Because we’re Britons, we will never be slaves. But we aren’t real Britons, because we are also Canadians. This isn’t quite as good, although it has its own song:
Miss Lumley’s jaw quivers in a frightening way when we sing this. Wolfe’s name sounds like something you’d call a dog, but he conquered the French. This is puzzling, because I’ve seen French people, there are lots of them up north, so he couldn’t have conquered all of them. As for maple leaves, they’re the hardest part to draw on our red flag. Nobody ever gets them right.
Miss Lumley brings newspaper clippings about the Royal Family and sticks them to the side blackboard. Some of them are old clippings, and show Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose, in Girl Guide uniforms, making radio and other speeches during the Blitz. This is what we should be like, Miss Lumley implies: steadfast, loyal, courageous, heroic.
There are other newspaper pictures too, showing thin-looking children in scruffy clothes, standing in front of piles of rubble. These are to remind us that there are many starving war orphans in Europe, and we should remember that and eat our bread crusts and potato skins and everything else on our plates, because waste is a sin. Also we should not complain. We are not really entitled to complain, because we are lucky children: English children got their houses bombed and we did not. We bring our used clothing, from home, and Miss Lumley ties it up into brown paper packages and sends it to England. There isn’t much I can bring, because my mother tears our worn-out clothing up for dusters, but I manage to salvage a pair of corduroy pants, once my brother’s, then mine, now too small, and a Viyella shirt of my father’s that got washed wrong by mistake and shrank. It gives me a strange feeling on my skin to think of someone else, someone in England, walking around in my clothes. My clothes seem a part of me, even the ones I’ve outgrown.
All these things—the flags, the pitch pipe songs, the British Empire and the princesses, the war orphans, even the strappings—are superimposed against the ominous navy-blue background of Miss Lumley’s invisible bloomers. I can’t draw the Union Jack or sing “God Save the King” without thinking about them. Do they really exist, or not? Will I ever be in the classroom when she puts them on or—unthinkable—takes them off?
I’m not afraid of snakes or worms but I am afraid of these bloomers. I know it will be the worse for me if I ever actually catch sight of them. They’re sacrosanct, at the same time holy and deeply shameful. Whatever is wrong with them may be wrong with me also, because although Miss Lumley is not what anyone thinks of as a girl, she is also not a boy. When the brass handbell clangs and we line up outside our GIRLS door, whatever category we are in also includes her.
Four – Deadly Nightshade
Chapter 16
I walk along Queen Street, past used comic book stores, windows full of crystal eggs and seashells, a lot of sulky black clothing. I wish I were back in Vancouver, in front of the fireplace with Ben, looking out over the harbor, while the giant slugs munch away at the greenery in the back garden. Fireplaces, back gardens: I wasn’t thinking about them when I used to come down here to visit Jon, over the wholesale luggage store. Around the corner was the Maple Leaf Tavern, where I drank draft beer in the dark, two stoplights away from the art school where I drew naked women and ate my heart out. The streetcars rattled the front windows. There are still streetcars.
“I don’t want to go,” I said to Ben.
“You don’t have to,” he said. “Call it off. Come down to Mexico.”
“They’ve gone to all the trouble,” I said. “Listen, you know how hard it is to get a retrospective anywhere, if you’re female?”
“Why is it important?” he said. “You sell anyway.”
“I have to go,” I said. “It wouldn’t be right.” I was brought up to say please and thank you.
“Okay,” he said. “You know what you’re doing.” He gave me a hug.
I wish it were true.
Here is Sub-Versions, between a restaurant supply store and a tattoo parlor. Both of these will go, in time: once places like Sub-Versions move in, the handwriting’s on the wall. I open the gallery door, walk in with that sinking feeling I always have in galleries. It’s the carpets that do it to me, the hush, the sanctimoniousness of it alclass="underline" galleries are too much like churches, there’s too much reverence, you feel there should be some genuflecting going on. Also I don’t like it that this is where paintings end up, on these neutral-toned walls with the track lighting, sterilized, rendered safe and acceptable. It’s as if somebody’s been around spraying the paintings with air freshener, to kill the smell. The smell of blood on the wall.
This gallery is not totally sterilized, there are touches of cutting edge: a heating pipe shows, one wall is black. I don’t give a glance to what’s still on the walls, I hate those neo-expressionist dirty greens and putrid oranges, post this, post that. Everything is post these days, as if we’re all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.
Several of my own paintings have been uncrated and are leaning against the wall. They’ve been tracked down, requested, gathered in from whoever owns them. Whoever owns them is not me; worse luck, I’d get a better price now. The owners’ names will be on little white cards beside the paintings, along with mine, as if mere ownership is on a par with creation. Which they think it is. If I cut off my ear, would the market value go up? Better still, stick my head in the oven, blow out my brains. What rich art collectors like to buy, among other things, is a little vicarious craziness. Face out is a piece I painted twenty years ago: Mrs. Smeath, beautifully rendered in egg tempera, with her gray hairpin crown and her potato face and her spectacles, wearing nothing but her flowered one-breast bib apron. She’s reclining on her maroon velvet sofa, rising to Heaven, which is full of rubber plants, while a moon shaped like a doily floats in the sky. Rubber Plant: The Ascension, it’s called. The angels around her are 1940s Christmas stickers, laundered little girls in white, with rag-set curly hair. The word Heaven is stenciled at the top of the painting with a child’s school stencil set. I thought that was a nifty thing to do, at the time.
I caught some shit for that piece, as I recall. But not because of the stencil. I don’t look at this painting for very long, or at any of them. If I do I’ll start finding things wrong with them. I’ll want to take an Exacto knife to them, torch them, clear the walls. Begin again. A woman strides toward me from the back, in a modified blond porcupine haircut, a purple jumpsuit and green leather boots. I know immediately that I should not have worn this powder-blue jogging outfit. Powder-blue is lightweight. I should’ve worn nun black, Dracula black, like all proper female painters. I should have some clotted-neck vampire lipstick, instead of wimping out with Rose Perfection. But that really would make me look like Haggis McBaggis. At this age the complexion can’t stand those grape-jelly reds, I’d look all white and wrinkly.