your day. – But there’s never any time. Vivianne cleared her throat, turned pages. No doubt in a notebook she uses to write down her patient assessments. No doubt Vivianne’s fingers starred with silver rings and turquoise rectangles. A hippie earth goddess

109 with multiple PhDs who begins each morning with one hundred fervent sun salutations. – There’s time for anything if you make time, said Vivianne. – Time is an illusion. Think about the metaphors. Time spent, lost, wasted, behind the times, passing, keeping time. Time being made. What’s something you like to make, Edith? – I like to . . . when I was a teenager I used to like making . . . matrimonial squares. – Make your time the way you would make matrimonial squares. Time is your tool. Delicious. – Time is my tool, Edith repeated. – Delicious. – Time doesn’t own you. You own time. – I own time. – Yes! – Yes. – Make the time. Eat the time. – Make the time. Eat the time. . . like matrimonial squares. – You own yourself. – I own myself. Once upon a time Edith’s PhD supervisor said, I own you. But that was a long time ago. And of course the supervisor lied. Edith blots out the thought. In a past session Vivianne told Edith to forget about her supervisor, Mary Ellen. – That’s a history best left interred, Vivianne’s voice clucked from the phone. – Move on with your life. Let Mary Ellen move on with hers. You are not her puppet. She is not your puppet master. Laser away that dead skin. There. I’ve lasered it. In her brand new Hangakus with their hour glass heels, Edith stilt- walks past the Victorian lotion and the caramel corn shops without stopping, wobbles past the escalator leading up to the rows and boring rows of white and stainless steel refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines and dryers, her hand swinging a cloth bag with its P. T. Madden logo, another bag with

110 the Hangaku brand swirl holding her old loafers, her wrists smelling like imaginary gardens. She bought a bottle of the perfume that smells like vanilla pudding too, so her neck smells new. The shoes still stiff, she admits, the odd heels like walking with spurs. But all shoes need some breaking in, right? She piles her bags into the Taurus. Riding a wave of self-congratulation, she tops up the gas tank at the Novacrest station at the east end of the mall parking lot, the clicks of the litre indicator matching the clicks of happy retail therapy self-righteousness. Her credit card bloats just a little bit. She revs around the concrete silos of the shopping centre parking lot to the ramp leading onto the highway, her bags thumping to the car floor but she can’t brake, her car bullying its way into belligerent traffic. She clicks to turn left towards the thicket of condominiums where she lives. When she was hunting for a place, right after she started making enough money to afford living without a roommate’s crusted beer spills in the fridge and leg hairs in the tub, she only considered new buildings. No sixty-year-old dodgy bungalows with drafty windows and low ceilings, no slapped-together 1990s infills with stucco peeling from the outer walls, no jinxed 1912 haunted houses with mouldy roofs and leaky, gnarled foundations. She wanted clean. Sawdust-smelling new. Shiny chrome, glass, and stainless steel, quartz; she wanted to be able to saunter to a bookstore, a coffee shop, a grocery store, a liquor store. Take the train to the University if she had to. Even though Inivea is not that kind of city, and neighbourhoods in Inivea with all those nearby amenities are scarce. Even though the University train station is where a student was stabbed in the heart by a young white man who thought he was the fallen angel Abezethibou hunting for his lost wing. Even though she spends more time at the University than she ever does in her condo. Her condo within walking distance of a second-hand bookstore, a Safeway, a 7-Eleven, Ollie’s Magic Liquor Barn, magic because hardly any of the wines cost over twenty dollars and her favourite rum sells for only twenty-three dollars a bottle. The ballet studio in the old Canadian Pacific Railway station where she’s signed up for a fitness class. A coffee shop,

111 The Kaffee Klatsch, on the main floor of her condo. She even has her own regular table in The Kaffee Klatsch. Perfect.

On her quilted bedspread at home, the P. T. Madden bag crinkles as she slides out the clothes in their tissue paper envelopes. She unfolds the first envelope. She holds the navy-blue flowers up to the fading afternoon light through the window. Sweet william. Or . . . lobelias. She peels off the P. T. Madden sticker on the second envelope. Black sweet williams or lobelias. The third envelope. Olive-green lobelias or sweet williams. She slides her hands into the armholes of the navy-blue blouse. Buttons it closed one by one from her throat to her lower belly. The mirrored closet door reflects the petals back at her. She smooths her hands down the sides. Strange little florets. No one will pierce past this armour. Not Mary Ellen, her old supervisor. Not even Coral. Whom Vivianne told her to stay away from. – Sometimes, Vivianne told her, her earrings tinkling, – sometimes too much passion is not good for a person. Occasionally, said Vivianne, – in certain circumstances, a person’s unchecked imagination, her misdirected intelligence as it were, can lead her on a journey into an unhealthy place. – But then maybe I should try to help her? – Or you could just stay away from her, said Vivianne, sounding like she was smacking her lips. – Not let her speculations and imaginings splash onto you and distract you, jeopardise your reputation as a scholar heading into mid-career under a newer, more rigorous headship. This next round of your Academic Achievement Overview. You’re not . . . ah . . . the most prolific academic, Edith. Edith’s right eyelid twitched so hard she clapped her hand to her eye. The eyelid bucked twice again under her fingers. Vivianne paused. – You have a book coming out soon, and kudos for that. But you can’t afford distractions. So that means you have to excel at many things,

112 which you certainly do, I assure you. You just have to excel at a few other things too. Edith could hear Vivianne’s likely Burgundy Wine lipstick smile on the other end of the phone. – But if you watch your p’s and q’s, maintain your work-life balance, stay out of the company of troublemakers like Coral, well, that definitely helps in the long run. Avoid negativity. Correction: flee negativity. I’ve witnessed the positive effects with other clients from the University. A woman in the Math department. A male professor in Economics. – You really think so? – I know so. Say this with me: I am the architect of my life; I build its foundation and select its furniture. Edith closed her eyes. – I am the architect of my own life, she said. – I build its foundations and select its fixtures. – Furniture, said Vivianne. – Furniture, repeated Edith. – You, said Vivianne, – you, Edith, are the architect of your life. You don’t have to invite anyone into your house if you don’t want her there. – You’re right. Thanks, Vivianne. – You’re welcome, Edith. We’re at the end of our time now. Goodbye. The phone clicked before Edith had the chance to say goodbye. Her appointments with Vivianne always ended like this. The only disappointing thing about Vivianne. She sits alone in her shiny condo. New clothes, new shoes, new smell, new tank of gas, but barricaded on every side by paper stacks, books she doesn’t want to read but should. Must. She clicks open Employee Centre, then Staff Hub. Maybe this time the AAO will work. Oops! This page does not exist L, the computer barfs. Her email pings. An email from Coral. Coral, her friend.

113 Coral was her friend. She needs to find a new friend. Edith unbuttons the top button of her new blouse.

114

Washing The very next morning, Edith snaps on her goggles and thrashes out a single lap in the University of Inivea’s Olympic-sized pool; she halts mid- way through the next lap, panting, choking for air. She paddles her arms and legs, floating in place, water sloshing in her earholes, waiting for her lungs to pump less frantically. The teenaged lifeguard busily texts, grimacing at something on her phone. The clock at the far end of the pool reads 7:01 am. I am the architect of my life; I build its foundation and select its fixtures. The balloon of elation still hasn’t popped from the three new blouses hung side by side in her closet, the new cardigan still tucked in its tissue paper, and new pair of Hangakus yin and yanged back into their cardboard box. Nothing will go wrong with the new academic year. This morning at 5:07 am, she pulled a pair of dress pants out of the washing machine. The washing powder had crusted into a rigid pattern in the crotch seam. When she squinted, the powder formed an A. She has no time to fuss with buying a new washing machine. She plunked the pants back into the machine and restarted the rinse cycle. Edith inhales a giant breath then plops her face into the pool water, stroking the water slowly, softly bumping up and down in the ripples and waves of the swimmers in the adjoining lanes. And old man’s belly and spaghetti arms dipping in and out of the water with the breast stroke, his swimming trunks obscenely red and tiny. A woman in black with the body of a 1940s pinup girl shooting past like a penguin. Pimple-like protuberances nestle in the mint-coloured concrete of the pool floor. A pimply landscape for the floating scraps of band aids, an errant pair of swim goggles. Dark jellyfish made of hair. Edith makes time. She bakes metaphorical matrimonial squares. She lurches her face through the water. 7:13 am. Her goggles starting to fog. She has no time for swimming. The semester starts in three weeks, September 4th. She has course outlines and syllabi to prepare, essay

115 questions and lecture notes to write and insert into PPT slides, monographs to decipher, a graduate student’s thesis chapter to red-pen, articles to cobble together, a conference presentation six thousand words too long to jury rig as best she can, a forty-three page agenda and appendix about the CWAC strategy to absorb for the next faculty meeting. Her next book to start drafting. Her AAO to fill out so she can prove her relevance for the next two years and avoid that awful circumstance of being refreshed by the Dean. When the jolly outgoing Dean with his waxed moustache and cowboy hat awarded her tenure two and a half years ago she believed that finally every day at her job would be Christmas Day, with spontaneously caroling students and her professor colleagues smiling at her and bestowing her with bouquets of red and white flowers and silver-bowed presents for no reason at all as she sailed down the halls, her healthy new self-possession shining a crystal-ball light. She wouldn’t have to worry about job security anymore, she could intellectually and even literally wear pyjamas to work every day and no one would care: she would be free! But post-tenure Elysium was a rabbit on a greyhound racecourse. This new Dean, Dr. Montrose van Dyck, brought in one and a half years ago with his extraordinarily hairy fingers and crisp silk ties is part of the new EnhanceUs university plan. He was brought in to refresh the Faculty of Liberal Arts. He wanted to refresh Edith the moment he met with her for the first time and opened her file on his desk. Refresh the heck out of her. He is white South African, which makes her nervous. What if he hates her because, well, because? Although her roommate in graduate school was a white South African girl and they regularly drank too many zombie cocktails together all the time. Misty could sure hold her booze. Really, the Dean with his small, cat-like head and fancy clothes just reminds Edith a bit too much of her father. – I see here Edith, said Dean van Dyck, his hairy fingers slithering through her file, his elbows on his desk and his cuffs rucked up so she could see his thick hairy wrists too, – that for two cycles in a row you’ve received only 4 Value Increments on your AAO.

116 She nodded. Her right eyelid spasmed. She pretended to scratch her eyebrow, but really gave her twitching eyelid a poke. Edith had thought his accent was English the first time she heard him; he did not immediately correct people who mistook him for British. – One more AAO cycle with a 4 VI would confirm your eligibility for the EnhanceUs Refreshment Strategy, said the Dean, his index fingers parked in the middle of a page. His back was to the window. The sun bleated from behind a knot of clouds, and the leather of the punching bag planted in the corner of his office by the window glistened. – I’ve been writing my book, she said, jamming her finger into her eyelid. – I’ve been trying to complete my book and that’s why my publication record has appeared to slow down the past few years . . . – You’re going to have to write that book and future books a lot harder, I’m afraid. This university is on track to be in the top 1% in the country in terms of excellence and globalisation, but to do that we’re going to have to shed those who diverge from the EnhanceUs strategic plan. You understand, eh, Edith? He cocked his head. She spilled out of his office, her head as substantial as a tumbleweed, her eyelid dancing a tarantella no matter how insistently she pressed it with the palm of her hand. Tears dribbling out from under her palm too. She whammed her shoulder into Angus Fella with his vodka-and- Vegemite breath. His hat jumped off his head and rolled partway down the hall. Combed-over strands of grey hair flopped in the wrong direction. She chased after his hat while he smoothed his hair down, resettled his fedora back on his head. – I’m sorry, she blubbered, her fingers over her nose, trying to stem the tears. – Looks like you need a tissue, he said, and began patting the pockets of his blazer. – Aha! Found one!

117 He brandished a mangled shred of Kleenex. – I only blew my nose in it once, he said. – In this corner. You can use any of the other three corners. Go ahead. Looks like you need it. She dabbed her eyes and wiped her nose. Handed the tissue back. She took a deep breath. – I don’t want to hear about your problems, he said. – Sorry, but I must be frank. He scuttled away through the door leading to the stairs. At the end of her day with the Dean, she drank Martiniquan rum and boohooed her eyes out until they bulged, drunk-dialed Coral the way she did every AAO biannual cycle, Coral on the other end of the phone ranting in her squeaky voice that the new Dean was a classic shitty Old Boy with an Old Boy plan disguised as an innovative, Young Boy plan. – EnhanceUs, squeaked Coral, – Newspeak is alive and screaming. Then Coral reassured Edith in as many ways possible that Edith’s articles and her future monograph on the housewife memoirist Beulah Crump-Withers remained terribly important, that recovering women’s history, making women’s work relevant in all its forms was essential to the struggle in this insidiously neo-patriarchal, neo-liberal, dribbling-cock- venerating machine of a post-secondary institution. – Peace does not keep itself, Coral said, then sighed. The phone silent. – You still there? gurgled Edith through her tears, marveling at her inflamed, bulbous cry-eyes in the ornamental tin mirror above her desk. She’d bought the mirror in Mexico with an ex, Beryl. Beryl who accused Edith of being an ugly crier. But this year, this year, will not be a year of crying and befouling her liver with rum because of her AAO. Edith claws through the chlorinated water in the university’s Olympic-sized swimming pool. She squints though her goggles. 7:35 am. Soon it will be 8 am and her day basically gone. Wasted! Because her book will come out just in time to list it on this year’s AAO, a published book the holy grail for a high VI, at least 10 VI, or maybe

118 even 11 VI, and Dean van Dyck and his punching bag will not refresh her. Her book will unfresh her. She pushes silver bubbles out of her nose. Her hands droop toward the pool floor. Not that she would drunk dial and weep to Coral about her AAO this time anyway. Coral’s been away. Their friendship punctured by distance. But now Coral’s coming back. Coral is a passionate person. Edith worries that Coral’s returning passion might affect Edith’s AAO score. The Dean grades on a curve. That murky, bumping sound of water spilling into Edith’s ears. She should be catching up on her critical theory, not frolicking in pools in the middle of the day. Like she’s a Lady Who Lunches. A Lady Who Laps. She pulls herself up the metal stairs from the water up onto the pool deck, water streaming from her ears, her goggled eyes foggy.

119

September 2nd An email from Coral has plopped into Edith’s inbox. No subject heading. Edith knows she shouldn’t open it. Coral carries contamination. Coral was refreshed last April, but now she has returned. She evaporated following a faculty meeting in Room D562 in which the Dean bawled them all out because, as he phrased it, a CERTAIN POLTROON employed in the Faculty of Liberal Arts blabbed to the media about allegedly unsound asbestos abatement procedures in Crawley Hall and this complaint media by a U of I faculty member DID NOT FOLLOW ESTABLISHED PROCESS. – Complaints are supposed to be submitted to the GARG committee first, he raged, stabbing his index finger upward. – Then vetted by the GAH working group. Steps will be TAKEN, he pronounced, stabbing the other index finger at the ceiling too. While the Dean continued stabbing the air, Coral and Edith’s colleagues focused on their computer screens, half-erased algebra formulas rococo-ing the whiteboard behind the Dean. Leroy Byrd the Victorianist cleared his throat, while Ian Clutterbuck the Modernist crinkled a Werthers candy wrapper and slipped the candy into his mouth. The only other sounds were the remote buzz of a saw one floor up, a student’s shrill laugh outside the door as she likely headed, carefree and sexual, to the student pub for zombie cocktails. Coral hunched with her arms crossed in the lecture theatre’s bottom tier of seats. – Tell the truth and shame the Devil, Coral muttered sideways to Edith. Edith slowly tried to shift her chair away from Coral’s. Immediately following the end-of-semester meeting, Coral ordered Edith to drink a coffee with her. Coral knotted her reddened fingers around her ceramic Male Tears mug. Edith clutched her paper coffee cup. Edith could tell it was nearing spring because the robins were hopping around occasionally on the university lawns between blots of snow. There was one

120 week left of the semester, Coral’s last semester ever, she said, in this factory masquerading as a place of learning. – And because the Dean hates women, said Coral, her lips thinning into a clench, – and he really hates me, and what a convenient excuse to refresh me. If I was a man . . . well, I just have to say, it’s great to own a penis and be invited to drink bellinis with the Dean just because you have the same old boy and young boy boyfriends from the same alma mater. Like a certain Digital Humanities expert. Coral slurped her coffee, the bitter smell exhaling every time she spoke. – This coffee’s shit, she said. – Everything’s always shit. Coral always complained that the coffee from the machine tasted like tree bark, but proper organic, fair trade coffee was only sold in the Novacrest School of Engineering tower, of course. Edith would miss her complaining. She and Edith were drinking coffee in the Jungle, surrounded by oversized potted plants, the dribbling of a small concrete fountain in the centre of the overheated room. The Jungle the only place in Crawley Hall with real air, according to Coral, because the plants filter out all the toxins. Coral perpetually holding her smaller classes in the Jungle or outside in the grassy quad before the snow drove her and her students inside. A staghorn fern trumpeted its antlers above Coral’s left shoulder. Edith angled her bum deeper into her chair with its coffee-stained seat, the glare of spring snow crusted in the skylights above them transforming Coral’s face into an angry collection of angles and shadows. Coral told The Daily Tribune and a local television station that the University of Inivea’s Liberal Arts building, Crawley Hall, is stuffed with toxic chemicals to the point of bursting and that U of I administration continued to cover it up. That there’ve been nine cases of testicular cancer among teachers and staff in the past five years, but the men were all too embarrassed to talk about it. On television the tendons in Coral’s neck stood out as she answered the interviewer’s questions, puppet-lines etching around her mouth. Edith didn’t have time to watch television, but she had it playing in the

121 background as she microwaved a single-serving shepherd’s pie dinner she bought in The Kaffee Klatsch at the bottom of her condominium complex. – The rate of stress and illness in this building reaches exceptional levels, Coral was saying, her carroty hair stringy around her face, her forehead shiny with acne. – The number of cases of advanced testicular cancer is unnaturally high. I also have anecdotal stories of chronic headaches among workers, colleagues in their thirties developing cataracts. Students losing their hair. I have been suffering from fatigue and migraines that my doctor cannot find the source of. I believe it’s because of the gutting, the asbestos removal started seven years ago, and cheap, toxic materials. For seven years there’ve been ceilings ripped open, entire hallways boarded up, and for what reason? What else did they find besides asbestos? What did they disturb digging around like that while improperly equipped? And in a building with windows that aren’t designed to open and let in fresh air? Why can’t they just move us into a healthy building that’s up to code? There’s a ribbon-cutting ceremony somewhere else on campus every second week for some new energy-efficient learning centre dedicated to medicine, engineering, business. But not for the Humanities. This building is sick. It’s dangerous, and it’s already started killing people. And another thing: the women who work here are not being treated – The newscaster’s head cut in, a frowny wrinkle between her eyebrows as she switched to a report on a female karate black belt from Wollongong, Australia who successfully fought off a grizzly bear with a single punch while hiking at Bow Falls. Edith forked shepherd’s pie into her mouth. The occasional bean burning hot, a few chunks of hard turnip still lukewarm. The mashed potatoes slimed and stuck to the roof of her mouth. It had never occurred to her that she could work in a building that didn’t always have the ceilings ripped open. She remembered drywall powder dusting the trouser cuffs of her job interview suit. She didn’t know a single man with testicular cancer. She didn’t know a single man who was even sick. Except for Leroy Byrd whom she saw once with a portable IV stuck in his arm while he was photocopying essay questions in the mailroom. Was the portable IV from

122 testicular cancer? She’d heard it was because of a clot in his jugular developed from sitting too long. And Otis the sessional instructor. Who couldn’t go on sick leave because he was on contract and so dragged himself coughing and wheezing into work, his skin sweaty and hands shaking from fever, so he wouldn’t forfeit his teaching seniority next year. Arnold Nash . . . now what happened to him? He just dematerialised. Olivia Crowshoe had an operation on her left eye last year for the single cataract she developed while serving on the department’s FARC committee, but how could the building be to blame? Elise Thurman went on stress leave but that was because of that student who stalked her all the way through her sabbatical, wasn’t it? Or was it because of the wrist braces she always wore? Edith always attributed the braces to carpal tunnel syndrome or something normal like that. Coral had left a petition in the mailroom asking faculty members to sign: This is a “sick” building, the paragraph at the top of the petition read. A building this old needs proper maintenance, maintenance the administration refuses to do in order to save money. Sign here to force an investigation into how this building is compromising the health of the faculty and staff who work here . . . Only Coral’s signature was on the petition. And Angus Fella’s. But he’s a queer fish. The other reason Dean pushed out Coral was because she told him she wanted more money. As much as that new Digital Humanities hire Leonardo Baudone was making as his starting salary. How did she know how much the new hire was making? Because he told everyone how much he was making, he told anyone who happened to pass by his office when he first started, his kookaburra laugh, his flinty inflections ruined that hallway. First he reminded them about his breakthrough, crossover book: cited 1232 times on Google Scholar, and also listed as one of the Best Books of the Year in The New Yorker; how he was one of the top thirty-five under thirty- five in Boulevard magazine. Then he told them how many job offers he got before he agreed to this job, then he told them how much he made, then he asked them how much they made. Coral nearly spat out her own tongue

123 when she overheard that Leonardo, that adult-sized rumpled baby, was making more than her. Considerably more. – I’ve been offered a position at the University of Bath, Coral lied to the Dean. – So how much is this university willing to pay me to stay? Edith could imagine Coral planted on the other side of the Dean’s wide wooden desk. Coral’s tiny biceps probably flexed, her demands in bullet point form on an iPad scorching the desk surface. The Dean with his spiky accent, with his hairy thumbs, his furry lobes. His lips curling in a Grinchy smile. – Were you wearing a power suit? asked Edith, – I wore a blazer last time I had to meet with him and that didn’t help with my confidence at all. Coral twisted her mouth unhappily. – So he says to me, Coral nearly shouted as she flicked the chipped rim of her coffee cup with her pointy fingertips, – Monty says to me, “Why don’t you just go then? Have a lovely time in Bath, among the Baths! No point in staying where you’re unhappy.” Then his Administrative Assistant Lisa Ives coincidentally knocked on the door right then to let him know his meeting with the President started five minutes ago. – Yeah, because the President has so little to do that she needs to fill up her time meeting with Monty, the Dipso Dean of Liberal Arts, Coral sneered to Edith. – Red Alert! There’s a poetry emergency! Caesura malfunction in Room 12! And he snapped his hairy old boy fingers and swivelled his chair away from Coral so he faced the view of the vast compound of concrete university buildings that Coral could refresh herself away from, muddy yellow backhoes mulching up the grass in the quad for the new exclusively solar-powered Safeway Supermarkets School of Business scheduled to be fully erected 2.3 years from last February. After the Dean told her to leave, Coral was refreshed because after her plan to earn the same salary as faculty members with penises failed, she contacted the newspapers and the TV stations and ratted out the University,

124 ratted out the Dean of Liberal Arts, exposed the Dean for being a maggoty little nabob, a fascist skinflint just like every other administrator at this university, willing to cut corners and sacrifice their employees to the asbestos-ridden, sick building Moloch of Crawley Hall in order to hire more managerial clones, splash money at their boozy dinners and catered meetings for university funders, and first-class trips to admin conferences in New York and Europe. Because the Dean has directed the funds meant for finishing up the renovations to buying more expensive wine for the millions of receptions he likes to throw. Crawley Hall is falling apart and everyone knows it but no one’s willing to say so on the record, and no Brown Bag Lunches and Town Halls moderated by absent-minded professors seduced into administration are going to stop the building from being sick. The asbestos abatement work in their building has already killed one Administrative Assistant, that sweet guy Andrew with the animal-themed sweaters died of scarring of the lungs, everyone knew it, his husband did an interview with the paper too, and Coral was not prepared to be the next casualty. She noted the mysterious curdles of brown in the mucus she coughed up regularly, the migraines. Coral packing her complaints, petitions and grievances into boxes with her books and computer and teleporting into academic limbo. Edith misses Coral the most when she collects mail from the wall of metal department mailboxes in the photocopy room on the fourth floor. On Mondays, for example, Coral would fling fliers and used envelopes into the recycling bin underneath the boxes and ask Edith about Edith’s weekend. Coral would have to reach up high on her tip-toes to twist her key in the hole of her box because her mailbox door was so high and she was so petite, while Edith would have to curl down low like a spider playing dead to reach her box because she is tall and her box is at the bottom. The wall of mailboxes and those tiny locked doors remind Edith of a columbarium. They first spoke when Coral told Edith that she’d come across Edith’s article in Canadian Quarterly and was dazzled. Edith blushed so hard she almost swooned, and could no longer look into Coral’s eyes so light brown they were almost yellow. She smelled Coral’s mothball perfume smell.

125 Before her fall from grace, at meetings Coral never chose the same seat in Room D562 every time the way some professors would. Coral sometimes sat up high in the fourth row beside members of the Faculty junta like Marian Carson in her authentic tortoise-shell glasses, she sometimes sat off to the side in the second row next to contract lecturers like poor Otis, old school eccentrics like the often tipsy Angus Fella, she sat next to graduate student reps in the bottom tier seats, she sat next to Edith. Coral could run with the hares and hunt with the hounds because unlike Edith, Coral had gone to the correct university as a graduate student, Carberry University in Ontario, from whence the Dean and so many members of the junta graduated. Although Coral was a specialist in an iffy, more contemporary topic having to do with feminism and philosophy. One month after she was refreshed, Coral sneaked her head into Edith’s office, her nose red and sharp. Edith swivelled from her computer, ready to hop up and hug Coral. Coral was carrying files, her Male Tears mug hooked over her thumb. She was also wearing a patterned dress. A 1950s-style housedress that looked like it belonged to a housewife who’d axed her husband to death in his sleep. A tangled ivy pattern. Coral pushed her whole body into the office, the ivy pattern cascading down the crinolined skirt too physically close to Edith, too too close. – I’m not supposed to be here, said, Coral. – But I left a file in my office. – They took away your keys, said Edith. – They don’t know anything. – Won’t someone see you? – I took the back stairs. Plus, who cares. By the time they find the right form for throwing me out I’ll be halfway to the Arctic circle. That April day, Edith had been in her office all day, since 7:59 am. An ache clutched the crown of her head. That gravelly headache that always descended at the end of the day from too much reading on the computer screen, breathing the stale recirculated air. Coral shut the door behind her. The air suddenly close.

126 – Edith. I have a plan. – Ok? – And I need your help. As professors we could organise a mass walk-out to protest the building’s conditions. All of us. Will you help me? An ivy tendril uncoiled from the elbow of Coral’s dress sleeve, and slowly licked the wall. Coral swatted at her elbow distractedly, as though a fly had landed on her arm. The tendril retracted back into the dress. – Edith? Coral pinched her face into a grimace. Edith whirled back to her computer, concentrating on the winking cursor on the screen, assuring herself that her headache was making her eyesight fuzzy. That was it. – I’m not brave like you, Coral, said Edith. She pecked her fingers at her computer keyboard. – You can be if you try, said Coral. – But . . . , said Edith, her hands digging into her keyboard, – I don’t want to. Coral clutched her file in both hands. – Edith? she asked. – Edith? The dress brushed the edge of the desk right next to Edith’s hand. Edith pulled her hands into her lap, curled the fingers closed like a sea anemone. Coral shifted her satchel to her other shoulder. – I have a lot of work to do, said Edith, leaning forward, pretending to read small print on her screen. – Bye, Coral. I wish you every success, I really do. Email me. We can go for fair-trade coffee before you fly off. She began tapping at her keyboard. Refusing to look in Coral’s direction, in the direction of the dress. Coral clasped her hands in front of the skirt, the file crumpling. – Goodbye, then, said Coral, tugging open the door. – Don’t let the work kill you, eh? Open a window or something in here. The skirt’s bulk rustling as it brushed out the doorway. Her footsteps tapping off into the hallway, waning until they completely disappeared.

127 Edith sat on her lumpy beige office chair and peered out the sealed window while Coral slammed her car door in the parking lot, her silver car a dirty blot in the white spring snow, and spun off.

Edith ponders the email message from Coral. They haven’t emailed in the whole five months. An e-card unfolds on the screen to the sounds of chirping violins: a cartoon of a piece of chalk scribbles Back to School! on a green chalkboard. An apple and a ruler dance the tango. The violins end. The apple and ruler separate. Play again? asks the e-card. Vivianne is right. Coral is a distraction. How she wishes she could call Coral. Her friend. She could call Vivianne instead. But her U of I benefits plan only allows twenty-five free sessions per year with a psychologist, and she’s already down to five and it’s only September and she’s about to begin one of the hardest parts of the year. Should she use up a precious session on this? On worrying about Coral just because she exists? She clicks Delete. Opens up the next email.

128

September 3rd New blouse and new cardigan laid out, new Hangakus posed by the front door. Tomorrow is the first day of the new school year. Edith’s bag by the front door packed with printer-warm paper copies of course outlines, syllabi, her memory stick with her first day presentation slides, calendar, pens, books. The olive-green flowered blouse she’ll wear tomorrow on a coat hanger neatly hung on a hook on the back of her bedroom door, along with a wool skirt, leotards, and twice-washed underpants because the washing machine is still being stubborn. And a bra. The coffee machine filled with water and ground coffee, ready to click on at 5:55 am so that at 6:00 am she can pour a hot cup right out of the pot and into herself. The ceiling smooth and clear and white as the belly of a space ship. The lights from the condos across the street punching into the room through the sheer curtains. 10:00 pm. She lies like a salami slice between clean, smoke grey sheets. Not too early for bed. Not too late. This will be her year, she repeats to herself. Her AAO year of triumph. Her year of finally becoming an author, the person she has always wanted to be. I am the architect of my life; I build its foundation and select the wallpaper and window coverings. Tomorrow she will begin the new cycle of failure. She wants to die. This job will kill her. 10:03 pm. Her fingers paddle the sheets, her legs swish irritably. She snags a ragged toenail on the blanket. She fumbles out of bed. She pulls on jeans, the pouchy wool sweater her Oma knitted for her when she was a teenager. She grabs her car keys, her wallet. She unbolts the door, sneaks to the elevators in bare feet. She forgets her shoes. Her brown toes gleaming against the hallway carpet. She’ll grab her flip-flops. The elevator chings.

129 She sits in her car outside the Dean’s three-storey house, alert for movement, lights. She buys a medium-sized cup of valerian-laced coffee from the new- ish barista in The Kaffee Klatsch. The barista’s nametag says Hi! I’m Beverly. They have spoken briefly before. Bev usually works the 5 pm -1 am shift and recently graduated with a Master’s Degree in ethnomusicology. She’d been doing the degree part-time for fifteen years, – But you know . . . with kids and everything, says Bev, while pulling another espresso shot, – and masquerading as a loving wife to the U of I Dean of Medicine as my other full-time profession for thirty-five years. Turns out I was his beard. Alys, one of my twins, she told me that’s the word for it. The only reason she was able to do the Master’s degree was because those years she was high on uppers her doctor professor husband gave her to help her juggle all the teenagers. One set of twins, one set of triplets. Bev knocks used espresso grounds out of a portafilter. – I said to him, you take the house, and give me the sexy fuckpad condo where you took your little twinks for your phony meetings and sleepover conferences. That’s what I told him. I was done with being the dummy. I was done with the house, all the dusty stairs, the perpetual cleaning. Laundry. Weeding, god I hate gardening, it’s just all plants, bugs and dirt. Never liked it. My job was never done. I could never go home after my shift. I was on the brink of pulling a Sylvia Plath. Bev tucks a strand of grey curl behind an ear. Licks her lips. Edith and Beverly fuck their brains out upstairs in Bev’s condo from exactly 1:16 am to 4:23 am. A pleasant, unscheduled surprise. – Do you always have your eye on the time? asks Bev. – I don’t know what you mean, says Edith. – What an interesting metaphor.

130

September 4th The first day of the school semester. Edith shoots out of bed. 7:15 am. Late. She doesn’t have time to fight the morning elevator crowds to get to her office and drop off her coat, so she hoists herself up one floor in the grim northern stairwell, panting and wheezing, stumbling in her new shoes. She skids muddy shoeprints along the polished floor straight to her classroom, a surprise autumn snow-rainfall this morning on the very first day of school and her new Hangakus slippery with muck. Her heels leave long black stripes. She rubs a chilly raindrop from her eyelash. She tugs papers and books out of her bag as she lumbers down the corridors that turn and undulate toward her classroom, her Canadian Literature Before 1950 class. The first thing she hears is the shouts. The identical red doors lining the hallway on each side of her as she tramps down this maze of a single hallway so early in the morning, the moon’s still hanging in the sky, her classroom at the hallway’s end, the outside of her classroom door clustered with students still bundled in their coats and bags, some of them thumbing their mobile phones, some of them shouting and shrieking. She steps more quickly, then starts to galumph in her weird, finicky heels. Someone’s shoved the desks up into a mountain beside the whiteboard, one boy on his stomach in his black puffy coat reaching his arm under the desks. The kicking and clatter of plastic chairs and tables, a mop handle someone found clatters among the metal legs. A hare, surrounded in this spindly forest of metal and plastic, its ears greased back against its spine as it tries its hunched-low invisibility trick. – Surely someone’s called security? Edith asks, thumping her papers and books on the long plastic table in front of the room. – Stand any closer than that, she warns the boy lying on the floor, his arm stretching out the hare, – and you’ll likely catch rabies.

131 She yanks the security phone receiver from the wall and jabs the button. Her books and papers slide to the floor, students’ mucky footprints start crumpling the edges. – Get away from those papers, she says. – I need those papers, she says. Students twisting and stamping on her papers, the edges tearing, the first page of her lecture notes tearing right down the muddy middle. She hangs up the receiver. She clambers down to the floor, trying not to get her coat dirty, her new scarf slithering in the grit. Stretches out on her stomach so she can spot the hare, huddled in the corner next to the radiator, its yellow eyes clenched shut, trapped in its shadowy cage of table legs. – I think it’s dead, says the boy on the floor next to her. She remembers the boy from last year. The boy’s name is Simon. She peers more closely, the rabbit huddled next to the wall, except it has no hind quarters. Its halved body shoved up against the wall. Some grisly practical joke. The floor not covered in shadow, but in sticky . . . He is correct. He is incorrect. The jackrabbit abruptly rockets, streaks and weaves through their legs, out the classroom door, students shrieking and stampeding. Amidst the shrieks, the tangle and tumble of desks, the fears of rabies, Edith hears another pounding screech, but she can’t tell from what direction. – Good morning class! she shouts, still panting a little from climbing that single flight of stairs.

132

Lungs After her very first class, Edith crowds with the other bodies at the elevators in Crawley Hall. New, clean backpacks, stiff blue jeans on the students, pressed clothes and freshly trimmed hair on the professors on this first day, this academic new year’s day. Today elevator #1 has a scribbled Out of Order sign taped to its silver door. Edith clusters miserably with everyone else on the far side of the low-ceilinged lobby, waiting for elevator #2. Her colleagues Leroy Byrd, Olivia Crowshoe. She nods at them. They nod back gloomily. Leroy Byrd hoists himself more securely on his crutches, his foot in a plastic cast angled out in front of him. Olivia Crowshoe frowns at her watch; gauze covers her right eye this time. – Your cataract operation was successful? asks Edith. – Did you have a good summer? – Very successful, says Olivia. – Yes, good. Other eye’s fixed too. – I had a good summer too, says Leroy. – Cast’ll be off in two weeks. – Sweet, says Edith. Crawley Hall is only five floors high, but everyone rides the elevators, the lobby grimy with academics and their students tracking in dust and crud, or snow and mud. They carry themselves like prawns, they stand as tall as fiddleheads curled in fried butter. Regularly walking up or down one of the stairwells would be more nutritious, but this morning nearly ate out her lungs because the air’s so close in the stairwells. And she’s so goddamn out of shape. And the staircases shrivel Edith’s spirit with their angular, patchy concrete, the iron banisters curling around the corners of stairwells shadowed like abandoned wells. The fluorescent lights flattening out human features so anyone in a stairwell turns bloodless, looks like she is dying. Edith cannot breathe in the stale air of stairwells, and no view at all except concrete and pipes painted black. Plus, she doesn’t want to sweat in her clean clothes before the year’s even had a chance to begin. They complain when the elevators locomote too slowly, or rasp past a floor without stopping, or never arrive, or stop only partway on a floor and

133 occupants have to venture an unsettling step up or down in or out of the elevator. Leroy Byrd pulls back his sleeve to check his watch too. Turns to Olivia. – You going to the welcome reception for the new Endowed Chair? asks Leroy. – Think so, says Olivia. – You? Edith? – Not sure yet, says Edith. Edith’s eyelid tics. – Mary Ellen’s a hoot, says Olivia. – I met her at a conference in Munich. Edith’s lips wobble into an approximation of a smile. The welcome reception tomorrow – Tomorrow! – means Mary Ellen’s likely landed somewhere on campus. Maybe even in the building. But Edith can’t imagine Mary Ellen doing anything as banal and mortal as waiting for a Crawley Hall elevator. But that is all the brain space she allows Mary Ellen. She must leave Mary Ellen interred. Coral must have returned by now. She must be in the lobby, somewhere. #2’s door sleepily blinks open. They stuff themselves in, huddling under the flickering light. Edith can smell toothpaste breath, soap, dry cleaning, wine stains, shoe polish. She holds her breath. I am the architect of my life, she recites to herself, I build its foundation and choose the furniment. Once she’s settled herself in her office, she will text Bev good morning, and send her a rose emoji. Romantic. Then ask Bev if she wants to get married. Just joking. No. Edith shouldn’t do that. The lights above the elevator door wink.

