The Girl in the Wall Read online

  “That’s not going to happen,” she said.

  “Maybe it will.”

  “Probably it won’t.”

  “Maybe the school nurse,” he added in vain. He felt like Mr. Cantwell.

  “I don’t like the school nurse.”

  George lay back on last year’s damp brown grass and he looked up at the sky. It wasn’t as blue as it had been earlier. The wind had picked up and it came at them from the northwest. The rain and cold were coming back, maybe even snow. You never knew at this time of year.

  “I know you don’t,” he said.

  “She’s rough and she smells like medicine.”

  “Rough how?” he asked.

  She sat down beside him.

  “Just rough,” she said. “Her hands feel like bark and I don’t think she likes kids very much.”

  They were the only moving objects in the whole of the flood bowl besides the old leaves from last fall that skittered across the baseball diamonds.

  “It’s just,” George said, giving it another go, “when it comes to private parts of the body, anybody’s body, people don’t really want to hear about it. Other than to tell you not to say it out loud, I can’t talk to you about this, Mor. I just can’t.”

  “It’s okay, Georgie.”

  She sighed, the deepest sigh George had ever heard.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t talk about it anymore.”

  Morven didn’t quite get the whys of the situation, but she got the part about what she wasn’t supposed to do. She knew from the way George was talking that this was way more important than not staring.

  “Let’s go to the Spanish Court and get a Popsicle,” George said, standing up. “And then go home and play Clue.”

  “I’m getting lime,” said Morven as they walked slowly toward the decrepit little store where they bought their candy. “I’m getting a lime Popsicle and a piece of Double Bubble to finish off with.”

  “Do you have six cents?” George asked.

  “Yes, I do,” she said.

  They were quiet for the rest of the way and George worried that she was thinking terrible thoughts about her body. He wouldn’t be able to help her with this.

  “One of these days I’m going to buy a package of Juicy Fruit gum,” she said. “It’s my favourite next to Double Bubble. They’re so different from each other it seems silly even to compare the two. Juicy Fruit’s a good gum, isn’t it, Georgie?”

  She stopped in her tracks to ask the question.

  “Yup.” He nudged her along to keep her walking. “It’s one of the best.”

  PART II

  1965

  10

  In 1965, in the summer of the year that she turned sixteen, two things of note happened to Morven Rankin. The first one was that George bought her a Kodak camera and showed her how to use it; it wasn’t difficult.

  Her stares became slightly more acceptable if she carried a camera.

  George taught her to ask people politely if she could take pictures of them. If they said no, she was to accept it and discontinue staring at them. If they said yes, she could click away till she or her subject had enough. More often than not it was the subject.

  Even for George, it worked out well. He and his sister were fixtures in the neighbourhood and had been for years. People scratched their heads over the girl and admired the boy for watching over her. Now that she had something of her own besides George, it freed him up a little.

  It was too late for Lila Strathmore. She hadn’t had the patience for a boy who couldn’t devote himself entirely to her. And it had been too soon back then to leave his sister to her own devices for more than short spurts. But now George was beginning a life for himself, separate from her. He had a girlfriend named Dina. Morven had watched them kiss. He also had some male friends that he horsed around with. He didn’t abandon his sister, not even close, but he increased the time he spent away from her and he encouraged her to venture out on her own.

  She carried her camera everywhere, took a vast number of pictures and spent all of her sizeable allowance getting them developed. Her father coughed up the money with no argument. This new interest of hers was the best thing that had happened to any of them since she was born.

  The photographs were mostly of people, with and without their permission. Oh, now and then she captured a rabbit or a dog caught very still and she practised on her own cat, Pookie, trying to catch him at the right time so there wouldn’t be a blur, but it was the human faces that interested her — their expressions: smiles, frowns, wrinkled foreheads, compressed lips, pouts, blank stares (like her own, she supposed) wide-open eyes, eyes like slits, all manner of countenances for her to figure out as best she could.

  A druggist named Ross at Wades’ Pharmacy sent her films away somewhere and magically they returned as pictures. She waited till she got home before opening up the packages and then she laid the photographs out on the dining-room table where she studied them. George said she had a knack, an eye, but she wasn’t looking for the quality of the photography. It was the workings behind the people’s faces that she was after. What went on in there that created particular expressions? If she could just get to the bottom of that, something — she didn’t know what exactly — but surely something would be solved.

  The second thing that happened to Morven that summer was a direct result of the first. Her dad gave up on the idea that doctors were of any use to them and he stopped organizing appointments. He announced to her and George that she seemed fine to him now and he didn’t see the point in keeping it up.

  Morven was glad and she knew that his decision was connected to her camera.

  Doctors had told her over the years that she had trouble expressing emotions, maybe even feeling them in the first place, and she felt as though they didn’t believe her when she said that she did feel things. She felt good, bad, and medium: bad when the other kids made fun of her; good when she saw her brother at the end of her school day; bad when Miss Horning and other teachers yelled at her. Actually, hate, but she wasn’t supposed to feel that; George had told her so.

