Daydreams of Angels

It costs us a fortune to ride the subway all at once.

In the tiny courtroom, the landlord makes a lot of accusations against us once again. My brother Sparrow tied a toddler to a telephone pole. Robin peed in a squirt gun and fired it at the janitor. Jay scratched his initials into the window of the front door of the lobby. My dad stole everyone’s shampoo samples from their mailboxes. I hung some dolls by their neck from the jungle gym in the courtyard. We all look at one another. What the hell is so wrong with hanging dolls?

The landlord says that we stole a wheelchair from the basement. We thought it had been abandoned. We hadn’t even really needed it. It was only for my dad’s convenience. If we had known it was stealing we wouldn’t have taken it.

Things do not look good for us after the trial. We know that they probably have us with the theft of a wheelchair. But there is nothing for us to do but wait for the results of the judge’s decision to come in the mail in two weeks.

That night I know I am going to have trouble sleeping because of what happened. But I really can’t sleep because the boiler is bubbling and burping all night long. Like it had a huge meal and now has indigestion.

My dad says that we should all go to the amusement park, to get our minds off things.

What a clamour all those cans make coming up the stairs of the subway! We’re like wasps coming out of a nest that has unfortunately been disturbed. The cans say that we have arrived.

The park is more amazing than I could have ever imagined. There are airbrushed waves on the sides of the little ships, and statues of mermaids on the back of them. There are dragons that you can climb into. There are swings that swing out from a giant post that has paintings of shepherdesses laughing on them. There is this strange imaginary hand that pushes your swing.

We ride all the rides and we make sure to scream louder than any other family in the park. I love the bumper cars the most. What would it be like to steer the bumper car out of the way so that no one could hit you, and then to drive it right out of the park? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to ride the bumper car right down the highway and forever?

We are too afraid of the haunted house. There are papier mâché witches hanging out of the windows, and a giant snake coming out of the chimney that keeps exhaling smoke. And you can hear children screaming inside, all terrified, but they come out laughing with tears in their eyes. What is nice about the amusement park is that it makes it okay to be afraid all the time.

Robin and I sit in the Ferris wheel cage together. We rock back and forth. And then we start to slowly climb up and up. I can hear my other brothers screaming in their cage. Saying things like “Oh no, oh no, oh no!” I can hear my parents laughing in their cage.

All the bright lights from every ride at the amusement park are all around me: orange and red and yellow and green and blue, as if we are in a meteor shower. And as I look out onto the city, all the little street lights are like strings of pearls. All the windows are lit up. We are right in the heart of the Milky Way.

We cry on the way home from the amusement park because it has been such a fun day and we are sad that it is over. We know that we might never get to go again. Not as kids anyways. And when we are old enough to finally afford tickets, the magic will be all gone.

Now it is night and the boiler is making a kicking sound. It sounds like there is someone trapped inside it. They have pretty much given up and reconciled themselves to their fate, but every now and then they give a violent kick to the side of it with their boot.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you most of all to Jennifer Lambert.

Thanks to the great team at HarperCollins Canada: Cory Beatty, Kelsey Marshall, Noelle Zitzer, Leo MacDonald, Iris Tupholme, Kaiti Vincent, Shannon Parsons, Suman Seewat, Stacey Cameron and everyone else.

Thanks to everyone at Quercus in the UK and, in particular, to the wonderful Rose Tomaszewska and Jon Riley.

Thanks to everyone at FSG in the US: Mitzi Angel, Will Wolfslau and Lottchen Shivers.

Thanks to Courtney Hodell.

Thanks to my agents and everyone at WME: Claudia Ballard, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh and Cathryn Summerhayes.

Some of these stories have previously appeared on CBC radio, This American Life, the National Post and Rookie magazine.

Research for this book included in part the following works: Julie Kavanagh’s Nureyev: The Life; Robert Gildea’s Marianne in Chains; Richard Vinen’s The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation; Susan Zuccotti’s The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews; Tom Douglas’s Canadian Spies: Tales of Espionage in Nazi-Occupied Europe During World War II; Mark Zuehlke’s Juno Beach: Canada’s D-Day Victory; and Angelo Jo Latham’s Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s.

Thanks to the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for a writing grant for this book.

Always thank you to Paul Tough.

And a special shout-out to my favourite human being: Arizona O’Neill.

About the Author

HEATHER O’NEILL is the author of The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, which was a finalist for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her first novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. It was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Orange Prize. O’Neill is a regular contributor to CBC Books, CBC Radio, This American Life, The New York Times Magazine, The Gazette, The Walrus and The Globe and Mail. She was born in Montreal, where she currently lives.

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