Murgatroyd Monaghan

Island Girl

1998

There is the sound of a swing. Damp sand sits crystallized curiously against my teeth. An upturned garbage can leaks its contents over my skin. I wonder why I cannot smell it. I notice the smell, but I cannot smell. Just as I cannot taste the sand in my mouth or hear the swing that is creaking above me. The sensation should scare me, but it doesn’t. Nothing scares me. I feel nothing. My favourite rainbow crop top is flipped up to my shoulders from when they grabbed it, I know it is, but my hands are not mine to move. I am floating somewhere off in the distance. My breath is catching from the stomping on my back. I see red blood on my hands. I send my brain around to feel for any pain that might be responsible for the blood, but it finds nothing.
Someone’s feet have righted me and carried me across the playground. The feet are at the ends of my legs, I can see this, but they are not connected to my nervous system. All of my thoughts seem brought in by satellite, or maybe by freighter or helicopter, the way they bring things in back home. The most important incoming thought is the need to rediscover reality and place myself back there. Palms press into eyes, nails scratch thighs, teeth bite tongue. Sand. There is the taste of sand. Spit. Good. Keep going. The body is the mainland, but I am far away.
Six birds perch on a wire above me. Eight now. Twenty-seven leaves lie on the ground beneath this bench. The bench is brown, browner than me. I am sitting on it. My feet swing. They swing sixty-five times. Hands pinch body parts. Sounds are louder now. I remember I know how to check the time. It is five-thirty. Dammit. I have to go.
I practise what I will say.
“I fell off the swing. Stupid mistake, really. I’m fine, I’m fine. What’s for supper?”
That sounds good.
My mother wouldn’t want to know the truth. She wouldn’t want to know that I am not adjusting to life in Canada at all, and that I’d rather do anything than leave my apartment and face other kids. Everyone loves a success story. No one wants to know the truth: the bullies make me hate myself. I definitely don’t want my mother to know that it’s her fault. She has enough of her own troubles.
I sling my backpack over my shoulder and begin my short walk to the bus.
My mind has begun to detach from my body a lot more readily, lately. This is a skill I have learned to master just like the other skills I have learned to master since arriving here. This is how I cope with the memories, the insults, the constant fear. I have become, not a Canadian girl, but an aspiring chameleon, a people-pleasing actor—a lie.
The world around me is real enough now. Walking helps. My mouth tastes the sin of its difference as I force it to form English words the way the other kids do, without my foreign accent; without the familiar vocabulary that makes the world make sense for me. I need to be normal and I don’t feel normal. I practise with song lyrics: “All I can say is that my life is pretty plain. I like watching the puddles gather rain,” I mouth. I don’t, though. I hate puddles. I can learn to like them, I guess. That band is Blind Melon. Another popular one is Smashing Pumpkins. I wonder why people here garner so much satisfaction from damaged produce. No matter. I can learn to like that, too.

2002

My mother takes me home on the TTC on Tuesdays. She can’t find a job, so she’s home all the time. Back on the island, my mother was the charge nurse on a burns unit. My grandmother and grandfather were born and raised in India, where my grandfather founded a hospital that still bears our family name. I come from a long line of medical professionals. Here, though, my mother can’t even get an overnight cleaning gig. We live in an overcrowded, derelict housing project that smells like pot and piss. My mother drinks and yells at my new father a lot. They blame “the system” for everything. I think Mum’s problems are her own fault. She doesn’t even try to fit in.
I am reading The Princess Bride as we sit together on the 39 Finch East. I am not so much reading as pretending to scan the pages while I actually use all of my senses to scan the environment around me for potential threats. I know as much as it is possible to know about every stranger within a fifty-metre radius of me, while at the same time, I go to great lengths to avoid potential interactions with them. There is a good reason for this. Speaking in front of kids is asking for trouble. But the adults are worse. Every adult’s response is inevitable:
Hello.
So cute. Where are you from?
Where is the bathroom?
Oh, where are you from?
Excuse me please, I’d like to get by.
Ha, where’s that accent from?
One day it’ll be, HELP, I’M HAVING A HEART ATTACK!
Aww, omggg, where do you come from?
If I have to hear that question one more time, I think I’ll scream. Anyway, it won’t be like this much longer. I’m starting a new school in September for the seventh grade, and I’ve been perfecting my Canadian accent. I’ve also been straightening my hair and using a different name. I almost look white, and I almost sound normal. The plan is for no one at the new school to ever know I’m different.
The biggest flaw in my plan is my mother. She is on a mission to humiliate me. As she begins to yap genially with a man across from us, I tense. I see the question forming on his face. I knew it. Right there. Here it comes. And I don’t want to hear it. Placing my hand on my mother’s knee and looking at the man, I say clearly and perfectly: “Please forgive her. My mother has a speech impediment.” The man smiles awkwardly and stops talking. I go back to my reading. My mother takes the high road and waits until we are alone to whack me upside the head.
“Oww!”
“Don’ be owwin’ me, ye daft shite scunner or ah’ll gie ye summit ter greet aboot. Da leik o’ dat. Ahm at doon-drappin wi’ ye. Tank d’Lurd Jaisus ye’v naught but a skelpit lug, noo.”
“Mum.” I rub my head. “People don’t hit their children here.” I duck as the next blows come rounding, but it doesn’t matter. She never misses.
“Och, raileh? Well, mebbe the bairns here are less cunty, leik.”
I look around me in horror. “See what I mean?! Mum, you can’t say that word here, it’s really bad! Just stop, okay?”
“Stop wot noo, Murga? Bidin’?” Mum has gone from mad to sad mad. I hate that. I don’t know the right Canadian words to say. My tongue floats, just like the island it left. I hear the waves of my swallow. I feel the salt in my eyes. I feel the muir under my feet and feel the mist on my skin, and then, just as I start to feel at home again, I know it isn’t real. Nothing ever feels real.
I feel sad-mad, too. The world is disappearing again. There is cotton in my ears, and my surroundings are both too blurry and too crisp. When I answer, it’s with a new voice. Murgatroyd Mk II has risen from the playground sand and become someone that neither Mum nor I recognize. Someone who doesn’t get picked on or hurt, with straight hair and straight A’s; someone who can keep the real me safe. I know a secret Mum doesn’t: if you aren’t real, no one can hurt you. If she could just turn off reality and step out of herself like I can, she wouldn’t have to drink so much. I touch her cheek.
“No, Mum. We can bide here. We can live, like. I mean, we can live.” I don’t believe that, but I want her to think I do.
My newest backstory is one the kids at the new school will respect. I’ve practised it until it feels true. My real parents are in prison. They’re … bikers. This? This is just a foster parent. Yeah, she makes me call her “Mum.” But I’m tough. I’m crazy. Don’t mess with me. My fantasy is my ticket to safety; to friends. It doesn’t feel wrong. What’s the difference between starting again in a new country and starting again with a new name? I exhale hard. Now seems like as good a time as any to tell my mother what I’ve been meaning to. “And I don’t go by that name anymore, Mum. Call me Hannah from now on, okay?”
Mum is silent. The silence is worse than her speaking. She just stares, like she’s watching a hurricane closing in from afar. She lifts my straightened hair and lets it drop like it’s dirty. Her breath is shaky. The hurricane is closer now. She pushes her sunglasses up her nose just as the tears form, and that’s when I know for sure that we’re both pretending.
“Feckin’ reet.” Her voice is quiet now, the eye of the storm. “Yare a reet braaly perskeet, du. Ah’ve a reet ter be here an’ so dae ye. Lay ye doon en yuir ain calf grund prood leik.” She puffs out her chest and smacks me again for good measure. I pretend it hurts, to make her happy. She smiles.

