Going Down Swinging Read online

  Praise for Going Down Swinging

  “Livingston has pared her prose down to a tough, unflinching realism … mastering multiple points of view [and] deftly switching narrative voices in alternating chapters. … [She] reveals an unflinching eye and a formidable grasp of the mysteries of the human heart.”

  —The Vancouver Sun

  “Going Down Swinging is written in a highly evocative, wryly humorous prose. An absorbing tale of growing up disadvantaged with an alcoholic mother and an absent father, the novel is no coming-of-age weeper. … Livingston does a subtle and effective job of making the specialness of [a] strange and loving—and, in the best of times, fun—family unit flame into memorable life.”

  —The Toronto Star

  “Billie Livingston vividly captures the heady romance of mother-daughter love, so strengthening in its unconditional acceptance and support, and so wretchedly debilitating in its blindness.”

  —The Hamilton Spectator

  “The novel is driven by the clear and believable voices of its characters. Eilleen’s fears and desires and shames are told without false sentiment. Livingston’s book is a humane and political look at the world of hard knocks. … We discover there are no happy endings, just the possibility of fresh beginnings.”

  —New Brunswick Telegraph—Journal

  “Eilleen and Grace—from whose points of view the story is alternately told—are small fictional masterpieces.”

  —Vancouver Courier

  “[Livingston] captures the view from the mountain tops and the valley bottoms—and the journeys in between—in Going Down Swinging It all rings so very true and so very moving.”

  —The Strathmore Standard

  Eilleen One

  NOVEMBER 1972

  NO ONE EVER believes they’ll sink So Low. So Low is someone else’s life, someone else’s man, someone else’s job. Everyone imagines little rubber bands hooked at the shoulder, springing back to safety just before the life-sucking bedrock.

  Now Danny’s gone, your man, the guy you called husband. And you’re wandering in the haze between dazed and terrified. Flat broke. Flat out. Just flat; a reasonable hand-drawn facsimile of your former self. Somewhere along the line, you got weak and sickly, sucked dry. And he got necessary.

  He’s always had a kind of crafty power—everyone wanted him and no one could push him. Not until they took him away, at least. Why did you start up with him again? If he hadn’t’ve been busted two years ago, you would’ve dumped him. So then, what’d you go and do in the meantime, you idiot—went out with one too many assholes until even Danny sounded good.

  And Charlie’s gone and fucked off too—mind you, for all intents and purposes, she’s been gone two years now. Couldn’t wait to get out of the house—all that hash and acid floating around the streets, all those micro-minis and fishnet stockings. Fourteen years old when Danny ended up in jail, and without him to make her, she wouldn’t do a goddamn thing you said. She got pissed off, sometimes smug, always bitching, sitting around lazy or walking off and coming home late. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. She’s been cruel ever since. She won’t look after you and you can’t look after her and she won’t let you. She’s sick of you and your wine and pills, and screaming retaliation every time she mouths back. Thank god for Grace. She loves you. She clambers all over you and says so.

  Now it’s just the two of you again, you’ll celebrate her seventh this month, alone. And you’ll have to work, find work for bills, and landlords and food and rent and Grace and the hydro and the phone. You’ve been sober all of one week now—too sick to get a job again, to go back to teaching—that was someone else, that woman. Sick when you do drink, sick when you don’t. Nauseous and sensitive—skin hurts, and your hair, you can feel each hair move when the air shifts. And the mess, everything’s dirty—you can’t get up the strength or the will to clean. You’ll have to get welfare again. At least for now.

  You pace all morning, trying to get up the nerve, the strength to go down to the Welfare office. Pick out the right clothes, now, or they won’t believe you. They’d have to be morons. He never kept you like a queen—you refused all hot merchandise in the form of furs and jewels—stupid-stupid-stupid.

