The View From a Kite

By Maureen Hull

An “ambitious and well-written” novel of a teenage girl who struggles to overcome medical and family challenges on Cape Breton Island during the 1970s (Quill & Quire).

I must admit that when I first started losing weight I was pleased. I dropped from a pudgy hundred and twenty-five down to one-eighteen in a month, and kept on going. One hundred and five, and my breasts disappeared. By the time they hauled me off to the Sanatorium, a feverish, weepy, ninety-pound weakling, I was out of love with elegant bones and scared that I was coming out through my skin.

A teenager in the 1970s, Gwen is stuck in a tuberculosis sanatorium with only her journal and the occasional illicit cigarette to keep her sane. Her twisted sense of humor helps her deal with invasive medical procedures, oversensitive friends, and dictatorial nurses, but nothing can spring her from prison.

Not that life outside would be much better. Gwen is haunted by the dark and violent turn her life took just before she got sick. Her family has been shattered, and Gwen is fighting hard—

with all the stubbornness and humor she can muster—not to be shattered too.

“Expansive, deep and nourishing.” —The Globe and Mail

“Beautifully written prose, humorous events, and a character who grows to appreciate the gift of being alive.” —School Library Journal

“Compelling.” —Booklist

“A challenging novel . . . an appealing and admirable character dealing with enormous challenges, yet never losing her sense of humor or her determination to overcome the difficulties and make her life matter.” —CM Magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 15, 2006
• ISBN: 9781551098166

Book preview

THE VIEW

FROM A KITE

Maureen Hull

978-1-55109-816-6_0001_001

Copyright © 2006 Maureen Hull

E-book © 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, permission from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.

Vagrant Press is an imprint of

Nimbus Publishing Limited

PO Box 9166

Halifax, NS       B3K 5M8

[phone]

Printed and bound in Canada

Interior design: Mauve Pagé

Front cover: Heather Bryan

Author photo: Cathy McKelvey

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

         Hull, Maureen, 1949-

         The view from a kite / Maureen Hull.

         ISBN 1-55109-591-2

         E-book ISBN 978-1-55109-816-6

I.Title.

PS8565.U542V53 2006       C813’.54       C2006-904645-X

978-1-55109-816-6_0002_002

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Canada Council, and of the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage for our publishing activities.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

PART TWO

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

PART THREE

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

PART FOUR

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

PART FIVE

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

PART SIX

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

CHAPTER 61

CHAPTER 62

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to: the Canada Council for the Arts for crucial support during the early days of this project; the late Pierre Berton, who so kindly invited me to apply for a residency at Berton House; the Berton House Committee and the many, many wonderful people in Dawson City who made my stay there such a happy and productive experience; dearest Jane Buss, of the WFNS, for unlimited help, encouragement, astute advice, and life-sustaining hugs; Sandra McIntyre, Penelope Jackson and everyone at Nimbus/Vagrant for their enthusiasm, energy, expertise, and for keeping me informed, reassured, and connected; Amy and Moira Harding, the best daughters and friends in the world, and David Harding, my beloved husband, co-adventurer and indispensable computer wizard.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

I am a Dangerous Woman in a Dangerous Dress.

The gym is foggy with chiffon: rose, peach, aqua, and mint, with dyed-to-match pumps spiked to the bottom, strings of pearls looped around the top—a pastel smear of background for the scarlet shout that is me. Gwen. My dress is a lick of silk, the molten edge of a suicidal sun. I move through the crowd like a reckless kiss, a flash of crystal at my stiletto heels, nails enamelled in heart’s blood.

His hair is too long, dark curls thrown into confusion by the knife edge of his collar. He draws frowns but no direct criticism because he just doesn’t give a damn and can’t be made to. He pulls me into his arms, the band blasts me up off the bed, trumpets and trombones in a frenzy, a dozen big booming drums, some crazed person hammering the bells off her tambourine. I cling to the edge of the metal frame, tangled in the sheets, hyperventilating, what is that tune? Sweet Jesus, it is not, yes it is. Onward Christian Soldiers.

