The Cat's Table

by Michael Ondaatje

  ‘The key, or I break his neck.’

  The other guard did not move and Niemeyer twisted the body and the guard was still, perhaps unconscious. There was a moan. But it was not from the man but from the deaf girl, his daughter, who came out from the shadows. Clouds were beginning to race past the moon, so there was more light reflected on the deck. The horizon had cleared. If the prisoner was hoping to make his escape in darkness, it was not going to happen.

  The girl came forward, bent over the stilled guard, and looked at her father and shook her head. Then she spoke to the other guard, in that difficult, unused voice. ‘Give him the key. For his feet. Please. He will kill him.’ The second guard bent towards Niemeyer with the key, and she and the prisoner did not move while the man struggled with the lock. Then Niemeyer rose, his eyes darting and looking over the railing into the distance. Until that moment he must have been conscious only of his given space, the extent of the tether, but now there was the possibility of escape. His legs were free. Only his hands were chained together, with the padlock in front of him. Then the night watchman came out, saw it all, and blew his whistle. And suddenly everything was in motion, the deck filling with sailors, other guards, and passengers. Niemeyer took hold of the girl and ran, looking for some exit. He stopped at the stern railing. We thought he might leap over, but he turned around and looked back. But no one came close to him. We crept out of our corner. There was no use in hiding, there was no use in not being able to see properly.

  For a moment everyone was poised there, with the lights of Naples, or was it Marseilles, in the far distance. Niemeyer moved forward with Asuntha, and as he did the crowd shifted back and a narrow path was created, the people not shouting but saying, as if complaining, ‘The girl! Release the girl! Let her go!’ But no one dared block the pathway and contain him in the crowd, this manacled barefoot man with his daughter. And in all that time the girl did not scream. Her face remained the one unemotional thing amid the rage that was building, just her two large eyes watching everything as Niemeyer loped through this tunnel he had been allowed. ‘Release the girl!’

  Then someone fired a pistol and lights went on everywhere, all over the deck, on the bridge above us, and in the windows of the dining room, and this unexpected abundant light spilled off the deck like liquid into the sea. We saw the ashen girl clearly. Someone yelled – it was precisely enunciated, ‘Do not give him the last key.’ And I heard Ramadhin near me say very quietly, ‘Give him the key.’ For all at once it was clear the prisoner was a danger to the girl, to everyone, without whatever key it was. If the girl’s face had no expression, the prisoner’s had a wild quality we had not witnessed during those nights when we had watched him walking the deck. Each time he moved, the narrow corridor widened to let him pass. He was contained in this limited freedom, with nowhere to go. Then he paused, held the girl’s face close to himself, in his large hands. And began to run again, dragging her through that tunnel of men. Suddenly he leapt onto the railing and hauled the girl up into his arms and stood there as if about to jump off the ship into the dark sea.

  A searchlight moved slowly onto the two figures.

  There was a growing wind we had been unaware of until now. I was holding on to Ramadhin, but Cassius had moved closer to Niemeyer and Asuntha, the girl he had always shown concern for, had wished to protect. A few feet in front of me I could see Emily. The voice that had warned everyone about the key had come from Mr Giggs, high above us on the bridge, surrounded by lights. And the pistol he had fired into the air was now aimed at the prisoner and the girl in his arms. He and the Captain beside him were shouting orders to the crew, and the ship shuddered and slowed. We could hear the wash against the hull. Nothing moved. There were only some distant lights marking a coast off the starboard side.

  During these moments, with the girl hoisted up into her father’s arms, I kept looking back to Mr Giggs on the bridge. It was clear everything that would happen now would be determined by him.

  ‘Get down!’ he yelled. But Niemeyer refused. He stayed as he was. He looked at the sea below him. The girl looked at nothing. Giggs kept the pistol pointed at the prisoner. There was a gunshot. And as if on a signal, the ship jerked and began moving forward again.

  I was turning back to look at Niemeyer, when I saw Emily. Her face was intently watching something on the far side of the deck. I swept my eyes over to that location, and just as I did, I saw Miss Lasqueti fling something out of her hands into the sea. If I had turned even a second later, if I had paused, I would not have seen this.

  Niemeyer was very still, as if waiting for the pain. The eighteen-inch chain that held his hands together hung down in front of him. Had the bullet missed him? He looked towards Giggs, who seemed to be clutching his arm. Had the gun misfired? Giggs’s pistol had hit the deck below the bridge and discharged a shot into the darkness. Nearly everyone was watching either Niemeyer and the girl or the bridge. But my eyes stayed with Miss Lasqueti and saw her quick recovery back to innocence, as if just one of the spectators, so that what I had seen felt like a hallucination. The gesture of an arm flinging something, some object, into the sea could have meant nothing. Except that Emily had been watching her too. It could have been one of her half-read books, or it could have been her pistol.

  Giggs was gripping his injured arm. And Niemeyer was balanced on the stern railing. Then the prisoner, never letting go of his embrace of the girl with his manacled hands, leapt into the sea.