134

Flush In her office, Edith scrolls through the pounds and pounds of email accumulated inside her computer, each email a tiny loaded telegram reminding her of some thing she has to do, or some thing she hasn’t done, or some thing she never did, a pinched nerve in her right index finger burning ember-red all the way to her elbow as she dully clicks her mouse, chasing after all the telegrams.

From: "Alice Zimmer" Subject: Drains Date: Tues., Sept. 4, 12:09 pm To: [email protected]

Wednesday, September 26, PLEASE do not use the drains in the STAFFROOM or in the MAIN office. On Saturday, September 29, there will NOT be ANY water in the building. Sincerely,

Alice Z. Office Manager (Faculty of Liberal Arts)

Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud. (Maya Angelou)

A toilet across the hall flushes. Edith needs to pee. There’s no time to pee. When she finally remembers to pee, it will probably be September 29th.

From: "Alice Qureshi" Subject: lock on back stairwell Date: Tues., Sept. 4, 1:14 pm To: [email protected] the lock on the back stairwell door to the fourth floor is jammed. if you go out, you won’t be able to get back in that way. a locksmith has been called, but in the meantime if you want to take the stairs between floors 3 and 5, use the ones by the elevators. also, the 2nd photocopier in the mailroom no longer copies. we realise this is a busy time of year, but please have patience. a photocopy machine repair technician is scheduled to do repair work sometime this afternoon alice q Associate Office Manager (Faculty of Liberal Arts)

135

Sometimes Edith pees on the fifth floor even though her office is on the fourth floor. Edith’s office, room C454, faces the fourth floor bathroom. Between 8:30 am to 4:30 pm the toilet flushes and gurgles while she prepares for lectures, while she’s trying to read an article she’s printed off, while a student complains about the price of the textbooks across from her at her fake wood desk, while she argues on the phone with Alice Z. or Alice Q. or with Suneeta in Human Resources about yet another office supply reimbursement that hasn’t come through, while Edith blows her nose crying for no good reason at all. A cough, a flush, the grunting of the paper towel dispenser as it wheels out rough brown sheets echoes and resounds in her office. Edith will squeeze her thighs and kegel muscles tight, to plod up the vertiginous east staircase to try and urinate in the much less-trafficked fifth floor washroom. Or just to sit by herself momentarily in silent contemplation in a bathroom cubicle, the only space where it is culturally unacceptable for someone to bother her. But she has to hold her breath every time she goes into the stairwell, the stale air unbearable, a boiled egg smell, even more so between the fourth and fifth floors. And the jolt of tromping up and down so many stairs inflames the soft tissue behind Edith’s kneecaps, and the flickering fluorescents hanging from the stairwell ceilings give her eyespots. She tries to savour her toilet breaks, her silent alone breaks, regretfully heaving up from the toilet seat when she knows she’s sat too long, flushing the toilet noisily whether she’s used it or not as she wipes the mucous from her nose, the tears slinking from her eyes. Bolting out of the bathroom before the person in the adjoining cubicle lets out her dainty farts and urine trickles. Please Wash Your Hands! shouts the sign on the door as it sighs closed behind her. Another email. She doesn’t recognise the sender:

From: [email protected] Subject: No subject Date: Tues., Sept. 4, 4:25 am To: [email protected]

I saw you park your car in front of the Dean’s house Sunday night.

136

Edith clicks delete.

From: "Lisa Ives" Subject: Reception for Endowed Chair Mary Ellen Toogood Date: Tues., Sept. 4, 8:09 am To: [email protected]

Sent on behalf of Dean Montrose van Dyck:

Dear Faculty and Staff,

All faculty and graduate students are invited to a reception tomorrow welcoming the new Mykytyshyn Endowed Chair. Greta A. Mykytyshyn and representatives of the Mykytyshyn Foundation, Novacrest Oil Sands and Safeway Supermarkets will also be present.

Lisa Ives Dean’s Office Administrator

Edith’s office also sits kitty-corner to the faculty lounge: a chair and expired coffee machine graveyard, a small mouldy fridge with a grinding engine. A round table stacked with decades-old literary journals. Ketchup smears and cookie crumbs from the cookies Angus Fella’s sister sends him from Adelaide. Sometimes the microwave beeps, potent and radiated odours like burning plastic Beefaroni containers bubbling over. Once upon a time she had an office with sealed windows (not) opening on to a view of the white crackled mountains rimming the western edges of Inivea, a sky as blue and wide as a mouth, the only sounds the occasional footsteps of a colleague or disoriented student in the corridor. Her boxes of books and papers she still hasn’t unpacked properly even after the four years since she was relocated to this office from her former, beautiful office, her teaching and meeting schedules always squeezed full, posters she needs to stick to the walls still curled in their cardboard tubes because she was so overwhelmed as a new professor, and then she was, well, just overwhelmed. But she was decanted under the direction of the Building Resources sub-department. She had to move all her boxes and herself out of her office

137 which is what decanting really means, room B409, four years ago this September because the bubbling brown stain on the white ceiling panels right above her desk one day matured and popped like a lanced blister, and showered her head and her student papers and zigzag stacks of library books with chalky hunks and chunks of disintegrating ceiling tiles, grey scraps of fiberglass pink, little black marbles of who-knows-what. She tried to peer up into the cloudy maw of the ceiling, poked a swinging ceiling panel with her finger, but had to stop because the air and dust billowing out of the hole burned her eyes. Just a blur of shadow and smut. In the washroom mirror, her skin powdered in white disintegrated ceiling, her eyes bright red as her father’s every New Year’s Day. The dust mixing into a stubborn paste on her palms and under her fingernails under the tap, the brown paper towels she wetted pilling on her face as she tried to scrub the ceiling off her cheeks. Ceiling matted into her hair. Crusting onto her scalp. Her old office, Room B409, was for a long time a restricted construction zone mazed with ladders and women and men in construction hats, the ceiling split open and exposing its silver intestines, the floor peeled and raw. Once she was sure she saw a pair of workers dressed entirely in white, wearing white hoods and see-through plastic masks, white booties swaddling their feet. But she’d been Xeroxing a lot for a night class that afternoon. The photocopy light made her brain brittle and her senses unreliable. She stacked her ceiling-caked boxes of books and files against the walls in what she thought would be only her temporary office, Room C454. A narrow and dank little cubby no professor or even graduate student had occupied in years, not since she’d started working at U of I. Edith does not know who was in C454 before the years it was outright abandoned. All she knows is when she opened the door with the key, she was washed over with the smell of metal bookshelves, of hidden dust, the harshness of old sweat. The bulletin board on the wall empty. The desk drawers empty except for an old fortune cookie fortune curled in the very bottom drawer: If you don't burn out at the end of each day, you're a bum.

138 The metal seams of her desk drawers peppered with paperclips, single mangled staples, crumbs. When she hauled her first boxes of books into her office, she wondered about the person who once tenanted her office, who also spent days and possibly nights listening to the toilets flushing across the hall, the beep-beep of the microwave around the corner. But then the tsunami of the job hit Edith, and suddenly she couldn’t care less, and there is no time to care more. And she had to throw out the old things that person left behind: a calcium-crusted kettle with a black plastic beak; a stack of unused exam booklets, the lined paper wavy from moisture, the purple covers fading at the edges. The booklets so old they were still stamped with 19__ instead of 20__. Outdated, useless textbooks about grammar, writing guides from the 1970s, a library book due back on May 15th, 1986. A glass ashtray, chipped. A pair of black stockings, obviously worn, then yanked off and stuffed into the kettle. A stiletto-heeled, lollipop pink shoe. She opened exactly one of her boxes right away: the one with the books she was going to teach that afternoon. The rest flung onto shelves. The former inhabitant’s detritus stuffed into two cardboard boxes and hauled off to a landfill. The window in C454 faces out on to the parking lot, the dilapidated ribbon of highway. Two of the fluorescent lights in the ceiling completely out. She pushed the other boxes into corners. Oh, how she planned to layer and layer the walls of B409 with pictures when she returned – posters of book covers, postcards of her favourite authors – finally unpack all her boxes properly, and fill those bookshelves to brimming when she moved back in. Maybe even buy a plant for the window. A philodendron or a hanging ivy. A small cactus with a merry pincushion top. They sometimes lasted up to ten months in her old office for the two years she occupied it before they browned and withered away. She never moved back into room B409. Malcolm in Facility Resources wrote her that Dr. Mary Ellen Toogood would need an office when she arrived, and the Endowed Chair office was under construction as part of the new Safeway Supermarkets School of Business building project

139 so they couldn’t install her anywhere else. Dr. Toogood had also pointed out with fortunate foresight that the University President and the donor would not be too happy to see Dr. Professor Toogood in an office just like every other professor’s. Mary Ellen asked for built-in walnut bookshelves and had workers paint each wall a different shade of mauve. And the ceiling did not disintegrate onto her immaculately coiffed head. Edith remembers Mary Ellen posed triumphantly in the doorway of her luxurious house on the south bank of the river valley back when Edith was still technically her student, back when Mary Ellen could say I own you to Edith, and Edith would nod yes. One of Mary Ellen’s artsy fartsy chandeliers, a bouquet of broken bottles crafted by a Venetian glass artisan, suspended above her head, its twin in the dining room, her marcelled and lacquered gold hair burning with the setting sun sticking its tongue out in the window behind her, her lips reciting familiar horror stories: that Edith’s dissertation was an inferior piece of work not worthy of a first-year university student, and it had no chance of ever being published, only a desperate Canadian hack press would publish it. You should drop out, she scrawled in the margins of Edith’s dissertation drafts. And the book would only be published if the publisher were paid. Astronomical amounts of money. Six trillion dollars wouldn’t even begin to cover it. That Edith was hare-brained and difficult, that Edith drove her, Mary Ellen, to drink, and where was Edith’s gratitude? – All the things I’ve done for you, Edith, blared Mary Ellen. – You have no idea how many bottles of anti-depressants and wake-up pills and sedatives I’ve had to choke down to get through the tangled mess of paper you call your dissertation. Sometimes I take the pills all at once! Chased with a bottle of cheap whiskey! Sometimes I lie in bed, weeping at the hopelessness. Your research questions are Byzantine. You, Edith, have nothing to say. Edith had had to meet with the Graduate Coordinator in his office, sit with a Student’s Union mediator, the university Ombudsperson, to force Mary Ellen to allow the dissertation to go through to defense, because in year six of Edith’s degree, Mary Ellen had instructed Edith to start all over

140 again. With a new topic. New everything. And because if Edith insisted on continuing to study the memoir of Beulah Crump-Withers, whose second marriage was to a Ukrainian man, then Edith should learn Ukrainian. – Supervising you is like turning the Titanic, said Mary Ellen. It was during the Titanic harangue that Edith’s eyelid spasmed for the first time. Her eyelid jumped so hard it felt like Mary Ellen snapped an elastic band against her eyeball. During the dissertation defense, at the long table of professors and Edith at the very end with her dissertation arranged in a neat, 111 085-word brick in front of her, Mary Ellen typed on her laptop at the opposite end of the table, texted messages on her Blackberry, then when it was her turn to ask Edith a question, asked sweetly, her s’s sibilant in that charming way Mary Ellen always used in front of strangers or the press, – I know this is an unfair question, Edith dear, she asked, – but does your dissertation topic even exist? I was in contact with the head archivist at the National Archives, and she told me that a letter just uncovered last month in the Canadian Prairie Section of the Archives suggests that Beulah Crump-Withers was a pseudonym for an American, bootlegging sleeping-car porter, a man, named Clarion Hughes. This undermines the whole premise underlying your dissertation, doesn’t it? If what we always thought was the 100-year-old memoir of a queerly articulate farmwife from Amber Valley, Alberta, was just a fantasy written by an American man from Chicago in the 1930s? If the truth of her identity was disclosed in a letter written by the mother of her alleged second husband? A letter written in Ukrainian? One of the other examiners, a woman with lime-rimmed cat’s-eye glasses, choked, then gulped from her paper cup of water. – This is what the most recent discovery is suggesting, offered Mary Ellen to the room. Her impossibly wide lips forming an impossibly small cherry-sized moue. – So what will you do if it turns out that Beulah Crump- Withers isn’t even real? I suppose this dissertation is, by extension, moot. Mary Ellen rose to standing then, her fingertips tented on the table, the tallest building of them all. But she was lying. Edith knew Mary Ellen was lying because Mary Ellen was biologically incapable of telling the

141 truth. In TV interviews she crowed that she read a book a day. To colleagues she whispered that she had persistent migraines and often had to go home to bed; the migraines so bad they forced her to go home and . . . post updates on Facebook about an upcoming symposium in Finland. Or Spain. Sweat dripped down the walls. Edith’s eyelid danced the cucaracha. The external examiner, scraggly grey hair squirting out from under the brim of his fedora, his voice traced with an accent that sounded English but not, suddenly guffawed, and slapped his flaking old-man hands on the table. – None of it’s real, Mary Ellen! We’re literature professors! We dedicate our lives to paper dolls and, bully for us, we get paid for it. Give this poor girl a reasonable question. Or a real criticism, one that can’t be remedied with a simple footnote. Please. Then he scrubbed his face with his hands as though he wanted to rub his skin off. He was wearing a watch with the Cheshire Cat on its face. Edith nearly puckered to kiss that watch face. Dr. Angus Fella. Mary Ellen simultaneously tapped all ten fingers on the tabletop. Exactly once. The tap ricocheted, the final sound of something small and precious keeling over dead. The Examining Committee Chair at the foot of the table murmured that members of the examining committee should remember to speak in turn, address the PhD candidate not each other, etc., and flipped hopelessly among his papers, his sentence trailing off into ellipses. The professor with the cat’s eye glasses cleared her throat, and began a question about Foucault’s heterotopia and what gardening while looking in a mirror might suggest about the memoir form. Edith’s very own fedora-ed deus ex machina: Dr. Angus Fella. And when she was hired as his colleague in Crawley Hall, he didn’t remember Edith one little bit even though he was responsible for throwing her the wooden plank that saved her life. Just strolled past her day after day, his hands in his pockets, his trousers ballooning overtop his wool socks and Birkenstock sandals, his Akubra jammed on his head, his Cheshire Cat

142 watch looping his wrist. The ancient professor with the billy goat beard who crumbles Anzac cookies all over the lunchroom and who refuses to take the elevator in Crawley Hall, gasping his way up and down the staircase. Dr. Fella who leaves the photocopying room suffused with eau de vodka or rum at 8:55 in the morning and who puts out a “revised” edition of the same anthology every third year. Edith assumes Dr. Fella tipples vodka – is tipple even a verb? – supposed to be scentless, but that’s a lie. When Edith drinks hard liquor, she prefers rum. The jaunty labels featuring antique maps or fields of sugarcane, people with pooled brown eyes in hot places: Martinique, Island of Flowers; Cuba, origin of the Cuba Libre. She would like one day to share a glass of something with Dr. Angus Fella, and ask him more about the paper dolls that ruin rule their lives.

She opens another email.

From: [email protected] Subject: Loser!!! Date: Tues., Sept. 4, 12:39 am To: [email protected]

New clothes can’t hide that you’re a Grade A lemon.

Her left hip crackles as she stands up to go pee. She’s been sitting at her desk for four hours. She knocks her knee on a stack of books heaped by the door. Sits down again. She forgot to email her PhD student Helen Bedford. Just one more email. Then she’ll pee. Edith deletes the email from [email protected]. She needs to stop sending these emails to herself when she’s drunk. This negativity just can’t be helpful.

143

September 5th On Wednesday morning, one of the building’s cleaners in the university’s blue smock uniform wheels a black plastic trolley heaped with swollen, bright orange garbage bags into the elevator before Edith has a chance to exit. The elevator suddenly hot with the smell of damp coffee grounds, fermenting fruit juice. Old bloody tampons, leaking vaginas, anuses, scrotums, leaking noses and mouths, and something else, something inexplicable and horrible. Edith presses the button for the next floor, scrambles out of the elevator as quickly as she can, away from the choking smell. The cleaner presses the > < button. Crosses her arms as the doors close. Edith pretends to dig for something in her bag as she waits for the next elevator to take her up two floors to the fifth floor and the faculty meeting. At the faculty meeting she rushes in late, has to sit in one of the curved plastic seats in the very front row, in the very bottom of the lecture theatre, like a Grade A lemon, so close to the Dean he sprays her skin when he talks. He refers only occasionally to the agenda, collapsing into a monologue on whether or not the word program should be spelled “program” or “programme” in the Mykytyshyn Endowed Chair Programme documentation. If they do change the spelling, that will require a new logo. – Is it worth the trouble to invest in a new logo? asks the Dean, – Do we have the budget? he asks rhetorically. – If we want to be a world- class institution in the top 1% then our brand is something we should consider very seriously, and if necessary make some sacrifices. Let’s strike a committee to investigate this. Please send your nominations in to Lisa. Behind the Dean, Lisa Ives types into her iPad and also scribbles on her notepad. – I have a question, says a voice from the back of the room. – Yes, Iris? asks the Dean, pausing in his pacing. Iris Clutterbuck points out that even though they’ve already approved the minutes from the last meeting, she’s just discovered a section

144 where there should be a semi-colon instead of a comma. – And there’s a squinting modifier that completely shifts the meaning of the sentence depending on how it’s read, adds Iris. The Dean asks them all to return to the minutes. Pages flutter, computer screens scroll. Edith extracts the agenda and the appendix from her bag. She read through the whole forty-three pages. She is ready to address item 14.5.6 on page forty-one. She has a question about the number of credits being allocated to a new course proposed by the School of Music and Linguistics. The Dean sways back and forth as he orates and moderates, his tie yellow, traced with hexagons, like a honeycomb. She must have been looking at her computer screen too long because when he strolls close to her, the honeycomb looks so three-dimensional she wants to poke her pinky finger into one of the holes. Suck honey off her fingernail. She longs for Bev’s earlobes. The Dean has asked for a motion to adjourn, and Leonardo Baudone shoots up his hand. – I now invite you, says the Dean, – to the reception for the new Mykytyshyn Endowed Chair, upstairs on the fifth floor. Edith’s colleagues rustle and grumble their way up from their chairs, Olivia Crowshoe wrestles out her bags, Leroy Byrd arranges and rearranges his crutches so he can negotiate the top stair leading to the back door. She missed her chance to ask about 14.5.6. Did they already address it? She can’t remember. She was too busy trying not to eat the Dean’s tie. Is that blob of reddish hair near the top of the steps Coral sweeping out the doorway in the wave of exiting professors, leaning her ear towards Iris and Ian Clutterbuck? Too late to tell. Coral also usually talked in meetings. Edith can’t imagine she was just in a meeting attended by a newly-returned Coral and Coral had nothing to say. Edith gathers up her bag, her coat. She climbs up the peeling, carpeted stairs in her pinching shoes to the doors with the rest of the stragglers, the student representatives, Lisa Ives with her hard triathlete’s legs. Even though Edith knows it’s a mistake, she will attend the

145 Mykytyshyn Endowed Chair reception. Vivianne said she should because making an effort to socialise with her university family might help when the Dean evaluates her AAO this cycle.

The official reception for the new Mykytyshyn Endowed Chair, Dr. Mary Ellen Toogood. Edith’s buttoned up her new blouse with the olive-green flowers. She’s hooked on a bra that harnesses her breasts in tight so that the blouse won’t gape in the buttons around her bosom. She tested in the mirrored doors of her bedroom closet this morning. Sat down on the edge of the bed. Raised her arms like she was flying. Stood up. Raised her arms again. Opened them wide. No gape. She strokes the cuff of the right sleeve, the little pin-prick flowers. Her blouse has a pattern. The blouse of the woman in line in front of her at the bar also has a pattern, overlapping, bright squares. The woman in front of the squares-woman, Iris Clutterbuck, bending forward to order her drink at the bar, wears a grey cardigan that sweeps below her hips. Just the way Edith’s cardigan sweeps below hers. Edith blushes with conformist gratitude. At the bar she asks the bartender, a young woman with an artfully frayed braid tossed forward over her shoulder, for a glass of white wine. She sips delicately from her wine, feigns interest in the Safeway Supermarkets banner draping next to the bar as she surveys the room. Armoured. Academics in twos and threes, gesturing at each other with drinks in one hand, little china plates of egg rolls, meat balls in the other, standing among white pillars in the brown-carpeted room, brown and downy like the fur of a dead animal. Or dead grass. This year will be her supernova year. Even though Mary Ellen had been her supervisor and the thought of seeing her is like contemplating a dirty toilet she’s just about to lick, Edith now has a new book, new clothes, a new therapist, and she already swam once this week. She believes she will

146 try to swim at least five times a week. She will only lick that toilet if she chooses to lick that toilet. I am the architect of my life; I build its foundation and select the furniment. Even the toilets. And bidets. Vivianne prepped her on how to do successful small talk, rehearsed with her lines about the weather, travel, work. Coached her on how to juggle a glass of wine and a plate of canapés at the same time by suggesting she just have wine first, then the canapés later. Don’t pile the plate with canapés because that could be misinterpreted. Don’t overindulge in the wine because that could be misinterpreted. But don’t go and not eat or drink because that could also be misinterpreted. Choose canapés that are bite-sized, tooth- picked or dry to the touch rather than messy when you bite them. Tooth- picked meatballs or small, compact slices of salmon roll are good; deep fried spring rolls drizzled with plum sauce not good. A glass of white wine firmly in hand like a roofer’s hammer, Edith has built her own foundation and selected her roof shingles at this reception. For she is an author. Of a book Mary Ellen told her would never be. That’s why she belongs here. With these people. These members of her university family. She sips the wine from its genuine glass goblet, marveling at the tink of the glass against her teeth. At receptions before this Dean’s reign and the EnhanceUs strategic plan, they always drank out of plastic glasses, ate off paper plates. She piles every twig of courage inside her, strikes a match, and for the very first time on her very own decides to light up a conversation with the Dean, the white man who wants to refresh her, who poses with his crystal wine-glass, chatting casually to Ian Clutterbuck in his corduroy pants and hands loaded with a drink and a plate of spring rolls. She cups her wineglass with both hands, sips, says, – Well this is a nice turnout, isn’t it? Ian Clutterbuck says through a mouthful of spring roll, – I have to find my wife. – Go find the other Dr. Clutterbuck, Dr. Clutterbuck, says the Dean, – heh heh heh.

147 This man in charge of Edith. The central cog in this ravenous academic machine. Her boss. Although administration and faculty never used that kind of language around the university. No words like Boss. Job. Employee. Teacher. Vacation. Money. Secretary. Instead of job, it was post or position. Instead of ripping out old poisonous asbestos tiles, memos from the Dean’s Administrative Assistant bandy about phrases like Asbestos abatement will commence next week on the second floor. The top of his head only came up to her chin. But he was one of those men who make women taller than him feel like perversions. Her father, a former CEO for an oil company, told her that schmoozing was how the deals got done with administrators. – The more expensive the scotch the better, he said. – Isn’t that part of the reason you were fired? she asked her father. – The 1970s were a great time, he replied. The Dean’s face slides away in the direction of the other employees while she schmoozes. Did he travel to the south of France again this summer? she asks. How windy the weather has been! What a magnificent reception! This wine is really tasty, yes it is! She noticed on the bottle that it’s over 14% alcohol content, therefore it must be good. He murmurs monosyllables. Fingers his cufflink. Does she physically repel him? Marian Carson saunters up to the Dean, a gin and tonic with a slice of lemon in her hand. Edith schmoozing not only with the Dean but Associate Dean Marian Carson! Marian says to the Dean, tapping him on the shoulder with the base of her drink, – You didn’t make it to the HEC meeting last night, old buddy, old chum, old life-long pal. Three prospective donors attended. The optics were not ideal. Marian sips her drink, jauntily parks her other hand in her pocket. She wears a green carnation in her lapel, like a gay man from the 1890s. Marian can talk to the Dean about important things, she is his equal. They used to go to the same conferences. They are both Carberry alumni.

148 The Dean hoots a laugh. – Well we never bothered to work that hard wooing only prospective, pissant donors at Carberry, he says. – Are you saying we did it wrong at Carberry? Carson laughs, – Good one, Monty. Edith has no idea what’s going on so she also laughs, grabbing the pillar for support with a flowered arm. Coral would handle this so much more elegantly. Coral knows the codes, knows how to talk to higher-ups about dogs, children, hockey, movies. She knows the right boutique television shows to watch and chatter about. Where is Coral? The first day of school gone by, and no Coral in the elevator or the mailroom, not even an accidental hallway collision. – I’d rather spend my time on the whales, not the guppies, the tadpoles, says the Dean, sipping his wine then grimacing. – Yes, well, says Carson, – remember that as intimidating as they might appear in size, the biggest whales only eat plankton. The Dean reddens, purples, clenches the hairy fist not holding his drink as Carson turns her back to him, saunters to the Novacrest representative who hands her a stress ball with the eight-legged lion Novacrest Oil Sands logo printed on it. Edith studies the flowers in the textile rock garden on her chest. The Dean rearranges his face, launches past her to the other side of the pillar and assaults the two people there: – You two an item now I see? Am I invited to the wedding? he asks shaggy Angus Fella standing coincidentally next to the peppy new Assistant Office Administrator from Facilities who ordered the catering and flower arrangements. Dr. Fella’s pasty face blushes snooker-ball red, and Peppy rejigs a spiky chrysanthemum in the vase on the table. Edith pushes out a guffaw. The Dean sips his wine. He holds a glass of white wine. – I prefer white, she once overheard him saying at a retirement reception for two faculty members, – Red stains the teeth. Edith’s face flushes. She slides after him. – My first book’s coming out month after next with the University of Okotoks Press, she blurts from behind his shoulder. She grips her wineglass, sticky and warm.

149 The Dean pops his glittering eyes back up to the general area of her face. She cannot read his expression, his dry lips unsticking from his tombstone teeth, and saying, – Oh, University of Okotoks Press. Like, Oh, University of Okey Doke Press. – Well, harrumphs the Dean. – You’ll find a press that can give you a higher Impact Factor for the next book, yes? But that’s a good effort for a new hire like yourself. – I’ve been working here for seven years, she says. – I’m going to find another glass of wine, he says. – All right, she says. She tries not to look down at her flowers. The Dean shoots for Greta Mykytyshyn, the perogie heiress and philanthropist with her seventy-year-old yoga and golf body who’s appeared in the doorway, her fingers and ear lobes chunked with diamond, her hair a svelte white bob. Students and professors ooze up to her. The Dean is an old boy, and he likes his tipple, Coral used to call him and it. He likes to attend receptions and banquets where he can drink wine: retirement farewells, ends of meetings on Fridays where bolder employees who join him at the graduate student bar address him by his first name. Monty. He and his wife Dimple, who also doesn’t correct people when they assume she is English. She comes to many of these wine bibbings in heels with red soles. Dimple chatters with Greta Mykytyshyn about English bulldog puppies. The Dean’s large brown eyes, the colour of soil, nod at Greta Mykytyshyn and he sidles away, the back of his suit jacket flapping. Normally Edith feels reassured by brown-eyed people; normally brown eyes are cosy. Trustworthy. The Dean’s flat receding buttocks, the specks of cork floating on the surface of her wine, the sad revelation that her new blouse, her new book burst triumphantly from her brain-uterus barely register with the Dean. She is not networking properly. She draws a hair out of the bowl of green salsa on the table next to her. She obviously must write and publish another book posthaste, and publish at a more prestigious press, a press in

150 England: Oxford or Cambridge, although why would a press in England be interested in any prairie Canadian local literary reflections? Growing up in the Canadian, Alberta prairies all she ever read were English children’s books, with lots of buck ups and hobs and shillings and “do let’s do somethings!” in her parents’ ragged duplex on London Road in a neighbourhood named Piccadilly Heights. She must learn to care about and discern the proper differences between wines: take a sommelier course. She’ll have to travel to France, then Italy, anywhere properly European where wine is produced. Her mother wanted to do a wine tour on a bus through the vineyards in British Columbia. Both Edith and her father agreed – for once – that a Canadian wine tour would be useless. And who has time?! Even if she manages to write a second book, manages to find a British fool who’ll publish it, she’ll have to write another book right after that one, and another after that, for the punishing boulder of the AAO that she wrestles up that hill keeps bounding back down, aimed straight for her chin, and she will always be Sisyphus until she dies of an aneurysm, probably sitting on a fifth floor toilet, her skull literally deflated from lack of ideas. And then there’ll be all that hope that someone other than the publisher might actually read her multiple books, might start regarding her as an expert in Canadian western landscape metaphors, in something. Publishing a book in England is the only path to strive for, everyone knows it, even the student part-time catering staff presiding over the towers of glass wine goblets, the trays of peeled shrimp and mini meatballs know it. She sips more wine. She asks the bartender for a refill. The cinnamon musk of Mary Ellen’s perfume slugs her in the nose. Edith ducks behind a concrete pillar. Mary Ellen. Edith’s graduate school horror resurrected in her restorative, renascent present. She tries to summon Vivianne’s warm buttery voice, imagines Mary Ellen lasered away, lasered away. Mary Ellen’s voice chimes out behind her, – Greta, so good to see you . . . I’m so pleased this didn’t conflict with your golf game . . . Mary Ellen paying her respects to Greta Mykytyshyn, grasping Greta Mykytyshyn’s elbow, – Can I get you a drink, Greta?, then barking at

151 a student in uniform holding a tray, – Ms. Mykytyshyn needs a drink, stat! And I’ll have a Caesar, with celery! The Caesar must be tall and it must contain a long celery stick, not a short one! A small tree! – But ma’am we’re only serving wine and beer, says the server. – The Caesar must be tall and it must contain a long celery stick, not a short one! The server skitters away, tray clasped against his chest like a shield. – Terrible service, she murmurs sweetly to Greta Mykytyshyn. They sniff the blooms spilling from a giant vase at Greta’s other elbow. Mary Ellen turns to the Dean. – Monty! The last time I saw you was at the REEC! Other professors, the Clutterbucks, Leonardo the rumpled baby, cluster to Mary Ellen and Greta Mykytyshyn like horseflies. They bury the women. A vomity burp rises in Edith’s throat so she gulps it down with a swig of wine that dribbles down the front of her brand new blouse, she dabs at the dampness with her napkin. The flowerets twist into tiny corkscrews where the wine has spilled. Yes. Corkscrews. A strange optical illusion because of the fabric darkening under the transparent wine. She recoils, tenting the blouse as best she can away from her skin. She lifts her face to the ceiling, her eyes closed. The hum of the reception guests, the bing and clank of the elevator doors just two rooms away. A humming. Someone’s humming. Her eyes pop open. She refocuses on the brown speckled broadloom stretching across the floor. Edith’s chest flaps. Her stomach flaps. She runs the greasy tip of her finger around the edge of her glass, and drinks some more. She guzzles. She peers around the pillar toward the voice, the laboratory-generated cinnamon smell. Her new blouse is revolting, she needs to tear it off her body, burn it. Her feet spontaneously cramp, rejecting their new shoes. She can’t leave. She promised Vivianne.

152 Dr. Toogood diving in to swoop her arms around the Dean and Greta Mykytyshyn in a death-grip, her hands squeezing their shoulders like stress- balls. This is the vivacious Mary Ellen, the sunny, ever-networking Mary Ellen. A photographer in a black leather jacket and boots corrals them with her giant black beetle of a camera, asks Olivia Crowshoe to pose in the photo too. – We need more diversity in these photos, says the photographer. – Say cheese! – Cheeeeese! declares Mary Ellen, shaking her Grace Kelly hair. Olivia frowns. So does Greta Mykytyshyn. – Cheddar, says Olivia. The camera clicks. A tall young man with prematurely grey hair hovers in the background, a beer in one hand, carrying a woman’s coat in the other. Dr. Toogood’s pearls like veneered, gleaming teeth, the elaborate gold clasp having slid toward her bosom, her chemise, – You need to dress the part, she once told Edith in their distant, decapitated past. Mary Ellen, her mother and father, Vivianne too it occurs to her, everyone was always telling Edith to dress the part. Like life is a perpetual costume party she’s always on the verge of being bounced from. Edith concentrates on the pattern of Mary Ellen’s chemise. Little green balls encircled with tinier balls. Little Earths with orbiting multiple moons, the moons grinding their way slowly around every Earth. Edith should say hello before she leaves to rip off her own shirt, the corkscrews spiraling into her skin. The adult thing would be to say hello. Vivianne said so, – This university’s motto is Give Yourself to the Truth. How would you interpret that in the context of your job at the University of Inivea? Edith dodges among the professors, students, servers with their trays, toward Mary Ellen. – Hello, Mary Ellen, she says. Her smile stapled to her face. – My dissertation’s going to be published as a book.