I see them through the half-open door, the Salvation Army Band, all dressed up in black wool, red collars, and shiny brass instruments. The leader winks at me as he whips the ensemble into a straight and narrow line, aims them at the crashing, metallic finale. Then, with the barest pause for breath, they fling themselves Into the Garden Alone.

I fall back onto the bed and stare at the ceiling. Check my pulse. One hundred and thirty, roaring and frothing though my veins and arteries. Check my watch—9:30, still the same damn Sunday morning. I have napped for less than half an hour.

Mary did this. She planted them at my door.

But when Mary staggers into my room a few minutes later, she looks as stunned as I feel. Her hair isn’t combed; it is a rat’s nest. Mary doesn’t go for a pee in the middle of the night without first combing her hair. She boots the door shut with her bum, crawls up on the bed, kicks her slippers off the edge, and reaches past me to the bedside cabinet where I stash a quantity of medicinal chocolate.

You’ll catch shit for closing the door. And you’ve just insulted a bunch of well-meaning Christians.

Well-meaning Christians don’t make that kind of a racket in a ward full of sick people, she says, stabbing the creams with one sharp nail, looking for caramel centres. They could have given old Mrs. Cyr a heart attack.

She’s too deaf to hear them.

Vibrations. She’d feel the vibrations and think it’s the end of the world.

She’s ninety-seven. The end of her world’s not that far off.

Nice talk on a Sunday. Got any smokes?

In the bedpan.

We gather chocolates, cigarettes, and matches, climb up on the broad window ledge and hang out the open window to blow the smoke away. The centre block and the west wing of the Sanatorium angle away from us. A few plots of purple crocuses, ringed with painted white beach stones, rise from the mud and straw of the lawn. Dirty scuts of April snow shrink and slowly spin off down the ditches on either side of the long drive that leads to the main gate.

Did you hear Joe come in at three this morning?

I heard him offer to marry The Witch. She was some wild. Lectured him for almost half an hour and made more noise than he did.

The first time I met Joe he scared me shitless. This guy, maybe forty, walked into my room, sat down on my visitor’s chair and smiled. He smiled and smiled and smiled. He wore pyjamas and slippers and a ratty plaid robe so I knew he was a patient from the men’s ward upstairs and he wasn’t supposed to be in my room. He wasn’t supposed to be on our floor at all. He didn’t say a word, just sat and smiled.

Hello, I said. Nothing. Can I help you? I said, louder. Still nothing. I began to get very nervous, but he didn’t make any move to grab me. There was no one in the halls: no nosy patients, nosier visitors, nosiest of all, nurses. After five minutes or so I concluded the guy was simple, and possibly dangerous if I didn’t come up with whatever social interaction he was expecting. You never know what people will do when their expectations aren’t met. I slid along the wall, excused myself, backed out the door and scuttled for Mary’s room.

The weirdest man is in my room. He won’t quit smiling.

Well we can’t have that. Call the cops.

No, I’m serious. I mean, it’s really creepy. He’s really creepy.

She yawned and put down her True Confessions.

What does he look like?

Creepy. Deranged. I think he’s from Ward C.

Mary went off down the hall, came back and said, It’s only Joe Paul. He wouldn’t hurt a flea. He’s in Sister’s room now, smiling at her with his jaws hooked back like a couple of curtain swags. She’s frantic, assaulting her buzzer in an attempt to get Fat Lily off her overstuffed polyester ass to come and rescue her.

Why doesn’t he say something? What’s he smiling at?

He didn’t say.

Fifteen minutes later, when I tiptoed back towards my room, he was in cranky old Mrs. Cyr’s room, smiling, smiling. She was tickled to have someone to yell to about the crooks and liars who run the government and steal all our tax dollars. Joe just kept on smiling. I decided to keep on going and hide out in the second bathroom. My room’s next to Mrs. Cyr’s, I thought he might decide to visit me again. He might be harmless, but making conversation with him was heavy going, if not impossible, and I’m supposed to be an invalid, after all. I’m not supposed to strain myself. After ten minutes OFN (Our Favorite Nurse) flushed me out of cover.

