The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  She shut the door and again stood before him, regarding him in an open, pleased way. There was a pride in her carriage that created an almost aristocratic effect, despite her plump figure. He explained that he’d just dropped by to wish Anna well and give her the bouquet: he held it up almost apologetically.

  “Well why don’t you give it yourself? I’ll go up and get her.”

  He waited in the hall. The house was much smaller than the McVeys and more sombre, with its dark woodwork and faded Indian carpets. In the living room to his right books were piled loosely on the floor. The walls were green with white trim (oddly, very like the walls in his own house) and hung with numerous framed photos and paintings. Propped on the mantel was a large oil painting of a seated woman with silver hair wearing a dress. Its pale-green folds, beautifully evoked, filled much of the old-fashioned-looking frame. Her lips held a vague smile, but her eyes conveyed a certain wistfulness.

  Anna’s mother reappeared on the landing above.

  “She wants to see you up here. Come up, Joe.”

  He shed his boots and climbed the stairs. Her mother gestured towards an open door.

  “Just entrez.”

  Anna was sitting in bed with her knees up, under a quilted spread. In the window to the left, the molten orange globe of the sun was settling into woods. Books were stacked on the rug beside her bed. A crumpled Kleenex lay nearby, like the head of a ghostly chrysanthemum.

  She unwrapped the bouquet. He noticed that her upper lip was chafed.

  “Heather! How did you know?”

  Her voice had thickened, with her cold.

  “Well, with a name like Macrimmon —”

  “The hills go purple with it,” she said, trying to smell the little dry flowers. “Have you ever seen it?”

  He said nothing. He was standing beside the bed, feeling a bit like a servant who’s delivered a message and will soon be asked to go. He could hardly believe he was here, in her room. Happy that he had pleased her, he stood secretly drinking her in, her pillow-flattened hair, the smocking of her flannel nightgown over her small breasts, her red nose. He could scarcely believe that she was here. She had been over there, and now she was here. She had been sailing on the Mediterranean, the actual blue, wet Mediterranean. Yes, just a few days ago, she had been in Europe — fabulous, distant Europe that he knew only from books. And now she was sitting in a bed in front of him, with a cold.

  Her illness seemed part of her trip and its aftermath, as if going to that other place and back again, as if breaching the mysterious boundary between these two different worlds (for where did one end and the other begin?) was a stressful thing. It had worn at her health. Her illness was the cost she paid for accomplishing the miracle of existing in two places.

  She told him to bring the chair from the desk. Picking it up, he glimpsed something of her private life. On a sheet of paper, half-covered by a book, he saw what seemed to be a poem — a ragged, narrow column of language in her familiar, jabbing hand. In the two seconds his attention lingered there, he saw the phrase “a mask of bees,” and in the same glance he scanned the framed photo standing by itself to one side. Anna, her hair bound under a kerchief, was seated in some kind of boat — he could see water in the background, the arch of a bridge — beside a handsome man with blond, slick-backed hair and intense, serious eyes; his arm circled her shoulders with a confident possessiveness. Joe saw this in a flash, with a sense of excitement and grief, as if he had at once embraced her life and lost it.

  He sat beside the bed while they talked. It was all he could do to contain himself, to make his limbs behave and not go jumping around the room in a mad dance. He kept shifting positions in the hard-backed chair.

  “Your letter was terrific,” he said. This seemed lame, a cliché — sometimes he felt he offered her nothing but. “I mean, I could almost smell those hills —”

  “It’s funny, I felt more like writing to you than to anyone. I have this feeling that you hear me better than other people.”

  “I do,” he said.

  “I’m serious. You seem to make the thoughts come. To draw them out somehow. You’re a good listener.”

  “Well that’s something.”

  “It’s a lot,” she said. The fading sunlight now left the room entirely. They sat in the dusk, not speaking. On her bureau, a clock ticked slowly. He felt as if his life were yearning towards its fulfillment. Everything he had ever wanted was here, so close at hand that all he had to do was — what? If he went to the bed and kissed her, he would spoil everything. She had made it clear they were to be friends only.

  She blew her nose.

  “Listen to me, a regular duck!”