  She didn’t have a name for her biggest feeling, the one connected to her mother and her dad. It wasn’t good, that’s for sure. And it was worse than bad. But its not having a name didn’t mean it wasn’t there; it was there all right, inside of her. And she felt it.

  During the in-between times she felt medium.

  Her sense was that the doctors didn’t know what to do with her, how to explain her staring and her unemotive behaviour, as one of them called it. She couldn’t even find that word in the dictionary, figured he made it up. So they followed a script, like her teachers did at school when they referred to their notes and couldn’t think up anything new to say without them. The doctors looked up “people who were born dead” in their medical textbooks and spouted what was printed there in point form. Then they went home and ate supper and watched television.

  When she mentioned this theory to George, he said it was more likely that they looked up “babies who were born with a lack of oxygen to the brain” but he didn’t deny that it might well be where they got their ideas about her “having trouble feeling and expressing emotions.”

  “They don’t know me; they don’t know anything about me,” she said.

  “No,” said George.

  “What was I supposed to do to convince them that I have feelings?” she said. “Punch one of them in the nose? I know better than to hit people; I’ve got some manners. Is that the same as not being able to express emotions?”

  George chuckled. It was an uncertain sort of chuckle.

  “And, anyway, what good would it do even if I could convince them? What would be the reward, the prize?”

  “I doubt there is one,” said George.

  “You know what, Georgie? I’m glad to be done with the stupid doctors.”

  “I’m glad you’re glad, Mor,” he said.

  George had more words than she did for feelings, way
more than good, bad, medium, and hate. He mentioned anger, shame, excitement, satisfaction, peacefulness, fear, frustration, uneasiness, happiness, and joy as some examples. She wrote them down in her awkward left-handed scrawl. She intended to study these and whatever others she could come up with on the faces of her subjects.

  Joy was an emotion that she was pretty sure she had never felt. The closest she had come so far was when she picked up her first batch of pictures from the drugstore. That had been a very good feeling.

  But joy was just one emotion of many. Never having felt it didn’t make her a freak. People, even those who hadn’t been born dead, couldn’t be expected to feel everything, could they? She had asked George that question, but it had been too much for him.

  “How many feelings are there?” she asked next.

  “That’s too hard a question too,” George said and then used words like nuance and degree and sliding scales as he slipped out the door to do one of the many things he did without her these days.

  Sometimes he joined her at the dining-room table when she had a new packet of pictures laid out and she would ask him to write a word for each face, the word that he thought best described the look. Then, when she was alone she would find the words he had used in the big Webster dictionary and connect the meanings back to the faces. She took to keeping the dictionary right out on the table. No one seemed to mind, as most of the family meals were taken in the kitchen in a manner that verged on haphazard.

  “Why does this man look irritated?” George asked once.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it because you were taking his picture without asking, without making sure it was okay?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Maybe, for sure, I expect,” said George.

  He reminded her again about the importance of being polite, of not encroaching on the private space around the other people in the world.

  She kept on trying.

  Sometimes with a favourite photograph she had an enlargement made. She went back to Ross at the drugstore and he sent the negative out to the same mysterious place that made the pictures in the first place. It took some time, but it was worth it. She would hold the photo up beside her own face in the hall mirror and try to recreate the look she had captured on the face of a stranger.

  What she sought was a way to feel how that person must have felt with that particular look on his face so she could recreate it when she thought she felt that way and appear normal. She was quite certain she’d experienced many of the feelings that resulted in the expressions: she recognized distaste when thinking about parts of her own body, fear when she imagined a life without George, and sadness, for sure, when she woke up each morning and remembered that she had to get up.

  At times she thought that her problem was simply an inability to create the correct expressions to accompany her feelings. At other times she thought that the mirror was the one with the problem. And at other times still, she felt as though there was no problem at all, at least not one that needed solving.

  She didn’t feel any different when she changed her face in the mirror. The conclusion that she came to from imitating her photographs was that she couldn’t play-act an emotion; she couldn’t feel on demand. She would have to try catching her own face in the mirror when she was genuinely experiencing something more than mild interest. Mild interest didn’t look like much of anything.

  11

  One summer afternoon in 1967 Morven sat with her camera on her knee in the emergency department of St. Boniface Hospital. George was in seeing a doctor about a sliver in his foot that he couldn’t get out. It was infected now and that made it worse.

  An ambulance pulled up outside, siren wailing. The double doors of the waiting room opened and a stretcher barrelled through. It held a silent open-eyed boy covered in blood. Medical people busied themselves over him as he rolled by. The siren had stopped, but a small figure stumbled in, screaming like a kookaburra. Morven knew about kookaburras from a nature show she had seen on television about the wild birds of Australia.

  The boy’s mother, she thought.