  By noon, a social worker is looking over your application. He’s sweet somehow, so careful with you. His little round bald head, his soft voice. Seems foreign now, another language; gentle, articulate. He puts gs on the ends of his verbs. None of Danny’s crowd could ever string together five words of proper English. It’s always boozin’, screwin’, fuckin’—or more likely f(ee-iz)uckin’—they’ve got to throw that ee-iz smack in the middle of anything illegal or obscene, just in case the walls have ears. But you can’t imagine this man ever uses those words.

  He gives you the emergency assistance cheque. You’ll soon receive a cheque every month: $269.67. For you and one dependant. You start to cry. The social worker doesn’t understand. Or maybe he does. He just doesn’t know what to do but yank tissue after tissue. Each one gives a sympathetic little gasp as it pulls free, until both you and the Kleenex box are hoarse from hyperventilation.

  Guilt is coursing through your arms, up your neck and pounding at the back of your eyeballs until you want to scream, rip it out of your wrists like ropy veins. It’s pointless, guilt is useless. It just wasn’t meant to be, that’s all. You and Danny shouldn’t have bothered again and Charlie should’ve just kept doing whatever she was doing: screwing with her foster mother’s head or robbing every kid in the group home blind. Christ, stop thinking such shit—it’s not her fault, it’s not your fault, it just is. You just couldn’t get along—used to start up as soon as you came in the door, the screaming. Fights were getting worse and worse and you were scared it was going to get as bad as it got before she took off the first time. Scared of getting your hair pulled and your mouth slapped and scared of doing it all back.

  The night before Charlie left for good, you didn’t come home. But it was about time that kid took some responsibility. Maybe it was time she found out what it was like looking after a seven-year-old in this insane asylum with a man who wouldn’t come home for three days running half the time. It was your turn to bugger off and take a break. It’s not like you were drinking much. And you were trying to go to AA now and then.

  Just before noon when you came in, and no one was home; it was a school day and Danny was probably out with his cronies somewhere pretending to be a real estate agent. You were standing in the kitchen. The room looked as if it’d spat up on itself: a chewed on dried-up piece of bread lay in a puddle of crumbs on the table beside a chewed-on twisted straw, dirty pots on three out of four burners, white plates covered with dried orange slop, macaroni pieces on counters, a milk carton tipped on its side, spoons in every pot, forks on every plate, a butcher knife on the counter and cheesy orange fingerprints all over the fridge door. You started to seethe. Christ, I live in a house full of assholes. They couldn’t even make a pretence of cleaning up, couldn’t even stack dishes in the sink, not even near the sink—they’re punishing you, you thought, this is what happens when you don’t come home.

  Remember yelling Fuck? Who were you hollering at? Yourself? For crawling out of a stranger’s bed at ten in the morning and straggling back to house and home. Huh! No. Why should you feel guilty, everyone else stays out all night, big deal. It wasn’t like Grace was alone. Danny said he’d stay home with her while you went to your meeting. Said it with a sneer, of course, said it like, Sure I’ll stay home and look after your kid, because you’re too weak and ineffectual to stay sober on your own. So. So there. So you met someone who was nice to you, so Steve/Dave (couldn’t get his name straight) with the nice bum, who turned out not to be named Steve or Dave but Karl (of
all things), turned out not to be queer either. And not bad in bed either. And furthermore, it was a nice change to be in bed with a man with a decent-size dick who knew what the hell to do with it. And for godsake, who was kidding who, the only reason you and Danny were living in the same house again was for Grace. He was hardly ever around. Wasn’t as if his stony little pea-size heart would be broken over this.

  The front door slammed. It was noon exactly.

  Hello? Charlie. What was she doing here? Oh yes, a school day, she must have been out running the streets.

  Hello.

  You listened to her denim legs rub toward you. She walked into the kitchen looking like a badger with a bone to pick.

  Where the hell have you been? you asked her.

  She squints in the uniform teenage-face-of-disgust. Where the hell have I been? You’re the one wearing the same thing you left in last night.

  How would you know? When’s the last time you deigned to show up in this house?