  She sniffed and said, “Liz tells me you’ve been seeing a lot of each other.”

  He had no doubt she knew everything and was being tactful. He felt fixed in his chair.

  “We’ve gone out a few times.”

  “I’m glad you asked her to the dance.”

  “Well, I did it for you.”

  “And are you still taking her out for me?”

  There was laughter in her voice. She blew her nose again. He said nothing.

  “Sorry, that wasn’t fair.”

  “I don’t know why I’m taking her out,” he said. “I’m not sure I like her very much.”

  She was silent, but he could feel her attentiveness, holding him, holding the entire room with its books and ticking clock, in the mild grey light. His confession, its edge of bitterness, seemed to float between them, not fading at all, something they had no choice but to consider. He felt a sad falling away, as if he had come to sobriety. A clarity. She was with Brad, and he was with Liz. And this was the basic architecture: his fate. Out the window, he could see the white fields of Wiley’s farm, the thickets that bordered the Atta. “Sunday I went skating on the river. Just down there,” he said. “It was incredible. Everything was frozen solid. There wasn’t any snow so you could skate for miles. At the first rapids, I saw a fox.”

  He told her, as best as he could, about his strange sense of the animal as it looked back at him, the way their eyes had met and he had felt as if he were being given a privileged glimpse of life in its depths.

  He told her how the fox had appeared in his dream. How it had seemed the same and not the same, with its stump of a leg, its menacing grin. “I was afraid of it, and yet I knew it wasn’t going to bite me. It just wanted to come closer.”

  “And you wouldn’t let it.”

  “No.”

  He felt a sense of failure. It seemed she was aware of it.

  “You see,” he said, “I couldn’t tell Liz any of this — I wouldn’t even think to tell her.”

  On the bed, Anna had let her knees drop.

  28

  PENNY WORKED AT HER BAR of laundry soap, carving carefully with her paring knife, trying to bring out the fish’s gills. The overheated classroom was filled with the clank of radiators and the smell of wool drying and the slow clomping of Miss Hobsbawn’s Oxfords as she strolled up and down the aisles with her hands behind her back, like Prince Philip.

  Penny’s fish was giving her trouble. Gouged from the hard, yellow soap, its head, she thought, looked an awful lot like a sheep’s. She gazed out a tall window, where a flock of pigeons wheeled through a chalky sky, trying to remember the fish her dad and Uncle Pete had caught on Lake Erie. And suddenly she saw Uncle Pete coming up the trail to the cottage with a bucket of bass. He had cleaned them on a board nailed between two cedar trees, a cigarette hanging from his lips, squinting through the smoke while he worked with his special knife. She saw the narrow-bladed knife run along the fishes’ bellies and cut behind their heads, saw it travelling flat through their sides, feeling its way, Uncle Pete said, along the ribs, as if the knife had a mind of its own; and then Uncle Pete lifting off the white fillets and putting them carefully on waxed paper. No one could cut a fillet like Pete, her dad said, the man could have been a surgeon! And she heard Uncle Pete talking, while the cigar
ette bobbled in his lips and seemed about to fall, talking about fish and what they could smell and what they liked to eat and where you could find them. He had picked up the waxed paper with the fillets and put it in her hands, letting her heft its weight while he grinned at her through the smoke of his cigarette, in the sunlight under the cedar trees: her Uncle Pete!

  “Penny, are you all right?”

  Wiping one eye with her wrist, Penny looked up. Miss Hobsbawn wore a grey skirt and a white blouse with a frill down the front. The story was that the teacher had had one breast removed. Penny couldn’t see her without wondering which bump was the fake.

  “Do you need your snack?”

  The teacher was peering through her little glasses, fierce-friendly.

  “No, Miss Hobsbawn.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she sensed Bobby Tuckett twisting in his desk to look at her. Sometimes he just stared at her, with a teasing look, and sometimes, running past, he’d whisper, Diabetic! She wished Miss Hobsbawn hadn’t mentioned her snack (the three Arrowroots wrapped in wax paper, tucked in her coat hanging in the cloakroom). She was supposed to eat them at recess, to keep from going into a reaction.

