The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal. Sean Dixon

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СКАЧАТЬ only looks, small gestures and violence.

Emmy was striped. Like a zebra. Except saying she was striped like a zebra is like saying Einstein was smart like a fox. It does not convey the truth of the matter. Also, we should stress that her stripes were not of the zebra (or tiger, etc.) variety at all. We know that, because they did not fan out from her spine, as they do in most of the natural world, but were rather more uniform, running horizontally all the way around her body. And her stripes changed width, colour and shade, depending on her mood. Still, no matter how they changed, one shade was always lighter and the other darker.10 So, if you attended a very close eye, you would always perceive the stripes. Her mind in those days was a perpetual state of black and grey, but her skin was always projecting at least two colours, exquisitely matched. We wonder, under what circumstances would she mismatch? And was it an act of will that she didn’t? Or was it rather an act of nature? Colours always match in nature.

      Her stripes manifested themselves with exquisite subtlety – if you met her on the street you would not notice that she had them. She managed, with some effort, to mask them from most observers by colouring her hair in a pair of tones and wearing brightly striped shirts. On regular days she had maybe four of them running along her face, six if you include her neck. On more intensely neurotic or desperately emotional days, there would be more. On the day that we introduce the Lacuna Cabal, 18 March 2003, there were plenty, but they were noticeable only to Romy.

      So there. We have told of a body changed into a shape of a different kind. And we get to keep Emmy in our story. This does present a bit of an aesthetic challenge for us, since, as we stated in our portrait of Priya, we are interested in the written word to the ascetic exclusion of all other art forms, including all those that are rendered in colour. But we’ll do the best we can.

10 Formally, we should clarify that we’re speaking of the stripes themselves and also the spaces between the stripes. We leave it to the reader to determine which was which.

      We might as well cut to the chase, let the cat out of the bag and say the thing that was obvious to everybody except Romy herself and perhaps Emmy as well: Romy loved Emmy. She would have loved her even without her stripes, but, as she was from Bingotown, Romy’s eye was involuntarily drawn to colour as something it had rarely seen. So Romy saw Emmy, and what she saw she loved, no matter how sullen was the object of her love. What’s more, despite the fact that her love was unrequited, Romy remembers it with wistful fondness and has offered her diary to be used for its edifying instances of self-loathing. We have, however, for the moment anyway, declined.

      Emmy sat next to

      Aline Irwin.

      Aline was the most controversial member of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club, for the simple reason that she was not a young woman at all. Not that she was old, or that we would not have been able to make some kind of exemption for elderly applicants, but we’re not entirely sure that we should have made an exemption for Aline Irwin, no matter what Missy might have wished.

      Still, Aline was there at Missy’s invitation and Missy’s insist ence, and there were certain matters in which no one would ever dare to cross Missy.

      Priya, who was new to the group, recalled once having seen Aline, sometime in the previous year, surrounded by friends (presumably including Missy, who did everything she could to protect Aline from the world) in a breakfast café on Parc Avenue. It was something Priya recalled easily for the simple reason that she had never before seen a person who looked so miserable as Aline did that morning, especially in contrast with her crowding compatriots. It was clear that her friends appreciated Aline, indulged her, allowed her to stay the way she was: sitting with her head down and peering through her makeup at the black dress, the stockings, the shoes. They accepted her without complaint and were heroically unaffected by his moods. The way you might sit with a sick friend when it’s many of you who have come to visit and not just one.

      But even in this recollection we’ve managed already to make the error of referring to Aline in the masculine. We can’t even prop up the desired illusion of femininity in our own account.

      Because it was clear to all of us, including Aline herself, if that permanently alienated expression was any indication, that Aline was a boy. A boy in a dress, as distinguished from a spectacular androgyne, like Prince, or like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. Probably not even a fully grown boy, since he was working so hard to mentally suppress his hormones.

      Yes, she was a he, dressed as a she, and no matter how much makeup and sympathy were ladled onto her, this remained a permanent, irreversible fact. She was never going to make the cover of Cosmo. Where the makeup was concerned, you could always more than make out a five-o’clock shadow – a misnomer in this case, since he shaved sometimes three times a day, so it might as well have been a 10 a.m. shadow. His skin reacted badly to the foundation and sprouted abscesses with deep reservoirs. No matter how loosely fitting her drop-waist dresses, you could always perceive the blockiness of her body, the flatness of her chest, the leggings emphasising the power of her thighs, the knobbiness of her knees.

      It was appalling.

      Missy (we suspect) invited Aline into the Cabal so that she might have the opportunity to meet and get to know ‘other women’ and have them rub some of their womanness off on her. Among other things, she wanted her to experience ‘the reinvention of the self through literature’ and ‘a bit of a haven from boys’.

      Since there were no boys allowed in the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club. Not then. Not ever. No exceptions …

      Neil Coghill was an exception. Because he was ten and alone in the world except for Runner. And he was not really a member but, rather, merely present to the membership. Otherwise, no exceptions.

      The one who was fierce in her loyalty to Aline, who sat next to her, protected her, displayed in the manner of all guardians that most profound test of loyalty – the commitment to a lie – was none other than

      Missy Bean,

      founder and president of the Lacuna Cabal, of whom we have already spoken. How could we not have already spoken of her? She touched and enriched each of our lives in myriad ways. She gave us books and she gave us one another, and she was lonely and she was from Westmount. She was our captain and our king. If we were the seven sages who laid the foundation, Missy alone was the engineer of human souls!

Which is not to say she could not be barbaric (or, if you prefer, particularly considering the aforementioned allusion to a quote from Stalin: which is to say she could be barbaric). She had the instinct for power and the will to find it. She left no question in anyone’s mind that politics is something pursued for the love of power and the craving of attention. Government is essentially barbaric – ‘barbaric in its origins and forever susceptible to barbaric actions and aims.’11 It can’t civilise itself. But it can certainly civilise the rest of us, depending on what book it elects to have us read and plunder.

      And we would have followed Missy to the ends of the earth. As it turns out, Missy did indeed go there, to the ends of the earth, before this story came to its conclusion, and we – the two of us – did not follow her there. So this book is our attempt to fulfil the tenets of our oath some years after the fact.

      Missy was a little older than the rest of us – a fact that she managed to conceal fairly easily, mostly by refraining from any discussion of her past. Truth be told, she’d had some СКАЧАТЬ