Robert McGill - Once We Had a Country

The room continues to fill, people entering loudly but growing quiet as they’re arrested by the images on the wall. They doff hats, stifle coughs, settle into seats. Rhea’s there in the front row with her boys, waiting for the ritual glimpse of their lost cat. George Ray is there too, his orange toque for once left behind, and she’s pleased that finally he’s watching something she has filmed.

Then Maggie sees the girl from next door, Lydia, standing by herself at the back. She seems bony and prepubescent in her slip of a dress. Dimitri can’t have invited her; he wouldn’t be so stupid. Is she here to cause trouble? Their eyes lock briefly, and Lydia’s expression reveals nothing. Maggie wonders if the girl knows that Dimitri’s wife and children are sitting a few feet from her. She seems less sure of herself than the other times Maggie has encountered her, slouching and straightening against the wall by turns, tugging her dress down over her knees.

Maggie considers confronting her, but then she notices the woman near the projector. Her features are so pale as to be ghostly; only a dark mole on her chin anchors her to the world. Something about her is familiar, and Maggie stares at her until she realizes who it is: the woman from the church. The priest’s sister, Lenka. Her beehive has been let down so that her hair flows over her shoulders, but it’s her.

The priest could be here too, then, maybe in this room. Wale must have invited him at the grocery store. When the reel comes to an end, Maggie sets to work changing it, conscious of her proximity to the woman. The beam from the projector cuts through the smoky air like a solid thing Maggie could reach out and touch.

“Margaret Dunne,” says a voice, the accent unmistakable. A jolt goes through her. How does Lenka know her name?

“Actually, it’s Maggie,” she replies without looking up.

“Maggie.” Lenka pronounces the name awkwardly but with a hint of enjoyment at its intimacy.

“Did your brother come too?” Maggie asks, and Lenka nods. “I didn’t think this would be his kind of scene.”

“Josef is here because he wants me to come,” says Lenka. “We are still new to country, and is quiet in rectory all day. Priest’s sister, she meet people easy, but is hard to make friends. You go to house for dinner and people are—what is expression?” Maggie shrugs, but Lenka finds it. “On best behaviour!” She lifts the wineglass in her hand, whether to toast her own vocabulary or the hospitality of local parishioners, it isn’t clear. With stern, drunken eyes she looks at Maggie. “Josef says you do not like talking of father. Fine, relax, I do not talk of him.” Maggie flicks the switch on the projector while Lenka takes a mouthful from her glass, then tips down the dregs. “Come to Mass, do not come. It doesn’t matter to me. But church is trustworthy, Maggie, in way you cannot trust people.” She pauses, frowning. “I do not speak properly for making friends. Pardon me, please. I drink too much tonight.”

Maggie says it’s all right and excuses herself, not knowing where she’s headed. The house has grown hot with bodies and makes her dizzy; for a moment, going down the stairs, she worries she’ll be sick. On the ground floor a current of cool air steals along the hall, carrying Fletcher’s voice from the porch as he holds forth about Sargent Shriver. Tonight she has no stomach for Sargent Shriver.

In the kitchen, she glimpses Wale just about to slip through the back door. When she calls out to him, people at the table look up, hearing the edge in her voice. He turns and she sees his beard is gone. She has always thought that men who shave their beards regain a measure of their youth, but Wale seems older than before.

“You invited the priest, didn’t you?” she says as she crosses the room, speaking loudly enough that conversation around the table halts. Wale doesn’t become defensive, though. Instead, he gazes at her with something like fondness.

“Maggie, where’s your camera?” He’s wild-eyed, but she doesn’t think he’s drunk; maybe some other drug. “My kingdom for a camera! United States of a Camera. Ha!” He begins to sing out of tune. “ O Camera, we stand on guard for thee …” Abruptly he breaks off and speaks in a stage whisper. “You should see the way you look now. The light on your face. Really lovely.” Without warning, he leans in as if to kiss her, and she ducks away. There’s a titter from someone at the table. “You know, I didn’t come up here for Brid,” he tells her.

“Don’t say that.”

“I wanted to spend time with you. You must have figured out that much.”

“You’re stoned.”

“You don’t even realize, you make me—” He hesitates, and she scrambles to say something so he’ll stop, but he gets there first. “You make me want to be better.”

“I don’t believe you.” She’s sure that all the eyes in the room are on them now.

“I swear, whatever kind of guy I am, I never meant for anything to happen, okay?”

The words create a feeling of vertigo in her. “What are you talking about? Have you heard something about my dad?”

“Just remember what I’m telling you. I promise you, I’m going to look after things.” Before she can respond, he steps out the door to the mud room, and she sees there’s a rucksack in his hand.

A few seconds later, a shriek comes from upstairs, followed by peals of laughter. Her first thought is that word is already spreading about his attempted kiss. Then someone calls down, “You’ve got to see this.” The people at the table start out of the room and Maggie finds herself abandoned, her mind still on Wale’s rucksack.

It isn’t long before more partygoers come in from the backyard to investigate the ruckus, and she’s swept along with them toward the second floor, trying to imagine what has happened. Maybe Lydia’s making a scene with Rhea. Or maybe Brid is watching the film and has viewed the dead bird in Pauline’s hand. Maggie’s legs grow heavy, but there are more bodies in motion behind her and she’s compelled upward.

Everyone is ascending the stairs except a lone pair making their way down. It’s Frank Dodd dragging Lydia by the hand. His bald head is beet red, his eyes angry slits, while Lydia’s skin is bloodless. Frank sees Maggie ahead of him and looks as if he might strike her.

“You people,” he seethes. “You people are sick.”

A second later they have passed by her and Lydia turns to flash her a helpless, desperate look.

Whatever has happened, it isn’t over, because upstairs the hallway is packed tightly with people pressing toward the playroom door, straining to look in. Maggie has to push past them to get inside. When she finally enters the room, everyone is staring at the wall and what’s projected there, and with horror she realizes why.

Beyond the backs of heads and wisps of smoke is a shot of her and Fletcher’s bedroom. The camera’s steady, as if mounted on its tripod. Sunlight pools on the floor, revealing a castaway pair of men’s underwear and a single brown sock. The comforter on the bed has been pulled down. Fletcher lies there on his back, not quite centred, his body sprawled across the sheets, naked, the light falling across him such that his ribs are individuated, countable. His legs are straight out, one foot hidden beneath a corner of the comforter, the other cut off by the frame. He faces the camera with a contented demeanour, head propped on a pillow, one arm flopped across the bed as though forgotten. With the other hand, he strokes his penis.

Fingertips run down the shaft, then squeeze and push up over the foreskin. Testicles hang one a little lower than the other, each disturbed by the hand’s motion, the skin that encloses them bright pink in contrast with the baked brown of the torso and the bleached thighs, the genitals so brightly coloured they’re almost not part of the body but an alien thing tugged at in a lazy effort to remove it. The fist works its way up and down. His hips lift from the bed to reveal the cleft of buttocks and a momentary wedge of darkness beneath them that collapses and vanishes as they compress upon the sheets. The camera’s focus is there at the root of him. His face is slightly blurred, subtleties of expression lost to the low resolution of the film stock, which registers only a kind of growing studiousness and flickers of pleasure that come and go with the flash of teeth. Maggie waits for a cutaway shot, a pan, a dissolve. Briefly a bird’s shadow flits through the square of light on the floor. The camera doesn’t flinch.