153 Mary Ellen glides around Edith, cocking her head and smiling with her generous apple-red lips at someone behind Edith, as though Edith is just a cold spot. Or a splash of vomit in her way. – You, says a voice behind another giant camera, – can you pose with the Dean? Great. The Dean suddenly pops up at Edith’s side, the Dean holding up his glass, his body so close to hers she can see skin flakes on his thinning scalp, he is so close he is almost pressing the top of his head into the spray of hair around her head. The photographer points her camera at them, – Try to look like you’re enjoying yourself, the photographer says. She frowns. – Yesssss, says Monty, baring his teeth. Edith tries not to blink. The camera’s black mouth clicks, once, twice, then the photographer zips away. Edith turns to the Dean, but he has teleported away. He is speechifying to the newest hire, Leonardo Baudone, the avant-garde digital humanities expert. Who is now schmoozing a suited man who must be from Safeway Supermarkets because he’s distributing gold Safeway pens, and now the Dean. She would like to hate the rumpled baby, but he always holds doors open for her. Always remarks, – Ladies first. Which she finds insulting but also charmingly old-fashioned. Rumpled baby in his blonde curly hair clanks out a laugh at a joke the Dean’s just made, no doubt eating up the Dean’s socially dysfunctional treatise on how listening to opera makes chimpanzees’ brain cells multiply, and how the Dean attended an intimate private dinner in honour of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall. Monologues she’s heard him deliver at every single University social event she’s gone to since he was hired. Much as she wishes Mary Ellen would just die already, Edith should try to learn from Mary Ellen. She needs to photocopy herself into a reproduction of Mary Ellen, publishing a book a year with her husband Dino who teaches at Carberry, gallivanting around the world in her oversized pearls and fancy dress suits and patterned blouses, cooking up institutes and hosting symposia in Morocco and Sicily, co-editing essay anthologies with Dino taught the world over, delivering standing-ovation

154 quality keynote lectures to waves of strangers. Edith leans her back against the pillar, her nose in her drink, no one thought to set out chairs at this reception. Her book is at the printer’s right now, she knows it, but her brain’s gouged and bleeding in spite of being an author in a proper author’s cardigan. The strange corkscrews begin turning again. She tries not to touch the corkscrews with her fingers, curls her back and tries to concave her chest to stop the corkscrews from touching her breasts. She drags in a sigh that turns into a chiselled cough. The Dean snaps his hairy fingers in a conversation with a pretty undergrad, but she is sure he is snapping his fingers disapprovingly at Edith’s wrinkled wool skirt. She should have ironed the skirt too, but there was no time. She let the time own her instead of baking proper matrimonial squares. Why didn’t she buy a new skirt too? Why didn’t she properly wash and iron those pants still caught in an ongoing cycle in the washing machine and wear those? Everyone here is wearing pants or skirts that stop at the knee. Mary Ellen’s chemise breaks right at the knee. Edith’s skirt wrinkles and droops down to mid-calf. She has the wrong foundations for her architecture. – Oh, Staines-upon-Thames Press! exclaims the Dean to the rumpled Leonardo, then claps his congratulations on his back. – Bravo! The cover of Edith’s book in the Okotoks University Press catalogue. Last February when the catalogue slid out of her mailbox Edith sliced out the page and taped it onto her fridge. Also a grainy thumbnail jpeg on the Faculty website, under Upcoming Publications. She clicked on the Faculty website 176 times in one day just so she could look at it. But the jpeg disappeared by the week’s end, replaced with the announcement of Dr. Mary Ellen Toogood’s upcoming position as the Mykytyshyn Endowed Chair, beside an image of the cover of rumpled baby man’s new book from Staines-upon-Thames Press. Yes, Edith has rolled up to the top of the publishing Ferris wheel, only to fast-pedal down the other side and find out she’s only made it to the kiddie park. Mary Ellen lets out a bark, and the Dean puts a hairy hand on her sloping shoulder. Mary Ellen’s pearls big snowy bubbles. Her hair waved

155 and polished into a 50s glam, golden bob. The Earths and their little rotating moons on her chemise. The Earths on Mary Ellen’s dress shoot out tentacles and devour all the moons. The chemise now covered in simple polka dots. Edith tries not to moan out loud. She stumbles over the dead grass carpet out of the door. Bends over. – Edith! calls a woman’s voice. Is it Coral? – Hello Edith! Edith clasps her knees, peri-menopausal heat pounding her in waves. – Hot flush, she whispers, – I have to go home. – Well text me, says the woman, her brown suede Hangaku heels clipping away. Edith has no idea who she is. Edith curls into herself as she rides the elevator down with two blue- smocked cleaners. One holds a trolley heaped with garbage like a shopping cart, Edith tries hard not to be sick at the fermenting food smell, the smell of dust, of dank; she turns away from the other who shepherds a murky bucket of mop water, the smell of carcinogenic, industrial strength cleaners, the unfocussed and diluted decay. Only something rotting underneath needs to smell that clean. She flees the elevator as soon as the doors bing open even though the elevator has only made it to the 3rd floor, clutching her belly. She clunks down the stairs, ignoring the stabbing in her knees, the thwack of concrete steps off her weird heels, the grime collecting on her hand as she clutches the banister on her way down. She trails scuff marks on the shined floors behind her like ellipses, through the corridors between the dark concrete hulks of buildings, away from the reception, away from the meatballs, away from her university family, her humiliating cupboard of an office across from the bathroom on the fourth floor of Crawley Hall. She pushes a dirty glass door open and plunges into the stony fall air, that sub- zero chill of the new year letting her know the next horrible year is just beginning, just like the last one began before that and before that. The clouds low, the leaves on the trees falling in soft, itinerant showers. The clenching of the nausea suddenly releases. She skids to a stop. She sucks in cold, clean, fresh air in gasps.

156 She crunches through scattered piles of fallen autumn leaves to her car in the parking lot by Crawley Hall. Grazing jackrabbits the size of spaniels lope away when she makes as straight a line as she can to her car. Hares studding the dying green spaces of this campus, over-sized and stringy. She should bring carrots for them. Lettuce. How much lettuce? Lettuce prices shoot up in winter, six dollars for a single clump of limp, blackening leaves. The jackrabbits gather in twos and threes, tucked around trees, bushes, feeding out in the unprotected grassy areas, and two hares swipe and jump at each other in a boxing match, clumps of hair drifting. She’s looked it up: a drove of hares, or a down or mute or husk of hares. In the dusk she stays far enough away that they continue their grazing on the lawns, or park themselves to contemplate hare matters on the gravel paths. In the half-dark they’re just brown smudges against the brown gravel of the paths. Their eyes bulging and silver when the beams of her car headlights hit them in the snouts. She swears a hare is feeding on a dead squirrel splayed in the road. Do hares eat meat? That hare gnawing on red bone, snuffling through entrail. Edith sniffs. Okey Doke Press. A grainy, ephemeral jpeg. She stamps each foot one at a time, jabs the calcifying calf muscles with her fingers. The new Hangaku shoes clutch too hard. Next to her old Ford gleams a silver Mercedes convertible. TOOGOOD says the license plate. Mary Ellen’s car. She kicks one of Mary Ellen’s tires. Scuffs the leather toe of her new Hangaku. She scrubs at it with her finger, tries to rub the scuff away with a little spit on her thumb. She yanks open the door to the Ford. Shoves down the gas pedal. Edith cruises the streets that twine and curlicue around the university, looking for where Mary Ellen might live. Mary Ellen favours big houses, ostentatious houses, even for short-time rentals when she’s a Visiting Fellow, houses like the one in the river valley in Edmonton all those years ago. Edith’s Taurus slows down whenever her car approaches a house that’s taller than the others on the block or an unusual colour, like periwinkle or purple. She’s lowered the window, her nose alert for leftover whiffs of Mary Ellen’s musky cinnamon spoor.

157 Edith roars her car home to her condo, chewing her thumb.

158

No Smoking She pulls into the low-ceilinged parking garage at the bottom of her building. The square concrete pillars. The spots scrapingly narrow. She eases the car forward. Taps the wall with her bumper. In her tiny foyer she pulls off her coat, nervous about her blouse. So much money for a hideous blouse that will just end up in the garbage. But the corkscrews have settled back into lobelias again. She brushes her chest twice with her hand just to be sure. Brushes one more time with the other hand. But this blouse is lovely! She clicks on the light in the foyer, shoves her arm toward the mirror where the light is brighter. The blouse is magnificent. Tasteful. Subtle. She must have just been overtired when she saw the corkscrews. She unscrews a bottle of red wine. At home she doesn’t have to worry about her teeth. She checks her phone to see if Bev has texted. Nothing. She unbuttons the top button of her blouse, unhooks her bra in the back through the fabric, and her breasts swing loose. She pulls the bra out of one of the sleeves. Throws the blouse in the dirty clothes hamper and grabs the baggy sweater her Oma knitted for her as a teenager. She slaps a slice of cold pizza into her mouth. She slaps open the washing machine door to see how her clothes are doing. Powdered soap clumps splat to the floor as she tugs out a bath towel. She stuffs the towel back in. Slaps the door closed again. Sets the washer cycle back to the beginning. Sips her wine. Pours another glass. She slumps at her desk, flipping through one-page essays she made the students write in class on the first day. She tries to read then grade the essays, the unruly pile spilling with her red scribbles. She opens her laptop, dickers with her AAO (the site’s working today), scrambles though a box of papers by her chair on the floor for evidence of a committee she was part of last year.

159 She tries to read a single paragraph. A single sentence of the third one-page essay. This essay by a Brooklyn Alonzo. Has Edith just dabbed pizza grease in the right margin of Brooklyn Alonzo’s one-page essay? The essay has no title. She told the students to include a title. She gave them a thoughtful speech about the importance of titles, and this essay has no title. She wrote on the chalkboard PLEASE INCLUDE A TITLE. The essay is brief: I have no idea what we taked about in class today. The pages you asked us too read in class were to confusing. it was boring to. was ther something about corn and a women. Sorry professor!!!!!! ((+_+)) This essay was supposed to be a one-page essay on the garden as a metaphor in the first page of Beulah Crump-Withers’ Corn Follies memoir. Then she remembers she has to meet her graduate student Helen Bedford tomorrow. She extracts Helen Bedford’s chapter from a stack on the floor, reads the last paragraph on page 11. Taps her teeth with her pen. She clicks opens her email. Coral’s written. How are you feeling? Coral has written. You looked awful. Hope we can go for coffee soon. The Dean refused to even look in my direction, now that I’m back, and now that I’ve won the refreshment appeal. I hired a lawyer and scared them pissless. I’ve nailed that old turd to the wall good and hard. Missed you! Edith’s fingertips hover over the keyboard, the warm smooth plastic of the alphabet, trying to compose an answer for Coral with whom she hasn’t emailed for a whole five months. I’m sorry, Coral. For everything. Thank you for the Back to School card. She deletes it. Mary Ellen’s dress ate itself before my very eyes. Why must we all wear such odd clothing? Delete delete. I hate you, Coral. I hate you and my therapist says that’s all right.

160 She drags Coral’s email to the trash. Opens another one addressed to the entire faculty from the Dean’s office administrator about a “BURP Research Opportunity Related to Business.” Because everything is related to Business. Business has all the money. The new Safeway Supermarkets School of Business building going up right behind her own building, the jay-walking and trundling over lawns she has to do now to avoid the long cage fences around the construction site, and the skeletal frame of the building-to-be on the other side of Crawley Hall. Buying a pita wrap in Mykytyshyn Hall where the food court is now takes 23 minutes because the shortcut from her office is now a fenced-in construction site. Sometimes, well, too often, she’ll just buy a terrible sandwich in a plastic container or an oversized starchy scone in the cafeteria in the basement of Crawley Hall, and slither back to her office with that. She prefers the white chocolate scones. Not as bready as the plain or Saskatoon berry. Maybe her next book will be about Business and prairie poetry? If only she could find a memoir by a businessman’s wife? A journal from the point of view of a cow on a dairy farm? Edith loves Beulah Crump-Withers for exactly who she is, her writing about the stewing and canning of rhubarb from her garden, and the sewing of dresses out of empty flour sacs. The beauty of a simple thistle blossom. Edith could write articles and books about Crump-Withers for the rest of her life. But Beulah Crump-Withers and Strategic Workforce Development? Flour sacs and Value Realisation? Edith scratches a budding pimple on her forehead. Today is supposed to be a ballet exercise day. She paid for classes, and she’s only gone to one since she signed up last month but she swam just yesterday! She doesn’t want to overstretch her joints. Really she should stay home because she’s kind of drunk, the bottle of wine 3/4s gone already when she swears she only poured herself one glass. Is this the second bottle already? Plus she has too much grading to do. And she has to meet Helen Bedford tomorrow. And she hasn’t read the book yet that she’s supposed to teach tomorrow afternoon. Well, she’s read it, she just can’t remember it. She remembers opening the book and only seeing reams of tiny font in a language she once used to know. And her notes from the last time she

161 taught it are only single word cues: one page says p. 81: Sloterdijk!, another on a blue sticky note: p. 243: motherhood?? She would like to travel back in time and kick herself in the neck for being so lazy and disorganised. She twists open another bottle of wine. The doctor at the university clinic told her her blood pressure was a tad high. Then the doctor asked how many alcoholic drinks Edith consumed in a week. She frowned at Edith’s answer. – Do you smoke? asked the doctor, her eyes on her computer monitor. – No. – Well that’s something. Here’s some literature I want you to read. She handed Edith a pamphlet called Rethinking Drinking with a photo of a beer glass filled with icy, frothy beer on the front fold. Edith didn’t want to go to that clinic. Edith’s mother told her a harrowing story about her own mother’s massive heart attack, how her skin was the colour of clay for a week before. Edith had no time to sit around waiting for teetotaling physicians in clinics, especially with her mother plopped down next to her, surreptitiously tearing out recipes from the clinic’s copy of Woman’s Day magazine. In fact, that last appointment was four years ago. She heaves herself up from her desk, her knees pop. She should go to her Ballet for Beginners class. She paid for it. She thinks about her sweatpants in the chest of drawers, her runners tossed into the dusty back of her closet. Just toss them on and run to ballet class. Just do it, Edith. Do it. The class only four blocks away. The clock on the computer tells her it’s 6:25 pm. Class starts at 7 pm. But she needs a good night’s sleep. She should have taken her swimsuit to work; she could have splashed a few laps. But she has no time for swimming now that classes have started, the undressing and re-dressing, the shower, the drying, students seeing her naked in the change room. It’s all too much. She will feel better if she grades some essays. She will make time for essays. A glass of wine and 27 one-page essays graded. Or at least four. She eases back down into her seat.

162 Shuts her computer. Draws the teetering bundle of 110 essays to her belly and pulls the cap off her red pen. She also needs to finish Helen Bedford’s chapter. She cracks her knuckles. Gulps from her wine glass. The red pen scribbles and circles across pages until 1:30 am, red blobs bleeding into her cuticles, staining the palms of her hands. The heat vent clicks on and off, the soft whirr of the building’s heating system warming her up. The occasional, distant ding of the elevator door at the far end of the hallway. The walls ash-grey, silver-grey, cockatoo-grey. The grey walls look like sleep. She lines up the essays in a bundle, taps the four sides of the bundle so the pile is an even, clean hay bale on her desk. That night a nightmare bangs her eyes open. The same night of studying the cork bits bobbing in her drink like tiny buoys, the night of watching her former mentor, the multiple award-winning Mary Ellen Toogood toasted by a cheering crowd as she pranced into her role as the new Endowed Chair. The earths lashing out and swallowing the little moons. This night ending in an email from Coral dragged into the trash, Coral is contaminated. Fraternising with Coral would be a mistake, it was lucky she was leaving just as Coral entered, this night ending in drinking two and a half bottles of wine – it only felt like one generous glass, really – and grading. This night of evil stacks of unmarked essays still lumping the surface of her desk even though she scraped through at least ten of them just before bed. And none over a page long. The essays like Sisyphus’s boulder but with paper cuts. She graded at least ten. Maybe eight and a half, but she can’t tell because she kept flipping back and forth between papers she’d already marked, worried her grades were too high and the students and the Dean and Associate Dean would think she’s a soft touch. And some of the papers she worries she graded too low and the students will come to her office and squeal with their tight, cross mouths about how they’ve never received grades this low ever. That night Edith dreams of hares. Hares hanging by their necks, throttled by catgut in a thicket of trees. Someone has executed them, hares the size of small birds, their soft, drooping bodies. All dead. Their long ears dangling, the half-closed yellow eyes. Hares hanging like grisly earrings from the branches. Edith wakes abruptly in her brand

163 new apartment building of shiny chrome and concrete, the walls painted with interior design catalogue shades of grey, the grey of time dripping away as grey water. She pushes back the covers and swings both feet out of bed. She pulls on her jeans, the old baggy sweater her grandmother knitted for her. She slides her wallet and her phone into her pockets. Forgets to lock the door behind her. She drives to the alleyway behind the Dean’s house. Garbage night. What luck! She drags away his garbage bin to the next block, upends it, and shines the flashlight from her phone on the detritus. Just Styrofoam and scraps of cellophane from packaging from a ready-made lasagna, a ready- made spinach ricotta cannelloni. A bag a quarter full of mouldy prunes. A wad of old Dilbert cartoon daily calendar pages that really should have been put in the recycling bin. Used dental floss, waxy Q-tips, Kleenexes crusted with what looks like blood. An empty prescription medicine bottle. From a veterinarian for a feline named Gordon. She stuffs the bottle in her pocket. The crusted Kleenexes too for good measure. Bev isn’t working in the Kaffee Klatsch tonight and the coffee is somehow not as succulent. Edith slurps her disappointing, valerian-infused coffee and texts Bev on her phone one more time.

164

Lemon Rinds Bev snores. Loudly, lustily. Her arms thrown up around her head. Her nipples buttoned from the chill in the room. Bev snores the way she makes her lattes, heaping with luxurious foam, embellished with artful leaves, flowers, once a panda bear’s face. The sheets twine around her opulent flesh like an Italian sculpture. She does not believe in bras but sticks little adhesive rubber caps to her nipples instead. She knows where to buy weed. She has five children. She left her husband eight months ago. Her phone dings with rainfall, sparkles, chimes, chirps and beeps, because her children and grandchildren are always texting her, even though they are all in their 30s. So refreshingly non-academic. When Edith texted to ask if she could come over because she couldn’t sleep, Bev wrote back, Booty Call! Edith rolls over on to her back, fighting not to fall asleep. She must get out of this bed. A long cobweb trails from the wire pendant lamp shaped like a dandelion clock suspended from the middle of the ceiling. Bev took the chandelier in the divorce. They lie on a mattress on a red Persian rug, its edges curling with green and gold tassels. Bev had to buy a new mattress because the husband fought her for the mattress and the bed frame, carved from a single cedar tree trunk. – It was fucking glorious, said Bev. – God, I miss my bed. But that’s the only thing. But the Persian rug she got in the divorce. – Well I stole it, said Bev. – Because I bought it. With his money. But really my money. The money I should have been paid to bear and care for his children. Worked like a truck stop waitress. Edith pulls the blanket up to her chin. Smells her fingers, redolent with coffee bean aroma and sticky from baroque, flamboyant sex with Bev, mother of five, new adventurer of life, Kaffee Klatsch barista and condo neighbour one floor down. – You’re my new adventure! shouted Bev, and she smashed her lips onto Edith’s.

165 Edith has been here tonight for 79 minutes. Now she must get up and exit this apartment. She scissors her legs under the sheets. Dozes. She has an 8:30 am meeting tomorrow with a graduate student. Her big lecture class is at noon, and there’s a workload agenda meeting at four. She hasn’t finished grading the one-page essays. Bev offered to help Edith grade essays. Edith declined. Edith slips out of bed, pokes and peers around for her sweater, her jeans in the half-dark. She tiptoes barefoot into the hall, slips on her flip- flops. Two nights ago, the night they slept together for the very first time, before Bev asked her if she wanted to come upstairs to her condo, Edith thought Bev might be a new friend to replace Coral, with her artisanal latte skills and her charming gap teeth. Or like a friendly local bartender, polishing glasses and mugs while Edith monologued her heart out at her favourite table in the coffee shop. The easy way Bev talked about kids, coffee beans, politics, Heinz condiments and different brands of soy milk. The way she moved so comfortably in her round, Venus of Willendorf body. Edith originally thought Bev was just inviting her over for coffee, that’s all Edith thought Bev the barista wanted. She thought that being invited for coffee to Bev’s condo would be maybe half an hour of idle chatting with a neighbour and a cup of coffee made from exotic, gourmet coffee beans, freshly ground, served in some exotic way, like with ice cream or lemon rind or 24-karat gold leaf flakes. Perhaps an elaborate silver coffee pot and red velvet drapes. Conversation about grandchildren, divorce lawyers, perhaps some listening to music and discussion about percussive syncopation. Edith envisioned a new friend. Edith would occasionally borrow a couple of eggs from her; maybe use her washing machine when Edith’s machine finally kicked the bucket. But instead the invitation was for sex. And it had been so many years since her ex Beryl, Edith couldn’t reasonably say no. Bev can’t stand coffee because she works with it every day, so Bev didn’t even offer coffee. – I’ve got tap water? Bev had said, pointing toward the sink. – I didn’t know you’d be thirsty.

166 Bev wrapped herself around Edith the moment Edith stepped in the front door. Edith has no time for sex. But this time she will make time. – I want your D-cup tits in my face, said Bev, her face close to Edith’s, her hands squeezing Edith’s waist. – I’ve never felt another woman’s breasts before. Can I? Does it bother you that you’re my experiment? There, I said it. – I don’t . . . , said Edith, squirming, her back suddenly very straight. – I have work to do, Beverley. This is literally my coffee break. – Me too, said Bev, whipping off her long apron, then hurrying back to kiss Edith, her hands cupping Edith’s face, Bev exclaiming that Edith’s cheeks were so soft! Bev exclaimed about every inch of Edith, the softness, the roundness, the smoothness, the bigness of the breasts. – I’m converted, exclaimed Bev. – I officially love women’s breasts! Bev stuck her face between Edith’s breasts, and kissed her cleavage and nipples with extravagant smacks. Edith has to admit being Bev’s experiment is very pleasing. Bev smelled pleasantly of coffee, milk, and lotion made of Bali sea foam. And every time Edith exits her building to go somewhere on foot, she by necessity walks by the glass floor-to-ceiling walls of The Kaffee Klatsch. Where Bev will see her entering and exiting the building if Bev is working. Bev can also get marijuana from her kids. For Edith’s mother’s arthritis. Edith found this out when Bev asked her if she wanted to eat a hash brownie or smoke a joint after their first round of sex. Edith runs from Bev’s condo, down the hall, and punches the elevator button. She’s forgotten her underpants. She coughs, her throat suddenly sandpaper harsh. She should have been grading papers if she couldn’t sleep, not inviting Bev the Barista to continue experimenting on her. Bev so loud, so non-academic. Edith’s ideal partner should be an academic. Like Mary Ellen’s husband Dino at Carberry University. Definitely Edith’s ideal shouldn’t have five children. An ex-husband. Work

167 in a coffee shop. But Edith can already feel herself dropping into love. Her new book and her new sweetheart will make this the most stunning year ever, even if it means being sleep-deprived, even if it means having this terrible Dean as her boss. She would love to telephone Vivianne about Bev. Crow to Vivianne about her life improvements, how she is architecting her life. But that would eat up an entire free session for no good reason. As soon as Edith pulls her own blanket up over her chest in her own bed she tumbles backward into sleep.

168

September 6th Edith’s meeting with Helen Bedford is for 8:30 am this morning. She can barely slide out of bed, her head concrete-heavy in her hands. She blobs mint toothpaste on her hair pick, accidentally picks it into her hair. She will wear the black and white version of the shirt today. She will tie on the new scarf. When she gets to the University, Edith boards elevator #1 on the basement level, a paper-bagged scone from the cafeteria in her hand. The doors close, and she pushes button #4. On the main floor the door opens to Mary Ellen, framed by the doorway, her dozing piranha mouth all teeth and dimples as she laughs widely at something the Dean’s said. The Dean hustles into the elevator, brushing Edith with an elbow. Mary Ellen’s eyes flick to Edith for a fraction of a fraction of a second, then flick back as the Dean punches button #5. Edith smiles in a vague, watery way at them both. She unbuttons, then rebuttons the top button of her coat. She fingertips the end of her brand new scarf, the gauzy, Harlequin diamond fabric. – You know what, Monty, Mary Ellen says to the Dean, – I’ll take the next elevator. I just need to freshen up for a second, I was up until late last night preparing for this graduate student talk this morning and I feel like a madwoman in an attic, so why don’t you go ahead and I’ll meet you up there? Monty salutes her, mock-clicking his heels together, – Of course Mary Ellen! Don’t take too much time. Your audience awaits with bated breath! Mary Ellen can’t even stand to ride the elevator with her anymore! Mary Ellen thinks she’s a monster! But no. Vivianne told Edith to practice her self-talk. What is your self-talk, Edith? I am the architect of my life. I build its foundation and select the locks for the attic.

169 Edith peers at the Dean, at Mary Ellen, from the dirty windows of her life. The Dean leans toward Mary Ellen, says – I’ll be in Madrid in February. I won’t be here that month, come to think of it. But thank you for the invitation, earlier. – Oh, the CREP conference? I’m being given the CREP award. I’ll be there too. – Ah, well. We’ll be doing a cava tasting on day three. – No one in Spain drinks cava anymore, Monty, says Mary Ellen. – I’ll be moving on to France right afterwards to deliver a keynote. Mary Ellen and the Dean natter on. They are weak, thinks Edith. I am strong. My foundation is reinforced concrete. My sub-basement is stock- piled with grenades and hair-trigger booby traps. The Dean wears a tie that looks like stained glass. 8:37 am, and Edith is seven minutes late for her meeting with Helen Bedford because the traffic was snarled with newly-fallen snow, and Mary Ellen and the Dean topping each other are making her even later, his hand with its unnaturally hairy thumb resting on the rubber edge of the open elevator door, preventing the elevator from rising and hauling Edith to her floor. The fingernail on his thumb is blue and peeling. Time is an illusion, but it is also gelatin. The elevator door beeps in protest, as though in pain. She stands in the elevator next to the Dean, the grit under her feet on the parquet floor powders its way up to the inside of her mouth. The scarf winds around Edith’s neck as the Dean grins and chatters with Mary Ellen on the other side of the elevator doorway. He faces straight ahead, his marionette- lined mouth smiling in a way having nothing to do with happiness, his hand with its blue, bruised nail blocking the door from closing. Dropping her scone, Edith puts her hand to her throat, the scarf screwing tighter, her fingers claw, trying to unknot. Neither of them notice her mouth making O’s like a koi in a pond, her scone rolling its floury way out of its brown paper bag into the middle of the elevator floor. The elevator door beeps in pain again.

170 The elevator door slides shut, the Dean settles back against the wall, his rooster feathers settling. The scarf collapses in her fingers, just a floppy fabric scrap she’s yanked away and balled up in her hands. Her stomach grumbles as she surveys her dirty scone. She’s not unlocking her office door until 8:39 am, huffing from labouring through the corridors. One hallway blocked with a Construction Zone sign and a warped plywood wall, in the alternate hallway the ceiling tiles have been ripped away the whole length, the silver ducts and metal pipes twisting above her in the dark, and her scarf crushed in her hand. Helen Bedford hulks by the dark blue office door with a mountainous backpack hoisted on her back, a gigantic cardboard coffee cup in her hand, her mouth flat as a slug’s. Edith fumbles at the knob. Drops her keys to the floor with a jangle. Then her scarf tumbles down. She reaches for the keys, the scarf. Her satchel swings forward and thumps her in the temple. She fights the door open, the key sticky in the lock. She refuses to let Helen intimidate her. Helen has wide open eyes, unnaturally wide, the whites of her eyes egg-fresh and luminescent and clear, and not unbearable to look at. Edith tosses her coat onto the coat stand, propels the scarf into the garbage, pulls out a stapled package of curled papers. Edith had to ask Helen for an extension: I’m just so sorry, wrote Edith in an email, I’ve just been so very overwhelmed with grading essays, attending meetings and writing my biannual Academic Achievement Overview that I wasn’t able to read your thesis chapter in time for our original meeting. Would it be all right if we just met later next week? Helen promptly emailed back, I can meet on Wednesday before 11 am, but after that I have a shift at my other job. And now here they are. Edith’s desk lightly powdered with construction dust and the metal cover from her heating vent is missing. For some inexplicable reason a grain of rice sits on her desk. Maybe a workman eating his lunch? But she cannot think about that as she swipes all the debris aside with her sleeve because she has had Helen Bedford’s thesis chapter for

171 almost seven weeks, and the chapter is only 14 pages long. Unforgivable! Edith spent the last week chewing through the chapter, a study of sugar in Canadian fiction. Helen interested in sugar in literature because of her juvenile diabetes. – Research Me-Search! Edith called out gaily when she first heard about Helen’s diabetes. Helen sits in the grubby chair with the flattened cushion. Grubby and flattened from years of students’ and professors’ bums. Edith tried to get a better chair from the faculty lounge and its collection of unused chairs, but the Office Administrator Alice Z. caught Edith pushing the chair along the hallway in transit between the lounge and her office and chided Edith, – Facility Resources is the correct department to contact when procuring a new chair for a faculty member’s office, Dr. Vane. Edith needed to fill out the appropriate form, and the new chair should be in her office in six to eight months. 13 months ago. Edith also sits in a tired, squished chair. She talks about Helen’s Chapter Three, that Chapter Three is shaping up well, but that Helen needs to better prepare for the line of inquiry she’s proposed in Chapters One and Two, and this chapter doesn’t seem to be taking into account Lucy Maud Montgomery’s numerous inclusions of cake in her Anne of Green Gables novels as instances of sugar or the most recent theoretical sources commenting on baked goods as semantic objects in literature. As Edith thumbs through pages 11 and 12 filled with her tiny red-penned comments, Helen Bedford inhales loudly and her cheeks fill up like a puffer fish. Edith realises that Helen is bored; that momentary, obvious imitation of a puffer fish telegraphing everything Edith needs to know. Edith desperately wishes she could call Vivianne. What would Vivianne do? Edith is not sure what to make of her imaginary house’s foundation. It feels untrustworthy, leaky. Edith inhales, exhales. This is her year. This will be her year. She is a published author. She has a new girlfriend for the first time in nine years. She straightens her shoulders. Crosses her feet at the ankles. Uncrosses them. Crosses them again.

172 The black hole of the heat vent suddenly belches burning air, moist and smelly. Like boiling eggs. Edith pauses a moment, plucks at her collar to let out some of her own heat. – Let’s continue, shall we? Edith says. She paws through her notes, trying to sum up two, three pages at a time, and when she reaches the end she looks up at the clock and sees that she’s been spouting for almost 27 minutes. She asks Helen if Helen might have any questions. Helen arranges her hands in her lap. Edith notices for the first time that Helen never took off her backpack, that Helen’s hair sweeps strangely thinner along the hairline. Edith has always admired Helen’s low and vigorous widow’s peak. – Yes, I do, says Helen. – I’m going with a different supervisor. Dr. Toogood has agreed to supervise my thesis. Edith’s back suddenly arches. She flips erratically through the papers, her notes glowing and crawling along the margins, the three-page typed response she wrote resting on top of the stack. Mary Ellen’s tentacled chemise. Edith should have paid attention to the tentacles and not the Earths. I own you, said Mary Ellen, only seven years ago. The Titanic. – All-All right, says Edith, her throat full of dust. The air from the heating vent blows harder, the boiling egg smell more pungent. The boiling eggs morphing into hot sewer smell. She pats her nose. She wonders how her losing Helen will affect the Dean’s targeted refreshment strategy. Helen leaving gives her no supervisions at all. She’ll have to put zero under the MA and PhD Supervision box on her AAO form. The toilet across the hall flushes. The vent blows a frizzing wisp of Edith’s hair into her eye. Edith clutches Helen’s chapter to her chest. – But why, Helen Bedford? Why? – Dr. Toogood said she could fund me. She said she could help me get the BURP assistantship because she’s on the long-list for a BURP grant. But I own you.

173 Helen puffs up her own cheeks, exhales abruptly. – I’m going to be late for my shift, says Helen. – I have to go. Can I have that? She reaches her hand out for the chapter. – What do you do? asks Edith, her fingers clutching and crinkling Helen’s chapter even more. – Where are you working your shift? – I do psychic readings, says Helen. Edith worked so hard on this chapter, she could have graded so many more essays if she hadn’t been reading and worrying over this chapter, she didn’t even prepare sufficiently for this afternoon’s lecture because she laboured so hard to finish reading on time. A gust of wind blows past the window. The window pane vibrates in its frame, as though the building exhales its exasperation with her too. Everyone is against her, even Crawley Hall. Tacked to her bulletin board is a list of all the faculty members’ names and recorded by each of the names is a list of the students being supervised by each faculty member. Alice Q. updates the list each year. Beside Marian Carson’s name, six students’ names. Eugene Thiessen has five – all scrawny, big-eyed women magnetically attracted to his pottering daddyishness. Even the perennially sick Leroy Byrd has three. He even video-conferenced in to the candidacy exam for one student from his hospital bed where he was being treated for septicaemia. Coral once had nine. And beside Edith’s name: Helen Bedford. Which Edith will have to strike out. Which the Dean will see. Leonardo who always opens doors for her even when his hands are full and hers are not has two names, and he only started a year ago. Edith will be forced to teach the giant classes that no one wants, that’s the punishment. The kind of class that texts and plays video games right in front of her, students who sleep with their heads on their desks. A class with so much grading, there’s no time to pee or breathe, forget about writing her second book. She won’t be able to make one pan of matrimonial squares with a class like that. Helen Bedford, please don’t leave me. The rumpled baby shouts his kookaburra laugh in the hallway. The toilet across the hall flushes.

174 – What did I do wrong? asks Edith – Let me know and I can fix it. – I need those papers, says Helen, the whites of her eyes glowing. – Dr. Vane, I can take that. – Helen, says Edith, – your nose is bleeding. – Shit, says Helen, touching her index finger to her nose. – That’s disgusting. Blood curls around Helen’s knuckle. – Let me get you a Kleenex! Edith scuffles through her purse for a package of tissue. – Pinch the bridge of your nose and lean your head forward! No, wait, lean your head back! Here! Here! She shoves a crumpled tissue at Helen. Helen coughs. Blood coats her tongue, daubs her teeth. A loud bang on the window behind Edith slams her from behind. Helen’s egg-white eyes flare. Hands to her throat, Edith spins to the window. The perfect residual outline of a bird in flight on the other side of the window, and a smear of feathers, a speck of blood, smushed into the glass. She turns around. The tired, squishy chair empty. The chapter gone too. Only a splash of blood on the tabletop. The scarf has evaporated from the garbage can. She dashes back to the window to see if she can see where the bird might have fallen. The heating vent blows its noxious air so hard the papers pinned to her bulletin board flap. She jams on her coat inside out. Slams the door shut behind her, harder, louder than she intended. The slam ricocheting down the hallway. Helen’s blood drops peppering a trail on the hallway floor.

175

Outspread Coral. Coral stands, mannequin straight, at the bank of elevators. The fine, straight ginger hair dabbling across the back of those narrow shoulders can only be Coral’s. Edith lurches to a stop, as though an invisible person has pushed a hand up against her sternum. Coral’s wearing a wheat-coloured trench coat. Cinched tight at the waist. No pattern. Edith hovers. Should she call out? Backtrack and plunge herself down the stairwell instead? Tap that bony shoulder? She does not want to touch Coral. Coral is tainted. She never emailed Coral thank you for the Back to School ecard. Will Edith lose her opportunity for promotion if the Dean or his spies see her chatting with Coral? For Edith has had the revelation that she does not want Coral back, no, she does not. She does not want to be identified with Coral. But the bird. Probably concussed and twitching in agony among the bushes below Edith’s window. She could gather it up in the skirt of her coat. Call wildlife officers. Feed it from a tiny bottle, and send it flying away, back into the grassy foothills where it belongs. Elevator door #1 slides open, and Coral steps in. Edith jumps forward, flapping her paddle-sized hands, crying gaily, – Coral! The prodigal daughter has returned! Coral spins around. Her familiar thin face flushes with irritation, with misdirected blood, eyeliner around her eyes thick and furiously black against her skin, her eyes two holes in her face. – You hate me and your therapist says it’s okay that you hate me? asks Coral, Coral’s face so much thinner than when she left, her cheeks painfully sharp. An insectival thinness. No wonder Edith didn’t recognise her before. The eyes disproportionately large. Edith’s breath stops. If she breathes she will burst into tears and she cannot let the tears gush here. She turns her face to the floor of this enemy space, the dusty corners of the elevator floor, a hair elastic knotted with threads of hair, a torn scrap of grey paper. Then she remembers the email

176 she wrote to Coral the night of the reception. But she didn’t send that email! She deleted it, she knows she did. – I didn’t mean to send you that email! says Edith, – I deleted that email. I was really tired . . . I . . . Coral! – Jesus. Not again. You don’t need to drink two entire bottles every time, Edith. – It was just a couple of glasses. – Don’t you think it’s a problem that when you drink you email horrible things? What if you accidentally email the Dean or the President? You’ll be screwed, Edith. Seriously. The elevator machinery lurches behind the doors, and they sweep open to Mary Ellen Toogood and her post-doctoral student, Melnyk, carrying two satchels, two coats. He is impassive as a Buckingham Palace guard. Her eyes flick to Edith, but strictly out of reflex, the way one’s eyes would flick to a ragged bit of curtain blowing from a sudden gust of breeze. Although it never breezes up here, the windows unopenable in this squat fortress of knowledge. Mary Ellen and Coral regard each other. – How do you do? says Coral, extending her hand out to Mary Ellen. – Hello, says Mary Ellen, her smile clicking open like an umbrella. She takes Coral’s hand, shines her sun on Coral. The lovely stranger Mary Ellen. – You look familiar. The elevator doors clunk closed after they squeeze in beside Mary Ellen and Melnyk. – You’re Mary Ellen Toogood. I’m Coral Pullet. We met once at the OOPLA conference in Venice, but I’m sure you don’t remember me. I did my PhD with Ted Hudgens at Carberry. I’ve read your monograph on bullying in the campus novel. It was absolutely fascinating. I’ve been a fan of your work for years. Mary Ellen puffs up; Edith can feel her puffing up, the officially recognised cock among the hens. Mary Ellen grasps Coral’s hand with both her hands now. They huddle together, Mary Ellen’s back to Edith.