You’re supposed to be confined to bed. Scoot before Mrs. Wharton finds you here and we both catch it. Mrs. Wharton: horse teeth, two black bands on her hat to show she’s the boss of us all. She’s the one we fondly call The Witch.

Not until you get rid of that crazy guy. The one that keeps smiling like he’s got an axe up his sleeve and means to use it.

Oh, for pity’s sake. Joe is harmless. He got his new teeth yesterday; he just came for a little visit to show them off. He’s so proud of them and not one of you told him how nice he looks.

I got used to Joe after a while. Every so often he gets bored and wanders down to the women’s ward to visit. It gives old Mrs. Cyr a chance to exercise her lungs and distracts Sister from her misery. I never know what to say to him so I just smile and he smiles back. By the time I’d worked up enough confidence to tell him how good his new teeth looked they were gone. He went to a dance in Coxheath and some idiot knocked them out and stepped on them.

At last the band marches off to Ward C. Mary runs my brush though her hair and goes back to her room to properly style her coiffure and paint on today’s version of her face. I can’t go back to sleep, I’m wide awake and bored. I have no good books left to read and it’s hours till I’ll have the pleasure of dissecting an inedible lunch. I dig my journal out from under the mattress and begin to write. In code.

I try to write at least one page a day. Writing in code takes time and patience so I’ve had to cut down on the rambling angst. Two weeks ago I woke up to find a student nurse flipping through my papers. Normally I’m very polite (meek and mealy-mouthed), that’s why I couldn’t close the door on the Sally Ann Band, but that day I had a screaming hissy. Told her to get the hell out, if she was so bored she had nothing better to do than go through other people’s private possessions she should go scrub out the toilets, a job well-suited to her brains and talent. Called her a stupid fucking bitch, or words to that effect. I don’t think I actually said fucking bitch out loud, but I certainly thought it. Then I cried for ten minutes. Then I felt guilty for saying such nasty things, but a little pleased at how articulate I managed to be in the midst of my rage, and on such short notice, too. I’m not sure which is worse, being so paranoid about my writing or being a slave to unnecessary guilt. I heard later from Mary, who is the Einstein of eavesdropping, that the student nurse got reamed for upsetting a patient.

Rest and relaxation are as important as the drugs you take. They say it over and over again. Worry interferes with the healing process. Our job is to look after you, and your job is to eat, rest, and remain calm.

Mr. Conrad, whose wife is in Kentville about to lose half a lung and whose kids are farmed out in two different boarding houses while he lies on his back upstairs, is so calm he heaved a jug of ice water at The Witch after she preached that little sermon at him one day when he was shredding his sheets and hyperventilating. I wonder if anyone lectured her on upsetting the patients.

Anyway, now I write in code. The discipline’s good, and it’s easier than shredding everything. I might want to use some of this stuff someday.

CHAPTER 2

I am temporarily in residence at the Cape Breton County Sanatorium. Two and a half months ago, before they stuck me in this place, I lived with my Aunt Edith on what remains of our half of the family farm on the Bras d’Or Lakes. Most of the farm was sold off to cottagers, who all wanted bits that touch the lake and were willing to pay through the nose for them. Edith has the original house on five acres on the lake and about sixty acres of woodlot running in back of all the cottages. Next door to her are Cousin George and Cousin Elizabeth, who live on and sort-of work the other half of the family farm. Would-be cottagers harass them constantly, mostly Europeans waving big cheques in their faces. George and Elizabeth look after Aunt Edith, who is sixty-seven and slowly losing her marbles. They are all of my family, except for a handful of second and third cousins who live in trailers, mostly on the mainland, and reproduce in a scandalously casual fashion. Before the farm, I lived in a house in Sydney that my maternal great-grandfather built with his father in 1884. Eventually it was left to my mother, and now it’s been bought by a lawyer who’s put his offices in the high-ceilinged downstairs rooms. Upstairs has been turned into an apartment that the lawyer rents out. To his mistress, according to rumour. I’ve driven by it on the way to see my mother, but after the first curious pass I stopped looking at it. I know it’s there; I don’t need to see it.