  *

  EMILY’S EYES MUST have watched all that had taken place with an awareness of what was occurring. But afterwards she said nothing. In all the comings and goings after that leap to their deaths in the attempted escape, Emily said not a word. During the previous week I’d often witnessed her bend towards Asuntha to talk or to listen to her, and had seen my cousin again and again in the presence of Sunil. But whatever Emily’s role had been in that event, it was to exist unspoken, throughout most of our lives. Did I witness something else below the surface of what had happened that night? Was it all part of a boy’s fervent imagination? I swung around, looking for Cassius, and then went towards him, but my friend seemed quietened by what had happened and withdrew from me, as if I was a stranger.

  This journey was to be an innocent story within the small parameter of my youth, I once told someone. With just three or four children at its centre, on a voyage whose clear map and sure destination would suggest nothing to fear or unravel. For years I barely remembered it.

  The Breaker’s Yard

  I BOARDED THE Queen of Capilano at Horseshoe Bay at about a quarter to two, and, as the ferry left Vancouver, I climbed the stairs to the sun deck. I was in a parka and I let the wind beat the hell out of me as the boat rumbled into a blue landscape of estuaries and mountains. It was a small ferry with several rules of warning posted here and there to tell you what you could and could not do. There was even a sign disallowing clowns on the boat, apparently the result of some fracas a few months earlier. The ferry entered the channel, and I stayed up there being buffeted by the winds, looking towards Bowen Island. It was a brief trip. After twenty minutes we docked, and they began letting the foot passengers off. What would Emily be like now, I wondered. Now and then I had heard stories about her escapades, for she’d latched on to a wild group of friends in London while finishing her last two years of school. We had found ourselves moving in different worlds, and distant from each other. The last time we’d met was at her wedding to the man named Desmond, when I had got drunk at the reception and not stayed long.

  I recognised no one as I walked over the sliding metal ramp. She was not there to meet me. I waited as the cars drove off the ferry. Five minutes passed, and so I started up the road.

  There was a woman alone in the small park across the way. She shrugged herself off the tree she was leaning against. I recognised the walk, the gestures, as she came cautiously towards me. Emily smiled.

  ‘Come. The car’s over there. Welcome to my neck of the woods. I love that p
hrase. As if it were part of a body.’ She was trying not to be shy. But of course we both were, and we didn’t say anything as we walked to her car. I realised she had probably been watching me as I’d stood there on the dock and looked around for her, making sure I was what she might have been expecting.

  We drove off quickly, and after going through the town, she slowed the car onto the shoulder and turned off the ignition. She leaned over and kissed me.

  ‘Thank you for coming.’

  ‘One in the morning! You always call people at one in the morning?’

  ‘Always. No. I was trying to get you all day. I tried about ten hotels before I found where you were. Then you must have been out. I was afraid you might be leaving before we could meet up. Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes. Hungry. Surprised by all this.’

  ‘We can eat at home. I’ve got some lunch for us.’

  We went along the road and then veered onto a narrow lane towards the water. We were going downhill, and she turned onto an even narrower track called Wanless Road. It really didn’t deserve a name. There were four or five cottages overlooking the sea, and she snuggled the car beside one. It looked like a place of solitude, though the nearest neighbour was twenty yards away. Inside, the cottage felt even smaller, but its deck looked out onto water and infinity.

  Emily made sandwiches, opened up two beers, and pointed me towards the one armchair. Then she threw herself onto the sofa. And we began talking immediately, about our lives, her years with her husband in Central America, then South America. His nomadic career as an electronics expert meant their friends changed every few years. Then she had left him. She said the marriage had been a cautious one, and she had stepped out of it, recognising it was ‘too cold a building’ to live in for the rest of her life. It was some years since the break-up, so she could speak with easy authority about what had happened, sketching with her hands in the air above her the situations they had lived through, the landscapes they had lived in. It was as if my faraway connection to Emily made it possible for her to be open with me. So she drew her life for me, as she spoke. And then she was quiet, and we just watched each other.

  I remembered something about Emily at the time of her marriage. The wedding was, as they all seemed to be in those days, a culmination, a clarity of shared purpose. Desmond was good-looking and Emily a catch. There were few other considerations in those days for a successful marriage. Anyway, at some stage before I left the reception I happened to notice her. She was leaning against a door and looking at Desmond. There was a distance in her gaze, as if what she was doing now was something that had to be done. Then she had quickly slipped back into the spirit of the party. Who would recall those few seconds at the wedding? But that is what I’ve always thought of when I remembered her marriage – that it was an escape perhaps from disorder, just as in an earlier time she had escaped a tempestuous, uncertain father by being sent to school in another country. So there had been that look in her face. As if she was considering the worthiness of something she had bought or had just been given.

  And so I continued to watch Emily, this person who had been for a while some kind of despot of beauty in my youth. Though I knew her also as quiet and cautious, even if she sometimes gave off the air of an adventurer. But the stories of her married life, in their various postings, and the affairs of the heart that had occurred, seemed a familiar version of my cousin, as she had been on the Oronsay.

  Had she become the adult she was because of what had happened on that journey? I didn’t know. I would never know how much it had altered her. I simply thought it over to myself at that moment in Emily’s spare cottage on one of the Gulf Islands, where she appeared to be living alone, seeming to hide herself away.

