Belinda's Rings (13 page)

She'd given up on trying to read. The train had already made four long stops. At this rate, she wouldn't be arriving in Salisbury until noon. But on the positive side, she'd been enjoying the time alone with her thoughts. As the train wove through the green countryside, Belinda saw herself surveying the scenery the way an archaeologist might — as a theatrical stage set against the curtain of history. The stage was only the magical surface of things; what happened behind the velvet folds of the curtain was unsensationalized reality. How many unknown stories remained embedded in those hills of chalk, infused in the splaying branches of ancient trees, waiting to be uncovered?

Stories of crop circles had been a part of recorded history as far back as 1678. An English woodcut pamphlet from that year, entitled ‘The Mowing Devil,' told of a miserly farmer from Hertfordshire who refused to pay a labourer the demanded price to mow his field. The farmer told the labourer he'd rather the devil mow his field than pay the sum, and his imprudent wish evidently came true. That evening, the grain blazed as though it had caught fire, but by the next morning a perfectly mown circle had miraculously appeared in the field. The circle was too perfect, the article pointed out, for a human to have made it. A primitive ink illustration pictured a man with the legs and horns of a goat swinging a scythe to flatten the grains. Two rings encircled him, the mown stalks rendered as sharp diagonal lines leaning against each other like fallen dominoes. Leaf-shaped flames danced recklessly around the rings.

Belinda understood how it would have been easier back then to attribute the miracle to the devil. It seemed too destructive and self-indulgent to be an act of God, and any notion of supernatural forces beyond good and evil had yet to be imagined. In a way, there was something almost sinister about perfect concentric circles, the centres of which could only be pinpointed from the sky. A mark of doom, a bull's-eye.

In fact, the first time she came across ‘The Mowing Devil' while reading library books in bed, the illustration sent chills down the back of her neck. It reminded her of Egyptian hieroglyphic drawings, eerier than realistic drawings because they stripped everything to the bare bones and forced your imagination to conjure the details. The white, unblinking eye of the devil seemed wise and all-knowing in its simplicity. She showed the illustration to Wiley, but he only groaned and rolled over.

But isn't it fascinating? she said.

Everything
is fascinating to you, Wiley said into his pillow. He flipped over. When are you gonna finish doing all that research? he asked.

Finish? Belinda said, almost laughing. This isn't some sort of temporary hobby, she said. What if I asked you when you were going to
finish
playing piano?

That's different, Wiley said. That's part of my job.

Well, Belinda said, you can think of this as my job. It's what I'm passionate about, after all.

Too bad you can't make any money off of it, Wiley said.

Right, Belinda said. Because you make piles of money as a piano teacher.

Wiley's lips tightened. Go to sleep, he said, reaching over her and switching off her bedside lamp. Belinda sat still for a moment, her book still open on her lap.

I'm going then, she said, climbing out of bed. I'll read in the living room. She gathered her stack of books and put on her slippers.

You're living in books, he said to the darkness as she left the room. They're like stories. It's not real life.

It was true, in a way. Belinda had never actually seen a crop circle. But by that time she had already decided she was going to make her way to England, where she would finally step foot inside her first crop circle. It would confirm everything she believed in. She promised herself that when the moment was upon her, she would remain acutely aware of every feeling running through her body. Many people who had experienced walking inside a crop circle, even some who had been adamant skeptics, admitted they had felt lightheaded and lethargic upon entering the area. Some even reported hearing high-pitched ringing sounds that seemed to drop out of the sky above. When cereologists took soil samples from underneath these circles, the tests detected high levels of magnetism. Belinda saw these as warning signs. Beneath the beautiful, swirling patterns lay a power beyond human control. It occurred to Belinda that uncovering the answers might even be dangerous. She'd read of animal corpses, porcupines and rabbits, recovered from several recent crop-circle sites. The corpses had been severely burnt, although there was no sign of fire anywhere in the field. One charred porcupine appeared to have been shrunk down to half its size like a cooked mushroom.