  For your information, I was here last night looking after Grace. Dad had to go out. And you never came home. I looked after Grace, fed her, and put her to bed.

  Oh. Well, that would explain why the place is such a pigsty then.

  Are you for real? You fuckin never came home last night! Where the hell were you—we thought you were dead, but I guess not, eh? Yeah right, an AA meeting, you look hungover ify’ ask me. What’d you do, find yourself some poor slob in a bar?

  Before you realized, you’d already slapped her face. How dare you come into this house and talk to me like that, and you of all people—talk about the pot calling the kettle black, the only reason you ever ran away from home in the first place was because you were a horny little slut and you couldn’t keep your pants on to save your —

  You stupid whore, don’t ever touch me again. Who —

  Shut your mouth, and you’re a goddamn thief too—you think I don’t know you’ve been stealing from me. Well, you’ve got another thing coming, you treat this place like a flophouse, stop by to eat, steal some money, take my pills —

  What!—I never took nothing of yours! You’re nuts!

  Liar!

  Nothings ever gonna change with you, is it? I’m getting the hell out of here—I wish you were dead and I’d take Grace with me. I should take her with me anyway.

  The front door opened and closed, but you were both too furious to shut your mouths.

  You just try laying a hand on one hair of that kid’s head and I’ll slit your throat. And there was a knife in your hand, the butcher knife. Charlie’s eyes were huge and incredulous, brimming hot water. But you meant it, no one was taking the baby anywhere. No. You could feel her in the room somewhere, that door-slam was hers, you could feel her but you couldn’t peel your eyes off Charlie.

  Charlie opened her mouth, there was a strand of saliva running between her jaws; she looked about to choke, but words came: You’re crazy. That’s all. And she turned to run and then Grace’s No-o-o Charlie-ee, and crying and Charlie running for the front door and Grace chasing after, bawling her sister’s name and you squeezed the knife once and let it fall and thunk linoleum and yelled, Grace, you stay in this house. But the door opened and the screen door banged in its frame and feet scrambled down wood steps. And there was nothing to do but push palms into eye sockets until the black screen turned psychedelic and you couldn’t hear your own moans. It’s all your fault, you thought again, again, everything’s your fault; he’ll blame you when he comes home. And Grace will hate you for making Charlie disappear again. Can’t change anything, even when you change it. And then you were up and running to the living-room window, terrified she really would take Grace.

  They were just a little ways down the sidewalk. Dead leaves scraping cement, scuttling past them onto neighbours’ lawns. The sky was slate and about to pour any minute. You could faintly hear their voices, mostly crying. Charlie shook her head and Grace was hysterical, face blister red, wet with tears and snot and saliva. She threw her arms around Charlie’s waist, pushed her face into Charlie’s stomach, the back of her head covered by Charlie’s hands, hands running over and over silky child-hair, and the both of them stood inside the same square of sidewalk and wailed and mourned for minutes or hours. Charlie’s lips were moving, She’s crazys and I love yous dropping onto your little one’s head.

  Numb.

  For the next few days you didn’t move much, except the occasional rocking. You brought Grace to bed with you most nights and held on, breathing deeply through her child-smooth hair as though it were an oxygen mask, her little body a scuba.

  She is the last thing, the last possession; she is the padding on the wall that keeps you from beating your head to bone and mash. So often you catch yourself whispering in her ear, making plans, the primary request being that she never grow up, that she remain small, pliable and loving.

  Now the house feels colder, as if there’s been a death. It’s this decade, this fucking sixties hangover, this time. Every time you turn on the TV, another insufferable teenager with centre-parted limp hair hanging dreary down the sides of her sulky face, giving it the look of a mooning teardrop, spouting off about Vietnam, about the consent she never gave to her own birth. Their sit-ins, love-ins, beads and flower power. Fuck them. Fuck them for making you cry every time you see a teenage girl on the street, every time you nearly call out to a strange girl with dark welling eyes.