  ‘Do you remember our time on the Oronsay, the ship we took?’ I finally asked.

  We had never spoken about the journey. I’d come to believe she’d buried or genuinely denied the existence of what had happened that night by the lifeboat. As far as I could tell, it seemed to have been for Emily just a three-week journey that led to a vivid life in England. It felt strange how little all of it appeared to mean to her.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she exclaimed, as if prodded and given a name she really ought to have remembered. Then she added, ‘You were, I recall, a real yakka, a real demon.’

  ‘I was just young,’ I said. She squinted at me thoughtfully. I could see she was beginning to approach her memory of it now, glimpsing a few incidents.

  ‘I remember you caused a lot of trouble. Flavia really had her hands full. God, Flavia Prins. I wonder if she is still alive …’

  ‘I believe she lives in Germany,’ I said.

  ‘Ahhh …’ She dragged it out. She was thinking deeper into herself.

  We stayed in her pine-walled living room till it became dark. Every now and then she turned to watch the ferries trail back and forth between Snug Cove and Horseshoe Bay. They would let free one long moan in mid-channel. By now they were the only lit objects moving in the blue-grey darkness. She said if she woke at six, she’d see the dawn ferry slide along the horizon. I realised this had become Emily’s world, the landscape of each of her days and evenings and nights.

  ‘Come. Let’s go for a walk,’ she said.

  And so we began to climb the steep incline of the road we had driven down hours earlier, walking over the scurrying leaves.

  ‘How did you end up here? You haven’t said. When did you come to Canada?’

  ‘About three years ago. When the marriage ended I came out here and bought this cottage.’

  ‘Did you ever think of contacting me?’

  ‘Oh Michael, your world … my world.’

  ‘Well, now we have met.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you live alone.’

  ‘You always were inquisitive. Yes, I see someone. What shall I say … he’s had a difficult life.’

  I recalled she always had known troubled, risky people. There had been a long arc to this aspect of her. I thought back to when she had arrived in England to become a boarder at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. I’d see her during the holidays, still part of the Sri Lankan community in London, some boyfriend hovering beside her. There was an air of anarchy about her new friends. And one weekend during her last year, she had slipped through the school gates, climbed onto the back of someone’s motorcycle, and roared off through the Gloucestershire landscape. In the accident she broke her arm, and as a result of the incident was expelled from the school. So she was then no longer a fully trusted part of that close-knit Asian community. She eventually got away from all that by marrying Desmond. It had been a quick wedding, he had been offered a post abroad, it was waiting for him, and they left soon after. Then, when her marriage finally ended, Emily decided for some sad reason on a sort of exile on this quiet island on the west coast of Canada.

  It seemed a not quite real life compared with what she and I probably imagined when we were young. I still had memories of us on bicycles being slammed by a monsoon rain, or Emily sitting cross-legged on a bed as she talked about that school in India, and her lean brown arms waving to me during one of our dances. I thought of those moments as I walked beside her now.

  ‘How long are you here, in the West?’

  ‘Just another day,’ I said. ‘I fly tomorrow.’

  ‘Where? Where to?’

  I was embarrassed. ‘To Honolulu, actually.’

  ‘Hon-o-lu-lu!’ She sounded it out wistfully.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No it’s okay. It’s okay. Thank you for coming, Michael.’

  I said, ‘You helped me once. Do you remember?’

  My cousin said nothing. Either she remembered that morning in her cabin or she did not. Either way she was silent, and I left it at that.

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ I asked, and she looked over at me with a smile that conceded this was not a life she had expected or chosen.

  ‘Nothing, Michael. You won’t make me understand all this. I don’t
think you can love me into safety.’

  We ducked under the cedar branches, returned down the wooden steps, and entered the cottage through the green door. We were both tired, but wanted to stay awake. We went onto her deck.

  ‘Without the ferries, I would be lost. There’d be no time at all …’

  She was quiet for a moment.

  ‘He died, you know.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My father.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I just need to tell someone who knew him … who knew what he was like. I was supposed to fly back for his funeral. But I don’t even belong there any more. I’m like you.’

  ‘We don’t belong anywhere, I guess.’

  ‘Do you remember him? At all?’

  ‘Yes. There was nothing you could do that was right. I remember his temper. But he loved you.’

  ‘I was scared all through my childhood. The last time I saw him was when I left as a teenager …’

  ‘I remember you told me your nightmares.’

  She began to turn away, as if she wished to think about it by herself now. She was turning but I did not want her to let go of the past. So I tried to talk again about our time on the ship, about what happened near the end of the voyage.

  ‘On the Oronsay, do you think you saw yourself in any way in that girl you got close to? The prisoner’s daughter. She too was caught up with her father’s life.’

  ‘It’s possible. But I think I just wanted to help her. You know.’

  ‘That night, when you were beside the lifeboat, with the undercover policeman – Perera – I overheard you. I heard what happened.’

  ‘You did? Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I did tell you. I came to you the next morning. You couldn’t remember anything. You seemed drugged, half asleep.’