She knew it was a silly and hopelessly romantic thought, but Belinda felt sure that her first experience walking into a crop circle was going to be life-altering. And now, with every turn of its wheels, the train brought Belinda closer to fulfilling her connection to the phenomenon. In Salisbury, she would meet Dr. Longfellow and join his team of researchers. She felt like a child on a rollercoaster, knowing the big drop was imminent but still breathless with uncertainty.

8
Perfect Circles

SOMEWHERE INSIDE JESS, THERE
is a Supermum trying desperately to break free. Mum never liked to bake chocolate chip cookies or banana bread like other mothers,
It's so messy, As if
I have time for that,
so Jess took it upon herself to wash the dust off the rolling pin and put on the floral print apron. The first time she made cookies she got flour all up her sleeves, so when she took a break to go to the bathroom she left a skiff of fine white powder trailing behind her. The cookies turned out okay — they were a little too crunchy — but we pretended they were delicious. Squid was too young to know how to pretend to like them, or even to understand why he should try to pretend. He told her they tasted like dry Ichiban noodles, but at that time everything tasted like Ichiban to him 'cause that's all he was eating. Jess really took it to heart though. You could tell because she got all quiet and then reread the recipe in Mum's
Best of Bridge
book a zillion times over.

The problem is that Squid just doesn't have a sweet tooth like most kids. For some reason Jess didn't figure that out for a long time. She got on this crazy baking kick, and kept trying to make Squid be her Oompa-Loompa. I think she thought that if Squid had a hand in actually making the treats, he'd get all revved up for eating them.

Wanna stir the brownie batter? she'd ask him, and Squid would reply, Um, I'd rather not. Squid figured out early on that he could get away with a lot if he spoke like a grown-up, so he was always saying things like I'd rather not. It made us all laugh and coo,
Isn't that precious,
and nobody would care that he wasn't doing what he was asked. So it went on like that for ages, Jess making cakes and tarts and crème de menthe pie and tiramisu and Squid saying he'd rather not help, and the rest of us feeling like we'd puke if we saw another peanut butter cookie but feeling bad when they sat on the counter for two weeks and went stale. But then one day Jess accidentally dribbled some melted butter across the cookbook page and the drip-spots turned see-through. When Squid saw that he decided he wanted to help, but then it was way more fun to draw with the butter than to stir it into the dough. Invisible drawing, he called it.

It's not hurting anybody, Mum said when Jess scowled at Squid's buttery fingers. Mum got him a pad of printer paper and oh boy, he went nuts. At first he was just dunking his fingers in the bowl of butter and making squiggles and dots on the paper, but eventually he started drawing circles. Circle after circle, and then he was getting careful, drawing separate circles and making sure he didn't overlap them. In the end he was dipping only his pointer finger in the butter and watching the tip touch the paper and slowly draw out each line. It was creepy, like being in the Twilight Zone watching six-year-old Squid concentrate on those circles. He drew one of the circles big enough to take up half the page, and he practically had his face on the paper he was concentrating so hard. Then he drew criss-crossing lines like a snowflake inside the circle.

Nice cookies, Squid, I said.

They're not cookies, he said, keeping his eyes on his paper. They're crop circles. That's why they've gotta be perfect.

Oh really? I said. But didn't you know that nobody, not even Picasso himself, can possibly draw a perfect circle?

Squid lifted his finger, looked up at me.

Not freehand, I said. It's impossible.

Mum gave me the not-so-fast eyebrows. That doesn't mean he can't try, she said.

Squid drew four more crop circles before Mum said he had to stop now, butter costs more money than crayons. She ended up putting Squid's drawings on the fridge. He hadn't bothered to tear the perforations between pages, so there was just one long trail of paper that Mum folded back up and pinned under a super-strength magnet. I thought maybe the butter would dry up and the paper would turn white again, but it stayed see-through and shiny, so you could see bits of the drawings underneath the top page, a few ghosted lines. For a while every time I looked at the fridge I thought of the oil-splotched takeout baggies filled with greasy samosas that Da likes to buy.