  She’s right maybe, maybe you’re out of your ever-lovin’ mind. Or maybe not so much. But how many people threaten their children with knives, order them out of the house? Then again, how many children threaten to steal their sister from home? None of it’s right. Nothing will ever be right again. Every time you hear the words in your chest, hear that day, you want to go upstairs, just go upstairs and take something. Before it all cracks into a thousand million splinters. It’s all too clear and ugly. A person’s got to take something, prescribe a nice smoky film on things—when things are too clear, the world is a closed glass door; you don’t see what’s coming until you’re already shatters and shreds.

  Grace One

  APRIL 1973

  SHE STOOD in front of the bathroom mirror, with a beer on the counter, and painted black lines over her top lashes, then thinner ones under her bottoms. She was going out man-hunting and I sat on the toilet with my heels on the seat and got a picture in my head of her going slinky like a tigress through the alleyways. She painted blue on her lids and rubbed some lipstick on her cheeks to look rosy. The last part was the most important; even if she didn’t have time for anything else, she got her face right in the mirror and made a sharp shiny lipstick-mouth. I swallowed and swallowed, trying to think of something good to say. She looked at me in the mirror and said, “What’s the matter, you look like you’re about to cry.”

  “Can’t you stay home, can’t we watch TV or something? or play a game?”

  “Honey, just let me get out for a while and I’ll be much easier to be around. Maybe I’ll find us a nice man who’ll take me for dinner and take you horseback riding and be sweet to us.” I didn’t say anything, so she asked me, “Are you going to stay up here so you’ll feel closer to Frank and Janet?”

  “No.” I didn’t feel like being down the hall from stupid Frank and Janet, all gooey-lovey and doing whatever they were doing in Charlie’s room. Since they moved in, Mum was either hating them for every second they spent in the bathroom or loving them for being last-minute babysitters.

  “Do you want to bring a pillow and blanket downstairs and watch TV and then I’ll bring you back up when I get home?”

  I didn’t say anything, just nodded. “Grace, why are you making such a production out of this? It’s not as if I’ve never gone out at night before.” I nodded. “Oh, come on now, stop with the crocodile tears.” I started hating that expression of hers since I found out it meant fake. I dropped my feet onto the yellow mat that hugged around the toilet. There was a space of tile where its fluffy arms were coming away. I crushed it back and
stomped out.

  From my bed I could see into her room, so I left my door open: I wanted to watch her go back and forth getting ready. Except she hucked her own door almost closed, so I had to listen instead. I listened to her pulling on pantyhose then swear and yank them back off and rummage for different ones. Skirts and hot pants shushed over her hips, the zippers zedding up and down every time she changed her mind. Then, what sounded like sweaters pulling over her head; my favourite one had a short zipper right at the neck. Then the sound that told you she’d almost made up her mind: the clunk and zipper of her boots coming on. First just one—she always did it that way: high heel on one foot, boot on the other, leg up, leg down, other leg up. And down.

  Another zipper. It’d be boots tonight. She bought two pairs a couple months before, one red, one white, both made of shiny crinkle stuff that was clingy on her legs. The boots usually meant hot pants. (Skirts got high strappy shoes—rain or sun or snow.) It was still wintertime, so probably the red; she didn’t think white was right for the winter, even though I tried to tell her it went good with the snow. I listened to her go around her room, she usually did that—prowled around, turning in the mirror to make sure.

  Her boots came down the hall toward my room. There was a pause as her heel snagged the carpet. A snap when she yanked free. She poked her head in my room. I was pretending to read Danny Meadowmouse, one of the books Charlie sent me for Christmas from Vancouver.

  I looked up. She had on my favourite outfit: black hot pants, a tight red turtleneck and a black tam. Plus the red boots. She sat down on the edge of the bed and patted her belly. “I’m getting fat.”

  I put the book down. “No, you’re not.” Her stomach did bulge a little under her sweater, but it looked pretty. Her boobs, her belly and her hips, all pointed at you like soft round fingers.