  “Penny, that is wonderful! Absolutely wonderful!” Miss Hobsbawn boomed in her man’s voice. “Class, look at this!”

  And she scooped up Penny’s fish and turned with it for all to see. “See what care she’s put into the details,” Miss Hobsbawn said, holding the fish between thumb and forefinger. “The head — look at that, class! The head! Penny, I’m afraid they can’t see. Why don’t you take it around and show everyone.”

  Penny went up and down the aisles, with the yellow fish in her open palm, trying to keep it balanced on its tummy. Some of the students hardly glanced at it, which was fine with her — she was embarrassed at having to show it — but a few studied it closely and murmured, “Huh” or “Good” and Ginny Lamport smiled at her as if she was pleased not just with the fish but with Penny too. She tried to slip by Bobby Tuckett’s desk, but he cried, “Wait!” and plucked the fish right out of her hand and looked up at her, smirking under his long eyelashes.

  At recess, she went off into a corner of the Girls’ Yard to eat her Arrowroots. The whole yard, overlooking Shade Street and the river, was a trampled mess of slush. A black dog with a white streak down its nose was barking shrilly, while two girls picked their way between the puddles, trying to catch it.

  “Still eating baby cookies, are we?”

  Brenda Stubbs. Unlike her last name, Brenda was tall and skinny, with lank hair and red-rimmed eyes that were always getting infections. Ginny Lamport was with her, Penny saw, Ginny with her fair hair as smooth as silk, cut in a pageboy. How often Penny had stood in front of the bathroom mirror, wishing she had Ginny’s hair, wishing she was Ginny!

  Penny fumbled her last cookie into her pocket.

  “Now be nice,” Ginny told Brenda. “She has to eat them.”

  Penny heard the click of candy in their mouths.

  She stood uncertainly, eager for them to like her. In her pocket, her hand abandoned the Arrowroot. She’d eat it later, in a washroom stall.

  “I really liked your fish,” Ginny said. Her eyes sparkled with amusement, as though Penny had done something cleverer than she knew. “We were doing soap carvings,” she explained to Brenda. “Penny’s was the best in the class.”

  Brenda held out a crumpled paper bag. “Want a black-ball?”

  “I can’t,” Penny said.

  “Licorice?”

  “I’m not allowed.” Her eyes followed the bag as Brenda drew it back. For a few seconds, no one said anything and Penny felt she was letting the other girls down.

  “Shall we ask her?” Ginny said to Brenda.

  “I don’t care,” Brenda said, screwing up her mouth as she looked away.

  “We want you to join our club,” Ginny said.

  “Okay,” Penny said. She’d never heard of their club before.

  Ginny and Brenda looked at each other.

  “It’s a secret club,” Ginny said. “You can’t tell the name.”

  “I won’t,” Penny said.

  Brenda turned and put her forehead into the chainlink fence, letting out a muffled laugh. Penny wondered if this was a trick.

  Ginny led her off, one arm draped over Penny’s shoulders.

  “You can’t tell the name,” Ginny said. “Not to anyone.”

  Penny promised again that she wouldn’t.

  Ginny put her pale, freckled face to Penny’s ear. Penny could smell the black-ball on her breath. “It’s called The Bare-Naked Club,” she whispered. This was so unexpected that Penny thought she’d heard wrong.

  “The what?”

  “The Bare-Naked Club.”

  Penny looked at Ginny, whose eyes were dancing now. Penny’s body was hot, under her coat, under her clothes, burning with a heat that came all the way up to her face. Ginny was colouring too, her mouth open in a kind of frozen laugh, her tongue black as tar.

  29

  IT SEEMED TO ALF that the only clean thing in sight was the beer. The yellow beer floating in cylinders on Sid Walter’s tray, the spots of yellow rising and falling around the crowded Men’s Beverage Room of the Vimy House, the yellow pooling at the bottom of his own drained glass. Everything else seemed dim, squalid, dirtied by the light that fell from wall-brackets and reflected dully off the dusty Venetian blinds. The room had a kind of womblike privacy — if you didn’t count the ten or so other patrons, who for reasons best known to themselves favoured the town’s grimmest hotel. He signalled Sid for two more.