This place wasn’t originally built to be a tuberculosis sanatorium. Sanatoriums were mostly all built back in the twenties and thirties, up in the mountains or by an ocean somewhere, not buried in the backwoods. This place is too new, for one thing—new being a relative term. It’s not what you’d call a state-of-the-art facility, it’s falling apart around us, held together by paint as near as I can tell. World War Two vintage, thrown together in a hurry when the casualties started coming back, some of them in baskets, some of them wearing masks. The sight of them was too upsetting for the general public so they hid them here, in this barracks of a hospital, on a point of land jutting into Sydney Harbour. Trees on three sides and nothing around but PMQs for the army medical team and their families. Now the TB staff live in the PMQs; it’s cheap—an extra perk for the fact that they work in dangerous surroundings. That’s us. The In-valid. The Infectious. Hazardous Material.

They started moving in the overflow from the Princess Alexandra Sanatorium sometime around the late forties. There were no more new vets coming in, but a little upsurge in TB almost filled the place. Now it’s three-quarters empty, and those of us who end up here these days are a temporary and annoying glitch in the medical world’s triumphant march against the disease—at least in this privileged corner of the world. Elsewhere, it’s a different story. But here they’ve battled it into a corner with streptomycin, PAS, and the wonder drug, Ionizaid. They figure to close this place in three years—I’ll be long gone by then.

They refuse to tell me when I’m getting out. Six months? Eight months? A year? The doctors won’t commit, they just shake their heads and tell me not to think about it, to rest. The nurses aren’t allowed to guess, or at least they’re not allowed to tell you what they’re guessing. I just want them to give me a date, any date. Make one up. Lie. I need to be crossing off the days on my calendar; I need to be subtracting from a number—big or not, I don’t care. I don’t need to be adding: yesterday was day seventy-three, today is day seventy-four. Well, I’m a big girl, I can pick my own date. Say, six months. So: yesterday was day one hundred and thirteen, today is one hundred and twelve.

There are three wards, of the original six, still open at the San. C is the men’s ward. A is for the kids—a dismal place with whiny toddlers and the smell of disinfectant and diapers. Ward B, Home Sweet Home, is a big long barn with half a dozen rooms and two open dorms planted around a wide central hall. The bathrooms are all jammed down at one end—next to the nurse’s station so you can’t pee without them knowing about it—and at the opposite end are the big double laundry doors where Mary and I have pizza delivered when OFN is on duty.

After the war the hospital administration picked up truck-loads of surplus army paint for next to free, so all the halls are painted army-puke-green and will be well into the twenty-third century. There’s a room in the basement full of the stuff and, unfortunately, none of the staff is the least bit interested in pinching any of it. The single rooms are painted pastel mud: blue, yellow, something called buff that looks like barf, and occasionally the pink of obscure internal organs. All army surplus. The barf and blue and yellow, I suppose, could have been used in offices, but it is difficult to imagine the army painting anything pink. Perhaps they put it in the PMQs and forced distraught army wives to live there. You have to wonder about the suicide rate of those women.

There is a nun, Sister Mary Clare, in the last bedroom down the hall. She is allowed to keep her bedroom door closed. We’re not.

What is this paranoia about giving us a little privacy? I asked Mary once.

It’s like this, she said. One: in the beginning they think you might croak on them; two: when you start to get better you might bolt on them; and three: when your boyfriend comes to visit you might drag him into your bed and bring the moral tone of the place crashing down. Don’t eat the applesauce, it’s full of saltpetre.

What? Why?

To kill your sex drive. I think they got a deal on that from the Army surplus, too.