177 The fragile, shiny skull under the coiffed, bright hair. Both women wear Hangaku shoes, the hourglass heels new and unscratched. Mary Ellen’s shoes distinguished by a lion’s head pressed into the leather at the top of the heel. – Of course I remember you, Coral, says Mary Ellen. – You were there when that waiter ripped off his pants at the conference banquet. I was at a conference with Ted in Basel last week as a matter of fact. Is this elevator going down? I could have sworn we pressed the Up button and we were moving up. Melnyk, you pressed the wrong button. – The pantsless waiter in Venice! says Coral. She clutches her chest in a giggle. – The Venetian waiter with the flexing buns of steel! – I was supposed to be in Basel, but I couldn’t make it. I was so looking forward to your plenary! – Well I’ll be doing another one in Vienna in three weeks . . . – Vienna! At the QTFR conference? You’re one of the keynote speakers? I’ll make sure I’m there! How wonderful . . . – Yes, I’m looking forward to it . . . The elevator keens to a stop. The doors open slowly, but stick partway. Edith and Coral squeeze out between the doors. – You have a meeting upstairs, Mary Ellen? asks Coral through the gap between the doors. – An AEX meeting. On the fifth floor with the Dean, says Mary Ellen. – I’m late, but I must retrieve my mail. Melnyk, go grab my mail and meet me on the fifth floor. Take the stairs because I can’t stop on the floor where the mail is. And he thrusts open the doors sideways, left hand on one door’s edge, right elbow on the other door’s edge because his right arm carries two satchels and two coats, and glides past Edith and Coral. – You and I, Coral, says Mary Ellen, fiddling with her huge pearls, – we should go for lunch. – I would love that, says Coral. – I’ll tell Ted I saw you.

178 The doors clunk closed, Mary Ellen’s perfume a remnant fog that clings to them. – Hmmm, says Coral. – I’ll bet she’s a keynote at that QTFR conference in Vienna, says Coral. – Which one’s the QTFR? asks Edith. – Oh Edith, says Coral. – You need to stop being so guileless. – Please let me buy you a coffee. Or a poutine. To make it up to you, I didn’t mean it, I was sincerely exhausted, I’d only had a drink or two. – Which means you revealed at least one of your truths, Edith Vane. Coral begins stubbing her toe against the peeling rubber baseboard. – Everyone’s invited as a keynote speaker at the QTFR conference, Edith. That’s how we’re all getting money to go. Toogood’s advertising herself as the only one. Coral clasps her arms around her waist. Her profile sharp. Coral’s hands more bony, more veiny than Edith remembers. – Did you know, Edith, she says, – that this building we work in is five floors of basement plus a basement. She turns to Edith, her high voice turning waspy. – Do you know what this style of architecture is called? Brutalist architecture. How apt is that, Edith? She coughs, then yanks out a tissue from inside her cardigan sleeve. – I looked it up. It’s the same style they use for jails and insane asylums, Coral says. She coughs again, into the tissue. – Look, she says, holding out her phlegm to Edith. – Does that look like a normal colour? I’ve only been back here for a few weeks and already it’s affecting my breathing. – I don’t see anything, says Edith, trying to avoid the tissue, looking at the floor, the wall, Coral’s pointy nails. – Of course you do, says Coral shoving her tissue and its shining phlegm towards Edith’s face. – Look! All you have to do is look. God, Edith. It’s so obvious what’s going on here. – Oh, you’re right, says Edith, pretending to squint. – I see a definite, unnatural tinge. Coral crumples up the tissue. – I’m sorry, Coral.

179 Coral wipes her nose with the tissue. Stuffs it back up her sleeve. – Friday we can go for coffee, she says. – But if you send me anymore drunk emails between now and then, forget it. Edith propels herself out of the building’s front doors. The hard bang on the window. The bird. She scurries to the bushes under her office window, hoping. Nothing but bushes shedding their leaves, discarded cardboard cups, tattered plastic bags. Twigs and branches scratch her hands as she parts the bushes, a plastic bag clings to her shoe as she tries to kick it aside. She leans back, looking for her window, counting windows up then sideways until she spots it. She turns a complete circle: grey concrete wall and skeletal shrubs, a metal side-door, scraggly pine trees, the view of the parking lot where she parks her car, the brown grass island with its single pine tree in the middle of the traffic circle, a sidewalk marked by pylons where a crack has been sprayed with pink paint, a concrete garbage can with a dented metal hood, glass doors, grey concrete wall. She turns another circle. Right between the concrete wall and the metal side-door a little grey bird lies sprawled on its back, wings outspread. She’s too late. The earth gives a small heave, and she stumbles. She needs to eat something because she could have sworn the earth just rumbled. Poor little bird. She bends down. The beak’s shiny hardness. The tiny curled claws. A rabbit lopes away from under a nearby bush. She should really bring carrots the next time she comes to work. Do a little good for the wildlife around here. Atone for the bird’s death. Wind gusts through branches of the tree and near-naked bushes, soughs weirdly as it blows past the doorway behind her. – Gonna bury it? asks a voice. Dr. Angus Fella. His ragged boots right next to her hands, propped in the dirt. – No, says Edith, sitting back on her haunches. She no longer cares about dirt on her knees, her hands. She rubs her hands together. – I could help you dig a hole, he says. – Got a shovel in my office. For emergencies. But my back’s fucked. You’d have to do all the digging. – I’d like to, says Edith, standing up. – But there’s no time.

180 – Oh well, says Angus. – Oh well, says Edith. – Bird couldn’t have been that bright, he says. – Trying to get into a building like this. Aren’t animals supposed to have some kind of instinct about bad places? Nutty old white man.

181

September 10th Several days later she has to drive around and around campus to find a parking spot, the entrance to her regular parking lot blocked off by a campus security officer in a neon orange vest waving his arms in front of yellow plastic barricades. She’s forced to circle into the Novacrest Library parking lot. She sighs as she eases into a spot between the TOOGOOD silver Mercedes and a black pickup truck. She tugs out from the front passenger seat foot well a plastic bag of unnaturally identical GMO carrots and a chopped-up head of iceberg lettuce, upends the bag in the scrubby, frosted grass next to the grill of her steaming car. She juggles her bag, her travel mug of coffee, and a Tupperware container of matrimonial squares. She baked them last night because today she is going to be handing back the one-page essays and her students will loathe her. Hopefully the matrimonial squares will sugar away some of the loathing. She slams the car door. She trips and slips across the pockmarked lot, past windshields and bumpers feathered with frost, past the concrete hulk of the Novacrest Library. She crams her nose into her collar, her fingers cracking with cold as she grasps the Tupperware and the mug, her briefcase thumping her buttocks with every step. There’s something very wrong with Crawley Hall. A crater blossomed in the night right beside the building. Which is why she couldn’t park in her regular space. Part of the parking lot, the traffic circle, the walkway in front of the main door on this side of the building, have collapsed into a giant hole. Part of the concrete foundation of Crawley Hall exposed. Its root. She flushes with embarrassment; seeing the raw foundation feels like accidentally seeing an ancient uncle’s naked buttocks. The brown grass island in the traffic circle collapsed in the night into a cavity the size of two bungalows, and now blue mesh fencing rings the hole with large CAUTION signs wired to the fence, and official-looking women and men in helmets and bright safety vests swarm around the hole,

182 chattering at each other, chattering at the hole, chattering into mobile phones and pointing at things. She pauses at the edges of the fence. Like the Friendly Giant punched a hole in the ground. For now she’s forced to go through the Crawley Hall’s main front door where she might run into Mary Ellen or the Dean. Or Coral. She simply has no energy for any of them today. Plus, the Dean and his wife don’t recycle their wine bottles, they seem to eat a lot of prunes, and at least one of them is on a mega-dose of some kind of narcotic drug which she supposes cheers her up somewhat. She pulls a book from her briefcase and pretends to read it, flipping through the pages as she walks to the front door, as her briefcase thumps her bum all the way to the elevator. At the edges of her book’s pages Olivia Crowshoe’s black and white wingtip Hangakus heel-toe past, the rumpled baby’s leather Converse runners squeak their rubber soles. She closes her book because neither the Dean’s polished black rumpelstiltskin shoes nor Mary Ellen’s lion-headed Hangakus are around. Edith nods at Olivia, at Leonardo. They wait for an elevator. – Did you see the sinkhole? Leonardo asks Olivia. – No, what sinkhole? – The one at the back of Crawley Hall. – That’s insane. The elevator doors wheeze open. They all step inside. The doors wheeze shut. – Olivia, says Leonardo. – Please go for dinner with me. I’m going to ask you every day until you say yes. Edith pushes herself back into the faux-wood wall. She should have taken the stairs. Olivia pushes her glasses farther up on her nose. The elevator opens one floor early and Edith slides out as quickly as she can. Edith tromps up the ugly stairwell. Her knees clicking unhealthily, the banisters coated with strange grit. Her lungs burn.

183 In her office, she continues panting from her climb up the single flight of stairs as she snaps open her email, and wipes the grit off her fingers with a tissue.

From: [email protected] Subject: Gross Date: Mon., Sept. 10, 2:33 am To: [email protected]

Nice work, boning the old lady who lives downstairs.

She deletes the email. She moves on to the next one. From the Dean’s assistant.

From: "Lisa Ives" Subject: Williams Engineering Date: Mon., Sept. 10, 9:07 pm To: [email protected]

Sent on behalf of Associate Dean Montrose van Dyck:

Dear Faculty and Staff, A representative from Williams Engineering was in the Department early this morning, and was allowed into Faculty offices on the fourth and fifth floors to take photos of the sinkhole from the vantage point of several offices. In doing so, window coverings or objects on the ledges may have been shifted. Lisa Ives Dean’s Office Administrator [email protected]

A stack of books has shifted from the left side of the windowsill to the right side. The bloody shadow of the dead bird lingers on the glass. She shoves the books back to the left side where they belong. The wall behind her bulletin board abruptly starts to bang. Asbestos abatement, she guesses.

184 She had another nightmare last night. But a predictable one this time. She has had them periodically since the first day she started this job seven years ago. That it’s the first day of the new semester, and she doesn’t know where her classroom is: she runs from room to room, the minutes before class start getting slushy in her hands and dripping away until she is five minutes late, ten minutes late, 35 minutes late, her class has already started and she can’t find the classroom, and it turns out she’s running around the wrong building. That she’s supposed to be teaching calculus or linear algebra and there she is in front of the blackboard, with no idea how to proceed because she knows nothing beyond the names she learned in the mathematics classes she failed in first year university. Vector spaces and derivatives. That’s all. That she stands in front of a chalkboard in a lecture hall packed with students, wearing nothing but a towel and curlers in her hair; she is teaching on a stage, but the towel is very short and she wears no underwear so the students can see flashes of her pubic hair under the towel. And the curlers keep unrolling and bouncing to the floor, so she has to keep bending over to chase her curlers while keeping the towel down, her breasts from popping out, and her genitals out of sight. That her students are so fed up with her they start to walk out. Except that today this nightmare isn’t happening in her sleep, today the nightmare is real, even though today she’s wearing clothes and she’s distributing matrimonial squares first thing to cushion the blow of their essay grades because students are always disappointed with their grades. Icing sugar powders between her thumb and index fingers as she offers the squares to each student. – No nuts except oatmeal, she says. – These squares are also gluten and dairy free. Then she distributes their graded essays, and they flip through the pages of their essays while she starts talking about the first slide she’s put up. They sit in horrible silence, absorbing their grades. The students’ eyes drilling into their grades, then drilling into her. On this essay she kept the

185 average at a C+, the way she was warned to at the end of last year by the Dean because he said her grades were overall far too high. Their faces curdle into hatred and contempt, even as they bite into her squares. A man in a yellow construction hat strides by outside the classroom window, his hands on his hips, along the sinkhole’s edge. She flips to another powerpoint slide: lines of poetry, with heavy marks above each syllable. The light from the projector turning the students’ faces blue. – So as I mentioned last class, in the poem’s third stanza . . . , she begins, in the semi-dark next to the projection screen. – Professor, can I talk to you after class about my paper? demands Caprice. Caprice’s voice clipped and trembly. As she explained to Edith on the first day, Caprice intends to go into Medicine, and she only needs this course to help her get into Medicine. – Um, Edith says, – yes, but my office hours are only on Tuesdays and Thursdays and today is a Monday. . . – This is really important, says Caprice. – I’ve never received a grade lower than an A in my life. – Well, even monkeys fall out of trees, Edith says. A thing one of her favourite Shakespeare professors once said. – So now I’m a monkey? asks Caprice. Edith continues on with the stanza, pointing out the way the scansion matches the content. – So here, she says, pointing at the lit screen, her head starting to thrum, – the accent of the syllable falls right on the word “whoosh,” and then we swoosh on to the next line in the stanza . . . – I don’t see it, says Caprice, her arms crossed. – It falls on “pear,” not “whoosh.” Caprice then asks her where is the proof the poem’s stanza ends on the next page and not at the bottom of the page. There is no proof! And what does it mean that there can be multiple interpretations of a poem, and there’s no single right answer? What is a poem anyway? Dr. Vane still hasn’t clearly defined what a poem even is.

186 – I’m not feeling very centred, says Caprice, slapping closed her laptop. – I’ll go wait by your office right now, if you don’t mind. Caprice slings her bag up from the back of her chair. She stalks out of the room, the door booming shut behind her. Edith continues pointing stupidly at the screen. She doesn’t know whether to run after Caprice or move to the poem’s next stanza. She can’t afford another student complaint to the Dean, she just can’t. A boy to the right licks date paste from his fingers. – Are we allowed to go? asks a girl next to him, her fingers curled around her essay, rolled tight like a baton. – Is that why she left? Because we can go? Or is this poem on the screen going to be on the final exam? – The class only started five minutes ago, says a woman on the left- hand side of the class who’s still wearing her coat. Edith wants to hug her in her zipped up parka. – So the “whoosh” propels the line forward . . . , she falters. She blinks at the students, at the clock ticking at the back of the room that says the class still has 64 minutes to go. If the clock is telling her the truth. The hour and minute hands flip her the bird. She lunges out the door to hunt down Caprice. The classroom across from hers is full of students enraptured with their instructor, Leonardo Baudone. Coral teaches in the classroom next to his, her room is also packed, students holding up their hands, eager to answer a question as Coral paces in the front of the room. But even as Edith totters through the hallways in her new shoes, clunks up the concrete stairs because the elevator would no doubt be its normal glacial self, her knees streaking with pain, her lungs searing, she cannot find Caprice. Her office door unmolested. Edith clumps back down the stairs in the ugly half-lit stairwell, clumps down the hallway to her classroom. Only a quarter of the students have stayed, texting, fiddling on their laptops, scattered around the room. Little Simon is one of them. His braces gleam as his mouth breaks into a smile, as though he is relieved at her return. She scrunches her hands into fists, raises herself to her full, Associate Professor, Philosophiae Doctor height. – This poem is most definitely on the final exam! she shrieks.

187 The students bend their heads down to their desks and begin to type and scribble in their notes.

She steps over the threshold of the elevator, waits for the grate of the elevator machinery lifting off before she presses the button for the fourth floor. The metal doors of the elevator close, and greasy handprints and footprints cloud the dull silver sheen. In the midst of all the hands and soles of feet, toes, a face; some bored student has pressed his or her greasy face against the doors, the smudge of chin, cheeks, forehead, tip of nose, lips. Lips smushed against the door. The elevator’s machinery finally starts to churn. That face’s residue leering at her. The elevator stops on the second floor. A cleaner trundles her trolley heaped with garbage bags into the elevator. Stands silently beside Edith. Facing the filthy elevator doors. – These doors need some cleaning, remarks Edith. The digital display above the door counts the next floor up. – These doors are filthy, said Edith. – Hmm? says the cleaner. She’s wearing ear buds. – You need to clean these doors. The cleaner smiles tentatively at Edith. The cleaner gestures at the pile of garbage. The digital display silently tings the fourth floor. Pauses. The doors not opening. – Why aren’t you doing your job? bursts Edith to the cleaner in her blue smock. – The semester’s barely begun. These doors are always dirty, filthy with fingerprints. Edith waves at the greasy smears, the handprints, the leering face. The cleaner faces the door. Edith notices a small pile of dirt in the back corner of the elevator. Not dirt. Little balls. Little brown and black balls. Rabbit turds.

188 The scat sweeps away into a cloth. The corner swiped clean. The cleaner bundling the turds in a cloth and stuffing it into one of the plastic garbage bags on her trolley. The elevator door pulls open onto the fourth floor. The cleaner pushes the trolley out the door. Clearly the building has a rabbit infestation. She should alert one of the Alices.

Her next class is her graduate class. She has a half hour break between classes today, not enough time to do anything except pee and panic that she’s not prepared enough for the next class, or give in and sip room- temperature leftover coffee from her travel mug while staring resignedly out the window at the enormous hole by the building where she used to park her car. After 22 minutes of watching brown dirt, parked white trucks and skeletal autumn trees, she gathers up her papers, her briefcase, her Tupperware just in case she needs a snack during the bio-break, and locks her office door behind her. The students seem to be feral. There is no other word for it. She dumps her briefcase on the table at the front of the classroom, extracts a stack of notes and a battered book from her own graduate school days. She curls her fingers on the table. The class empty except for her. But that’s okay, it’s only 1:55 pm, and the students meander in late in twos and threes. She begins talking to them at 2:08 pm. By 2:25 one of the more senior PhD students has already pissed on a junior PhD student. In general, however, she notices that in graduate classes the PhDs interrupt and snarl at the MAs. After class, the MAs will yowl to her in her office. The PhDs will sneer. Today, both PhDs and MAs snarl at her, they yip, they spray her with their frustration and competitiveness, try to jostle her out of the top spot. They all hate her because they smell her panic, how she’s bumble-faking key theoretical concepts that aren’t in her area: she always mixes up the words tautology and ontology, and she has to look up what aleatory means every single goddamn time. She cringes as they ooze contempt, refusing to take notes, as if everything she says is meaningless. She namedrops theorists just to get the students to think she’s smart and deserves to be at the front of the

189 classroom, and mistakenly mentions Derrida and cryptomimesis. The most innocent-looking of them all, Karis, lingers in the room after the others have left and peers at Edith from under her straight brown bangs, her perpetually squinty eyes pencil-eraser blue. Karis asks a question about Derrida and haunting, – Did he mean actual ghosts? Does he mean that ghosts exist? How the hell should I know? Edith wants to say. Who cares? she wants to ask, and she doesn’t care what the answer is. All she cares about is Beulah Crump-Withers, but no one ever wants to talk about Beulah Crump- Withers. Then Karis says she didn’t know Derrida believed in the supernatural, and Edith’s tongue prickles for the new bottle of wine she bought yesterday, a cabernet merlot blend. So red, so luscious. A quick tumble with her new girlfriend and future wife Bev. Yes, that’s what she needs. Edith tosses her papers into her satchel, pops the lid back on her drying-out whiteboard marker. – The spectral is only a metaphor, Karis, Edith says. – Of course ghosts don’t exist. – Oh, says Karis, her mouth drooping, as though she’s been told Santa Claus is only a seasonal contract worker with a fake beard. – That’s disappointing. Edith wonders if perhaps next week she should bake the graduate class matrimonial squares too as a surprise, to break the unrelenting tension, to cheer poor idiot Karis up. The other class seemed to like the matrimonial squares even though they hate her. Only three were left in the bottom of the container and she baked a total of 84. She wonders if Bev should move into her condo or if she should move into Bev’s condo when they finally take the leap. Bev’s dandelion lamp will have to go.

Edith slumps against the elevator wall, her throat dry, her arms sagging as they prop up her books and papers. The elevator stops, the door yawns open, and she plods down the colourless hallways to her office,

190 straight, then right past the mailroom, then right again, then left, then another left. She forgot about the second left. The hallways seem to stretch longer and longer these days, now that she is more tired, she supposes, now that the days are shorter. A trick of the changing sunlight. Her watch says 4:40 pm. She remembers she said goodbye to Karis and flicked off the classroom fluorescents at 4:26 pm. It took 14 minutes to get from the third floor to her fourth floor office? The fatigue clearly feasts on her. The elevators slower, the hallways longer and longer. Longest. But as she tries to round the second left, she nearly trips. Books litter part of the hallway, a pile collected against the wall opposite an open office door. A plant flies out of the door, spatters dirt against the wall, peppering the books. – Fuuuuuuuck, she hears. Then, – Fuckety fuck mcfuckintosh o’fuckinstein vanfucklington! The office belongs to Jack Froese. One of the creative writers. A porcelain mug skids across the floor, its handle popping off in a spray of dirt and flutter of pages. Creative writers always so histrionic and easily offended. Especially the poets. Dr. Froese’s head with its white springy nostril hairs pops out of his doorway. – Ellen . . . Elise . . . whatever your name is, he says, raising his finger as though he is about to assault her with a sound poem, – tell MontyfuckfacevanDyckdick that may the only pear he ever eat again be a Pear of Anguish! Froese is being refreshed before her very eyes! Her pupils dilate. She shields her head with her Tupperware container, and ducks in the other direction. She can’t reach her office except through Froese’s hallway, unless she wants to retreat the way she came, navigate the hallway the floor below and climb the back stairs. Instead she folds herself into a bathroom cubicle, settling herself on the edge of the toilet seat. She picks at the three matrimonial squares. She scrapes a hunk of date paste off a crust. Licks her fingers. The texture gluey.

191 The toilet in the adjoining cubicle flushes, water rushing violently; a mound of toilet paper unspools to the floor. If she stays in her cubicle long enough, maybe the students waiting at her office to complain about their assignments will collapse from boredom and slink on home.

Only five students lined up to complain, which seems like a record. The matrimonial squares worked! After, she stumbles around the mesh- fenced sinkhole, her fingers puckering in the night-time breeze. Where the hell is her car? She’s forgotten where she parked her car. Then she remembers she parked by the Library this morning. The iceberg lettuce she left as an offering for the rabbits flaps, untouched, in the wind. The carrots still dumped in a heap. Jackrabbits graze nearby, tugging at the brown grass but not her bright, fresh vegetables. Their pelts already starting to clot with winter white fur. The dead bird still lies on its back behind the bush where it landed after crashing into her office window, the eyes collapsed, the body dehydrating. But a hare is nuzzling it, nibbling a toe on one of the frozen feet. The foot missing completely from the other leg. Edith clamps her hand to her mouth. – Ewwwww, she whispers.

192

Cardboard The palm tree beside Coral stretches out its spiky fingers. Coral sips from a cardboard coffee cup. For once she doesn’t complain that the coffee tastes like rabbit turd. Unnatural warmth prickles across Edith’s skin. From the heat of her own coffee, from the jungle’s muggy air, from the sadness of Coral drinking instant coffee out of a disposable cup instead of her ceramic Male Tears mug without complaint. Like a normal person. When Edith asks Coral if she has any gossip, like if Coral knows anything about what’s going on with Olivia Crowshoe and Leonardo Baudone, Coral answers that she’s in a new meditation group, and as part of the meditative practice they refrain from gossip. A rainbow film coats the surface of Edith’s coffee. She gently bites the edge of her cup. – Umm. The weather’s not been great for the rabbits lately, says Edith. – The jackrabbits are already turning white but the ground’s brown. Warmest autumn on record so I wonder if they’ll ever have enough snow for camouflage. Fish in a barrel for coyotes. – Why would coyotes fish? Your metaphor depletes me, says Coral. – I’m feeling so much more grounded now that I’m in my group. – Oh, says Edith. – When did you start going to your group? – When I was refreshed. I’ve recast being refreshed as a great gift. A time for me to recast, reevaluate, and reorient. And believe it or not they’re part of the U of I BalanceWell employee health program. I found out about them after I stopped being an employee. They offered me a free year-long membership as part of the post-employee outboarding program. Why not. She sips her coffee. – You should join. – I’m really worried about my AAO, says Edith. – Monty’s read me the riot act. – Oh Edith, says Coral, licking her lips as she swirls her coffee around the bottom of her cup, – You just can’t sweat the small stuff. Concentrate on the bigger fish. Or coyotes. Whatever. You know what I mean.

193 She gulps her coffee. – It’s not like we’re the Fukushima 50. This job’s not that hard. Just manage your time. Stop dwelling so much on the negative. When we give to this job, we receive so so much. Coral brushes something invisible off the tweed grey of her pants. – Anyway, she says, – I should go to my office and polish off the article I’m writing. I’ve been working on it for almost three weeks. I don’t like taking longer than two weeks to write an article. Heat crawls up Edith’s scalp, envelopes her extremities. – Hot flush, she gasps, pulling open her collar, fanning herself with her hand. Sweat pools around her ankles, streaks down her arms. Three weeks to write an article? Even those self righteous, goody goody how-to books say an article that takes 12 weeks is fast. And during the first weeks of a brand new semester? Edith salvages a scrap page of student newspaper from under Coral’s seat. She fans herself, aiming inside her shirt’s neck hole. – I control my hot flushes through meditation now, says Coral. – I haven’t had one for at least seven months. It’s all about self-control. Self regulation and ownership. I am the architect of my life; I build its foundation and select its furniture. – Say that again? asks Edith. A rotten banana smell ripples out with the cool air of the newspaper. – What did you just say? – My BalanceWell therapist told me that I am the architect of my life. I find this useful as an epigram for pretty much everything. Edith fans more slowly now, then quickens. – Who’s your BalanceWell therapist? she asks. – A wonderful woman named Vernita. I’m so happy about BalanceWell. What a gift. Isn’t it a gift? And you can phone anytime, day or night. Edith untucks her blouse, poofing out the hem, parachuting the fabric.

194 Through a dribble of sweat she sees Coral pour the last of her coffee into her mouth, upending her cardboard cup. Handwriting scrawls across the bottom. Coral stands up to go. Straightening her pants, hoisting up her bag to her shoulder. – Bye, Edith, she says. – Be well. Be productive. She crumples the cup. She drops the cup on the floor by Edith’s feet. Litterbug! Coral swings out the glass door, her fine orange hair flicking. Edith hoists up her own bag, her own cup, the page of student newspaper. She retrieves Coral’s discarded cup. It’s over is scribbled in ballpoint pen on the bottom of the cup.

195 Tears Edith hooks together a longer and longer paperclip chain while she talks to Vivianne, the cord leading from her ear buds to the phone gnarled and twisted. The paperclips sparkle in the desk lamp light. She tucks her left foot under her thigh, sways in her chair. – You can’t help it, Edith, says Vivianne, – if your graduate student Helen Bedford chose another supervisor, although I agree it’s not a . . . welcome . . . development. When Helen told you she was going to leave did you try to talk her out of it? – I asked her why. – Next time . . . I don’t advocate this for everyone, but next time you might try crying, Edith. Show some emotion. – Cry in front of a student? – Sometimes it can work quite well to get others to do things for you that they might not otherwise do. It can work quite well for showing individuals in your life how important an issue is. – Erm, okay, says Edith, upending another box of paperclips. – By the way, I met with Coral. – Yes? – It’s like she’s been neutered. Or spayed. Neutered. She’s joined a completely depressing meditation group. And she has a BalanceWell therapist too. Named Vernita. – BalanceWell has proven itself a very successful program. – Vernita told Coral that she was the architect of her life, too. Do you all have the same script? – BalanceWell is a very successful program, Edith. – I was just making a joke. I really do appreciate you helping me. Coral wrote It’s over on the bottom of her cup. Though how she wrote upside down, I can’t fathom. Weird, huh? Why not just say that? What’s over? Maybe her cup was second-hand. Yuck! She never drinks out of cardboard cups. I guess she’s figured out the planet’s screwed so why not one more paper cup?

196 The phone hums as Vivianne flips pages, clicks and unclicks her pen. – Hello? asks Edith. – You’re welcome, Edith. We’re at the end of our time now. Goodbye. Edith taps out an email to Coral: What’s over? Clicks Send. Edith unhooks the paperclips, dropping each one into a glass jar. She slips into bed, one foot cold, the other numb. Her eyelid tics. She curls herself around Bev’s warm, round limbs. – Did Vivianne say anything useful? asks Bev. – She’s an excellent therapist. – Hmm, says Bev, her hands climbing down Edith. – Bev? – Yes? – Will you marry me? – Sure, says Bev. – Now get on your back. Edith flops onto her back, pulls a pillow over her face, and tries not to scream with joy.

197

Train October 12th. Some of the rabbits have transformed into full-fledged ghosts, completely white except for the ear tips. Friday afternoon at 4 pm, handprints and footprints coat the shiny elevator doors, as though a number of barefooted people ran on all fours up the wall, the ceiling also covered in greasy hand- and footprints. Germs. Edith slaps her hand against the door. Leaves her own handprint for company. She checks her mailbox, mostly overdue essays, while Angus Fella photocopies his bank records behind her because he’s in the process of remortgaging his house. Coral collects her mail, smirking briefly at Edith while chatting with Iris Clutterbuck about bodies without organs. Coral’s twig legs poke out from under her skirt. Coral’s body is shrinking, she is disappearing. Edith wants to force her to eat an extra-large poutine with extra gravy, extra cheese curds, and extra French fries. An entire suckling pig. Their friendship is gently renewing: they haven’t had coffee again together, but Coral once high-fived Edith when Edith duct-taped back in place a peeling wall panel by the fourth floor bathroom door. Another petition’s appeared in the mailroom, but this time about the conflict of interest in the Dean’s hiring of ParTray Catering Co. for 16 faculty functions even though the Dean’s wife coincidentally works as a food stylist for ParTray Catering Co. Either Dimple van Dyck should resign from ParTray, or Monty should resign as Dean. Once again the petition is signed only by Coral and Angus. Melnyk waits in line with a book in his hand, likely something he has to copy for Mary Ellen. Edith nods hello on her way out, but he barely blinks. At least he gives her eye contact. Coral said It’s over. Edith emailed Coral It’s over, but no email from Coral pinged into Edith’s mailbox. And they’ve never talked about it. Jack Froese’s rage still bothers Edith. How quickly the Dean erased him. Jack Froese didn’t even have a proper retirement reception. The Dean

198 adores excuses for receptions. Froese’s office nameplate has evaporated, his face and faculty profile stripped from the department website. Even though he’d been working at the university for 42 years. His office door stripped of the fading writers’ festival posters and fliers advertising student writing contests. Three sessional instructors, plus Melnyk the postdoctoral student, and Coral cram into Froese’s office now, three women and a man and Coral who is only hotelling in the office as her touchdown space while Alice Q. tries to find her permanent office space. Coral’s former office swathed in tarp and an Authorised Personnel Only designated zone. All their office appointment hours on different sized sheets of paper are taped haphazardly on the door, along with conference ads and photocopied cartoons about grammar. Students’ sullen forms line up at the door, they camp out on the floor with smartphones and calculators and iPads. Bev said she was only kidding when she agreed to marry Edith. Their first fight. Their first luscious bout of make-up sex two days later. In just under three weeks they’ll have their two month anniversary. Edith will maybe propose again. In her own office, Edith shuffles, stacks, re-stacks the three neat heaps of brand new essays from three different classes on her office desk. She snaps an elastic band around each bundle, then angles them all into her P. T. Madden shopping bag. She slings on her coat. She will try to catch up and grade at least twenty mid-term exams a day this Thanksgiving long weekend. She’s filled out the PLOPE section of her AAO – yay! – and she has packed with words and printed out the top of the BURP grant application relating Beulah Crump-Withers the Amber Valley Alberta farmwife-diarist to Health, even though there is absolutely no connection between Canadian prairie landscape metaphors and Health, but the Dean’s Office Manager Lisa Ives sent a blanket email about a grant opportunity having to do with Health in the Workplace. Edith could argue that Beulah’s kitchen was her workplace, the memoir a journaling of her 12 children’s and her two husbands’ various bouts with influenza, toe fungus, and bedbugs?

199 In the elevator, Olivia Crowshoe tells Leonardo Baudone that she heard Froese tried to hypnotise his students. Leonardo harrumphs that he had bellinis with the Dean last week, and Froese was a dinosaur who reviewed books on the radio, hadn’t published a single poem or poetry book in decades, and who pooh-poohed academic grants like the BURP or DIC as part of the capitalist machine. – It’s a different time now, said Leonardo. – Tenure’s not going to help you keep your job if you’re not on board with the EnhanceUs plan, putting out a book every year or every two years, bringing in a BURP or some other grant. Did I tell you Warburg Publishers has accepted my next monograph for publication? I’m not happy because Warburg didn’t do a good job with the images in the last book Monty co-authored, but you know. Warburg is one of the foremost academic publishers in the world. If not the foremost. So I guess I’ll go with them. Though I hate to compromise. Then he asks Olivia if she has any plans for dinner tonight because Monty’s told him about a vegan, gluten-free tapas and wine bar in Mull. Olivia answers, – I’m against everything you stand for, Leonardo. Leonardo clasps his hands in prayer, and says, – I don’t know what you’re talking about but I can change. Edith raises her lecture notes up close to her nose, pretending really hard to re-read and re-read the nonsense typed at the top, and Olivia still hasn’t answered Leonardo by the time the elevator door opens and Edith squishes herself past them into the lobby. Cinnamon perfume crashes into her nose and she sneezes. When Mary Ellen is around, her perfume ripples out behind her like nerve gas as she roams the halls, stakes an odorous claim to the photocopy room, the washroom. Edith almost collides into Mary Ellen and Melnyk, Mary Ellen haranguing him because he took her outfit to the wrong drycleaner. – They are going to ruin the buttons on that dress, she huffs. Melnyk stands, stoic as an Edwardian butler. Edith composes a mental list: the stacks of mid-term exams, the AAO’s final section, the BURP grant application, that too-long conference

200 paper with so many off-topic tangents and dead ends it’s a textual Winchester House, the minutes from a WAC meeting she needs to type up and upload to the committee Dropbox by the next meeting. The building electronic wall of untended emails from university administration and committees, and no new book. Not a page, not a paragraph, not a single letter of the alphabet. Every time she types the letters arrange themselves into a letter to the Dean: Dear Monty, Please Don’t Refresh Me. Maybe she should follow Vivianne’s advice with the Dean and cry in front of him. The long Thanksgiving weekend starts tomorrow, and tomorrow morning she has to drive two and a half hours to Red Deer where her parents live. She hasn’t even packed underwear yet. She is so behind her eyelid threatens to flip inside out. She emails Coral for the fourteenth time: What’s over? She wants to phone Vivianne again. But that would be four times in three weeks, and that would put her two sessions beyond her quota. What would Vivianne say? What do you need to do to make yourself feel better? Vivianne might say. Rearrange your metaphorical furniture, Vivianne would say. At her condo, Edith hooks two paperclips together, three. She sips her wine. She could drop by Bev’s apartment and water Bev’s plants. Hunt for Bev’s diary so she can read it and find out what Bev really thinks of Edith. Bev’s spending Thanksgiving in Victoria with two of her children and a new grandbaby, but she didn’t tell Edith she was going until the very last minute and then didn’t invite Edith to come too. Edith feels uncertain about Bev’s emotional investment in her. Bev told Edith the last time they slept together that Edith is a lot of fun. Edith hates the frivolous sound of fun. Edith hooks up three more paperclips. She clicks on a jewellery website, glumly surveys engagement rings, unsure which one Bev might like but certain that if she wants to catch Bev for real, a marriage proposal is the way to do it. Women love that stuff. What does she need to do to make herself feel better?

201 She needs to grade papers. She needs to read graduate student applications and try to nab a graduate student to supervise. She needs to write a birthday card for her mother because the weekend is for Thanksgiving but also for her mother’s birthday which is only a day later. She needs to exercise. Exercise. Edith will snap on her flippers and go paddle in the university’s Olympic-sized pool. She will swim! No. The ballet class she signed up and paid for. She pulls her sweatpants out from under a mound of dusty shoes.