  On the screen above the bar, players swarmed up the ice like insects. Leafs versus Red Wings. I never did get those tickets, he thought, lifting his glass an inch or two off the table and swirling the contents. He set the glass down. The thought had drifted to him out of nowhere, a fragment of normal life where fathers promised to take their sons to hockey games and sometimes forgot. But who was he fooling? He wasn’t going to take Joe to Maple Leaf Gardens. Such things seemed as far from possibility now as the moon. Yet he kept on talking and acting as if nothing were wrong. Do you want anything from the store? I’m just going out for a walk. Hand me that wrench, will you? Normal life took place in him like something glimpsed in a fever. He watched himself go through the motions, but the motions seemed to have very little to do with what was actually happening to him. And what was happening to him lay beyond his understanding or his ability to express though it carried him like a current might, a cold current that swept him on, oddly fascinated.

  At the small table opposite, Freddie Stone had been watching him since he’d come in: little Freddie Stone with his dishevelled face and watery eyes above the flagrant red of his bunched scarf, watching and smiling and nodding as if he and Alf shared some understanding that was a source of great pleasure to them both. He’d known Freddie all his life, retarded Freddie, who’d spent fifty years at least as an errand boy at Bannerman’s. Now that he was retired he lived in a room at the Vimy House, supported by a couple of small pensions and a monthly stipend paid, people said, by Doc McVey.

  Sid arrived with the beer, two tall, tapered glasses of golden light through which strings of bubbles drifted. Sid expertly corralled the empties with the fingers of one hand and swept them up with a clatter. When he was gone, Alf raised a glass and the cold, bitter beer slid under its own foam into his mouth. He wasn’t drunk, not yet, but he had reached that state of clairvoyant wakefulness where it seemed he was on the brink of understanding more than he usually did, and this produced a feeling of imminent danger in him, as if he were venturing out onto thin ice. On the far shore he glimpsed a deeper drunkenness, where the danger would be past because there he would feel nothing: it was what he was aiming for.

  Across the way, Freddie smiled with his wet, shapeless mouth and nodded and seemed to be saying, That’s right, just keep it up and you’ll get somewhere nice.

  Alf raised his glass to him and drank again. Behind Freddie, Ron
Carson moaned an obscenity and let his balding, scabbed head nod forward. The television over the bar bayed its crowd sounds and in the dim room a few men shouted. Alf had told Margaret he was going to the Legion. In the past he’d often dropped in there, of a Saturday night, for a bit of pool or to watch the hockey game. But he no longer had the heart for the Legion, with its noisy, forced camaraderie, as if the lot of them had only just got back from overseas.

  He lit a cigarette and took its mild fire on the back of his throat. At least Margaret had stopped asking him what was wrong. Is it Pete? she’d said once, prodding. And he’d said, Yes it was Pete, of course it was Pete, what in the hell else could it be but Pete, and she’d responded by embracing him. He’d gone stiff and wanted to cry. In fact, he’d been on the verge of telling her everything, telling her that he’d betrayed his best friend and a lot of other people too, and now his best friend was dead because of it. But he’d stopped himself. Did his shame run so deep? Was he afraid she’d stop loving him? Each time he contemplated putting his crime into words, he felt he was approaching the edge of disintegration. He felt he could not survive confession. It had been the same, twenty years ago, after the war. It was when he had tried to tell Margaret what he had gone through — the tension and killing and sleepless nights, the German boy lying at his feet in the wine cellar — that he had broken down. He had hardly told her anything. But the mere approach to telling her had unleashed terrors he’d somehow kept at bay for his two years in France. That’s when the tremors had started, the nightmares, the fear of the streets. Better silence, he felt, than disintegration. Better to grimly endure than to go to pieces and be of no use to anybody. Or so he told himself. But he kept wondering, Was he just making excuses? Was he just trying to be safe? He didn’t know, but in the course of his doubts he gravitated instinctively to silence, his old ally and fortress. It had been silence, finally, that had allowed him to bury the demons of the war. Perhaps he hadn’t killed them. Perhaps they were alive (he knew they were alive) in some red-line crisis zone from which they made brief raids into his dreams, his life. But he had largely banished them from the light. And couldn’t he do the same with this?