Which brings us finally to the call of the role. The sitting members of the Lacuna Cabal as of 18 March 2003.
House left, stage right, in a semi-circle heading towards house right, stage left, books open in our laps, it goes as follows:
The first is one of us. One of the two of us. One of we two narrators or, if you prefer, glorified stage-direction readers. Missy liked to keep us separate so that her consolidation of power would not seem so obvious. So I, Jennifer, about whom the less said the better, sat at the farthest left, house left, all by myself, next to the newest member, whose name was (is)
Priya Underhay,
the aforementioned newest, the ray of hope and sunshine8, meant to combat the gloom that had followed a death in the club – about whom we knew, at the time, very little. She was, not coincidentally when you consider Missy’s motive for taking her on, a bit of a hippie. To us she seemed a little crazy and often could be overheard speaking in a low voice to – one could only assume – herself.
Priya, who carried a travel guitar with her wherever she went, missed the occasional meeting because she had the occasional commitment to play at the occasional small-time open-mike event. She called these ‘alt-country nights’, whatever that meant. Such events were never attended by the Cabal, for two, no, three reasons:
1 They would have blown our cover.
2 We were declaratively interested in the written word, to the exclusion of every other art form, and would pay attention to a ballad only if it were written in a book.
3 An example of Priya’s early song lyrics:
we are the fortunate ones, you and I,
who travel with the pelicans and the platypi …
‘goodnight’, lisp the smiling, dozing sarcophagi
as we pass them by.
8 There are several names here. These are presented in large print so the reader can flip back and refer to them from time to time. There is no shame in this. We’ve had to do it ourselves a couple of times.
we are the delicate ones, though we do not cry
when we wound one another with the lash of an eye …
‘and you think you’ll live,’ screech the dead sarcophagi
but they are out of earshot, by and by.
We’d like to meet some living sarcophagi.
(Allowing a folk singer into our ranks seemed, for the longest time, a very serious mistake.)
At the time when this story begins, Priya had written, by all accounts, upwards of thirty songs, most of them incomprehensible, and suffered from the occasional nosebleed, one can only imagine because of her nocturnal flights with fellow folksinging witches.
Next to Priya sat
Romy Childerhose,
the aforementioned squirrel in her nest, who hailed from the so-named Bingotown and had felt drawn to the epic seediness of the Jacob Lighter building.
We have no desire to present a negative portrayal of Romy in this passage, as we feel it might cause pain and would not be commensurate with the esteem in which we currently hold her. This presents a problem for us because, during the time this story takes place, we felt nothing but contempt for her, and this account would be nothing if it did not present something resembling the truth. In confessing this dilemma to the subject in question, however, a solution presented itself: apparently, not surprisingly, our contempt was nothing compared to how Romy felt about herself.
Here, therefore, is Romy’s introduction, in her own recently commissioned words. Characteristically, she has begun far earlier in her story than expected, and has included informa tion that we were perhaps better off not knowing:
I was born in a barn. I was. Just outside of Bingotown, Ontario, where my mother-to-be had been dropped in a field with her two older sisters, one of whom had vomited on the other two while their parents – my grandparents – were on their way to church in their Sunday best. They dropped the vomit-covered sisters in the field to wait out the hour while the clean ones – the younger boys and the parents – went off to do their churchly duty. It was just enough time to quietly induce labour, since the sisters were privy to the know ledge of my mother’s condition and the vomit had in fact been purposely induced. My mother (did I mention that my mother was very large?) had managed to conceal her pregnancy from her extremely Catholic parents. And then, for several months after I was born, she managed to hide me. You’ve heard the story of Kaspar Hauser? Living beneath the floorboards of a little house somewhere in Germany? Well, if I hadn’t been discovered, I might have been the small-town southwestern Ontario version of that poor kid. And in many respects, perhaps I was.
What’s more, Romy felt that this was one of the two seminal stories of her childhood, the other one being a Homeric narrative on the subject of fatness and responsibility:
People get fat through an act of will. Don’t they? It’s instead of a callus. The emotion is all nestled inside, like a pig in a blanket, and, as with calluses, the blows don’t land quite so hard. Is that why they do it? My mother was fat. She was a cement balloon sinking into the ocean, who held me by the ankles and pulled me down, like galoshes on a mobster who’d slept with the wrong moll. I was fat too, but my fat was an air pocket to try and keep me afloat, to try and stop my mother from consuming everything. When I was a kid I once purchased a mouse. A little white mouse. I bought it at a pet store downtown and took it home in a small cardboard box, with a big bagful of mouse food. It was in the middle of a particularly harsh winter. I don’t know what I was thinking. When I got home, my mother flipped out. Another mouth to feed that was not her own. But I have food for it, I said. A whole bag. I’m sure it’s not the kind of food that you would like, I said. Who’s to say? she said, and took the food. Besides, there was no place for the little mouth to live. My mother occupied everything. I found a little fishbowl that had belonged to a long-ago goldfish. And I put the little mouth in there. And then I watched in horror as he scrabbled around the small bottom and tried to jump free. He would leap into the air and catch a small paw at the lip of the bowl, spin his legs frantically and then fall to the bottom again. It was horrifying. Only a matter of time before he mastered the leap. I considered putting a pile of books there, at the top, to block the exit, but then he would have suffocated. I suppose I could have drilled some holes in the books, but I didn’t have a drill and you don’t treat books like that, do you? And besides, the goldfish bowl was way too small. It was way, way too small. There was a woodpile at the back of the yard. I gazed at the woodpile through a window, imagining that it might make a beautiful, spacious, multi-hallwayed new home for my little burden. No, said my mother, the poor thing will die out there in the cold. We have to return it to the store. But there’s a no-return policy, I yelled. It says so on a big sign right on the door! But we drove downtown with the mouse in the