She attempts pliés and jetées, pirouettes and tries to reach her toes above the level of her waist, she tries not to judge her gangly, angular flamingo self in the long mirror reflected in the high sparkling windows. Her quads and buttocks ache, her neck sweats, she sweats into the tangling, frizzling roots of her hair, while her ballet teacher counts out loud, tells them, – Move with propulsive strength and purpose! Don’t flop around like dolls! Edith chugs her breaths like a train, the inside of the windows veiled in the students’ condensed sweat and breath, her joints straining until they tear and pop. The teacher plays the first strains of Dance of the Little Swans. She and the other women in the class link hands in two human woman chains, the teacher presses play on the CD player, and they hop and clump sporadically in and out of sync while the teacher shouts directions, trying to follow the teacher’s steps and keep in time to the stabbing notes of the flutes. Edith towers over all the women. They watch themselves in the long mirror, she is the tallest of them all in this Dance of the Little Swans, her own hands and the two hands she desperately holds on to are slippery and hot. The lack of coordination, the sweat trickling around her ears, the puffy fingers of the other women clutching her own, the clumping of their feet on the shiny wooden floor. The ceilings in this room stretch very high, and she wonders what part of the train station she is now galumphing around in. The old waiting room? A storage room? Did the train once run

202 through here? She can hear the whistle of the train as it crashes towards her while she hoofs from side to side pretending to be a little swan, the train’s scream splitting her open. The teacher crashes the CD player off and emotes at them, – I want to see the electricity crackling out of your fingertips! Edith sags. She stops in a 7-Eleven on the way home to buy aspirin when she sees Angus Fella using tongs to pick up a hot dog from the rolling rows of greasy, withered hot dogs in the corner of the store. She has never seen him off campus. She is like one of those children who believe their teachers live at school, are shocked that teachers do things like shop for packets of French onion soup mix or aluminum foil. – Angus! she calls. He fumbles his hot dog, he is so startled. It squelches to the floor, and rolls, picking up layers of dust and dirt. – You’ll have to pay for that, sir, declares the pimply clerk. – No, interrupts Edith – I’ll get it! But even as she says it, she remembers she only has small change in her sweatpants pocket, and wallet and credit card back home in her hallway closet. – That would be super, says Angus. She jingles her hand in her pocket, anyway, fruitlessly. – I can’t get it, she says, I don’t have enough money on me. – Well that’s just great! says Angus, he claps together his thick, wrinkled hands. – I’ll buy you a hot dog another time. Tomorrow. Will you be at school tomorrow? – Someone’s going to have to pay for that hot dog, pipes the clerk. – I’ll pay for it, you ninny, says Angus. – A hot dog isn’t even real food. Really, you should be paying me to eat it. – It’s not company practice to pay customers to buy food, sir, says the clerk, barricaded behind the counter. – That’ll be $3.99.

203 – I haven’t had a chance to put it in a bun, says Angus. – I haven’t put any ketchup on it yet. He scoops up the hot dog from the floor with his fingers, jams it into a bun. Holds the ketchup container upside down over the dusty hot dog and squeezes. A glob of ketchup blats out of the container. He takes a giant bite. – Dr. Fella! squeals Edith. She gags. – That’ll be $3.99, sir! yelps the clerk. – Here, says Edith to the clerk, digging her new bottle of aspirin out of her pocket. – I’d like to return my aspirin, and get my money back and pay for a new hot dog. Angus, please put that hot dog down, I’m buying you a new hot dog. Angus, still chewing after the first bite, takes another extravagant bite, pink hot dog particles, the tinfoil edge of a gum wrapper, and wet bits of white bun spilling from his mouth. – Has the aspirin bottle been opened? asks the clerk. – I can’t accept a return if the bottle has been opened. I will also need the receipt as proof of purchase. – I haven’t opened the bottle! – I’m afraid I have to disagree, says the clerk. – The safety seal on top of this bottle has been broken. – But someone else must have done that. I didn’t even . . . You’ve seen me standing . . . – Have you ever considered a job in government? Angus asks the clerk. – I am completing my degree in business administration as a matter of fact, says the clerk. – Even better, says Angus. – Even better, a fine law-abiding young man like yourself. – My hot dog tastes great, by the way, says Angus, chewing with his mouth open, his lips glossy and a dust bunny hanging from the corner of his mouth, waving the hot dog in Edith’s direction. She draws herself up to her full height, taller than the clerk, taller by far than Angus Fella, and in her best angry Associate Professor’s voice she

204 instructs the clerk to exchange the hotdog for the aspirin. His face blinks red from blushing and his pimply whiteheads pop out.

– Only this time, he mumbles. – Whatever, (bitch). She hands the new hot dog, warm, withered, and greasy, to Angus who blats ketchup and mustard all over the dog. – Thank you, Evelyn, says Angus. He chomps into the hotdog, squirting mustard onto his moustache. – Name’s Edith. My pleasure, Angus, says Edith. She holds the door open for him as he passes into the night. – Killed any more birds? he asks. – No. – The job killed you yet? asks Angus, chewing his brand new hot dog, – Or made you crazy? Or both? – It’s a long weekend coming up. – We’re all mad here, he says, shoving his Cheshire Cat watch into her nose. – Heh heh heh. – Yes, but there’s free psychological help via telephone, 24-hours a day, and subsidised exercise classes, she says. – My psychologist is amazing. – One of the head shrinkers hired by the university, am I right? Saying all the perfect, inspirational things? They tell you what administration wants them to tell you. – That sounds like a conspiracy theory, she says. She titters, shakes her pocket full of change. Presses a finger between her eyes to try to press away the ache. – No, says Angus. – it’s not a conspiracy theory, spittle flies from his mouth as he enunciates the p. – Oh, Angus. Such a white man. – I’m not joking, says Angus. She keeps walking, swinging her arms, electricity shooting from her fingertips and toes, her limbs loose and swan-like. Still proud she told that

205 pimply little business major what for. The pimply little business major actually listened. Angus blathers on, – The University of Inivea is just a machine that eats people. The shrink and the pool are bait. They want you to give until they’ve sucked you into a husk. He sounds just like Coral does. Like Coral did. It’s over. Edith shakes her head. – Heh heh heh, she says, pretending to laugh at his joke. – Oh come on! he says, – haven’t you noticed how sick all our colleagues are? The medical leaves? Froese’s nervous breakdown? The general nuttiness about semi-colons and rampant incompetence? You think that’s all a coincidence? Don’t you feel like what we’re trying to accomplish is becoming more and more impossible? – I’m just happy to have a job, says Edith. He grumbles. – What am I trying to accomplish? she asks. Angus stumbles as he steps down off the lip of the sidewalk. He mumbles as he plods away from her, the second half-eaten hot dog in its paper clutched too hard in his hand. – If it’s so bad then why haven’t you quit? she shouts, her words climbing into cold mist. – It’s not like we’re the Fukushima 50! He shouts some words sounding like kangaroos and paddock and waddles across the street in fury, white scraps of hair fluttering out from under his hat. He marches past a clump of pine trees. A hare hunched among the tree trunks flattens its ears against its back. Freezes. At home, she pulls off her sweaty clothes and stuffs them into her broken washing machine while she phones her mother. – What would you like to eat for your birthday Thanksgiving, mother? she asks. – I can bring down anything you like that you can’t buy in Red Deer. – All I want is my beloved family around me, says her mother. – Nothing else. Oh. Your father would like to speak to you too. Sounds of rustles and fumbles. Her father clearing his throat.

206 – Does Chicken on the Way deep fry turkeys? asks her father. – Your mother’s craving Chicken on the Way. – I think Chicken on the Way only does chicken, says Edith. – Seriously? That’s what she wants for her birthday Thanksgiving dinner? – It’s the best in the province, he says. – That would be some birthday Thanksgiving Day, now wouldn’t it, Sondra? Edith hears her father say to Edith’s mother. – Edith! Your mother says that’s a smashing idea. Let’s shake it up! Also, bring me a bottle of Armagnac. That would be nice too. Not the cheap one like last time. Your old father doesn’t have many years left and he needs to enjoy them. – Okay, says Edith. – Get a cake too, he whispers. – And candles, because I can’t find the candles. And a birthday card. Makes sure it’s signed for both you and me. Corn fritters would go well with the chicken. I’ll pay you back. And don’t forget flowers. From both you and me.

That night, dreams of dead things speckle her sleep, of her hands stretched out to catch a falling crow, her hands clutched around the throat of a kicking, struggling rabbit. She wakes up in the night to pee, and when she reaches out to wash her hands at the sink, cannot comprehend the long scratches up and down her forearms. She will wear long sleeves at the birthday Thanksgiving dinner so that she doesn’t have to explain herself to her parents.

207

Thanks Giving Saturday. Her mother’s birthday. And official/unofficial family Thanksgiving day. For her mother’s birthday gifts, Edith dashes to the mall first thing and buys a bucket of caramel corn, Victorian hand lotion, a new bathrobe with matching slippers, and a box of chocolate truffles from the Hudson’s Bay. Just like she does every year. Only this year the bathrobe is silk, the terry cloth slippers embroidered with a gold crest. She starts crying as she picked out delicate, hand-made wrapping paper and a card embedded with flower seeds in the stationery shop. She also buys a box of deep-fried chicken and corn fritters from Chicken on the Way, and from Safeway she buys a pre-tossed salad in a double-sealed plastic container, a pre-packaged Birthday cake, and a paper cone of bedraggled chrysanthemums because they’re the only kind of flower left. From Safeway liquor store a bottle of Armagnac, the cheapest one at only $75.63 with tax. $75.63! She packs it all in her P. T. Madden and Hangaku bags, and stows them in the trunk of her car. Her mid-term exams in a third bag. She slams the trunk closed. Maneuvers her Taurus onto the Queen Elizabeth highway and aims her nose for Red Deer. Edith would like to have her mother to herself. She would like to take her mother out for a nice birthday dinner in a restaurant with cloth napkins and servers in uniforms, silver buckets to hold the ice for white and sparkling wine, amuse-bouches and palette cleansers between the courses, a long list of chocolate desserts they could share. The chance to impress her mother with her fancy salary, her taste in foodie food, but she knows her mother would insist her father come along, and she knows her father would order the most expensive wine and the most expensive food on the menu because that’s what he used to do before he lost his job, and her mother would look at Edith as though she’d been stabbed in the heart when Edith tells her father he can damn well pay for himself if he’s going to insist on ordering a $250 bottle of wine.

208 Once she gets to the house, she can tell that the reason her mother is probably craving fried chicken is because both she and her father are stoned on marijuana tea. At 3:00 in the afternoon. The marijuana Edith buys from Bev who gets it from her drug dealer son. Edith puts her job at risk for this marijuana, she sleeps with a woman who fraternises with drug dealers to relieve her mother from arthritis. – Medical marijuana is so weak, her father insists. – It’s as if they think only five-year-olds will smoke it. As soon as Edith enters the house, her father presents the daisies to their mother with a flourish and a wet kiss on the lips, – For my best friend and lover, my crocus in the snow, he says. – Happy Birthday, mummy, says Edith, kissing her mother on the cheek. – Thank you, Deedee, says her mum. – Any wine? No wine! When’s your book party? Date picked yet? – My daughter the author, says her father. – I’ve always had a book inside me. Just haven’t had the time to write it. I know mine wouldn’t take as long as yours to write though. I know how to manage my time. Edith extracts forks and knives, clinks out plates from the cupboards and drawers. Her father has already torn open the bag in the dining room. He rips open the top box, packed with deep fried corn fritters and an overflowing container of gravy, cranks open the box and fritters, and begins biting into corn fritters at an Olympic rate. – Father, don’t you need a plate? He chomps, his cheeks and fingers greasy, bits of fritter catching on his chin. Her mother uses a fork to nab a chicken wing from the greasy, chicken-fragrant paper bag from Edith, and nibbles at the skin. Her father grabs a drumstick like he is Henry the Eighth and begins gnawing. Her mother tosses away the wing bones and tears her teeth into a chicken breast. The tattered bouquet salutes them in the middle of the table among the detritus of greasy paper bags and cardboard Chicken on the Way boxes. – There’s also a salad, says Edith.

209 She slides the vase of flowers to the side, plops down the plastic container in the middle of the table. Her father pauses in his mastication, – That is so environmentally unfriendly, he says. – I can hear the last of the polar bears screaming in agony as I look at that thing. Edith peels off the lid of the container. Lettuce, mandarin orange slices, sliced blanched almonds. – That thing is so solidly plastic, it could be a kiddie pool in the summer, says her father. – Hey, mother? A kiddie pool. Her mother laughs, her mouth spilling shredded chicken, her fingers cramming in fritter dolloped in gravy. – Yeah, because the former oil business exec suddenly cares about plastic pollution, says Edith. – Why don’t you go hug a tree. – Namaste, my daughter, says her father, a rocket leaf hooked on his collar. Her parents’ half-drunk cups of marijuana tea cool and congeal on the sideboard, a layer of oil skimming the top. – I’ve fallen in love, says Edith. – I don’t know why you couldn’t hold on to Beryl, says her father. – It’s not the getting the girl it’s the keeping the girl. Beryl, she was a catch. Made over a quarter of a million dollars a year. – Preach! says her mother, raising a chicken breast. – What does your new objet d’amour do? asks her father. – She’s a coffee barista. – So she’s young, says her father. – Okay. – No, she’s older than me. She has five children in their 30s. She left her husband six months ago. Her parents chew, their clicking jaws, the dissolving, disintegrating meat in their mouths the only sounds in the room. – She’s the one I buy the marijuana from, says Edith. – From what I am deducing, this is the last wing, her father says, waving the chicken limb, – anyone want this wing? No? He plunges his teeth through meat, gnaws on bone.

210 – That was simply delicious, says her mother. – Too bad you forgot the wine. – How’s your arthritis, mother? – My what? – Here’s what it is, says her father. – I drank some tea, I watched an episode of Cosmos with Neil Degrasse Tyson, and an hour later I had a crashing moment of clarity about the universe. Nothing matters. We’re all just microscopic blips with no effect whatsoever. This is what you need to do, Edith. You need to give up control and follow the currents of the universe. That way, maybe the world will stop shitting on you so much. Or when it inevitably does, you won’t mind so much. Or get so excited by . . . mediocrity. – Daddy! – All you need is a cup of the home brew. Here, he says. – You can have the rest of mine. The most generous thing he has ever done for her in their entire lives together. – Tea I paid for, she says. She takes a sip. Bitter. Greasy. – Now maybe you’ll stop being so hypersensitive. – Excuse me? she says. – You heard what I said. Just a cup. Half a cup. Let me microwave it. She takes another sip. She settles back into her chair. Cat hairs stick to her lips, poke up her nose. She sneezes. Her parents’ cat Aldous steps onto her lap and starts to knead, his feet occasionally poking her belly like he is conducting an external exam of her ovaries. She hates cats for their presumptuousness, their furry slitheriness. She sneezes again. – The cat gets it, says her father. – See, even the cat gets it. – The tea’s not doing anything, Edith says. – It’s not working. – There’s nothing going on, she says. – Pointless, she says. – Stop talking and listen to the universe! says her father.

211 Her mother in the meantime has slid away from the table and is so engrossed in repotting a plant she doesn’t even notice that they’ve brought out the cake. – No candles? mutters her father. – This cheapness does not come from my side of the family. – Mine either! retorts her mother, her hands deep into a bag of dirt. Moving the plant back and forth between the old pot and the new pot they bought at the mall today, changing her mind each time about whether the plant looks better in the new pot or the old pot the new pot or the old pot the new pot or the old pot. – Well, this is pointless, says Edith. – We’re out of time. Goodbye. She grabs up her bag, her coat, her car keys, her empty cloth bags. Her father smiling at his idiotic Aldous as the cat sucks at the tassels on a fraying pillow. – You’re leaving already. I thought you were staying overnight? – I’ve got too much work to do, says Edith. – Time management! shouts her father as Edith bangs out the front door and flounces to her car. Edith drives home, in the growing darkness, for two and a half hours, furious at all the time she wasted, belching gravy. The streets of Inivea dim and empty when she finally pulls into the city. At the Novacrest tower downtown, instead of turning left she turns right, in the direction of the University.

212

Fallen Tuesday morning, the red, blue, and white lights of an ambulance, a parked fire truck, a police car revolve close to Crawley Hall. She parks her car in the Mykytysyn Hall parking lot. She trudges through the quad, past rusting iron garden sculptures, the dirt heaps and looming concrete skeleton of the future Safeway Supermarkets School of Business. The closer she gets to Crawley Hall, the more obvious it is that the whole backside of the building has been blocked by temporary fencing. She’ll have to go through the main door again. She peeks at the action, the police officers in their hulking uniforms, the ambulance. She sidles closer to the building, to a side door, far from where she needs to be but also far from her colleagues’ regular entryway. She will take the stairs again today. She opens the door, passes rows and rows of student lockers and potato chip, beef jerky and Red Bull Energy Drink dispensers. She crawls up the back stairs, parking herself at every floor to ease her scorched lungs. Angus Fella wheezes in at the door leading to the second floor. – Morning, she says. – Morning, he grunts. – Why do you always take the stairs? she asks. – None of your business, he says. She has to drag her briefcase through three different hallways to get to the proper stairwell, but she is still early for her meeting with Simon from her introductory literature class. But the hallways smell worse than usual. Like boiled eggs. Not just boiled eggs, but eggs boiled in manure soup. She wonders if someone had a particularly potent diarrhea in the washroom across the hall. But this smell has a dull, bitter quality, not like diarrhea or the regular boiled eggs smell, but like a banana made of meat and drizzled with human piss. She taps opens her email while she waits for Simon.

213 From: "Lisa Ives" Subject: Sad news Date: Tues., Oct. 17, 09:45 am To: [email protected]

Sent on behalf of Dean van Dyck:

Dear Faculty and Staff: It is with much regret that I have to inform you that Coral Pullet was involved in an accident when her car drove into the sinkhole behind Crawley Hall. Coral has suffered minor injuries but has not yet been released from hospital. The as of yet unidentified male passenger died at the scene. I will inform you of the details when I receive more information. Flowers and a card have been sent on behalf of the faculty to Coral in the hospital. Lisa Ives Dean’s Office Administrator

Edith leaps to the window, yanks up the crooked blind. In the hole, the butt end of Coral’s white car points up at her. The roof and doors ripped off and the edges jagged. The hole and its edges swarming with more humans, fences, yellow police tape. Edith presses her forehead to the glass. Coral. Edith’s eyelids flutter, tears coiling, congealing. It’s over. Is this what Coral meant? A tap at her office door. Simon.

Edith digs through Simon’s essay, babbling about thesis statements and topic sentences so that she doesn’t have to imagine hearing the noise of the car in the hole, its choking exhaust, the faltering engine sputtering. She circles moments of illogical reasoning, thesis spelled as theses, ficus spelled as feces, shows him misplaced commas and a faulty parallelism. She ticks off his name on the class roster: Simon (Emma) Leavitt. A toilet across the hall flushes three times in a row. Simon pulls the neck of his t-shirt up over his nose. She suspects he probably thinks she’s farted when it’s just the regular smell. She can think of no way to broach the topic. A grain of cooked rice drops onto Simon’s essay. He pulls the t-shirt away from his face.

214 – That’s a maggot, announces Simon, pointing. – It’s a what? she says. – Yup, says Simon. His lips curl. The braces on his teeth sparkle. Simon pulls the t-shirt back over his nose. They both turn their faces up to the ceiling. Between the edges of the adjoining panels, another rice grain drops out and plops on the desk. She pokes the rice grain with her red pen. Simon is correct. One rice grain has segments. The rudimentary beginnings of eyes, jaws. She flicks the one maggot off the paper into the garbage. The other she slides off into the garbage with the blade of her hand. No way is she moving offices again. No way. She will kick and scream and cling like ivy to stay the architect of her own life. – Let’s move to this side of the office, she says, and drags her chair to the bookcase next to the door. She brushes the top of her hair with her hand. To make sure nothing’s dropped on her head. Simon slide-thumps his chair across from hers. She props his essay on her ancient edition of the Riverside Shakespeare and keeps talking. Once Simon’s left she’ll plug up that hole with her handy roll of duct tape.

But that afternoon she’s dumping the books she has into her P. T. Madden shopping bag and sliding her boxes, still packed, into the hallway. Her floor’s C wing is being temporarily decanted and jammed into her floor’s D wing. Faculty members will have to double up in their offices, writes Alice Z. Her office ceiling wasn’t the only one dropping maggots. Other people in offices on her floor were just more sensitive about it. Please bear with us as we undergo this transition phase. She now shares an office with Leonardo Baudone. Thank you so much for your patience during this transition phase. She lines up with other displaced, maggoty professors and contract instructors at the main office. Alice Z. even more clippy and sneery than usual as she hands out new office keys, her desk littered with a pyramid of empty Pepsi cans and photos of her Russian blue cats.

215 – Do you know which hospital Coral’s at? Edith asks Alice Z. as she takes her new key. – How should I know? The University Hospital? – Didn’t the faculty send her flowers? – You’ll have to ask Lisa. – Do you know how Coral’s doing? – Think she broke her arm or her leg or her collarbone something. No idea. Next in line please. Leonardo’s office smells like armpits and musty bike clothes because he cycles to work every day and drapes his sweaty cycling clothes around the office to dry. His second-best bike, his words, parks in the corner by one of the filing cabinets. He recently stuck a line of silver fish stickers leading from his office door down the hallway, all the way to Olivia Crowshoe’s door in an attempt to persuade her to love him. Edith unpacks her stapler and box of Kleenex and lines them up with the edge of the new old desk. Her old desk from upstairs now in a new place. I am the architect of my life; I build its foundation and select the furniture, she scribbles on a post-it note and tucks it inside the top drawer. Edith’s on the same side of the building as her last office. But she has a radically different view of the sinkhole, closer, more north. She is kitty-corner to the south side fourth floor washroom instead of across from it, which she guesses is an improvement. She notes the rough kidney shape of the sinkhole. Another, smaller pit deeper inside the sinkhole, as though another sinkhole occurred inside the sinkhole. A shattered fragment of Coral’s rear bumper shining up out of the hole in spite of the dust and death. She tries not to listen to Leonardo’s phone conversations, usually about going for martinis with someone, anyone, at the newest most chic downtown restaurant. She tries not to dislodge or bump the many award trophies and excellence plaques and mounted magazine articles with photos of Leonardo on the walls and bookshelves. He’s arranged his bookshelves with the spines facing inward so the covers won’t fade. – How do you know which book is which? she asks. She slides two out of a shelf. – They’re not even alphabetical.

216 – I have a system, he says, taking the books from her hand and sliding them back in. – And a photographic memory. His bookshelves are arranged in a multi-layered maze. Her boxed materials are in storage in Crawley Hall’s basement. Every day she will meet his bicycles and sweaty clothes, a garbage can overflowing with Kleenex from she-doesn’t-want-to-know-what. His glittery fish stickers and unrequited love for Olivia Crowshoe. The constipating, robotically-neat handwriting on his file labels. The heating system whooshes in Leonardo’s office even worse than in her old one. Rhythmic. Rasping. Sighing like a pensioner. Fever-hot when it’s on and sinew-freeze-drying cold when it’s not. She misses the sounds of the faculty lounge microwave beeping out canned soup. The smell of canned spaghetti or recycled restaurant biryani far more appealing than the smell of sweaty, unreciprocated, overpaid nerd love. She calls the University Hospital but no Coral Pullet has been admitted to any unit there.

217

> < A week passes. Edith stumbles into the mailroom, the fragrance of Mary Ellen’s cinnamony perfume so formidable her eyes water. Mary Ellen wrenches her key in her mailbox keyhole, stonily ignores Edith. Mary Ellen wears a knee-length coat, an elaborate petally ruffle around the neck making her head look like a grumpy stamen. Mary Ellen tugs the key, whispering shit shit shit. Edith’s mailbox swings open without even a squeak, Edith’s eyelid spontaneously bumping her eyeball. She could recoil to her office, or she could pretend to be absorbed by her flyers while Mary Ellen wrestles with her mailbox. Edith shuffles junky envelopes and postcards from scholastic publishers; newsletters from the FEK and NOB associations; the confidential Mandate Visioning document and ballot from the Dean. Maybe Mary Ellen will speak. Will ask Edith for help with her jammed mailbox, then they will burst out giggling in shared frustration. Throw their arms around each other. Invite each other to the student bar for rum and cokes. Speak, Mary Ellen. – Take a Polaroid picture, Edith, says Mary Ellen, her teeth gritted, her fingers gripping the jammed key. – It lasts longer. Mary Ellen snarls at the mailbox, slaps the wall of mailboxes with her palm, dives in again at the little metal door. Edith moonwalks backwards, folds herself out the doorway. – Melnyk, Mary Ellen calls. – Melnyk, I need you! Edith nearly crashes her face into the doorjamb when Melnyk pushes past her into the mailroom. – Coming, Mary Ellen! he sings. He pulls at the key. – I think you’ve bent it. – Don’t be ridiculous, huffs Mary Ellen. – Obviously you bent it. Edith slinks away. She should have heralded the warning smell Mary Ellen even before she entered the mailroom. She sniffs her wrists. She believes she smells the vanilla pudding eau de cologne she spritzed on this

218 morning. Worries that the sweaty bicycle pong of Leonardo’s office has rotted out her sense of smell. Towards the end of her degree, when things started to crumble, Mary Ellen called her hare-brained. Over the years since then Edith has done a little research into the hares that nibble among the buildings throughout the campus grounds, these members of the genus Lepus, the family Leporidae, the mammalian order Lagomorpha. She wants to tell Mary Ellen that hares are not actually dumb at all, they are precocial, the leverets born with their eyes open and their legs ready to run. From predators, thank you for the nice compliment, Mary Ellen. She scuttles to the elevator, her mail in her hands. The button already lit up. The door opens to the Dean fiddling with his tie. She clutches her bundle of mail. She steps backwards, then, embarrassed, forward into the elevator. The doors jerk closed. – Feels like there might be proper snow soon, she says. – God! Let’s hope not! exclaims the Dean, stroking his crisp yellow tie over his belly, probably expensive. Hugo Hilfiger? Tommy Lauren? Anderson & Shepville? Did those stores even make ties? She can never keep the brands straight. Her father used to flap around with silk ties and platinum tiepins before he was fired for mismanaging funds. The Dean presses the elevator button twice. Her laugh idiotically high. Her father told her that people in superior positions like their jokes laughed at. Which is why he doesn’t understand why Edith and her mother never laugh at his jokes. On the second floor another white man with salt-and-pepper hair in an equally ironed and thick dark suit steps into the elevator, likely another Dean, and Monty starts talking companionably to the other Dean about a restaurant he’s found, the only one in this damn city that has a wine he likes on their wine list, Bordeaux de Bleu, he and Dimple went there for dinner just last week before the opera. Too bad the owner Gaston wasn’t there that night; he’d had to pay full price. Edith shifts her molecules so she can sink into the wall.

219 The silver elevator doors reflect nothing. Edith suppresses a cough. – Did I tell you, Ronald, says Monty, – about the time I had a private dinner with the Duke and Duchess of Rothesay? The other white man ho-hums. The elevator redolent with older man aftershave. – Sorry, let me bend down and pick up those names I dropped, the Dean says, chortling. The elevator dings. The two Deans’ matching hard-soled shoes tick-tock off the elevator onto the main floor, the two like toy cuckoo-clock men click off in the same direction Edith intended. She dekes into a hallway under construction, walks a long loop. The ceiling is ripped open and sinuous silver pipes and other shiny guts leers out from the darkness overhead. She fetches her books from the library – books on Strategic Workforce Development – her breath misting in the cold, her feet slipping over hidden pockets of ice. She re-enters the Crawley Hall elevator, pressing the > < button to close the doors. Frantic footsteps gallop toward the door. She scrambles at the < > button, and the doors freeze, then wheeze open. She waits. Pokes her head out the door. Nothing but an orange pylon next to a hole in the wall and the view of a cabinet stuffed with taxidermied birds and prairie rodents. Vermin. She taps the button to the fourth floor and the doors grind shut. The elevator wheezes then launches upward. The gears of the elevator start to whine, like an old-fashioned fan belt, then shriek. The elevator abruptly lurches, then stops. She punches the #3 button again. Sweat trickles down the back of her ear. She presses the Emergency button. A radioed voice crackles: – Maintenance. – My name is Dr. Edith Vane. I’m trapped in the Crawley Hall elevator, she says. – This elevator isn’t moving.

220 – Do you know about which floor your elevator has stopped? crackles the voice. – Between third and second. Or fourth and third. Just above the floor with the taxidermied owl and blue heron. – We’ll be there right away, says the voice. Is the floor undulating? The impossible waves are only in her head; she is probably only going to faint and the floor isn’t really moving at all. She has a night class in forty-five minutes and she hasn’t finished writing her lecture notes, she has a POC meeting tomorrow at 9 am, a BOYL connect session right after because her electronic interface with her students hasn’t been working, she has marking to do, and she hasn’t read the books she’s teaching in her two other classes this week. She tucks her library books in an armpit, and pulls her thumbs. First her left, then her right. Her left, then her right. She once saw a group of students emerge from stuck elevator #2, their hair plastered to their heads from sweat. Condensation from their breaths and heat dribbling down the walls. Clangs echo in the elevator shaft above. – I’m Dr. Edith Vane, she shouts. The clanging stops. – We’re going to get you out very shortly! shouts a voice above. – Yes! she shouts. The clanging resumes, then stops. Clang clang clang, then nothing. Silence settles, an overstuffed down blanket, in the elevator. She leans against the wall. She flips through the library books, but one is dense theory she only pretends to care about, the other a book she heard Leonardo nattering about that she assumes is important. She wishes she’d been trapped with her laptop. At least then she could have gotten some work done. She needs to fill out the External Service box in her AAO! So many things she could be doing now, in this time. Time dropping away. Her scalp starts to tingle. She can’t tell if she’s getting hot because of the air in the elevator or because her hormones are about to mutiny. She lays the side of her head against the wall. Rolls her forehead against the coolness to tamp down the approaching menopausal bonfire.

221 She digs in her pocket for a piece of gum or a Kaffee Klatsch breath mint. Nothing but old Kleenex. Lint. She dumps her books on the floor. Bev! She could phone sex Bev! She dials the number but only reaches Bev’s mother-of-five, harried-sounding voice mail message. She leans her head against the wall again. She unbuttons the top three buttons of her blouse. Pinches the neck of her blouse and flaps it in and out. She turns her other ear to the wall. Air shifts inside the wall. She spreads her arms out, hugging the wall. She closes her eyes. A building erected in the 1950s. Air pockets in the walls, heating ducts. Sounds like humming wires, like wind. Pushing one way then the other. – Soon? she shouts at the ceiling. Distant banging. Muffled shouts. She decides to try the elevator doors, wiggles her fingers into the crack between the silvered elevator doors, crams both sets of fingers into the crack, trying to tug the doors apart, the flabby muscles in her arms straining, the joints popping as she tries to pry apart the doors with her bare hands. The tips of her fingers ache; weak, useless fingers only good at typing and shuffling paper, not even tough enough for paper cuts. The crack between the doors opens partially onto a concrete wall. She will not panic. The oil from her sweaty hands and fingers smeared translucent along the doors’ edges, among the regular fingerprints and smudges the cleaners refuse to wipe off. She lays her cheek against the wall in the large crack. She closes her eyes. Cold, sweet rock. The flames lick her shoulders. Her forehead, her armpits crackle with sweat. Remote clanging from the workers above. She tugs off her cardigan, ties it around her waist. Rams up her sleeves. Wipes away sweat trickling by her ear. A tap. On the ceiling. A workman must have dropped a screw down the elevator shaft. – Hello! she shouts.

222 She dabs her cheek with the wad of used Kleenex. She presses her ear against the wall. The ceiling taps again. The stony cool fades as the wall absorbs the heat from her face. The hard concrete tepid, then warm, almost fleshy. She fans her blouse, presses her other cheek against a lower section of wall, flinches. The wall exudes unexpected heat. She places her palm against the wall on her right: also uncomfortably warm. All the walls too warm, as warm as she is. The walls moist, condensation beading. Sweat drips into her eye. She gathers her hair in her hands, braids and screws her hair up into a bun on top of her head, tucking the end, fans herself with one of the books. Corkscrew hairs spring from her hairline, around her ears from the humidity. Her watch face gawps at her. She has sat suspended in Crawley Hall’s spinal cord for 58 minutes. The overhead light buzzes. The ceiling taps. Not at all like an errant screw dropped from a height. More like a set of 10 fingernails descending all at once on a tabletop. – Oh fuck off, she whispers. The fingernails tap again. Above the watch, the flowers on her sleeve begin to pinwheel. At first as though nudged by a breeze, lazy flowery circles. But then a wind picks up. They begin to spin. She tears off the blouse, a button popping off and clicking into a corner. She kicks the blouse away. But now all she’s wearing is a bra. Not even a good bra. A grey, peeling, old bra. A new bra her perverted washing machine chewed. She flips the shirt inside out, the lurid black flowers inside, the milky interior outside. The shirt ruined. The elevator suddenly jumps. She unties her cardigan, shoves her arms into the sleeves, pulls the front panels closed, buttons it willy-nilly. The concrete wall files past, and a floor with pairs of working boots slides toward her at head level, then chest level.

223 Another grinding halt. – You ok? asks a set of feet. – I’m Dr. Edith Vane, she says. – Dr. Edith Vane! The doors crank open further. She tries to scramble and pull herself up the wall, the wall suddenly cold again. A giant workman hooks her by the elbows, another hoists her armpits. One grabs a big handful of her bum, and she bumps her chin on the floor. She writhes on her chest across the floor, away, away. She clutches at the edges of the cabinet of dead animals. In the cabinet, among the taxidermied owls, mallard ducks and the blue heron, a stuffed jackrabbit she never noticed before, posed, ears erect.

224

Babushka She will never ride in an elevator again. Ever. She splashes cold water on her face in the washroom, her hair broken out of its bun, halo-ing her face in the mirror. She hooks her coat over her arm, the handle of her briefcase hooked around her elbow, her books clamped against her chest. Deliberately clomps down the staircase to the main floor and to her car.

She hauls herself up five floors in her shiny Plumtree Condominium Towers staircase, but when her lungs start to sizzle, her knees click, and her quadriceps throb so hard they feel like they’re oozing blood, thirty-one more flights of stairs, yuck, and the elevators in her condo have never gotten stuck or out of order as long as she’s ever lived here. She chokes the neck of her bag as she steps into the sleek little box of an elevator, lights up the number 36 under her finger. She holds her breath. The doors slide closed, the elevator shoots up into the building. She hovers in the middle of the elevator, not touching the walls, the mirrored walls reflecting her reflection of a reflection: a tired and saggy-faced, thirty-something brown woman, flashing crooked cleavage in a stinky sweaty cardigan. Nothing but gears and a one-way whoosh of the box up the shaft. The elevator door opens fluidly, professionally. She digs for her keys in her purse as she steps on the mossy hallway broadloom. Her apartment door stands ajar. She forgot to lock the door, some burglar’s jimmied the lock, she’s been robbed! She crashes into her condo, her cellphone in her hand, 911 already dialed, all she needs is to press the green button, the condo door wide open behind her so she can scream for help. The TV bright and noisy, the kitchen island spilling Styrofoam food containers, a pizza box with the lid sprawled open, the pizza littered with red and green peppers chunks.

225 Is she being robbed by a cooking show? She’s allergic to peppers; they make her gassy! A man lolls on her chaise longue, facing away from her, toward her blaring television. Edith screams. – Edie! says Bev, hustling out of the bathroom, her hair tied back in a red babushka. She holds out her pink, kewpie-doll arms to Edith. – Bevvy! she cries, and squishes Bev tightly. The man planted at her coffee table watching television, his feet up on a stack of essays, one of Edith’s red pens tucked behind his ear. The curve of that ear. The spiky greying hair on the young face. She knows him. How does she know him? – Bev! says Edith. – Edie, I thought we could do dinner tonight now that I’m back. – . . . – This is my son, Arthur. The man unfolds his long, thin legs from the chaise longue. Melnyk. Mary Ellen’s post-doctoral student. Her protégé. Her lover? It sure seems that way, Melnyk following Mary Ellen around like a pot- bellied pig at every event, in her office constantly, nagging the admin assistants on her behalf for space heaters, air conditioners, a mini bar fridge. – Melnyk? – Dr. Vane! – Melnyk’s his middle name, says Bev, bustling about with paper napkins and dirty plates. – I thought Arthur could keep me company. Arthur, Edith isn’t just my friend. She is my new lover. I’m a lesbian. Arthur, your mother is a lesbian. And your father is a horny, gay slut. – Mom! – Edith is an author! She has a book coming out very, very shortly. Its release date’s been delayed for some reason, some mix-up about getting the rights for the art on the cover or something, but it’s coming. Edith stops putting away her coat and shoes, and instead presses a long kiss onto Bev’s mouth for being so wonderful. – Why are my essays piled in front of the TV? asks Edith.

226 – Look! says Bev. – Artie and I marked all your essays. I knew you would say you were too busy. Are you happy with me? – Bevvy! Edith scrabbles through the papers with their paper-clipped corners, their uneven stapling. – But you have no experience, Bevvy. – Yes we do, says Melnyk. – I should go now, mom. – Arthur, Edith is my lover so you will show me respect. She ate me out three times last week. I, in return, ate her pussy twice and she had an orgasm one of those two times. Beginner’s luck, right Edie? – Mom! Edith has walked into a daydream masquerading as a nightmare. She dumps her briefcase, her coat, her purse on the floor. Plops herself on the chaise longue. Pulls the essays towards her. – Would you like a slice of pizza, Edie? asks Bev. – I wasn’t sure what you liked on your pizza. Edith scans front pages, back pages of the essays, the comments brief but precise, the grades matching the students she can remember on the few papers she leafs though. She is on the verge of sobbing from being trapped in the elevator; she is also so happy she could cry. The sobbing howls wrench from her mouth as she succumbs to waves and waves of hopelessness, confusion, gratitude.