  “Please have a seat, ma’am,” a crisp voice said. “We’ll call you in a few minutes.”

  The wild-eyed stare and then the look of utter incomprehension struck a chord with Morven and she stood up. She moved toward the mother with her camera in her hands. It was still her original Kodak. She didn’t take a picture; she knew better.

  The boy had been taken now to a place in the back.

  Morven sat down next to the woman and waited till the crisp voice left them. Then she stared into the tortured face and said, “Shh,” in a gentle way.

  The face grew quiet.

  No one came for the woman. After a time Morven stood up and reached out her free hand to take hold of an icy damp one. She made a path for the two of them through to the back. Nobody noticed. They passed George lying down on a stretcher in one of the cubicles. He was staring at the ceiling. His foot was propped up on a pillow.

  They found the bloodied boy and heard a man’s voice say, “I’m afraid he’s gone.”

  The wailing began again and no one tried to stop it this time.

  Someone had closed the boy’s eyes; maybe he did it himself. Despite the blood and death that covered him he looked to be at peace.

  “Take a picture, dear.”

  The keening had stopped.

  “Take a picture of my baby boy.”

  Morven did as she was told. She took more than one photograph and she worked from different angles to be sure she captured something that would please the crumpled face that called her “dear.” She wished she could take one with the eyes open but didn’t say so.

  That was her first time. That was how Morven got her start taking pictures of the dead.

  In bed that night she reviewed the scene in her head. She was pleased, very pleased, that she had known not to take a picture of the mother, though she had been itching to do so. She knew without the tiniest doubt that she had made a good decision and it made her feel very grown-up. The knowledge was a treasure and she kept it to herself, not even telling George.

  Of course, she had told him about everything else; there seemed so much to tell.

  “Somebody asked me, Georgie,” she said. “She requested my services. It wasn’t me begging for a chance to take a picture, like it usually is.”

  “I’m glad you were asked,” said George. “It’s just…”

  “Just what?”

  She watched him try to muster up some excitement for her.

  “Is it the subject matter?” she asked. “Is that what’s bothering you and making you not be happy for me?”

  She knew she was right when she saw his face shift a little.

  “It’s good,” said George. “Very good that you were asked.”

  “Yes, Georgie,” she said. “It’s very, very good.”

  12

  Morven needed new equipment. The Kodak wasn’t good enough anymore. George took her downtown to Sam the Camera Man. They zeroed in on a Nikon camera with a motor drive, a real beauty.

  She put her old Kodak on a shelf in her bedroom. It was the only item on the elaborate set of shelves that covered part of one wall.

  By now George had switched to business-related subjects at the University of Manitoba. He still had absolutely no idea what he wanted to do and going to school didn’t disagree with him. His father assumed that one day George would follow him over to the stockyards but he didn’t mind when, as long as his son was furthering his education. Learning never hurt anyone, he was fond of saying, no matter what the subject.

  George had a new girlfriend; Dina had fallen for someone else. The new girl’s name was Pam and she was a fine arts student majoring in sculpture. She tried to talk to Morven about her photographs but she was usually rebuffed. Morven didn’t trust her. She figured Pam was only being nice to her to impress George.

  After a family meeting, minus the mother, George signed Morven up
for the photographic technician program being offered at the new Manitoba Institute of Applied Arts. It was the fall of 1968, the year she turned nineteen and the year John and Yoko were photographed naked. Over a year had passed since she took her picture of the dead boy.

  It was a ten-month program all about photo processing and printing, which was exactly what she needed.

  The drugstore had balked at Morven’s pictures of the dead boy. She wasn’t sure if it was Ross, the druggist, doing the balking or the processors of the film, but she had never been back. Since that uncomfortable day she had taken her film downtown to Sam’s.

  In spring of the following year, with George’s help and the new knowledge she had acquired at MIAA, she set up a darkroom in the cellar. The four walls already existed; it was the old coal room. It just needed some fierce cleaning, some modest modifications and, of course, equipment, which her dad paid for.

  Now she was all set. For what, she wasn’t entirely sure, but she knew it had everything to do with that summer day in the emergency department.

  She took to hanging around the hospitals with her camera at the ready. She practised a positive look in the mirror each time before she set out, not quite a smile — that felt dishonest — but an approachable look. No words were spoken about her idea: she didn’t want to ruin anything by trying to explain it in its first vague form.

  Part of her plan was to take buses to different hospitals to avoid being noticed as a familiar fixture in any one place. She longed to be a magical being that could move in and out of invisibility as needed. She’d heard about a book called The Invisible Man by someone named H. G. Wells, so she borrowed it from the Norwood Library and read it to see if it had any practical tips. But it was beyond her with all its scientific terms.

  The General Hospital, the Grace, and the Victoria all became part of her regular route, but the St. Boniface was her favourite. It was close to home, it was where she got her start, and it was near the Red Top, where she always stopped in for a jam buster on her way home and watched the teenagers act out their lives.