The fight of her life

 

February 12, 2000.

Going Down Swinging by Billie Livingston

Random House Canada

326 pages. $29.95

 

Reviewed by

GALE ZOE GARNETT

 

Single mothers. Substance addicts. Prostitutes. Street teenagers and preternaturally precocious seven-year-olds. Outside of front-line health-care professionals, most Canadians either don't know such people or disclaim them, turning away as quickly as possible, lest something "unwholesome", a social contagion, stain them - lest they be forced to acknowledge that the world as it is may be significantly at variance with the world as they would have it be.

 

In a powerful and disturbing debut, Vancouver-based author Billie Livingston fully embraces the daily lives behind the statistics.

 

The accurately titled Going Down Swinging is told in three voices: Eilleen Hoffman, her seven-year-old daughter Grace, and indirectly, Grace's teenage sister, Charlie. The "swinging" is there; in the clubfighter half-punchy refusal of Eilleen to stay down for the count; in little Grace's bright, gutsy determination to find the "happies" in each catastrophe; in the gut-level solidarity of a trio that is part nuclear family, part nuclear-bomb.

 

The trajectory of this family's life, in the early 1970s - pingponging from St. John to Toronto to Vancouver, pursued by their public-health records - is vertiginously downward. Eilleen's path takes her from hopeful young schoolteacher, through two really bad-news guys, to alcoholic pill-popping street hooker. Eilleen's "fall" is almost dizzyingly fast. It is also true, as any shelter-operator or food- bank worker will confirm, that the distance between stability and deep trouble can be startingly small. And that disbelief itself can hasten the fall ("This can't be happening - it's a setback". (Eilleen is both touching and infuriating as she disdains her family's working-class bigotries, yet maintaining, even as she turns risky low-end tricks in cars and laneways, a snobbism about "riff-raff" and modes of decorum.

 

The reader follows through most of this family journey through a child's voice, a child's eyes. A loved child - loved by her mother, her (almost love-proof) elder sister, and loved by Billie Livingston. The "Grace" segments are the richest, most detailed and the best written. ("Mum was all perked up from getting well at the hospital... she bought me all the happies she could afford: A package of new plastic animals;- Safari ones, pink nail polish, new jacks, Silly Putty ... We were both kind of goofy about being just-us again, but I couldn't help watching her; something about her felt like a big nervous laugh. She finally told me on my fourth day home, like it was just by the way, that the welfare was nosing around still... I didn't want anything to spoil her mood, spoil the feeling that I was the only happy she needed - her forever shiny doodad.") Grace, the seven-year-old defender of the faith that is family, goes straight to the heart.

 

Livingston also understands the little-kid love of shiny, colourful things. Things that adults see as tarty, as gaudy. The setting of Going Down Swinging predates the Spice Girls, but Livingston knows that female children reaching for that stuff with hot little pre-sex hands is not the end of the world, or anti-feminist. For many little girls, Bright and Shiny is a hope-form, a dream-form; always was, always will be.

 

Livingston is also a poet, and every once in a while, the usually wonderful Grace voice sounds off-key, sacrificed to the imagery impulses that seem more to the author's than Grace's (" Us being together again snapped her like sheets on a clothesline.") When the need to make metaphoric images stands between Grace and the reader, one waits for the remarkable kid to return. Fortunately, she always does.

 

While Grace still has her dreams and her choices still open, the 15 year-old Charlie is the kid that got away. The one Eilleen and life let slip. For Charlie, who is street tough, pregnant, savagely beaten by the father of her child, the prognosis is dark. One senses that Eilleen knows this, and through all her brave forward surges and slippery backsliding, her determination not to lose Grace powers this book to its satisfying ending. Things are still shaky, but survival of both mother and daughter is possible.