Arthur asks if he can smoke in her apartment, and because she is so embarrassed by her violent crying fit, afraid that Arthur is Mary Ellen’s spy, Edith slides open the balcony door. She worries about how much or what Mary Ellen’s told Melnyk about her, and what a failure, a hare brain she is. A car far below them honks. The glittering window lights in the forest of buildings fencing in her condominium tower sharpen. Melnyk taps open a slim cigarette case. Extracts a hand-rolled cigarette, a yellow plastic lighter. The sweet, cabbagey skunky smell of the marijuana twists through her living room. Her clothes, her furniture will stink of pot. She narrows her

227 eyes at the first sinewy line of smoke. Does he smoke weed at Mary Ellen’s? Does she smoke it with him and then they make stoned, May- December love? He inhales; the cigarette’s tip brightens. He passes the cigarette to his mother. Bev pinches the cigarette between her lips, pulls in a breath, holds the joint in the V of her fingers. Bev leans over to kiss Edith, tries to blow the smoke into Edith’s mouth. Edith can’t help opening her mouth, kissing her back, inhaling. Who is this man, sitting on her carpet so casually in his pointy hipster shoes and spiky hair? This is Bev’s son, Mary Ellen’s current protégé. Melnyk is what Edith was. Melnyk will tell Mary Ellen about Edith. She wonders if he’s slept with Mary Ellen. If he likes having sex with a woman at least 30 years older than him. Maybe it’s his thing. Maybe it’s a fetish. Is she being ageist? Maybe the sex is just that good. Maybe if they all smoke long enough, she will work up the courage to ask him if he’s Mary Ellen’s boy toy, and he will be high enough to tell her the truth. He hovers the joint under his nose, deliberately sucking the smoke into his nostrils. Such an angular young man, such smoothness, such leanness. She can see why Mary Ellen would want him as her servant. The walls exhale. – My head is killing me, she says, slumping her face into her hands. – What happened to your shirt, says Bev. – I Botox my forehead to stop the migraines, Arthur says. – So you can’t move your forehead at all? asks Bev. – Raise your eyebrows so I can see. His eyebrows sit. He hovers the joint next to his nose. – Yeah, Alice Z. told me it worked for her so I tried it. Worked after only one session. – Alice Z. in the main office?

228 – Yes. You know she breeds Russian blue cats? She won the lottery when she was eighteen but then spent it all by the time she was twenty- three. All she had left from all that money was three purebred Russian blues. Edith will ask him. She is going to ask him. She can pretend she’s stoned. He owes her after sucking all the oxygen out of the room and making her high. Spying on her. – Have you and Mary Ellen ever slept together? Melnyk studies his yellow lighter. Flicks on the flame, flicks it off. – Well, he says. – Have you, sweetie? asks Bev, her head in Edith’s lap, her eyes glassy. Turning her face to Melnyk, – Yes? – Not that it’s anyone’s business, he pauses. – But yes. And no. Bev pops up, her babushka askew. – I have to go to work. I have a shift in 10 minutes. She folds a slice of pizza in half and shoves it into her mouth. – I thought you were going to give me a ride, says Melnyk. – I can drive you, says Edith. – I would love to drive you. – So nice! mumbles Bev through her half-chewed pizza. – But aren’t you too busy?

Edith slows her car to a stop in front of a four-storey, 1912 renovated monstrosity, a picture window stretching up two floors. A faux sandstone finish, and faux-antique lamps. A giant abstract painting spanning both floors – Thanks, he says. – I’ll get you the weed by Monday. I’ll ask Alice Q. to put it in your mailbox. He leaps out of the car, his courier bag slung over one shoulder. His tall, lean form loping towards the house, pausing, then loping back. He opens the car door, sticks his head into the car, his cheeks rosy, his breath smoky. – We can’t ever be friends, he says. His head disappears and he gallops for the front door.

229 The door opens to warm incandescent bulb light, walls painted mauve, and rows of bookshelves. An artsy chandelier composed of broken bottles arranged in a bouquet. Suspended from the ceiling in the front hall. Edith knows that chandelier. Its owner bragged that she bought it in a glass studio in Venice, and that she slept with the artist Lorenzo who made it. Mary Ellen’s house. She circles into the alleyway behind Mary Ellen’s house. She rolls Mary Ellen’s garbage bin to her car, hoists it onto the bumper. The lid flops open and smacks her wrist. A neighbour’s dog barks. She hauls it up into the trunk. She speeds away in her car, cradling her wrist in her lap.

230 October 24th As part of her new routine, she winds her car through the narrow corkscrew roads of the campus, hunting for a parking space because her parking lot is still a collapsed hole. She trudges on lumpy, frozen grass to get to her side door of Crawley Hall. She shifts her books to her other hand, her wrist banged up from where the lid banged it. – Edith! cries a voice. Crawley Hall has sprouted a gargoyle in the night. She clings to the top ledge of Crawley Hall. The gargoyle is the shape of a woman in black. A black blot against the brown concrete planes of the building. The geometrically precise rows of tiny slits for windows. Edith cannot believe what she is seeing, the more she sees the less solid the ground becomes. Her throat closes and she cannot shout the word no. She hesitates beside the mesh fence circling the sinkhole. Then she strides toward the building, trips, kicks off her shoes, then dashes around the large fenced-in-area of the sinkhole. A grazing hare on the grass startles and bounds away, she trips and tumbles over the concrete edge of a scrubby grassed meridian strip, on ice, bits of snow, feet in ripped stockings, her head dangerously light as she runs, for what she has no idea, to catch the woman she supposes. She is the only witness to this woman so high up, clutching the side of the building. Edith reaches towards the woman as though to pin her to the side of the building, Edith’s bulky skirt twisting and gathering in a clump between her thighs. She tumble-runs to the bottom of the building, grips her hands together in prayer, her eyes cemented to the horrible bird perched on the uppermost windowsill. – That’s not allowed! shouts Edith. The woman in her long black gown, clinging to the side of the building. She lifts her hands away from the building, fits her hands together like a swimmer on a diving board and dives toward the concrete sidewalk. But no. This is impossible. Because the windows on the building were never designed to open. The woman in her black gown is not a tragic gargoyle poised on a window ledge, not a woman in rippling clothes smashing her hardened fontanelle into the rippling sidewalk below.

231 A spread of bones and cloth abruptly pile at the edge of the sinkhole. Edith stops, tries to hold herself upright by digging her fingers into the mesh of the blue metal fence, then leans over to gag into a shrub at the edge of the pit. She falls onto her hands and knees, dirty snow, twigs and little rocks digging into palms of her hands, her jaws cranked open, waiting for something, anything to expel. She wonders if today she can cancel her classes. She has to prep the students for their mid-term exams and she needs to interpret chapter nine with them or they’ll be floundering in the sea. She fumbles her phone out of her bag. She hopes this doesn’t make her late for the AJX faculty meeting. The heap of dress, the face twisted toward her. Coral. Not in a black dress but in graduation regalia: a tasselled bonnet, a pleated black gown and blazing red hood. She punches a number into her phone. Edges herself away from the body so awful it glows behind the blue mesh. – Campus security? answers the voice. – There’s been a terrible accident! She turns back to Coral’s body behind the mesh fence. She doesn’t want to see the face again. But there is no body, there is no woman in black, there was no jump. Just caved in sidewalk at the edge of the stupid stupid hole. – Ma’am? asks the phone. She clutches her head, presses it with both hands, hard, the way she tries to press away headaches. She squeezes her head between her hands, willing it to burst like a melon. Crawley Hall’s top floor as empty and plain as usual. Except for a new concrete bulge in the corner. An outsized, mottled carbuncle, probably from some kind of long-term water damage. Why does everything about this building have to be so ugly? So inefficient?

232 She shivers as she waits for the elevator. All she wants is to make herself a cup of tea with the kettle in the lounge, sit on her side of Leonardo’s sweaty office, re-read her lecture notes, google plot summaries on Wikipedia. Forget what was obviously a waking dream because she didn’t sleep enough last night, and smoked too much bad weed. The door slides open. She enters. The door slides closed. A greasy handprint on the buffed silver inner door. A leftover from her horrible night. She leaps for the < > button.

She trudges up the stairs, heaving herself up past Angus Fella as he bumps, slow motion, down the staircase, wheezing and pausing for breath every second step. The air in the staircase is damp, chilly. She pulls her coat collar up around her neck. Her breath rises in white vapour. Another hallucination. She will never smoke weed again. Never.

From: [email protected] Subject: ur a sad cliché Date: Wed., Oct. 24, 8:33 am To: [email protected]

You look and smell like a deranged Victorian spinster when you huff and puff up the three flights of stairs. Save us all and take the elevator like a normal person.

Christ, she’s an asshole when she smokes up. Delete.

From: "Lisa Ives" Subject: A meeting Date: Wed., Oct. 24, 12:09 pm To: [email protected]

Dear Dr. Vane: Dean van Dyck would like to meet with you briefly. The following times are available and should not interfere with your class time or office hours: Tuesday 7:00-7:10 am or Thursday 4:20-4:30 pm. Regards, Lisa Ives Dean’s Office Administrator

233

Edith has to lower her head between her knees in case she faints in her seat. She tries not to hyperventilate, her hands clutching her chest. – What are you doing? asks Leonardo. – Please don’t throw up in here. She picks her way down the staircase to the Jungle for a coffee, hoping she’ll collide into Coral, hoping the green, the chemicals secreted by the phony rainforest, will reorient her. She pauses in the stairwell, her phone pasted to her ear, – Vivianne. Please, she whispers, – I need to book an appointment. I have to meet with the Dean and I’m on the verge of a panic attack. Vivianne. Vivianne not answering her phone. The air in the Jungle juicy, rehydrating her lungs almost immediately. The coffee cup plonks down from the machine, coffee whizzing into the cup. Angus Fella reads a book in the corner by the palm tree, a coffee cup balanced on his knee between his flaky, wrinkled fingers. She presses the cup’s edge against her lips. Slinks out, pretending she hasn’t seen him.

234

Gap Thursday, 8:00 am. Lecture Theatre Room D562. As usual, her Canadian Literature before 1950 class is as exciting as a buckwheat pancake. When she asks the students questions about the book, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, they fiddle on their laptops, observe her like she is a strange sea creature. They nod in their baseball caps and yoga pants, their parkas sliding to the floor. She can’t stand Sunshine Sketches, but it’s a Canadian classic by the father of Canadian letters – it says so right on the book – which is why she must teach it. One of the students, Joffrey, responds irritably that the book is far too long considering the frivolousness of the content. She tries not to be afraid of Joffrey, but cannot help it, cannot stay immune to his rising voice, his heavy beard that makes him look thirty- five even though he’s only eighteen, the strange way he only ever wears t- shirts even when it’s sub-zero temperatures outside. Joffrey’s told her he’s going into Law. She has not yet given him a grade below a B, strictly out of fear. Only Simon’s finished the book, bless his heart, his hand popping up so many times she’s tempted to ask him to just settle himself at the front of the classroom and teach while she leaves for a coffee and a cry. She stands, lumpy and undercooked, on her side of the classroom. All the students but Simon sit, lumpy and undercooked, on their side of the classroom. She arranges them into groups and orders them to go through the first chapter together and come up with three humour clusters to talk about. Anything. Please. She putters around on the computer in the podium, checking her email. [email protected] has written, Why don’t you give up your job for someone who knows what they’re actually doing? Delete.

4:00 pm. Room D562 again. Professors and instructors dribble into D562 for the monthly AJX faculty meeting that the Dean likes to hold fortnightly for some reason. This time Edith sits on the other side of the lecture theatre, the student side. She opens her laptop and drapes her

235 cardigan on the back of her chair in the top tier of the giant horseshoe of seats, a seat away from Ian Clutterbuck red penning a stack of student essays, and Iris Clutterbuck pounding the keyboard of her open laptop. Leonardo’s blonde curly head leans in to Olivia Crowshoe, and Olivia Crowshoe gestures to Leroy Byrd who wears a clavicle brace. He broke his shoulder when he slipped in a puddle of water in the men’s washroom. Dean van Dyck chats on the classroom stage with his assistant Lisa Ives while she taps the edges of her papers straight. Angus Fella planted opposite her in the horseshoe, his fingers curled together into a single, outsized fist. The Dean calls the meeting to order, his hairy fingers tucked in his pants’ waist. The room drudges through the minutes from the last meeting. Edith rereads her AAO, which is due next month, and which she’s completed except for proof-reading. Leroy Byrd comments in his puddingy monotone about the TUP plans, and notes the colon used instead of a semi- colon in section 5.4 about the Hawaiian-themed December holiday reception. Lisa Ives tosses her hair back over her shoulder, squiggles her pen on her lined writing pad. Ian Clutterbuck skips his pen through his student essays, curling the pages back as he scribbles, sometimes flipping back and forth. Iris Clutterbuck taps her keyboard, raising her hand during votes for and against changes to the minutes. Marian Carson has stationed herself in the row below Angus. Edith tries not to stare at Carson’s breasts, the nipples poking through the beige jersey fabric. Edith once saw Carson in her office reading Deleuze and Guattari and smiling. Like Deleuze and Guattari are fun. Marian has an outrageously shapely bosom when she wears jersey. Edith scrubs her pen in an inky circle. Mary Ellen clunks open the room door, followed by Melnyk of course, carrying her briefcase and a Holt Renfrew shopping bag. Edith ducks her face behind her laptop and almost smashes her nose against the KOC section of her AAO. Mary Ellen maneuvers herself past colleagues, empty swiveling chairs to the centre of the front row. Melnyk slides in beside Mary Ellen

236 Edith colours in the circle so violently she punctures the paper, and inks the desktop. She flaps her hand at Melnyk in a subtle wave hello, she will probably be his stepmother one day whether he wants it or not, but he is too busy arranging Mary Ellen’s coat into comfortable folds behind her back. Edith rereads the most important line of her entire AAO: Vane, Edith. Taber Corn Follies: The Memoirs of Beulah Crump-Withers. Okotoks, AB: University of Okotoks Press. 343 pages. Monty begins an anecdote about the time he was at an intimate dinner with the Baron and Baroness of Renfrew as a way of segueing into the budget update. Edith presses Save, then Submit AAO. Submit AAO? asks the program. Yes, she presses. AAO Submitted, the program responds. She wants to shriek her lungs raw, she wants to kick up a flamenco, she wants to drink mojitos until she turns peppermint green. She doodles a happy face with her blue ball-point pen. Olivia drones about the study coming out of the University sociology department about the statistic regarding the increasing rates of suicide and depression among professors. Dean van Dyck reminds them of the UofI BalanceWell faculty and staff Care and Wellbeing support program. – And of course my office door is always open if you have any issues you would like to discuss with me. I’m not just your Dean, he says, spreading his arms out wide, his pocket watch chain glinting at his breast pocket. – I am also your first stop for institutional support. Sharon Silver, the Food Anthropologist, begins to sniffle when the Dean reminds them about the approaching deadline for the AAO and the progress on the EnhanceUs Refreshment Strategy. Edith overheard Olivia telling Leonardo that Sharon’s being indirectly pressured by Safeway Supermarkets to retract damning articles she wrote about how modern North

237 American grocery stores isolate community members from each other, unlike the food markets of ancient civilisations. Edith wants to cackle for she is free of her AAO, at least for another two years. And this time her VI score will be astronomical. Angus raises his hand and asks, his words tight, – Is anything going to be done about the sinkhole? It’s been stewing there for weeks, Crawley Hall will slide into it any day. One of our own’s still in the hospital from falling into it! Angus rabbits on about how he’s seen a crack in the basement that travels along an entire wall, and a urinal detached itself from the wall while he was pissing into it and nearly crushed his foot. Marian Carson shakes her head. Most of the faculty smile and shake their heads. Leonardo clucks a laugh. The Clutterbucks chuckle, lean against each other that way long-married people do. Poor dotty old Angus. Dean van Dyck abruptly stops his pacing. – Angus, he says. – As I’ve informed you on numerous separate occasions, I’m not going to address an issue like building management and other non-curriculum issues at an AJX Faculty meeting. The proper University department has been notified about the landscape development, and an executive committee meeting scheduled next month will discuss the possibility of striking a committee to address this concern! Angus slams down his stack of papers, and pushes himself to standing. – While you’re planning yet another fully-catered, host bar reception, he bellows, – as professors we’re being forced to subsidise photocopying and pencils and p-p-paperclips! We’re two and four to an office while the C wing vomits vermin. That goddamn elevator #1 is getting more erratic and was stuck between the basement and main floor for three hours last Wednesday, probably because the building is literally falling over, and my eight-month pregnant teaching assistant nearly gave birth in it! Why don’t you committee that, ol’ Monty.

238 He shoves himself past the other people sitting in his row, bonking Leonardo’s head and ruffling his cherub curls. Angus shoves out the door, a sheet of paper fluttering behind him. – Well I guess that’s that, says Monty. The room chuckles. Chairs squeak as faculty members shift in their seats. The Dean chuckles, coughs. Pulls his handkerchief from his suit jacket pocket and dabs his mouth.

At the end of the meeting, Edith slings her bag over her shoulder and skips down the steps out the door, her burden lighter because she has submitted her AAO. She’ll pour herself double rum and coke when she gets home. Maybe she’ll go exercise like a normal person! She hovers behind the pack of her colleagues, keeping Mary Ellen’s yellow bob in her sight. The professors and sessional instructors cluster in front of the elevators. Edith skulks past them to the staircase door, and flits down the dark stairs. Goosebumps leap out all over her arms, and she remembers her cardigan. Which she left in D562. She climbs back up the flight of stairs. Even more lights in the stairwell have fizzled out, the absence of light creating a definite murk. In D562 the Clutterbucks are still flumped in their seats behind his stack of essays, her open laptop. – Meeting’s over, Edith calls out, as brightly as she can. Of course they ignore her. She sweeps up the cardigan from the back of the seat, bundles it under her arm. A patter. Like dropping grains of rice. Edith pivots back to the Clutterbucks. The Clutterbucks haven’t moved. They aren’t moving at all. – Iris and Ian? she asks. Iris lies slumped back in her seat. Ian flopped onto Iris’s shoulder. Not Iris. Not Ian. Their mouths slack, Iris’s eyelids drooped and still. The Clutterbucks, they loll, as if their bones are an afterthought. They sag, like drunks in a still-life. Edith has seen dead bodies before, but they were in caskets, neatly arranged, posed, coloured in.

239 Above them, the ceiling gapes, the tiles blistered and ragged. Rice grains dropping, spitting from the ceiling. Edith stumbles down the five tiers so quickly she catches her foot on a patch of duct tape holding down a carpet seam. She bashes her shin on a chair, the pain slashing to the tips of her toes, her brain popping from the pain. She scrambles for the campus security phone at the front of the room, her hands, her teeth chattering so hard she can barely form the words, – I . . . what . . . I . . . , she burbles into the receiver. – Campus security? answers the receiver. The Clutterbucks’ faces, hands, their faces . . . the Clutterbucks are dolls now. Horrible, waxy, meaty dolls. Their exposed selves are unthinkable, but their clothes writhe with life. Edith cowers, the phone crushed to her cheek. The green checks of Ian’s shirt crawling and undulating, the paisley of Iris’s blouse bumping, twisting and sighing. Their clothing alive, and now Edith is officially losing her mind. They are only hallucinations. Like Coral leaping from the fifth floor, the ivy on her dress, the flowers on Edith’s P. T. Madden blouses, but this hallucination lingers too long, this hallucination clings and clings. Edith’s cardigan crushes and wrinkles in her hands. A warm, dusty draft ebbs from the hole, ruffles her hair. She throws her cardigan over her head to block the awful breath exhaling from the ceiling. Shoves the heel of her shoe into her mouth to block her teeth chattering. Tastes grit and salt.

240 Ponytail Edith sprouted itchy patches on the backs of her hands in the night. She thrashed her legs between her sheets, sucked on the corner of her pillow trying to block the sight of the inanimate biological packages that used to be Iris and Ian Clutterbuck, the maw in the ceiling that seemed to have sucked them up then spat them back out. She was only sitting two seats away from them during the meeting. Did they die during the meeting? When? How could she have not noticed them dead? Why didn’t anyone else notice? She’d assumed they were napping or thinking hard with their eyes closed. Everyone naps at meetings. Was it a coincidence they were sitting under a vast and ragged hole in the ceiling? Was the ceiling ripped open before the meeting or did the ceiling rip open after the meeting? So many ceilings in the building were exposed, nothing but pipes and ducts and wires, she can’t remember. Did someone poison them? Did carbon monoxide ooze out of the hole and envelope them? Then why wasn’t anyone else in the room killed? She never noticed maggots dripping from the ceiling during the meeting. She gulps once from her kale smoothie, then shoves the smoothie into the fridge. She gags the rest of the smoothie into the kitchen sink. Kale and chia seeds pooling on the stainless steel. This morning while she navigates traffic on the way to school she picks and picks at a flaky spot on the back of her scalp, her fingernails chipping through the skin. Her fingers twist and pinpoint a pimple which she picks. Blood under her fingernail. A habit she had as a child that has now returned. Surveying sections of her hairline, portions of her face in the rearview mirror, she stuffs her hair into a ponytail with the elastic she’d snapped around a pack of student essays so she won’t be tempted to pick at her scalp while she’s teaching a class. The way she wore her hair when she was a teenager, a big poof at the back of her head. Edith crashes into Leroy Byrd in the photocopy room. – Whoa-ho! said Leroy Byrd. – You almost dislodged my clavicle brace! – You okay? she asks.

241 – I’ve been better, he sighs, scratches at a spot under his brace, – I’ve been better. . . You found the Clutterbucks. – Yes. – That’s tough, he says. – Poor Iris and Ian. What a way to go. Was there any chance you could have . . . revived them? Suddenly colleagues like Leroy and Alice Q. and Olivia are initiating conversations with her and giving her eye contact, not excusing themselves immediately when she starts talking. Marian Carson and Leonardo Baudone, she enthralls them. Leonardo wheels his bike alongside her in the hallway to their office, his tires unfurling muddy tracks, his bike pedal biting her calf, her ankle. They want to know details, to know if she has any theories. They want to know why she couldn’t save them. – What exactly did you see, demands Marian. Edith can’t help glancing at Marian’s chest. Marian’s wearing a jersey again. u r a prevert! Edith will email herself later. Courtesy of [email protected]. – I’m late for a meeting with the Dean, she tells Marian. – I really must go and prepare. In the office, Leonardo drapes his damp bicycle shorts over her coat hooked on the coat tree, then wheels his chair in front of his computer. He starts battering his keyboard so hard it clatters against the desk’s hard surface. He abruptly stops typing, then asks her, – Did you give them mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? Did you check for heartbeats? They both work on their opposite sides of the office so she has to turn to talk to him. She tries to speak. Tears blur her eyes. She swivels back to her computer. – I would have done mouth-to-mouth, says Leonardo. – Or CPR. – They looked like old meat, she says, her lips dragging around the words. – They were decaying. – That’s impossible, says Leonardo. – It’s biologically impossible for advanced decay to have set in that quickly. He clatters his keyboard some more.

242 – Was it carbon monoxide poisoning? he asks rhetorically. – Coincidental and simultaneous heart failure? Poison? Did you notice them ingesting anything at the meeting? Did you try to talk to them? Call their names? Just in case they were still alive? Wouldn’t there have been death rattles? You say their skin was strange. Was their skin red? Or are you sure they weren’t actually blue? I am sure they must have been blue, given the circumstances you’ve described. Yes, they were blue, which suggests asphyxiation of some kind. Edith’s lips crush, her mouth filling with mucous and tears. – I have to go now, she says, and she slams the office door behind her as best she can. Cinnamon chemicals envelope her, heralding Mary Ellen’s imminent arrival and just one more nauseating addition to this day. Edith’s not sure which way to turn down the hallway. She dives left. Mary Ellen sails toward her, lips a violent red slash, Helen Bedford and her gigantic backpack cantering alongside her, humping Mary Ellen’s flowery coat and briefcase. Edith flattens against the wall as they hurtle by. She is 3.5 minutes late for her meeting with the Dean. She scuttles into the nearest washroom and dabs her face with cold water. In one of the cubicles behind her, a woman clicks her heels together three times.

243

House – I’m sorry that you were witness to the Clutterbuck tragedy, says Monty. – Thanks, says Edith. – But notwithstanding all that, frankly, says the Dean, his chair swiveling back from the window to face her, – it’s been a full two years since you received tenure, and I’m seeing 0% improvement in your teaching evaluations, and here we are again, with seven undergraduate and graduate students as separate, organised groups using up my valuable time to complain about your classes. She shakes her head. The view from the window shows the bleak stretch of thrusting concrete buildings, wide swaths of dead grass, churned dirt on the construction site, the steel lace of still and silent construction cranes. The punching bag glowers in the corner of his office. A witness to her humiliation. Why is it so hot in here? Like an oven set to Self-Clean. He has no books in his dark wooden shelves. No papers, no files. His desk as clean and wide as a prairie plain. – And your negligible involvement in higher level committee work, your lack of success with a BURP or DIC grant or any other kind of funding, I wonder if it wasn’t a mistake to hire you in the first place. I’m not sure how you received tenure; only one book in press in seven years? I was brought in to clean house, says Monty, scrubbing the air, pretending to scrub a wall, she guessed. – I’m cleaning house. The dropout rates in your classes are extraordinary. Ninety students dropped down to thirty-three in your Introduction to Literature course. That’s more than fifty percent. Complaints from graduate students. One more semester of this and you’ll be due for a third official warning, book or no book. AAO or no AAO. – Third? Edith dabs her forehead with her sleeve. She would like to rip every stitch of clothing off and streak into the snow, Monty’s severed windpipe dripping in her hands.

244 – This is your second, says Monty. – One more warning and I will be forced to engage the EnhanceUs refreshment apparatus. He harrumphs, and slaps closed her file. Edith twists her hands compulsively in her lap. Her hands are a thrashing baby rabbit, its throat slashed by a bored cat. – Mary Ellen once mentored you as your supervisor. She says you’ve never been exactly prolific, and that this book is exceptional only because she believed you had no chance of ever finishing it, he says. – But it’s still a book. And it was due out this month, she squeaks. – It’s been delayed because of some printing issues, but it will come out. – Ah, but that was your dissertation. That is how you first got the position, that is how you sidled in to receiving tenure with the last Dean, whose standards were evidently at a basement-level. Because you had a book coming out. Mary Ellen tells me she essentially co-wrote that book. Now you need another book, he says, spreading his hairy fingers out across the desk surface. – A proper book. Or at least four publications per year in top tier journals. A BURP grant for at least $75 000. An award of some kind? Supervision of a graduate student who actually completes the degree with you? Surely you can manage one of these things. That’s what you’re paid for. If you don’t make things happen then things will happen to you. You’ll scrape by this AAO cycle because of your book, but next time I’m not so sure. She can imagine her father’s excruciating sympathy, possibly his secret delight, if she lost this job and had to go work in a coffee shop like Bev. Him fired, then Edith fired. Her mother the only immediate family member who managed to not get fired before retirement. Although her mother did have to give that one client a free $800 hair weave after she burned off the client’s hair with straightener because she was too busy gossiping with her sister on the phone at the same time. Or maybe her father would be glad because he could blame it on the economy rather than his dodgy expense claims and fraternising with a competing company for payoffs. Her mother’s disappointment, the ulcers Edith would develop trying to pay down her new gigantic mortgage by working in a coffee shop.

245 She isn’t even qualified to work in a coffee shop. Probably Bev will dump her too. – Leonardo Baudone only has one book, she mumbles, – and it was his dissertation. – I refuse that kind of response. I refuse to make comparisons. But I will note that Baudone’s book came out with an international press. It was mentioned in The New Yorker. His book has high Impact Factor. And he’s had a second book already accepted: two books in three years! She dabs her temples with a square of Kleenex. Her cuffs soaked with sweat. She should leave before she starts crying. No. She will take Vivianne’s advice and cry properly, in front of the Dean. She squeezes her eyelids shut. Tears spurt from her hot face. Ugly crier. If she were a beautiful crier would it make a difference? What does a beautiful crier even look like? A bubble of snot heaves in and out of her nose. – Oh come now, says the Dean, tapping the desktop impatiently. – Is that necessary? But with his South African accent, so it sounds like Eess thet nessissree? Which only urges her to cry harder. I am the archaeologist of my life; I build its fountains and dig the nuclear bomb shelter. – Monty? she asks, remembering advice her father once gave her. She wipes her nose on the back of her hand. – Yes? He picks up his phone and pushes a button. – What kind of soup did you eat with the Prince of Cornwall again?

– Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, he sniffs. – Duke Rothesay, Earl of Chester, Baron of Renfrew, Earl of Carrick, Lord of the Isles, Prince and Great Steward of Scotland. Organic watercress soup, of course. He stands up from his gleaming desk, straightens his shirt cuffs, and whisks out the door. He does not return, but instead his Administrative Assistant, Lisa Ives, poses in the doorway, her long hair curling around her

246 shoulders and chest in a lanky, Catherine Middleton fashion, and guides her into the reception area. – The bathroom’s over here, says Lisa Ives. – You probably want to freshen up. Lisa Ives steps back from Edith, as though Edith might vomit on her. – You found the Clutterbucks? says Lisa Ives. – Yes. – Such nice people. So sad. She frowns, a Kate Middleton dimple sweetening her right cheek.

Edith unbuttons her blouse and fans at the heat frantically. Drops her head into the washroom sink and bawls, miserable wails that curdle up from her innards. She smears snot all over her hands, she wipes her hands up into her hair, she frees her hair from the stupid elastic band, her hair a comforting black, hot mass cushioning her cheek, her neck, her jaws. She’s dribbled water from the sink down the front of her shirt, her mouth agape, she doesn’t care. She surfaces from the sink, faces the mirror. Her eyes are the size of grapefruit seeds. Ugly crier. She looks like she belongs on the cover of Creepshow. That’s another thing she remembers her ex Beryl once told her. Oh god, she misses Beryl. Beryl collected old comics. Maybe she should call Bev. But Bev might tell Melnyk who would tell Mary Ellen that she’s a loser. A loser. A woman in a stall behind her sighs. Edith sniffs. She should probably pee. She rebuttons her blouse. Perhaps the woman will come out and ask Edith what’s wrong. Perhaps the woman will say something hopeful or magical and Edith will feel better instead of such a dreadful failure. Both the stall doors are closed. She waits, rinsing her hands again in the sink, blowing her nose into one of the rough brown paper towels that immediately dissolve into brown pulp on contact with any kind of moisture. It’s been a minute, maybe more. She blows her nose again. Shoves the paper towel into the flipped metal lip of the trash. She peeps under the doors to see the feet of the women in the stalls. To see if one of the stalls is actually free, and just the door closed.

247 Leather lion heads mounted like figureheads on Hangaku heels: Mary Ellen’s shoes. Edith didn’t smell Mary Ellen because her nose was so plugged up with tears and snot! The pattern in Edith’s sweaty olive-green blouse froths. Her blouses only ever animate when she’s at work. There’s something wrong with this place, this building that asphyxiates people, spits maggots, makes her blouses weird. Her mother was right: patterns do look terrible on her bosom! The bathroom door clunks behind Edith on its broken hinges as she bolts from the bathroom. She swings down the staircase banisters like a rabid gorilla, two steps at a time, the banisters icy, slippery. Mary Ellen says she co-wrote Edith’s book? Is that what Mary Ellen is telling everyone now? And why is Mary Ellen on the fifth floor? Is she meeting with the Dean to talk about Edith? Conspiring to get Edith refreshed? Edith pulls on the door handle to the fourth floor, but the door sticks and she nearly yanks her entire right humerus out of its shoulder socket. The stairwell’s trapped her inside its hollow grey horribleness, this echoing concrete colon of a stairwell. Everyone in this building hates her; this building hates her too. – Let me out! she shrieks, and the door flies open. She screws her key into her mailbox, her hands shaking, her nose running. Perhaps a reassuring promotional postcard from her publisher. A free book she might bury her nose in. Nothing. Just the metal slope of an empty mailbox. That’s incorrect. A letter from Parking Services. Its stiffness suggests it’s her new, overdue parking pass. For a parking lot that’s a people-eating, car-eating hole at the foot of a building that’s methodically poisoning them all. She slams the mailbox shut, pinching her index finger, the pain lightning up her hand. Yanks out the key. A crooked key still protrudes from Mary Ellen’s box. She rubs her face in her cardigan sleeve, trying to unravel the horrible ball of hairy crud the Dean has lobbed at her. Her mailbox door pops open.

248 She shoves the key into the door, turns it, closes the mailbox, turns the key in the opposite direction. Yanks out the key. Mary Ellen’s mailbox snaps open. Envelopes, papers, packages slither out. She bends down to gather up the papers, manila envelopes, the parcels. A thunk on her crown. A shower of thunks. Papers, envelopes, catalogues, fliers, catalogues cascade onto and around her. Other mailboxes snap or yawn open, mail spewing and fluttering. She tries to gather up the mail, but cannot keep up with the envelopes, boxes, fliers slipping, whiffling out. This isn’t her job, cleaning up after dysfunctional mailboxes. Or is it? She can’t imagine Alice Z. on her hands and knees, chasing envelopes under the photocopier. She chases an envelope under the photocopier. Dr. Mary Ellen Toogood, Mykytyshyn Endowed Chair, CONFIDENTIAL. She holds the envelope between her fingers. She wants to drop it and pretend she never touched it. Or put it in her pocket and keep it with her forever. She gathers more of Mary Ellen’s mail under the photocopier along with gobs of dust, paperclips, pencil nubs. Desiccated rabbit turds? She stuffs Mary Ellen’s mail into her bag. Scoops up two more pieces of mail, a large manila envelope, a postcard, next to the mailroom filing cabinet. Flees. The mailbox doors continue spewing and vomiting. She ducks into a utility closet, plastic pipes, a dry mop bucket, jars of bleach and stacks of folded garbage bags. She huddles with her phone. Vivianne’s line keeps ringing, a repeating burr that bores into Edith’s eardrum. She needs Vivianne to just tell her what to do. Cure her. Explain to Edith why Edith stole Mary Ellen’s mail and how to give it back without anyone finding out. She skitters to her office. Grasps the doorknob, but cannot understand why her hand slides off.

249 At first she doesn’t understand the mottling on her office doorknob, the lumpishness, until she recognises the material she sometimes gets on the bottom of her shoe, that material. Her key parked in the middle of it. It must be a prank, peanut butter? Dirt? But the smell. The doorknob smeared with dog feces. A terrible, spirit-crushing prank. Aimed at her, she knows it.

She sits in her car now, her hands still trembly and smelling. She got some on her hands when she first pushed in the office door key, she can’t wash the smell off; even after hot water blasted into the sink in the women’s toilets, even after soaking them in dish soap in the faculty lunchroom, her fingers still smell of shit. She suspects one of the students from Canadian Literature before 1950, Joffrey, or the white boy with the half-shaved head, or maybe the marshmallow-faced kid with the goatee in her night class. Or Karis the graduate student who only got an A- on her presentation. Or Mary Ellen. Or the Dean. It could be one of them. Or all of them. Edith careens out of the parking lot in the dark, zips round the curves in the playground zone near the university daycare at sixty km and clips a jackrabbit. The low white flash of hare against the dark of the asphalt surface, one of Crawley Hall’s spies, she just knows it; the thud of impact, a bump, but when she gapes into the rear view mirror, just black road tinted red in her rear lights. She jams down the brake. Squints in the rearview mirror again. There. She’s crushed its skull. The fluffy white paws. She is a filthy murderer. Edith strokes the rabbit’s soft fur, the body still warm, blood and matter splashed from its head all over the road. She touches the throat. Loops her fingers around the ribcage, her fingers pressing the warm lines of bones, swings it up and carries it to the trunk of her car. Drives away. She will bury it somewhere properly. Edith broods outside Mary Ellen’s remodelled century-old house, under the canopy of bony trees until she witnesses Helen Bedford and her

250 backpack labouring up the steps to the front door. Mary Ellen’s silhouette inside. Melnyk weirdly nowhere in sight. Bev helps Edith scoop the stiffened, dripping rabbit out of the trunk with a black garbage bag turned inside out. – I dunno, says Bev. – The city has a road kill pickup service. They could have taken care of the body. Now the inside of your trunk’s covered in blood and gunk. Eeeyuck! Edith cannot abide Bev’s callousness. Blood sprinkles and drips down Edith’s forearms. – Maybe we should smoke a joint, says Bev. Instead, Edith drinks two bottles of wine while Bev eats funky brownies made with Melnyk’s grade A marijuana. When Edith asks Bev if Bev wants to have sex, Bev says, – No. Wrestling dead headless rabbits kind of doesn’t do it for me. Bev licks the last of the brownies off her fingers, and stands up because she has to be at her shift in twenty minutes and she still has to iron the apron of her uniform. – Where should we bury it? asks Edith. – The sinkhole by your building? says Bev. – At least it’ll be close to home. Or the garbage bin? Like ensuring the proper burial of the rabbit Edith murdered is some kind of joke. – At the very least put the body outside now, in the cold, says Bev, – so it won’t rot. Bev hoists up the black garbage bag full of dead rabbit, slides open the balcony door. – What’s this black garbage bin doing out here? she asks. She tosses out the garbage bag onto the balcony. Steps back inside and slides the door closed. – I think my building is haunted, says Edith. – The condo? asks Bev in alarm. – No. The building where I work.