Sister—obviously trusted not to croak, bolt, or screw a boy-friend—is permitted to keep her door closed. She only comes out to babystep her way to the bathroom, clinging to a nurse. Her nightgowns come up to her ears and down to her toes and out to her fingertips. She wears a soft little white hat. She stares at the cracks in the tile floor.

She’s a bit depressed, said OFN. She was supposed to go to Africa to join a mission there, but she failed the medical. It was a terrible disappointment for her. Try to be friendly whenever you see her. She needs cheering up.

Black-veiled Sisters, wearing grey wool skirts and cardigans, white blouses, and massive crucifixes hung round their necks, and priests in the usual black-on-black and Leonard Cohen haircuts come to comfort her. Occasionally you can hear low moans coming from her room. But she keeps her door closed, always, and never looks any of us in the face. Makes being friendly quite a challenge.

Good morning, Sister, we chirp when we see her, and she sometimes makes a muffled little bleat into her collar in return.

Across from Sister was Louise, until last week. She was thirteen and she was from a reserve on the mainland. She didn’t look sick; she was plump and—until you heard the brutal, bladed cough she dragged up from the basement of her chest—you’d have thought she’d been misdiagnosed. Mary extracted most of her life story the first day she was here. Took her about ten minutes and most of my chocolate nut clusters.

"She says she’s only staying for a couple of months, until the weather warms up some. Then her parents are taking her to some island off the coast where she’ll be magically cured.

She says it only works for natives; it’s some special deal with the Virgin Mary. She says lots of her relatives have been cured there."

So why won’t it work for us?

Power of faith, baby. You got to believe.

I believe she’ll be back here next year hacking out the rest of her lungs.

After some thought, though, I reconsidered, and I tried— shamelessly—to cozy up to Louise to get a little more information. I was curious about this Lourdes of the Island, but she’d obviously run into too much skepticism because she clammed up on me. I’d ruined my chances with my narrow-minded attitude; a mistake, I’ve decided, I will not make the next time something like this comes along. There was quite a little scene when her grandparents walked in, packed up her stuff, and took her home. The doctor was furious, the nurses cluck-clucked and fussed. Seems Louise wasn’t testing positive anymore so they couldn’t send the cops to drag her back. Her local doctor had promised to see that she continued to take her pills.

We’ve had this problem before, a nurse’s aide confided.

Do they always end up back here? I wanted to know.

Well—not always.

So what, so they die?

Oh, no. Heavens, no!

Then sometimes they get cured, right?

Well, they were probably on the mend anyway. I don’t really know. I’m not a Catholic.

Neither am I, but I think there’s something here the medical profession should look into. Why should I spend another six or seven months of my life here when Louise is gone off to be cured? If what’s-his-name of Navarre could convert to get his hands on Paris, I could surely do it for an early release.

We don’t know she’ll be cured.

Louise does. Her family does. You should be researching this. I’m willing to volunteer right now.

No one took me seriously.

It was at that point that I started my research into cures for tuberculosis—other than the accepted-party-line cures, that is.

The guy who invented the saxophone, a Belgian by the name of—naturally—Sax, claimed that playing his invention strengthened the lungs and should be used to treat TB. His son, Sax Jr., wrote and published a booklet called The Gymnastic of the Lungs, Instrumental Music Considered from The Hygienic Point of View in 1865.

Where can I lay my hands on a saxophone? And do you have to have some innate musical ability? That could be a problem.

Next door, to my left, is cranky old Mrs. Cyr. She’s deaf and it drives her crazy not to know everything that is going on; to make herself feel better, she tries to drive everybody else crazy, too. She lassoes passersby into her room with her bullwhip of a voice, she yells out questions and then can’t hear the answers unless you yell back. She can’t read so you can’t even write things down for her.

WHO’S THAT BIG UGLY WOMAN IN THE BLUE HAT JUST WENT INTO SISTER’S ROOM?

"I DON’T