2004

The first time I cannot find my way back, I panic. I try teeth, nails, palms on my eyes. Nothing works. I am floating, floating. I never got lost on my island back home. How could I? Even if I tried to lose myself, the village midwife would find me when she went out on her bicycle, or perhaps the barmaid’s husband would click his teeth at me on his way home from the postmaster’s, or any of the mothers or grandmothers trading vats of soup or bites of gossip who walk around with their skirts hiked over their leather boots would come up to me and grab me by my ear to bring me home. Once, I walked out alone to the phone box on the outskirts of town, and when I returned, my mother scolded me in our unique dialect of Gujerati-Scots for skipping stones at the glass even though I was sure no one had seen me. But here in my head there is nothing, not even wind, not even stones, not even a phone box two miles away.
I begin to cut myself before I know what I am doing. When the air touches the pink globs of fat poking through the opening in my forearm, the sting begins like seawater in the wound and the shoreline comes into sight again. I breathe because I am home. I bandage my arm and wear only long sleeves, even in summer. It takes my mother a year to find the red lines criss-crossing my skin like a highway map to nowhere. It takes her another year to speak to me without hatred because of the shame I bring on our family. I spend less time at home and more with the neighbourhood kids, who fear my scars and follow me as if I can take them to a place where they don’t feel pain until it pushes its way out of their flesh, either. My mother stumbles from drink and shouts that I am not her daughter. There are dozens of Gujerati-Scots words for crazy and I know them all.
We don’t have a word for lost that doesn’t also mean broken.

2006

Clouds are closing in overhead. Bring in the boat, I think, but it is an old thought. There are no boats here for us to make our living. Here, I survive with my fists. I roll up my sleeves. The girl my friends are dragging across the parking lot to me is crying, but I don’t care. These bitches all cry. Not me—I haven’t cried in years. “What’d this one do?” I say, looking into the tear-streaked face. Some of them steal boyfriends, tattle, or run their mouths. This one looks pretty clean.
“New girl. She don’t speak no English, even. We brought her to you for initiation. Curb her bitch ass.” Fight, fight, fight. The familiar chanting begins, and I realize I am floating away.
It is like looking into an enchanted mirror. My ears and eyes keep losing the present and I see blood on my hands. C’mon, hit her, what are you waiting for? But I taste playground sand in my empty mouth and hear the sound of the swing, the swing, the swing. I can’t hurt myself here, and the creaking is so loud it envelops me. You stoned or what? Fuckin’ knock her out. I finally smell the garbage. It took years, but it all comes back now. “You hit me first,” I whisper to the girl, faking a shrug, trying to keep my cool. “It’ll be better for you.” The girl just cries hysterically and keeps shaking her head. Please, please.
There is so much fear between us I could cut it with a knife. But I have no knife, not to cut the fear in the air or the fear out of my own skin, and the girls who know Hannah surround me, hungry for blood. I know only one way to find my way home from here: I leave reality, go to a place where I have no feelings or sensations at all, and I punch the girl in her face as hard as I can.
The kids cheer. Everyone disperses.
She is vomiting. Or maybe it’s me. I might be vomiting. I don’t know. I can’t feel anything. Feet are running, and they’re mine. I am an island surrounded by wind, water. The water undoes the job of the straightener; reveals my curls. Nothing touches me. Everything is touching me. The feet take me to my apartment door. I am wet and screaming. “Open the door, Mum. It’s me, Murgatroyd. It’s Murgatroyd. It’s me.” The door is open now, but I am still sobbing and banging the doorframe. “It’s me, Mum, it’s me, it’s me, let me in.”
My mother squeezes me softly and strokes my half-curly hair. She is mostly sober, and for the first time I notice the hand marks on her neck and shoulder, the thick makeup over her left cheekbone. “Ah know who ye are, ye stchupid bloody fecking chakotra. Ah know.”