251 – As long as it’s not the condo. The condo fees are already astronomical. It’s been fun, Edie, says Bev. And she pecks Edith on the nose. Fun. Edith wonders if Bev is preparing to break up with her.

252

Turd After Bev has left, Edith brandishes her letter opener while contemplating Mary Ellen’s stack of mail. Two literature journals in transparent plastic envelopes, a newsletter from the university teachers’ union. An invitation to a reception at the Inivea Petroleum Club. And five envelopes of varying sizes, thin and fat, provenance ambiguous since several sport names she doesn’t recognise or lack names entirely, and one seems to be from Carberry University. I am the architect of my life; I build its foundation and design the cellar crawlspace within which I hide the bodies. She slices open the envelopes one by one. Mary Ellen’s garbage bin is parked on her balcony so the smell doesn’t intrude in the apartment. Edith has only had time to go through two bags. The first bag was exclusively used tissues either from a cold or from nearly endless tears, but the second bag was prolific: packaging for a medication named Aprinol which Edith has googled and seems to be for heart issues or control of acne; an empty ladies’ hair pomade jar; expired cold and flu medication; and an empty container that once held laxatives. Also Styrofoam and cellophane from chicken, an empty rice bag, and two plastic bags from pre-washed rocket and baby kale mix. One of the bags unopened and the rocket and kale morphed to black slime inside. And four condoms still in their packages. Confusing. Edith slots the empty packages into a series of files in her filing cabinet. Her fingers shrink cold as she contemplates opening Mary Ellen’s mail. She’s positioned the shredder between her feet so she can destroy the evidence immediately. The first envelope holds a letter asking Mary Ellen to renew her subscription to the QTFR association. Edith has never been able to clearly google what the QTFR is, the results are always in German or French, even though Olivia, Coral and Leonardo namedrop it. So do the Clutterbucks. So did the Clutterbucks. On the masthead at the bottom of the page, the meaning of QTFR is revealed: Quality Thing For Research. Edith crumples

253 up the paper in irritation. Palms it smooth again, then feeds it to the shredder. The second is a notice informing Mary Ellen that she’s been banned from Sanderson College, California: Please be informed that you are banned from entering the Sanderson campus or contacting any Sanderson College employee unless you have received express permission in writing from the Chancellor or Vice-Chancellor of Sanderson College.

The third a submission from Helen Bedford. Mary Ellen is old school. Of course she’d make Helen submit a hard copy of her crappy sugar chapter. Edith would print out Helen’s emailed chapters. Edith bets Helen’s regretting Mary Ellen as her supervisor! The shredder grinds as Edith feeds sheet after sheet into its eager, cavity-laden teeth. The fourth a CONFIDENTIAL hard copy of Mary Ellen’s budget so far as the Mykytyshyn Endowed Chair, and how Nancy in accounting has found several expenses that cannot be adequately accounted for: flowers delivered to Mary Ellen’s home address, a banner produced by a non- University of Inivea-sourced printing company, a three-week car rental in Italy, an $817.44 restaurant bill, two first-class return airplane tickets, one to Rome, the other to Hungary, and an unspecified clothing purchase from Coco & Violet for $3499. Please forward detailed explanation for the receipts and credit card statements as soon as possible . . . The fifth envelope, return address Carberry University decorated with the Carberry chimera crest, holds a hand-written letter and a gold signet ring. Hurried handwriting on Carberry letterhead: Mary Ellen – Since you refuse to share your home address with my lawyer, I am sending your mother’s ring to you care of the U of I address. – Dino

Dino. Mary Ellen’s husband. Edith slides the ring onto every finger on her left hand until she finds one the ring fits. Her thumb.

254 The last package holds a cloth-bound book: Genéviève Masson: Métis Balladeer of the Red River by Mary Ellen Toogood. Another new book. One of the few Mary Ellen’s written without co-authoring with Dino. Dear Dr. Toogood, Please find enclosed a copy of the book with the erratum included, as we discussed. Sincerely, Duncan Wu Warburg Publishers

Edith flips through the book. Glued inside the book’s front pages, a paper rectangle with a doubled black border: Erratum – Mary Ellen Toogood gratefully acknowledges Arthur Melnyk Jones, postdoctoral scholar, for his meticulous research assistance and for co-writing the book’s introduction, conclusion, and prefatory sections to each essay in Genéviève Masson: Métis Balladeer of the Red River.

Edith holds the Erratum page up to her nose, inhales the glorious glue smell. She brushes the page across her lips. Arthur wrote and edited this book. But Mary Ellen took all the credit. Then Mary Ellen somehow got caught. Edith lays out her trophies: the book, the three delicious letters, the ring. She should shred the letters. She should pawn the ring or toss it into a gutter grate. But they make her heart explode into petals and pearls. Her email pings on her phone:

From: "Mary Ellen Toogood" Subject: darling Edith Date: Fri., Oct. 26, 2:34 am To: [email protected]

Darling Edith, Meetme in myoffice Tues at 10 weneed to talk Hugs, Mary Ellen Toogood PhD, MA, LBo, CoD, FAX, WeE

255 Mykytyshyn Endowed Chair

Edith retches, drools on her carpet floor she retches so hard. Mary Ellen knows. Mary Ellen always knows. How does Mary Ellen always know?

256

Perfume Tuesday, October 30th, 9:58 am. – Edith, exclaims Mary Ellen. Mary Ellen throws her perfumed arms around Edith. Edith perches herself across from Mary Ellen on the very edge of the seat of a new leather upholstered chair, in Edith’s old office with the view of the crackling mountains, of trees, of blue sky. But Edith chills from the breeze of the pendulum blade swinging above her head. Mary Ellen chatters as if they never stopped being friends, frequently placing her hand on Edith’s upper arm, her fingernails so glossy red they look like they might drip, talking about her gardener, her cleaner, the keynote she gave recently in Finland, the conference she’s organising in Portugal, her new book about Genéviève Masson which will be coming out shortly. – How’s Dino, says Edith, her tongue flat, sticky. – Oh he’s wrapping it up at Carberry, ready to move here and putter around on the golf courses like every other retired man I know. For the first time in our entire marriage we’ll be living in the same city! Mary Ellen laughs, her mouth wide, showing off every single tooth in her head. Perfume billows from the folds of her clothes. She pats her gold victory roll. – He’s talking about taking up scrapbooking, says Mary Ellen. – Insists he’ll be a househusband. He needs to find better hobbies. Edith stews in her chair, lumpen. – Now Edith, says Mary Ellen, leaning in toward Edith, settling her elbows on the arm of her chair. She picks at something lodged between her teeth with a pinkie finger, – I know you stole my garbage bin. – No. – I have a video surveillance camera set up in the back of my house. – I don’t know what you’re talking about. – You poor, sad thing. Did you find what you were looking for? Pathetic little bug.

257 – I would never do such a thing, insists Edith. – Oh Edith. Do I need to post the video on YouTube? Mary Ellen twists her wedding ring. Pats Edith’s knee. – Edith, I have a proposition for you. She hands Edith a sheet of paper. Edith nearly chokes. – I don’t understand this email, says Edith, shaking the paper. – Edith, says Mary Ellen, settling her bottom into her seat and folding her perfumed arms, crossing her perfumed legs. – You and I both know how hard you worked on this book, but also how hard I worked on this book. There would be no book if it wasn’t for me. I introduced you to Beulah Crump-Withers in my graduate class. I led you to the archives. I suggested the methodology. I gave you the structure. I edited the writing, drew out your ideas, and frankly, gave you many of my own. My name as co-author is only fair. After all I’ve done for you, the tears I shed, the arguments I had with your examining committees to have you pass your candidacy exam, your final PhD defense. I was on the committee that admitted you into the PhD program in the first place. I never told you this, but no one else wanted to admit you into the program. I cried, Edith, I cried and I fought because I understood your potential. Mary Ellen kicks up to standing. Floofs the hair at the back of her head with her fingers. Rubs her hands together, flips through papers on her desk, then settles herself on the other side of her desk. Pounding in the ceiling. A muffled shout from someone upstairs. – I wrote to the University of Okotoks Press several months ago, she says. – I know the Acquiring Editor, Stanley, from years ago at Carberry. I showed Stan the emails, drafts I kept because I keep the drafts of all my students’ work, and Stan knocked together a new cover that includes my name, and they’ve put a rush on the printing. – It already has art on the cover! – I’ve never liked William Kurelek. A Group of Seven painting would be more appropriate. Greta Mykytyshyn owns a Lawren Harris. I’m sure she’d be delighted to let us photograph the painting for the book jacket.

258 She’s very excited about the book and the attention it will bring to the Foundation. Edith’s eyelid so frenzied it threatens to jump off her face and down Mary Ellen’s throat. A crash on the floor above them reverberates. Construction and asbestos abatement. Or as though someone’s knocked over a bookshelf. – You know the Beulah Crump-Withers book was a collaborative effort, says Mary Ellen. You’re clever, Edith, but cleverness only takes a woman so far. You’re empty inside. You couldn’t have finished it without me. Edith leaps across the desk, her clawed fingers only centimetres from Mary Ellen. Mary Ellen doesn’t move. A handful of rice drops between them. A short shower that tip-taps onto the desk surface. The ceiling tiles bloat, crack. Edith slings her briefcase over her shoulder and shoves past Mary Ellen for the door. Both hands tugging the doorknob she tries to pull open the door, but Mary Ellen crowding behind her makes it impossible. Edith turns, grabs each of Mary Ellen’s arms with her hands, all she can grasp is quilted fabric and handfuls of hard pearls, and she politely shoves Mary Ellen away. She yanks open the door. Behind her, a creak, then a cavernous thunk as the ceiling collapses. Followed by plonks of plaster. Plinks of dust and debris. An overriding smell of boiling eggs and synthetic cinnamon. The office a mound of white ceiling tile, cottony insulation, and uncoiled silver ducts and coils. A dusty brown rabbit scuttles through Edith’s legs and leaps past. The only sign of Mary Ellen is the palm of a hand that blinks open in the middle of the pile of debris. – Mary Ellen! she shouts. She trips and slips over ducts, stumbles and falls onto crumbling tiles that collapse into dust. Grabs hold of the hand. The hand clutches back. Edith speed-dials Campus Security.

259

260

Blazer Edith sleepwalks through the first weeks of November. Her forearms so deeply scored from her fighting herself in the night she has to buy Band- Aids to stop the blood. She shreds the three letters addressed to Mary Ellen. Pointless. The blackmailer blackmailed. Mary Ellen’s mother’s signet ring she drops into an ancient jar of pickled beets at the back of her fridge. A jar of beets she keeps for sentimental reasons because she made the beets following a recipe in Beulah Crump-Withers’ journals. Maybe she should give the signet ring to Bev as an engagement ring. Edith still hasn’t had time to shop for a proper engagement ring. Once she even ventures into the University pool, hoping freezing cold water will wake her up again, but Angus Fella with his round fish belly and genitalia-red trunks outlaps her again and again. She floats facedown, irritating the other swimmers so much they shout at her and accidentally on purpose bang her with their flippers and flutter boards. Finally the lifeguard descends from her high chair and asks Edith to leave. Sometimes she forgets to go home until deep into the night; roaming as a nocturnal being in Crawley Hall almost provides a kind of solace. Sometimes Angus shuffles past her office door in his bedroom slippers. – I’ve always worked better here than at home, he says. She suspects he’s sleeping in his office every night. Swimming every morning in the pool for his bathing and morning libations, and eating bacon and egg McMuffin breakfasts in the food court in Mykytyshyn Hall when it opens at 6 am. The silent corridors and rows of locked doors. The deserted nighttime campus almost hums it is so empty, the floors somehow shinier, more hopeful, in the vacant hallways. 10:59 pm, Edith wheels Leonardo’s second-best bike from the office doorway after she collides into one of the pedals with her shin. She redrapes his crusty, second-best cycling shorts over the handlebars when it accidentally slips to the floor. She settles herself at her desk in Leonardo’s

261 office, draws towards her chest the motley, ragged stack of essays she’s had for almost four weeks. She peers into her reflection in the window. The night view outside calming, luminous in its darkness. The sinkhole, the quad beyond it, deep as outer space. Nothing but occasional streetlights, the lights stringing along the highway at the edge of campus. She extracts her red pen from her purse and begins scribbling and ticking her way through the wildly ungrammatical pages, the miles of faulty logic, the written-the-midnight-before-wool gatherings. Soon she is a marking powerhouse, she has graded seventeen essays in fifteen minutes, she is a marking automaton. She should grade papers at three in the morning every single day! Her mind vinegar-sharp, a slayer of dangling, squinting, and misplaced modifiers. Until she hears the dripping. A steady drip of the tap in the bathroom across the corridor. A drip that intensifies, pokes into her concentration, fragments her midnight geniusness. She pushes the exams away, stands up from her desk, slips her keys into her pocket. She pushes open the washroom door into moonless black. The sound of water running from a tap. She flicks on the switch. Only one fluorescent light flickers on. The ceiling gutted and cavernous. Her heart startles, clatters in her chest. A woman in a yellow dress bends over the sinks. Coral at the mirror, her face down towards one of the sinks, rinsing her mouth. Coral’s hand stops, mid-rinse, her hand still cupped over her mouth, water drip-dripping, her bloodshot eyes gazing at Edith through the dim reflection in the mirror. – I’m sorry, Edith half-shouts. – I didn’t know anyone else was in here. You scared the stuffing out of me. You’re back! You look great, she lies. Coral’s hand still over her mouth, her eyes red. Edith knows it would look stupid to leave the bathroom without using it, so she shuts herself into a cubicle, shoots the bolt of the door, and pulls down her pants. Sits down.

262 She hears the faucet turn on, then off. Then on again. She pees, wipes, stands up and refastens her pants. She swings open the cubicle door. Coral still standing there, her back still to Edith. Her hair straight, and shiny as a red toy car. Coral’s fingers over her mouth. Coral’s thin fingers red. – I like what you’ve done with your hair, says Edith. – The colour I mean. Or maybe it’s the light in here. Is it? Water drips from Coral’s hands, plinks in the sink. – Have a good night, whispers Edith, and she scuppers out the door without washing her hands, her urine-speckled fingers firmly pushing into the middle of the orange poster that trumpets Please Wash Your Hands. Edith inserts her key into the office lock. Just before she turns, she hears from inside her office a pale intake of breath. She unlocks the door. Swings it open. Paper and exam booklets scattered all over, her room spills with paper, the exam papers tossed around the room, pages ripped and crumpled. Edges frayed, shredded, almost as though they have been chewed. Leonardo’s bicycle mangled and upside down beneath the windowsill. She dashes back to the washroom. – Coral! she shouts. The washroom dark again. She flips on the single fluorescent light bulb. Only her reflection in the mirrors. She bounces side to side down the hall, yanking and twisting doorknobs on offices, boardrooms. Runs to Coral’s office and bangs on the door. Locked. She needs a telephone, an emergency phone. In the elevator lobby she trips over a mop bucket. The mop bucket only jolts and splashes, but Edith spills to the wet floor. The night janitor shakes his mop in Edith’s face. – You okay? he asks. – My office has been vandalised! He stoops down, scrutinises Edith’s face. – You high? He sits back on his heels.

263 – You’re high! – I’m not! – You’re in the office with the muddy bike tracks all the time. She learns his name is Wing Lau. After he helps her sit up they concur about what a slob Leonardo is, then call Campus Security.

She steps around the heaps of spilled paper and books on the floor in Leonardo’s office, gingerly picks out her purse and laptop, and heads for her car. Burrowed into her car seat, she dials Vivianne. Vivianne’s voicemail oozes her placid voice. She texts the word URGENT to Vivianne, pressing so hard her thumbs nearly puncture the glass screen on her phone. She will visit the BalanceWell offices tomorrow first thing because this has gone on long enough. The universe is pulling her apart. Her book, Coral, the ghost in her office, her scratched-up arms, Mary Ellen accusing her of outrageous things she hasn’t done. Her therapist has obviously quit and no one told Edith. She snuffles, then erupts into tears. She drives from the library parking lot to Crawley Hall. Stops her car. The orderly, symmetrical lines of Crawley Hall’s lit rooms suggesting an order, a reasonableness she has not known for months, for years. She digs through her briefcase for a Kleenex to stop up her runny nose, her tears, when the silhouette of a stick figure woman stumbles out the building. The woman steps unsteadily as though drunk, then splays her limbs wide as she clings on to the mesh fencing around the sinkhole with her fingers. She begins to climb, fitting the toes of her shoes into the mesh, her torso, her arms moving like a jerky spider’s. She reaches the top of the fence, then rolls herself over the top. Abruptly drops into the pit. It has to be Coral. We’re all mad here. Edith’s right foot punches down on to the accelerator and the wheels spin on the layer of fresh snow before plunging her out of the parking lot and onto the campus road.

264

November 20th The next day, Edith climbs the staircase. She fears the washrooms in Crawley Hall, fears the elevators. She fears her own office, the paper mess she left behind last night. She fears the plink of maggots in her classrooms when she’s teaching, and what about all the rabbits? The only place, ironically, that she feels safe is in the stairwells, where the naked concrete and pipes are exposed and true; not costumed with drywall or mouldings or tile and glass. Paper shields the inside of the window in the BalanceWell office door. She has never approached the physical office before. The knob locked too. Edith assumes the staff might be attending important meeting, or a coffee-break birthday party in the lounge and they didn’t want to be disturbed. They didn’t even leave a sign. She stands at the door, taking turns pulling the thumb of one hand then the other. She checks her phone again. No message from Vivianne. She tromps down the stairs all the way to the main floor and out the side door. She hasn’t been to Leonardo’s office yet. She figure eights in the snow. She figure eights too close to an evergreen and a jackrabbit dashes away from under the branches. She stops pacing, squints through the fence mesh around the sinkhole and into the hole’s apparently empty depths. Where Coral spends her time. Time spent. Time lost. Out of time. Oh Vivianne. Edith slept hardly at all last night; her arms so scratched up this morning she could hardly stop up the bleeding. Dr. Angus Fella ambles slowly around the other side of the stiff metal fence, the broken and slack yellow police tape. In his puffy down winter jacket, the grimy cuffs and collar, the fedora settled firmly on his head. Edith notices that the jackrabbits ignore him, he walks close to them, between them, they continue nuzzling the stubby grass under the light stretch of snow as though he is invisible or another rabbit, this perpetually inebriated, perpetually hatted man, as he perambulates in what she guesses is the direction of the library.

265 Edith skids and slides over the ice after him. – Angus! she calls. He wheels around. Touches the brim of his hat, then wheels back and continues walking. – I owe you a decent hot dog, she says. Striding to catch up to him. Her breath thick. She tugs his arm – There’s something wrong, says Edith. – I understand what you were saying now. About the bird flying in instead of away. The Clutterbucks. Their death was unnatural. Coral Pullet’s losing her mind too. Crawley Hall is not a good place. She takes a deep breath. – I think Crawley Hall’s haunted, she says. – I think Crawley Hall killed the Clutterbucks. It’s killing Coral. It’s making all of us crazy. – Would you like a glass of rum? asks Angus. Rum! Does she have time for rum? – Yes, says Edith evenly, puffing. – Should we head to the bar? – Bar’s the wrong direction. He turns back to Crawley Hall. She toddles after him like a duckling, a cygnet.

Angus opens the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet and pulls out a bottle of Bundaberg and two cardboard coffee cups. The same cups that plop out of her favourite coffee machine. He pours too much rum into both cups and hands her one, his hand shaking slightly. She accidentally gulps her first sip, nearly chokes. – Tasty, she says. – Is it? says Angus absently. He fingers a mangy stack of battered hardcover books on his desk. Behind him, on the face of a filing cabinet drawer, a smudged, muddy handprint. Angus pulls open a filing cabinet, offers her a cookie from a peeling blue and red plastic packet. She crunches on a cookie. – Neat-tasting cookie, she says, dipping it into her rum. – It’s not a cookie. It’s an Anzac biscuit.

266 Edith crunches. Coconut. – Do you think that Crawley Hall is haunted? she asks, spitting out crumbs. – You’re here at night. I’ve seen you. You live here. He grunts. The office stinks of their rum and biscuit breath. She wishes she could open the door. – Crawley Hall isn’t haunted, says Angus. – It’s got ghosts. – Ghosts are beside the point. Edith swirls the rum in her cup, biscuit crumbs swirl at the bottom. She dashes the remainder of the rum into her mouth. Stands up. She understands now a little why some people might want just a little drink before work. The rum runs down inside her chest, kindles inside her hands and feet. She will confront the fact of her office and begin the cleanup. She will have to come up with some kind of excuse for Leonardo. Blame it on vandals even though there was no time for vandals, and no noise, and the only reasonable, rational answer is that she tore up Leonardo’s rubbery bicycle shorts and mangled his bicycle with her bare hands, threw the papers around herself in a mad, sleep-deprived, 180-second frenzy and blocked it out. That’s all. She checks her phone for a message from Vivianne. Or Bev. – Don’t you and I have an AJX meeting right now, Angus? – Do we? He checks his Cheshire Cat watch. – Och. They laughed at me. She licks the edge of her sadly empty cup. He pours more rum into her cardboard cup, into his own. – This building is a ship, he pronounces, – steeeeeeered by a madman, and a wilting economy and collapsed oil prices that are toooossssing us through stormy seeeeeas. In the encroaching, early winter night outside the window Angus’s desk lamp glows. He turns his face to the window, leans back, his hands cupped in his lap.

267 – Well someone, something, threw my student exams and papers all around the room, and crumpled them up! The office is a mess. Leonardo’s bicycle looks like a 500-pound man sat on it. She bites off the edge of a fingernail, then nibbles the fragments. A shred of nail travels to the roof of her mouth. Angus takes a swig. His cardboard cup crackles. – I don’t know what I’m going to tell my students, she says, clutching her hands around her cup, crumpling it. The fingernail has caught in a groove in the roof of her mouth, she is dying to pry it out. – I told one class I’d have their papers back to them on Friday, and the other class expects their quizzes back tomorrow! – So just tell them your car got broken into, the bag the quizzes were in got stolen, and their next assignment is worth double. Or give them all A’s. – Have you ever done that? – Of course! The students don’t care about the essays. They just care about the grades. Your problem, Evelyn, he says, – is you care too much about the wrong things. Edith gulps. Angus’s rum has washed away most of the panic. Maybe tomorrow she could phone in a bomb threat and buy some time that way. Buy time, waste time. But that would just buy her a single day. She could say a car thief stole the assignments. Yes, she could. Yes, she has no choice.

She clicks Angus’s door closed behind her. Angus whistles a fragment of a march inside his office. At the same time, Coral whirls into the hallway her heels clicking tick-tock, her head lowered as though she is an arrow shooting straight for Edith under the twisting silver ducts in the gutted ceiling. An angry bony silhouette growing more brooding and more alarming with each Hangaku-heeled step. Coral’s had a bath. Coral looks almost normal. As she approaches, the frown hammered on Coral’s face takes on sharper and sharper focus, the outrageous dark rings Coral has smudged

268 around her eyes, her hair’s vibrant colour from last night bled out, her lips pale, chapped. Coral clawing herself out of the pit. Coral sleeps at night in the pit. – You missed a faculty meeting again, Coral whispers as she whishes by Edith – Today you were on the agenda. Congratulations on your and Mary Ellen’s new book. Edith chest clenches, her mouth opens but utters no sound. Coral’s fingernails are broken and uneven. Dirty, as she tugs her blazer closer around her. Edith inserts the key in the office lock. The lock so sticky she has to jiggle the key. The door sticks, but she shoulders it open with a grunt. Leonardo is already inside, grunting and hoisting books on to his desk. – Look at this mess! he says. – I hear you contacted Campus Security. You could have warned me too about the mess I’d have to face. Snowflakes straggle by outside the window. She checks her phone. Still no Vivianne. No Bev. She heaves up a stack of paper onto a tangle of exam booklets. The papers tattered. Scattered among the chewed-up papers and booklets, drywall dust and little black marbles of rabbit shit. She picks up one of the marbles between index finger and thumb, studies the tiny brown planet, bundled and dehydrated plant fibres. The rabbits. The rabbits are unnatural too. Leonardo harrumphs. – This is completely unacceptable, Leonardo says, slotting his books backwards into the shelves. – I know, she says. – Frat boys are the worst! – I had no problems before you moved in here, he says. – Vandals, feces on doorknobs, interminable lineups of grumpy students. She ignores him. Between the rustles of paper and thunks of books pushed back into shelves, as she tries to distinguish between the chewed and the unchewed, the fluorescent lights secrete their usual low buzz. These papers on this sliding stack, these quizzes on that sliding stack. Leonardo hoists his

269 mangled bicycle above his head and grunts out the door for the day. The rustle and thump of paper, the office floor growing quieter as the staff pack up for the day, as students depart classes and office hours dwindle, the buzz loudening into a rhythmic hum. This first stack dumped into a black garbage bag. That sixth stack on a salvage pile. Her forehead hot. She wipes her forehead with her shirt sleeve. Her reflection in the window sharpens in the afternoon’s waning light. Or perhaps the hum of the lights sounds like breathing in and then breathing out. Does she care? She thinks that maybe she just doesn’t care. She stands with her hands on her hips. Surveys the mess. The lights breathe in and out in their electric way. The heel of a shoe sticks out from under a burst box of her books. She hesitates, sussing out the shoe, whether it’s still got a foot in it or not. Is there a body under there? Impossible. She pounces on the shoe. A black Hangaku. The outside powdered with drywall. The inside stuffed with fiberglass pink. The shoe far too small for her own foot. She’ll show the shoe to Angus. This building is haunted. Cursed. She doesn’t care what he says. Unless the building’s somehow absorbed the woman’s shoe. Or the woman. Whoever she was.

270

Meatballs Even though the book isn’t even available in bookstores yet, Mary Ellen orders the Dean to host a book reception for their book. 4:00 pm, immediately following the final AJX meeting for the autumn semester, hijacking the regular end-of-semester, December faculty holiday reception. December 3rd. Books will be for sale because Mary Ellen had Stan from Okotoks Press express ship her three boxes. All faculty and students are invited. Taber Corn Follies: The Memoirs of Beulah Crump-Withers By Mary Ellen Toogood and Edith Vane – Have I ever told you what was for dessert the time I had a private dinner with the Earl and Countess of Carrick? the Dean asks Greta Mykytyshyn. – Pumpkin tart. Imagine that. He straightens his tie, jauntily leans his elbow against a pillar. A heap of books salutes Edith on the table by the doorway, presided over by Helen Bedford who operates a tin box of cash. Mary Ellen, stitches on her forehead decorously bandaided, her broken leg tastefully hidden under a long, black velvet skirt, poses for a photo with the book hovering next to her face, her open-mouthed snarl smile and her pearls gleaming. When the photographer gestures to Edith, Mary Ellen tosses her head back with an exuberant laugh, and throws one of her arms around Edith’s waist for a photo, holding the book just below and between their faces. The shutter clicks. Mary Ellen hobbles over to the Dean and Greta Mykytyshyn, Helen Bedford flourishing a copy Taber Corn Follies right behind her. – Hello Edith, says Coral. Coral has folded herself into the windowsill. Thin as a stick man. Bev heaps her plate with miniature cupcakes loaded on a tray carried by a student server. – Boo! she said, – Shame shame! she shouted when she first saw Edith’s author’s copies on Edith’s kitchen counter. Edith grasping the Exacto knife she used to cut open the package of books, the knife glued to her sweaty palm.

271 In Mary Ellen’s interview with the University electronic newsletter UGotIt, she talks about the years of research she did on the book, – I knew Beulah Crump-Withers was gold the moment I read the first bit of archive. Just a recipe for good old-fashioned pickled beets, but in the margins I saw clear evidence of an exceptionally sophisticated brain, someone who was clearly a savante. Her wit, her self-awareness are breathtaking, even in the margin of a canned beet recipe! Beulah Crump-Withers is a Canadian gem. What a boon for Canadian feminist prairie studies. – Well, she is a good looking woman, said Bev on her stomach, studying Mary Ellen’s photo on the UGotIt website, her pink-soled feet waggling in the air off the side of the bed. – Very fine. But why didn’t they interview you too? – Shut up! Why can’t you shut up! Bev bolts Edith’s bathroom door. At the reception, Edith’s mother and father line up at the bar, her mother chatting with Alice Z. Her father strutting in the only remaining CEO suit he owns that still fits him. But he’s lost weight in the neck and the neck weight’s slid down to his gut so his neck looks like a wet magpie’s. The neck hole gaping. The shirt fabric stretches painfully across his stomach, the buttons ready to burst. Edith would like to introduce them to Bev, but Bev disappeared after the first round of cupcakes came out. Mary Ellen greets Edith’s parents like a society hostess in a movie, her arms wide and welcoming. The jolly, jolly laugh she carts out for special occasions crescendoing at something Edith’s father says. He adjusts his cuff links and pops meatballs, whispering in Mary Ellen’s ear. A student bartender in a bow tie and black vest doles out glasses of red and yellow wine, pop and bottles of water from white plastic bins behind her full of ice. Her hair wound in a knot plopped on the very top of her head. Angus Fella carefully and deliberately asks for a bottle of water. He props himself against the bar, unscrews the bottle, and sips. Then he fades away.

272 University catering staff with round trays of canapés – cherry-sized meatballs on toothpicks, satay chicken skewers, spinach phyllo triangles – wander among the academics, students, and staff. Edith doesn’t care anymore and in one hand holds a glass of wine, tears with her teeth at a skewer, tips her wine on to the carpet. The Dean glides about the room with a glass in his hand, moving among the clusters of professors and senior students. He stops at Leonardo and Olivia Crowshoe. Leonardo cups his hand in the small of Olivia’s back. – Funny seeing you two here together, he smirks. Leonardo erupts in an appreciative laugh. – Can I freshen your drink, Monty? asks Leonardo. – Sure sure, says Monty. – I’d like a drink, Leo, says Olivia, twisting one of her heels into the broadloom. – Sure sure, says Leonardo. – Two glasses of white it is. And he trundles off to the line-up at the bar. Monty stands closer to Olivia Crowshoe, his hands move as they talk and it’s clear his hairy thumbs want to touch her. Leonardo returns with two glasses of wine, he tries to butt between them, he tries to offer them their glasses of wine. He laughs at another of Monty’s jokes, then he drifts to the side, a glass of wine in each hand like he is their table. Olivia frowns. Edith escapes to the bathroom, locks herself in a cubicle. She sits on the toilet seat, her hands between her knees, rocking at this joke of a book party, this toilet of a day, this toilet of a life. Whispering in the next cubicle. A giggle. A zipper unzipping. – I want your D-cup tits in my face, whispers a woman. – Stop it, another voice whispers, – you’re so funny. – I’ve only felt one other woman’s breasts before. Can I? Marian? Does it bother you that you’re my experiment? There, I said it. – Oh. My. Jesus. Chrissssst, whispers Marian Carson.

273 – Mmm hmm, murmurs Bev. Edith flushes the toilet. Water swirls back into the toilet. She flushes it again. And again and again and again. She slaps her cubicle door open, and yanks open the main door. Don’t Forget to Wash Your Hands, proclaims the sign.

Leonardo hands Monty his wine. An old white man in a black suit strides by. Monty detaches himself from Olivia and trails after the man. Leonardo attempts to grab Olivia’s hand. She bats him away. – I’d like to say a few words, Monty says at the front of the room. He clears his throat. – I’d like to say a few words about this wondrous occasion, he repeats, opening his arms to the crowd. He brings a hand to his mouth. He coughs. He coughs so hard his whole body vibrates. The next cough makes him drop his wine glass, white wine kicks and sputters across the brown broadloom, a cough so hard it blurs into hack, into retch. He draws his hand away from his face, a handful of bloodied pudding pooled and spilling from his palm. The crowd freezes. Edith always assumed the Dean was made of concrete, was hard and cruel concrete, and would last forever like the Roman Colosseum. But now she sees he is nothing but a paper bag of rusty blood. They are all just paper bags of blood. Silly paper beings. A sparkling headache seizes her. She needs to faint. She cannot faint here, in front of these people who crash as a wave into the Dean.

Edith hobbles down the stairs, her hands on her knees, bright sparkling spots in her sightlines. Coffee. Caffeine is good for migraines. She flops against the wall, crawls down the hallways toward the faculty lounge, trips over limp philodendrons, paper recycling bins, confronts a white-washed plywood wall with an Authorised Personnel Only sign. She has wandered back to her old hallway, where she used to have an

274 office, her crappy little cubbyhole of C454, but at least it was her own crappy little C454 cubbyhole. She crawls towards Leonardo’s office, clutching doorframes as she goes, she will lie down on the floor of the office, she will rest. She will curl into fetal position and mourn her precious stolen Beulah. Then she will buy herself a cardboard cup of coffee. She nears Coral’s office, the office Coral shares with four other people. At first Edith does not know what she is seeing, then she believes she has only dreamed it, then she knows what she has seen but the connection between her eyes and her brain sputters. Coral in her office, with a man, the door slightly ajar, and Coral sitting on the top of her desk, her hands grasping the man’s face, her skinny legs angled around him, wrenching him to her as she greedily eats his mouth. As if she is starving in the soft faint light of the cellphone glowing on the desk. The spiky outline of the hair on the man, Edith knows those spikes. The man’s hands mauling Coral’s chest, bending Coral backwards as Coral pushes back, pushes at him violently with her hips. Edith freezes, blinks only once, afraid to stir. The light in Coral’s office makes strange shadows, but shadows don’t make muffled, keening sounds like Coral’s. Edith steers a U-turn, tiptoes quietly and quickly down the hall, her head thumping, stars popping, to the emergency exit, the stairs, and pulls open the heavy metal door. She presses her spine, the palms of her hands, the pointy back of her skull against the concrete wall, as the door sinks closed behind her. The harsh fluorescent light in the stairwell, the sharp grey edges of the stairs leading up to the next floor. She tries not to peer through the window in the door down the hall, the wire security netting embedded in the glass. So what if Coral is with a man in an office? It’s Coral’s office, it’s Melnyk’s office too. So what? Edith hugs herself with her long arms. It is late, she wants to go home but there’s nothing at home. She wants to stay in the stairwell. The

275 wall cools her forehead, the stars do not pop so painfully. No one ever bothers her in the stairwell.

Through the netting in the door’s window, she sees Melnyk saunter into the elevator lobby. Push the button for the elevator. His sculpted hair mussed, the skin around his mouth red, as though it’s been pinched. Edith can smell the hard synthetic fragrance of his cologne, but nothing else. He exhales once, and obviously decides to take the stairs. He heads towards her door. She dithers too long, not sure if she should head up the stairs or down or pretend to be entering the lobby. He opens the door. She stands, wobbles there stupidly. – Dr. Vane. – Oh. Hello. Melnyk. She wipes her nose on the back of her hand. An itch. She pinches and unpinches her nostrils. His forehead crinkles. – Are you all right? – Just a headache. – Botox, he says. – I’m telling you it’s magic. You’re here late. – Book party upstairs. – Oh yeah. Mary Ellen’s ‘do. Mary Ellen’s ‘do. It’s her ‘do too. So why is she down here peeping tomming into other people’s doorways? He gallops down a flight of stairs, his thighs flexing through his tight jeans. He stops. Calls her from the landing. – You got enough? You need some more? Your mother’s arthritis okay? – She’s got enough for about another month. – I’ll get you some more. Next week okay? He jogs down more steps, his footsteps echoing. – I thought you weren’t allowed to speak to me, she shouts down the stairs. Her head throbs with each syllable. – She is no longer in need of my services. Yeah, let’s just say that. – Oh, says Edith – Of course.