Squid's drawings didn't stop Jess's baking spree, though. Granted, her baking did get better. In my book, Jess is the reigning queen of pineapple upside-down cake. But it got to the point where I was thinking in desserts. One of her greatest successes was this ginormous triple-layer chocolate Oreo cake, and we got to eat our slices sitting in front of the TV because a
National Geographic
show on space nebulas was on and Mum didn't want to miss it. All that talk about the vastness of the universe got me feeling really philosophical. If life on earth were a chocolate Oreo cake, I thought, then human existence would be the thin layer of gross vanilla pudding in the middle. The best parts of the cake — the creamy icing on top and the Oreo crust on the bottom — are above and below us, and it's a mystery why we're sandwiched between all that spongy filler 'cause we don't taste like anything anyway. It's no wonder we think we're so great when we're stuck in the middle, so far from the deep oceans on one end and outer space on the other that we can't even fathom the kinds of things that live there. I thought Mum would totally agree with me when I told her this, but she just gave me the weird-eye and said I was very imaginative.

My friend Rose once tried to explain to me what purgatory was. She's supposed to be Catholic, but in grade seven Greg Pearson convinced her that the Virgin Mary was actually a prostitute and now she says it's all a load of hooey. Even if she did believe in it, she always skips Sunday school and tells lies in confession, which I'm pretty sure makes her a sinner in the Pope's eyes.

Purgatory is like this place between heaven and earth, she said, and nothing is really good or bad. It's just kind of — blah.

But earth is pretty blah too, I said. So what's the difference?

Well it's better than earth, she said. It's where you go before you can get into heaven. I think you have to get whipped and burned and stuff.

That sounds worse than earth to me, I said. Sounds like hell.

'Kay, forget it, Rose said. I think she could tell I knew she was just B.S.-ing it.

I asked Wiley about it when we were having dinner that night. This was before we found out about Mum's plan to go to England. Squid was over at the neighbours' house eating hot dogs, which was good 'cause he would have gotten all scared hearing us talking about hell and dying. Wiley's parents are Catholic and whenever we went to their house they had to drape a tea towel over their painting of Jesus on the cross so that Squid wouldn't start crying. The first time Wiley explained to him that Jesus was hanging up there by nails hammered through his hands, Squid put on his mittens and refused to take them off. He told us it hurt to look at his hands, and when Mum made him take the mittens off to eat dinner, he kept holding them in fists and tucking the fists under his armpits.

Anyway, I thought Wiley would know about Catholic stuff from his parents, but he was in one of his hyper moods that day, which meant nobody could get a straight answer out of him about anything. Mum asked him how his lessons went and he blabbed on for fifteen minutes about how he was going to create the next piano prodigy.

I can feel it, he kept saying. This Raymond kid, he blows my mind! I swear to God, under my instruction, he's going to be playing with the Philharmonic by age thirteen. Mark my words!

Mum listened while she prepared dinner, told him she was glad it was going well, but the whole time she had this slight smile, lingering just beneath her plain-faced surface. After Wiley finished his rant he kept pacing around the kitchen like he was juiced up on Pixy Stix, opening the oven every few minutes to check on the potatoes as if they were about to explode. At one point Mum had to take him by the shoulders and say, Re
lax
— you're so intense! His whole face dropped into a scowl in one snap motion.

I told you not to call me that, he said. For FUCK'S sake, can't a guy be hungry?

We all froze, stared at him. The sound of sizzling ham filled the silence.

Sorry, sorry, Wiley said, holding his hands up in the air. Just forget I said that, okay?

Jess gave me a scared look, but I pretended not to see it. I just helped Mum take the dishes of ham and peas and potatoes out to the table. Her face was red, but she wasn't saying anything. She wouldn't even look at me or Jess until we'd all sat down at the table and started eating. Wiley bit into a piece of ham and said it was succulent, and that made everyone breathe a big sigh of relief. I felt like someone needed to start a conversation then, so that's when I brought up the subject of purgatory.

So, I said, Rose and I were talking today about purgatory.