Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

I stood him in the bathtub, naked. My fingers went wherever ivy lurked: toes, thighs, belly. Felt odd doing that but he was so trusting. I worked lotion into his back. Cleft of his bum. I felt so close to him. A casual intimacy I thought could go on forever. To this day I’ll feel it: a phantom thack-thack on my bare palms. My fingertips so close to his heart.

OnlyDanny and Cassie Mulligan show up to my Bullying Symposium.

Mulligan had sat down with Trupholme’s class to talk about Internet predators. Sadie in particular. One of the more awkward experiences of his life, he told me. “Soon as I spoke her name, this eerie stillness. Like that movie, Village of the Damned . Kids with glowing blue eyes and test-pattern faces.” Afterwards he’d handed out invitations to this Symposium, which had been my idea.

My son’s school days have since turned hellish. He was the one who ratted out “Secret Sadie” to the grownups. Now he was being teased mercilessly in the insidious ways modern technology affords: IMs, text messages. Someone spat in his pencil case. When I picked him up yesterday he had a wad of grape gum stuck in his hair. It took half a jar of peanut butter to untangle it.

During recess I’d idled in my car overlooking the playground. Dylan ate Nerds alone on the teetertotter. Behind the fence stood a woman. Rainboots and an umbrella on a sunny day. A man dressed like that you’d think was a molester. Could be her womb was barren. I trailed her down the street before recognizing her as Patience Nanavatti, the fireworker’s daughter.

On the day of the Symposium I lead the Mulligans into my family room. Finger sandwiches in a ruffled plastic tray. Dylan’s on the sofa. No cape. The other day I asked after his new persona. He said, “I’m nobody. Just stupid old me.” His mother’s looking into having him finish the school year in Toronto.

“You should’ve called everyone’s parents, Nick, to make sure they got the invites.”

Mulligan’s the sort of guy who, you’re waiting for an elevator, he’ll push the button again. Even though you’ve already pushed it. Even though it’s lit.

The DVD I’d taken out from the library is called: Bullies: Pain in the Brain . The cast is comprised of little Aryans. An omniscient narrator asks questions:

“Jonathan, is your gang fun?”

Jonathan: “It’s super. I used to be in a different gang but they started bullying. I didn’t feel right about that, so I left and started my own gang!” Calliope music kicks up.

Jonathan dances with the members of his new gang. They sit down to read books quietly.

”What do you know about bullying, Amy?”

Amy: “I was in a gang that started bullying. It was hard not to join in when they picked on others.” This hardened ex-gang member is a seven-year-old in barrettes and a turtleneck sweater. What gang could she possibly belong to? The Thumb Suckers? The Bedwetters? After thirty minutes the ex-bullies and ex-victims form a conga line and dance off the edge of the screen to “Islands in the Stream.”

Afterwards Mulligan shoos Cassie and Dylan outside. We head upstairs to Dylan’s computer. He surfs to Youtube. Types ‘Trupholme Joke’ in the search box. One result. He clicks the video. It’s Dylan rubbing against his teacher. A bundle of pixels available to anonymous eyes. Mulligan scrolls to the comments.

I hate u, dylan! looozer!

He should die… lolz!!

And, from SECRETSADIE:

Omg! what a total drip! if I wuz him, i’d kill myself and get it over with!

It wrenches my heart to see such hatred. So bloodless. Cowardly. I want to seek out their fathers. Those who’ve fostered under their roofs such horrid monsters. Bash them to bone paste.

“I sent it onto the Internet crime division. How’s Dylan’s frame of mind?”

“He’s ten, Dan. Overweight. Picked on in cyberspace. This one.” Pointing at the cutesy moniker of SECRETSADIE. “Is encouraging him to…”

Out in the backyard Dylan pulls the padded seatcover off a lawn recliner. Earwigs scuttle into patio cracks. Cassie shrieks. I should have put the patio furniture in the shed by now. My wife usually reminds me.

Dan clicks on SECRETSADIE to open a fresh window: Clips viewed by this poster . He clicks the only other video: Colin “Brink Of ” Hill NF Stunt .

The scene opens on the Falls. Grainy footage of Wesley Hill in his boat. The angle zooms out to spectators clustered along the railing. In the left corner, fleetingly, I catch sight of myself and Abby crossing the road. The viewfinder sweeps Goat Island and the Skylon Tower. Pink flakes congest the air. The lens climbs Clifton Hill to zoom on a construction site. I see Dylan in a mesh of raw girders on a concrete foundation slab. He’s ripping with his bare hands at a giant plastic-wrapped insulation brick. He is joined by Jeffrey, Mama’s boy. Together they tear at the bricks. The camera captures the steel filigree of a knife in Jeffrey’s hand. My son is obscured by pink. The vantage returns to the river, where Colin Hill’s barrel goes over the cataract. The camera pans the basin, shifts abruptly to the barrel floating past the spume. It’s broken open. Colin’s arm is a white branch crooked over the rim. Wesley Hill enters the frame. He lays his son’s body in the belly of the boat. Whatever clothes Colin was wearing had been sucked off by the water. A thatch of dark pubic hair and the rest of his body is whitish-blue. His legs are all twisted together like a figure skater’s in midSalchow.

“Criminal mischief,” says Mulligan, I guess in reference to Dylan’s fibreglass-ripping. “Not that your son’s old enough to be charged. It just doesn’t seem something a well-adjusted ten-year-old would do. You know the man he’s with?”

“Jeffrey, yeah. He used to live down the street.”

“From here?”

“No. As kids. On Sarah Court.”

Back downstairs Mulligan tells our kids they have to stick together. Rough lately, he knows, but your Dads will fix things. Cassie asks if we’ll come to school and beat up the bullies. Dan places a hand atop his daughter’s head. His fingertips pulse like a heartbeat.

“What’s this?”

Cassie grits her teeth. “What?”

“A brain sucker. What’s it doing?”

“I dunno.”

“Starving.” He kisses her head where his hand had been. “Beat them up yourself.”

That evening I take Dylan to his grandfather’s house. I find him on the back porch with Fletcher Burger. The two of them could’ve crawled out of the same bottle. Despite their drunkenness there’s evidence — a bodily gravity between them — of a serious conversation having taken place.

“The champ!” Fletcher rocks boozily to his feet. “And the little champ!”

I hug him. It comes as a surprise to both of us. That he’s sitting here, drunk, while his daughter’s in the hospital… this enrages me.

“What are you two talking about?” I say.

“Well,” Dad says, “Fletcher here has just finished giving me an object lesson in cowardice.”

Fletcher heads home shortly after this. Dylan goes inside to watch television.

“He’s not wearing the cape.”

“He’s quits with that.”

“Weird habit. That girl folded him up like a K-Way jacket in the ring.”

I’m amazed at my father’s ability to link unattached grievances into a single incoherent insult. No use getting my dander up. Arguing with him is like eating charcoal briquettes: stupid, pointless, and ultimately quite painful.

“Fletcher and I were talking about being fathers,” he says to break the silence. “How hard can it be, you know? The butcher’s a father. The plumber. Mailmen.”