276 More echoes of footsteps. – Bye now, calls Melnyk up the stairwell. She leans over the stairwell, watching him spiral down and down the well. The final door snicks shut behind him. She stands alone in the grey.

She feeds coins into the coffee machine, the trickling of the fountain water behind her, the green rustling in the artificially moist breeze of the Jungle. The Jungle front door opens. Coral creeps into the room. She reaches the edge of a plant bed, drops on hands and knees and crawls into the plants, winding her away around trunks of palm trees, banana trees, under and over ferns. Edith rushes to the side of the plant bed. Coral has chosen the furthest, darkest corner. Coral pads in a circle on her hands, her knees, digging with her hands, forming a depression, then curls into the dirt. Her eyes glittering among the fronds.

277

Taxidermy

From: "Lisa Ives" Subject: Sad News Date: Monday, December 10, 8:52 am To: [email protected]

Sent on behalf of Dean Montrose van Dyck:

Dear Faculty and Staff, I am very sorry to have to announce that our esteemed fellow faculty member, Dr. Angus Fella, passed away last night after a sudden illness. I will keep you abreast of the developments regarding a memorial service as they become available. Flowers have been sent to his boarding house. Lisa Ives Dean’s Office Administrator [email protected]

Edith rocks back and forth in her chair, clutching herself, weeping. Then stopping, then weeping and rocking some more. She should have known. She spent the weeks oblivious to the danger when she should have known. Leonardo and Olivia kiss and purr in his swivel chair on the other side of the office, their loud smacking kisses, rustling clothes. Giggling. Giggling! She is completely alone. Melnyk tells her as he hands her the oversized plastic bottle marked Tangy Orange Flavour! Chewable Vitamin C that Angus was in his office on the weekend and suffered a heart attack, but still managed to dial 911. The paramedics tried to get to him but elevator #2 was broken, so they took elevator #1 and then elevator #1 stuck on the way up, and by the time they were free, Angus had passed away, writhing from cardiac arrest. – Angus didn’t have long anyway, Melnyk says. – What with his testicular cancer. Of course he had testicular cancer. Of course he did. She should have guessed.

278 – You okay? asks Melnyk. He taps Edith’s elbow. – It’s not like Angus was the healthiest guy. He drank like a sailor. Believed his Australian cookies qualified as a vegetable because they had coconut in them. Edith unscrews the Vitamin C bottle, sniffs. Tugs out the baggie to check the amount. Unfolds $500 from her wallet and hands it to Melnyk. She paws through her office desk drawers for a tissue because the box on her desk is empty. A fortune cookie fortune catches under her pinky fingernail. A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. The paper yellowed and smelling of . . . clay.

December 11th. She huffs up the stairs to the fifth floor. She should be getting in better shape with all the daily stair-walking, but every time she breathes her lungs fill with murk. The staircase is, frankly, starting to smell like wet dog. She tiptoes into the hallway on the left, hoping no one in the right hallway leading to the Dean’s warren of offices will see her; she doesn’t want to collide with the Dean and the silver-tipped cane he’s taken to hobbling around with and waving in faculty members’ faces. And his weight loss has been astonishing. She wants to break him over her knee. She sneaks past walls taped with fliers, glass cabinets filled with books, hates herself for cringing when she hears his voice soaring from one of the rooms. Passes by the old display case that seems to shift from floor to floor and which must have migrated up from the sub-basement when the pipes broke. A case populated by a taxidermied mallard duck and mate, a blue heron, a single loon, a cock-eyed gopher, and a jackrabbit, standing on its hind legs in the alert position. The rabbit so alarmingly large the tips of its ears would reach to her waist if she were to set it on the floor beside her. Fauna of Inivea announces the blotchy, oxidised plaque at the base. Her face is so close to the glass she clouds it with her breath. She abruptly turns away. The door to the BalanceWell office suite is still locked. But she can see inside. Sweeps of tarp, white-washed plywood, the floor covered in duct-taped cardboard. A Construction Personnel Only sign under a single

279 light bulb suspended from the ceiling. Ragged rolls of broadloom, plywood flooring. Only the ghost of the BalanceWell sign normally above the door – dusty outlines of the L and the W. How could Vivianne do this to her? To the right of the door, just beyond her line of sight, a hammer rat- a-tat-tats. Edith bangs the glass with the palm of her hand. The hammer stops. – Can I make an appointment with Vivianne? she calls. – She’s a psychologist. I don’t know her last name. She works here. No one’s answering the phones. She bangs her palm again, the glass hollow-sounding. The single light bulb blinks off.

280

Bacterial December 11th. 2:00 pm. She cries wildly into her cardboard cup of crummy coffee. Fella’s gone, now her therapist has absolutely and thoroughly disappeared, Coral’s turned into a badger, her book’s been stolen, the Clutterbucks murdered, her love life’s imploded, she can’t go to her regular coffee shop anymore, and Leonardo and Olivia are having make- up sex all over her office. And no one except Edith notices. And she’s officially run out of underwear and clean shirts. And she can’t ask to use Bev’s washing machine because. Because. Handwashing clothes in her bathtub reminds her too much of grading essays. Today she will buy a washing machine. She has no time to slog dirty clothes to and from laundromats, and her last water bill crashed through the roof and shot into the stratosphere. She had to hold her heart when she read her water bill. She imagines it’s because she’s been washing her clothes four times each time, just to get the powdered soap out. She’ll buy the first washing machine she sees, get in, get out. She navigates the broken escalator stairs at Bull Head Shopping Centre. The stairs’ sharp metal teeth bite into her shin when she misses a step. Dishwashers, refrigerators, microwaves, stoves, clothes dryers. Washing machines. She wraps her arms around herself as she beholds the vast sea of metal boxes. She was going to buy the first one, but at least two hundred of them stretch out around the giant room. Does she want white or stainless steel? Front or top-loader? Energy efficient for more money or energy horrific for less money? What is her price range? She doesn’t know, she hasn’t looked at her credit card bill or her student loan balance in months. She doesn’t want to talk to a salesman because he’ll try to upsell her. Talk her into a new dryer and refrigerator too. Does she need a new refrigerator? Maybe she does. She’ll say no to any salesman who comes near her.

281 She needs to talk to a salesman. No she doesn’t. A salesman with Arnie stamped on his nametag sidles up to her and asks her if he can help her. She grits her teeth, ready to say no. Arnie. Arnold Nash? – Edith, he says, – lovely to see you. Dr. Arnold Nash specialised in Shakespearean tragedy. He used to eat kippers out of the tin with his fingers at AJX faculty meetings, and actually sounded reasonable sometimes. He always smiled. When he was angry or someone was being ridiculous he smiled even harder. Then one day he wrote a letter of resignation. Edith thought she would never see him again. Arnold explains to her the difference between agitators and washing drums, Quiet-by-Design technologies, vibration reduction technology, AutoBalance suspension systems. – All I want, Arnold, she says, – is for the patterns to stay put. Not change from florals to giant bacterial entities. Something like that. He pulls a Kleenex from his shirt pocket and wipes his glasses. – I would recommend then, he says, – the SenseClean technology on this model. He leads her to a hulking cube of stainless steel.

They both disregard that he once worked at the university, that she sometimes waited in line behind him as he Xeroxed books and forms or in line to ladle pineapple and ginger ale fruit punch from the bowl at the faculty, December winter party; that once upon a time he was referred to as Dr. Nash rather than simply Arnie as printed on his red plastic nametag. She’s never met someone who voluntarily left the profession. She wonders if he is happy, if he misses the money, the social status. She is slightly embarrassed for both of them even though he opens and closes washing machine doors as if it’s no big deal, showing her digital displays and the energy efficiency symbol. Her old washing machine had begun washing so hard the bras splintered into wire and polyester wrecks, the arms started

282 tearing off blouses, she wants to tell him. Her colleagues are dying. She is seeing letters of the alphabet in the clothes. Once the powder crusted into an E, nestled in the crotch of her flannel pyjamas. Another time a K. – Arn! says another salesman. – Arn! – Yes, Darren, says Arnold, smiling hard, his thick moustache bristling. – Don’t forget about those invoices. Darren marches by, pointing at Arnold, – I told you about them yesterday and they’re still not done. – I’ll do them after I’m done with this customer. – Boss is pissed at you, dude. – Thanks, Darren. After twenty-five more minutes she settles on the K25-200 front loader by Novacrest. – Novacrest does washing machines too? she asks. – Novacrest does everything, says Arnold, handing her her receipt. – Pleasure doing business, he says, pulling his business card out of his breast pocket and handing it to her. – Delivery will be on Saturday between 12-4 pm. Let me know if you need any more household appliances. She accepts the tiny slip of cardboard. Holds it up to her nose. Dr. Arnold Nash. Arnie. – Everything good at the Uni? he asks. – No, she says, folding the receipt into her purse. – It’s a horror show. – So nothing’s changed then, he says. She swan dives down the broken escalator to the main floor and the main floor’s perfume and cologne gush. Buys a diamond ring. Picks the first one she sees. For Bev. Edith is going to propose. Properly this time. Her credit card creaks and collapses.

283

Frown The last week of classes. An electrical fire breaks out in the sub- basement of Crawley Hall – only a small fire, quickly extinguished – but it smokes up the entire building. The scorched plastic smell trickles up through the vents all the way to her fourth floor office where Edith tries to ignore Leonardo and Olivia’s bickering over conceptual versus lyric poetry, the smell thick and man-made. Edith and everyone else in the building trickle down the grey stairs, a growing river of people as the alarm blares, and the closer they near the main floor. Their voices an echoing, bouncing cacophony. Their eyes rolling, their bodies so soft, suddenly so aimless, so naked in the blaring, possibly incinerating building. They stand in a clump just outside Crawley Hall’s side doors. Leonardo storms out the doors in his yellow neon cycling jacket and stalks away in the direction of Mykytyshyn Hall, probably because that’s where the Student’s Union pub is. Olivia strolls over to the smokers, bums a cigarette and lights up. The smokers lean against the sinkhole fence, they glance casually at the orange tarp cobwebbed over parts of the sinkhole. Inside a ring of bright orange pylons, Mary Ellen regales graduate students with stories of her time in the Antarctic. Edith huddles next to a concrete planter filled with dirt and studded with cigarette butts. The Dean rests feebly on another concrete planter, huddled inside a big black overcoat, his knobbly hands clutching his walking stick. He coughs into his hanky. Lisa Ives takes the hanky, hands him a clean one. After the fire department allows the teachers and staff back into the building, Edith sits in her office and keeps her appointments with her first year, Canadian Literature Before 1950 students in spite of the smell. Holding her nose between appointments. The smell so acrid it should have a colour, it should emit a sound. Because her students have the class final exam coming up, and it’s important that they know how to properly write an essay when they’ve completed her class, and now is their very last chance. She refuses to leave until she meets with every single one of them and helps each of them establish a thesis statement, an outline for their essays.

284 Edith breathes in the fumes of the burning plastic as she sits in her office with its brutally sealed window, waiting for the students who come and sit in the straight-backed chair across from her, some of them fidgeting with their binders or pens. When they come she uses open body language the way she learned in that mandatory teaching workshop years ago so she looks like she cares – eye contact, her body facing fully towards them, arms and legs uncrossed – and hops her fingers across the desk to them sometimes. She tries not to clench her teeth too hard as they list the excuses for why they haven’t drawn up their draft thesis statements yet: because they’re working on law school applications, because of wisdom teeth extraction, depression, the flu, sisters’ weddings, dead grandparents, grandparents’ wedding anniversaries. After the seventeeth student, an older woman with boots that drizzle dirty, melting snow all over the floor, the water trickling in meandering streams toward the window, Edith feels a little dizzy, the smell a wall of scorched chemicals winding up from the heat vent, like someone is reaching his fingers up her nose and clawing out the inside of her head. During a little break between student appointments she writes out carefully with thick black pen then scotch-tapes a sign on her door Back in 5 minutes and runs to the bathroom. She pushes open the door, and hears a swish of clothing, hears someone weeping in one of the cubicles. Edith retches, heaves air into the sink, the stench finally unbearable. Saliva dribbles onto the porcelain. She splashes her mouth with lukewarm water. Dabs her eyes. The burning smell lacquered inside her nose. She runs back out the door. Coral has nested in the lunchroom. Edith rinses out her coffee cup, – Hello Coral, she says. Coral ignores Edith, sits glowering at the screen on her laptop. Edith dries out her cup with a paper towel. Coral doesn’t even look at the screen, just at the keyboard. Coral’s thinner than ever, her cheek bones, the hollows around her eyes making her face veer towards extraterrestrial. Alice Z., Alice Q., and all the other Administrative Assistants and Office Managers closed up the front office and went home.

285 Her last student meeting is with Joffrey, who doesn’t show up of course. She places an x beside his name on the roster: Joffrey John Bain. She photocopies the pages of a book she just retrieved from the library, pages 26-27, pages 28-29, pages 30-31, pages 34-35, the bar of light in the machine sliding left then right, pages 36-37, pages 38-39, pages 40-41, the light a green as bright as an eclipse. The new dusty smell of the paper sheets sliding about in the photocopy machine, pages 42-43, pages 44-45, pages 46-47. Pages 48-49. There. She’s done. She folds the book closed, a job well done. The machine light has left a black bar hovering in front of her eyes, wherever she looks, she shouldn’t have watched the bar over and over again as it brightly slid back and forth, but she couldn’t help it, such hot, embracing light almost sunshiny. She notices that she’s accidentally cut off the left side of the last three pages, and she missed pages 32-33 entirely, distracted by the burning smell she supposes, her eyes begin to water. Tonight she will try to mark at least ten exams over a late dinner. Make herself a home-made pizza with dough from the Italian grocery store, and chop up a head of lettuce, some hard and tasteless winter tomatoes for a salad. Maybe an ice cream cone from the 7-Eleven. Or a piece of cake from The Kaffee Klatsch if Bev is working. Maybe tonight she’ll propose to Bev. Show Bev what she’s missing. Neither of them have texted each other since the night of the . . . betrayal. She photocopies the rogue pages: pages 32-33, the light slides left then right, pages 44-45, pages 46-47. Pages 48-49 again. Left, then right. The sleeve of her blouse glows in the green light. The tiny stitching on the cuff. A safe, solid blue. She flips through the papers, the stitches on her cuff at the edge of many of the papers, once or twice the bottom of the heel of her hand. One where her watch face is showing. But she isn’t wearing a watch. She studies the Xerox of her wrist. It’s a Cheshire Cat watch on a thick, scaly, man’s wrist, the cat’s paws at 10 and at 2. Angus Fella’s watch on Angus Fella’s wrist at the edge of her photocopy. Her scalp prickles. Her eyelid spasms.

286 Angus? She flips through more of the sheets, her stitched cuff, her bony wrist bone. Her breath stops. The Cheshire Cat watch again, this time the watch paws wilting, the smile distorted into a frown. She jerks the paper away from her. Dumps all her papers on the floor.

Not until she’s turned away from the machine, the warm papers scattered on the floor, does she scream. A bearded man stands in the doorway. Her heart stops, her heart strangles as it misses too many beats, her skin springs out in a drenching sweat. – I’m sorry? says the man. Not an older, bearded man. Godammit! Only18-year-old annoying Joffrey in a Hello Kitty t-shirt, the pimples peppered along his left temple. His eyes such a light blue they nearly fade into his face. How long was he watching her photocopy her book? Why doesn’t he care that she just screamed? Gallantry is truly dead. – You missed our thesis statement meeting, she says. – Dr. Pullet left for a bathroom break during our class, and she never came back, he says. – We don’t know where she is. She stomps over her spilled papers, and returns with him to the classroom and the empty front of the room. Calls security, checks the lounge with its dead coffee machine and trailing cloth plants. Joffrey follows her, tweeting like a baby bird, offering suggestions of where Dr. Pullet could be. She keeps open body language to his suggestions, to his dry lips, his faded eyes, his t-shirt decorated with a bloody cartoon cat. Coral gone missing. She knocks on the door to Coral’s office, striking her knuckles among the curling office hour notices and cartoons. The glass above the office door shows nighttime but she knocks on the door anyway. She knocks again knowing Coral won’t answer. She knows exactly where Coral has stowed herself, but she cannot expose Coral to strangers. They march up and down stairs. Joffrey doesn’t ask her why they aren’t taking the elevator.

287 She marches down the hallway, away. She instructs Joffrey’s class to go home. That an office administrator will contact them about a make-up class. She enters the Jungle. – Coral? she asks the room, the trickling fountain. She circles, parting bushes, peering behind trees. She steps into the ferns, looks for Coral’s hole. – Oh hi, Edith, says Coral from her hole. Coral’s eyes are puffy, her face streaked with dirt. – Coral, says Edith, placing her hand on the trunk of a tree, – your students were wondering where you went during the bathroom break in your class tonight. I sent them home. – This is not a good place, says Coral. – What do you mean? asks Edith. – Do you mean this building’s haunted? I believe you, Coral. But you said it’s over. What’s over? She wants to hear the truth ring from someone else’s mouth. She crouches down. – They’re all lying to us, Coral whispers. – Who? whispers Edith. – You know who was in the car with me when I drove into the hole? You know who died? I feel safe telling you because you don’t belong here either. – Who? – Our therapist. – Our therapist? – The programmer for the BalanceWell phone therapy bot program. – Coral, can I call someone for you? Or do you want to get your coat from your office and we can drive for a visit to the hospital? Just to check you over and make sure you’re okay. – Edith, I am the architect of my life. I’ve finally figured out where I’d like to put my furniture, Edith. Edith kneels into the dirt. Smooths Coral’s hair away from her sad, lovely face.

288

In the stairwell, Edith dials Vivianne’s phone number, for what she knows will be the very last time. Vivianne’s voicemail clicks in, Vivianne so self-assured, so present. More present than any flesh and blood human being Edith has ever known. She hangs up. She feels a crunch under her heel. She turns up the sole of her shoe. A rabbit dropping. A hare dropping. She continues up the stairs, counting the seven steps of each flight before the loop around to the next flight of steps. She looks up from her feet to the top of the stairs. She stops. At the top of the third floor stairs a hare, hunched down, its ears plastered to its back. Her eyelid clicks. The hare is brown, the one bulging eye facing her is yellow in its outline of pale fur. The hare’s ears slowly lift. Her chest tight, she can’t remember how to breathe, her eyelid battering so hard she can barely see. She holds the bannister with both hands to keep herself upright, she wonders if a hare in its trapped wildness could ever be dangerous to a female human. Rabbit, she wants to call, Brother rabbit! Abruptly the hare pops up its hind legs, its white rump a signal, and bounds up the stairs away from her. But the hare is brown. It’s the third week of December. All the hares outside, congregating in the snow of the parking lot, on the stretches of dead grass during this abnormally warm winter, the rectangular quads between buildings, are white. Where was the hare going? There’s no time to care.

289

Missing

From: "Lisa Ives" Subject: Missing Persons Alert Date: Fri., Dec. 14, 12:09 pm To: [email protected]

Sent on behalf of Dean Montrose van Dyck:

Dear Faculty and Staff, I am very sorry to have to announce that English Department faculty member, Dr. Coral Pullet’s whereabouts are currently unknown. Any faculty or staff who may have had recent contact with Dr. Pullet are required to speak immediately with the police about information they might have. Thank you for your cooperation. Lisa Ives Dean’s Office Administrator [email protected]

From: "Lisa Ives" Subject: [transition-l] Sad news Date: Fri., Dec. 15, 12:07 pm To: [email protected]

Sent on behalf of Dean Montrose van Dyck:

Dear Faculty and Staff, I am very sorry to have to pass on the sad news that Dr. Leroy Byrd passed away suddenly after a piece of Crawley Hall’s facade fell on him. Plans for the memorial service will be emailed in the coming days. Lisa Ives Dean’s Office Administrator [email protected]

290

Angus and Leroy Edith can’t help but notice that plastic wine goblets are being filled at the bar at this reception when glass wine goblets were used to serve the wine at the memorial for the Clutterbucks. The Dean must be really sick if they’re drinking from plastic cups. If anyone deserves glass, Angus does. His sister Bronwyn flew all the way from Adelaide to be here. The University should let her toast his memory with wine in a glass. And the Clutterbucks got shrimp skewers and salmon pinwheels! Angus and Leroy only get canned salsa and chips, and dried out carrot and celery sticks. The Dean moves slowly with his walker to the podium. He stops behind the podium. Edith sobs loudly, dramatically, during the speeches, her Kleenex dampened all the way through, so soggy after the first speech she has to blow her nose into a handful of napkins. She barely knew Leroy. It’s Angus and Coral she’s crying for, Coral hasn’t been showing herself in the Jungle for days and days. Angus and Coral knew all along what was happening and they were punished. Because they tried to do their real jobs as teachers and teach Edith.

291

December 20th The giant pimple on the building’s face has fallen and killed Leroy Byrd. The Clutterbucks were asphyxiated. Angus Fella died of a heart attack. Word has it the Dean has nested in the hospital until January at least because of a mysterious, debilitating respiratory condition. And Coral has disappeared. Edith hunts through the Jungle, pushing aside branches and leaves, partially climbing trees to find Coral. They’re lying to us, Coral had said. Edith’s dismissed her very last class for the semester. All that’s left is grading final exams, and late end-of-term papers. Edith goes in to Crawley Hall every day anyway. She hunts through photocopies for more sightings of Angus’s watch but finds nothing, ashamed that she was so frightened when he might have been trying to tell her something important. Someone, probably Alice Q., cleaned up all the papers she dumped on the photocopy room floor, and now Edith wishes she’d kept those papers. Maybe she would have found some answers. This afternoon, December 20th, Edith drops a pen to the floor in her office and it rolls and rolls until it collides into the filing cabinet. She’s dropped pens before, millions of pens, and they haven’t rolled like this before. She drops the same pen in the mailroom and has to fish it out from where it’s rolled under the photocopy machine. She sets the pen on the floor in the staircase and has to chase it as it rolls and bounds down the steps. Crawley Hall is sick and rotting. Crawley Hall has a growing tilt. Almost everyone except her and the administrative, cleaning and cafeteria staff has gone home for the Christmas, Chanukah, Solstice and Kwanzaa holidays. Angus spoke of a crack in the men’s washroom. She will find that crack. But first she needs a scone. She buys the scone in the basement cafeteria, bites into the scone, and travels the basement floor plan until she hits the men’s washroom. She’s never entered this wing of Crawley Hall before. Not in the whole seven years she’s worked here.

292 She opens the door. A normal washroom except for a startled art student in paint-splattered clothes at the urinal exclaiming, Whuzzawhit! while trying to keep his back to her and whizzing penis out of her sight. Wrong washroom. All the urinals hanging in a proper row on the wall. She travels to the other side of the building through the labyrinth, dabbing her lips with napkin to blot away icing, and chomping into the scone. She will need sustenance. She pops the last of the scone into her mouth. Brushes her hands off on her skirt. – Angus! she calls down the hallway. – I’m not scared! Please show yourself! I need to talk to you! This men’s washroom has an Out of Order sign taped to the door. She pushes in. Doors on two of the cubicles wilt off their hinges. A urinal lies, cracked, on the floor, a yellow tape strung around it, tiles on the floor fractured. A crack originating from the outline of where the urinal used to hang on the wall. She steps over the yellow tape, touches the crack’s beginning with her finger. Her finger following the crack, she strolls out of the men’s toilets into the corridor, following the crack, tripping her finger over rows of student lockers in dark hallways she’s never seen. A bulletin board peeling with audition notices means she’s near the School of Drama and Philosophy rehearsal spaces, now Music, now Dance. The crack widens, she can poke her fingertip in, and she saunters past Greek and Roman Studies, Religion, Comparative Literature, Finnish Studies, Slavic Languages. Philosophy of Medicine, Pure Mathematics. Now unidentified hallways with three-legged or backless chairs piled on top of one another, wooden boxes, the crack as wide as three fingers in some parts. In a section where a chunk of wall has fallen out, someone has stood up a troll doll with fiery plasticised hair. A section of crack so wide she could stick her head in if she wanted. Not even a crack anymore so much as a fissure. Another section so wide it’s become a ledge. Her eyelid clicks. A flash of white bounds somewhere in the dark inside the crack. She peers into the dark, grasps the ledge with her fingers. She touches on the flashlight on her phone. Shines it inside the fissure.

293 Nothing. Just crumbling, oddly bulbous rock. Just like the outcropping that grew on the outside of the building. She turns off her flashlight. Peers again into the fissure. Not white, but light. A sliver of sunlight. She must be looking into the sinkhole. She picks a bit of scone out from between her molars with her tongue. Her phone chirps. The traitor Bev. Edith walked past the coffee shop entrance last night and who was there? Marian Carson. Drinking a glass of red wine and reading a book at Edith’s table, the one where she would sometimes sit and grade papers or prep for classes while Bev worked her shifts. Edith stands on her toes so she can see further into the fissure. To her right, a brown hare squeezes out from the fissure, drops to the floor, hops to the door. The hare butts the door open with its head, hops into the stairwell. Edith hesitates at the doorway, then follows, her heels clicking. The brown hare steadily lopes down the stairs, the white on the back of its ears, the brilliant white on its upright tail and rump as its long bony ankles angle up then descend away from her. She slowly follows the hare down stairs she didn’t know existed. Edith thought she was already in the basement. Crawley Hall has more basement? She passes a door marked Sub-Basement. Tries the doorknob, but it’s locked. She continues clicking down more steps. She switches on the light in her phone when the fluorescent lights in the ceiling stop which she’s sure is against some kind of building code. She trips more than once on the stairs’ chipped concrete edges. The hare’s white rump glowing. It halts, looks over its shoulder at her briefly, the eyes silver, hops downward again. More eyes in the dark glint silver, but dull, tin foil silver, at her. Rows and rows of silver jackrabbit eyes lining the walls survey her as she descends the staircase. Murky darkness except for her flashlight, the fluorescent lights in the upper floors of the stairwell only a dull, distant

294 glow. She descends, step after step. She didn’t know the building ran so deep. Murmuring. From down below. She pauses. – Hello? Edith calls. In the dark, the murmuring abruptly stops. She hopes it might be Coral. Dreads it might be Coral. – I need to talk to you, a voice says, the sound right next to her ear. She falls backwards up the stairs, stumbling, but afraid to turn her back to the pit. The phone trembles in her hand. She continues backing up, her breathing jagged, she does not recognise the voice. The rabbits motionless, like they are silver-eyed toys. Puppets awaiting animation. – Don’t you walk away when I’m talking to you! screams the voice. Edith turns, leaping two stairs at a time, slipping and stumbling, she clicks and clacks in her idiotic shoes. – You come back here! She clambers the stairs three at a time, drops on all fours, phone shoved into her pocket as she uses her hands, her feet, and gallops up the stairs to the first open door she can find, bursts out of the stairwell. Out.

295

December 21st

From: "Lisa Ives" Subject: Interim Deans Date: Sat., Dec. 21, 12:09 pm To: [email protected]

Sent on behalf of Associate Dean Marian Carson:

Dear Faculty and Staff, This is to let you know that Dean van Dyck has decided to step down from his role as Dean of Liberal Arts in order to dedicate his time and energy to his health and wellness. In his place Associate Dean Carson will serve as interim Dean for the next three months. She will then go on to take the well-deserved research leave owed her. Because of her extensive experience with university upper administration, Dr. Mary Ellen Toogood has agreed to take over as Dean after Dr. Carson completes her interim Deanship until a search for a permanent Dean can take place – most likely in two years. Dr. Toogood will resume her duties as the Mykytyshyn Endowed Chair when a permanent Dean has been installed. Thank you to both Marian Carson and Mary Ellen Toogood for volunteering their administrative experience in this tumultuous time, and Greta Mykytyshyn and the Mykytyshyn Foundation for their patience and understanding. May you all have pleasant and productive holidays. Lisa Ives Dean’s Office Administrator [email protected]

296 Service For two nights, since the news of the Dean’s stepping down, she has slept in her office on a yoga mat because she doesn’t want to go home. She’s swum each morning in the big pool, eaten a scone from the basement cafeteria for breakfast, then other meals she buys and eats at the food court. She could do this forever while she waits for Angus and Coral to appear. She patrols the hallways, peeks her head into classrooms, open office doors, tries the sub-basement door again but it remains locked. The campus will close down for the holidays. And the food court and the little basement cafeteria in Crawley Hall will close soon too. She needs to find Angus and Coral. She hunts in the Jungle. She photocopies hundreds of pages, looking for traces of him along the edges, but nothing. Alice Q. tells her to turn out the lights and lock the photocopy room door behind her when she leaves. – Have a good holiday, says Alice Q., slinging her bag over her shoulder. The nicest thing she’s ever said to Edith ever. Wing Lau tells her about how in order to relax some people do things outside of work. Like go to movies, or plays, or wrestling matches. – Some people, he says. – Doesn’t have to be anyone in particular. She has not travelled down that awful basement-below-the-basement staircase again, but she plods up and down the stairs, first in one staircase, then in the other on the other side of the building, trying doors, entering lobbies, bumping into people who look at her curiously, smile nervously. She does not smile back. Sunday, Dec. 23, her last day. Her last chance before the holidays. She tries the doorknob to the sub-basement door one more time, the last door on the last level where the stairs are still normal, where the steps are still sharp and well-maintained. The door bounces open. Success. She opens the door into the sterile fluorescent light of a room she has never seen before, her lungs scratchy and tight with fear. Grey concrete floors and walls, silver pipes maze the ceilings. Rows of parked, empty cleaning trolleys line the walls; metal shelf after metal shelf filled with sturdy plastic bottles of chemical cleaners, rolls of paper towel and toilet paper wrapped in plastic. Cleaners in their blue smocks sit around tables, sit on benches and lean against the walls.

297 A woman in a blue smock appears at her elbow. – You’re on the wrong floor, says the woman. – I must have pushed the wrong button in the elevator. The woman frowns. – I’m looking for Wing Lau, lies Edith. – You came down the stairs, not out of the elevator. Wing Lau is in a different department. – I was looking for my friends. An old man with a beard and a hat? A skinny red-haired woman? – No people like that down here. – No, said Edith – Of course not. – Of course not. The woman cocks her head to the right, – Elevator’s over there, she says. – I don’t ride elevators. I’m afraid of elevators, says Edith, turning to go back up the stairs. – The elevator’s over there. The woman punches the elevator button, and stands with her arms crossed, waiting for Edith. Rabbit turds and dust cluster along the baseboard. Clumps of rabbit hair. – Over here, says the woman. Edith stands next to the woman, and when the door slides open to the elevator’s silvered and faux-wood interior, she hesitates, then steps forward. The door clangs closed behind her. She stands with her back to the silver doors, she does not want to see the reflections in the silver doors, she does not want to see the greasy faces, the hands, caught inside the doors. The elevator lurches upwards, and she grasps the handrails in the corner, jams her forehead into the hard corner. The elevator whines as it rises. Her eyes widen, her blood falls to her feet. A bang on the ceiling as the elevator moves, another bang. The banging of fists, like hail, like someone trying to get in. – I need to talk to you! wails that voice in the elevator shaft above her. – I didn’t do anything wrong! She vomits, her abdomen squeezing and expelling her fear.

298 She is so embarrassed, her hunched in the corner, her back to the door, her crouched over her own steaming mess, her own bald fear. The tiny room jerks to a stop. The doors slide open behind her. She falls onto her bum, onto her own vomit, rights herself, skitters backwards like a crab out the elevator door, the vomit steaming and drooling in the corner of the elevator. She’s accidentally kicked off one of her Hangaku shoes. The door closes. She collapses onto her back, spread-eagled, the cool of the peeled floor beneath her, layered with asbestos tiles, her fingers dabbling in grit, the dusty leaves of an ancient and twisted philodendron poised over her right shoulder. She hobbles a little way, then takes off the other shoe and walks in her stockinged feet. She is on the fourth floor, and no one’s home. She slides across the floor as she tries to reach her office. The floor feels like it’s on such a tilt she has to brace herself against the wall to stay properly upright. She should have left with everyone else. But she was too stubborn, and now the building has trapped her. She will retrieve her purse and her car keys and go home. She slides her key into the lock. The office door falls open and bangs against the wall. Freezing, fresh air gushes from her office. The furniture has slid to the windowed side of the room, and a bookshelf has obviously crashed through the window. It leans out the window frame. The window frame gapes, an open, jagged square. A sharp wind hits her where she stands, still in the doorway. She turtles toward the window, clutches the window frame, and looks down three floors into the sinkhole. Hundreds of white jackrabbits. Thousands. Nibbling grass, dozing, boxing, their white blob selves peppering the sinkhole, climbing in and out of the hole, meandering the quad, nibbling in the brown, dead grass, snow- dotted expanse. Edith draws back from the window, the shock of fresh, brittle air pulling out a stuttering cough from her chest. Her phone tings. A UofI Emergency bulletin:

299 Irreparable structural damage has forced a complete evacuation of Crawley Hall. Students and staff will be notified of new classroom locations by January 2nd of the New Year.

Edith wipes her mouth with her fingers. She fishes out her purse, her coat, her laptop under the mess of desks, books, chairs. She throws her purse strap over her shoulder. No classes will be held in this building anymore. A new year in January. A different building. She will start again. Start properly this time. Write a book with only her name on it. If she can get out of here. She’s not sure how to get out of the building. She doesn’t want to hear that voice that lives in the elevator shaft, in the staircase ever again, its entitled rage. She bursts into tears. She palms away her tears. She’s supposed to be at her parents’ house in Red Deer for Christmas Eve dinner tomorrow. Christmas day she’s got a flight to Minneapolis for the PULE conference where she’s supposed to deliver a paper on the 26th. She was going to fix her paper on the airplane on the way there. Somewhere in there she will begin writing a new book. A sharp pain in her foot. She looks down. A brown jackrabbit has nipped her heel. Now it leaps onto her foot and wraps itself around her ankle. She screams, kicks away the rabbit and slams closed the door. Could she jump out the window? Crawl down the side of the building? The ledges too narrow, too 1960s Brutalist modernist mash-up. She clenches her jaw. Licks her lips. A handful of dust showers her head. She pulls away a dust chunk lodged in her eyelash. Not dust. A maggot. She dashes for the door, throws it open. Masses of brown jackrabbits, frozen alert and tall, watching her. She leaps through the door, not looking back at the whump of ceiling that collapses into Leonardo’s office.

300 She sprints in her stocking feet down the hallway, right then left, then left again, slipping, the rabbits parting in front of her, leaping away, until she reaches the stairway door. The door lolling open, wanting to swallow her. She plunges through the doorway and leaps down the stairs, no sound but her own terrified breaths, then a gradual crumbling, clattering, chattering she refuses to hear, she won’t, Crawley Hall howling as she runs down flight after flight of stairs, her feet used to the edges, the worn depressions now, her hand on the bannister sure. Maybe Crawley Hall’s tongue is chasing her down the stairs, maybe not. Maybe Coral and Angus, devoured by Crawley Hall are chasing her too, but it doesn’t matter. She plunges down the last flight of steps, yanks open the door into the main lobby, and does not stop running, not even when she is outside on the cement, leaping over dead grass, iced snow banks stippled with sharp gravel. She collides into the door on the driver’s side of her car. Jumps in, jabs in the key, and presses down the accelerator, the wheels spinning on the ice before the car launches away.

At home she runs a bath, the water steaming, condensation clinging to the bathroom’s slick tile, porcelain and glass surfaces. She finally warms up her freezing, filthy, bleeding feet. She dumps her dirty clothes into her brand new washing machine. Throws her stockings in the garbage. She pours herself a glass of wine. She packs her suitcase for the conference. Her suit. Her old loafers. A plain blouse. She prints out the conference program. Props her packed suitcase by the door. The washing machine dings. She stuffs the wet, clean clothes into the drier and presses Start. 6:09 pm. She could work on something productive instead of sitting here. She could start writing her new book. Yes. This tiny break between semesters is the time she’s supposed to use for her own research. She gathers her library books, photocopied business and health articles, Beulah Crump-Withers’ journal in a horseshoe shape around her computer.

301 The computer asks, Open New Document? She clicks Yes. The white, electronic page unfolds. Waits.

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