The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  “I don’t wanta go there,” he said in a muffled voice.

  “He said I should ask you.”

  Jamie said nothing, though he was shocked at the idea that the old man was thinking about him. It was like God thinking about you — “We’re always in God’s thoughts,” his mother said — but it was like God upside down, a bad thinking. The old man might be thinking about him right now, he might be sitting in his old brown kitchen looking at his candies and thinking about Jamie. It put an icy feeling in his stomach. They crossed Bridge to Jarrod’s Shoes. Outside the store, a line of boots was arranged on a table, one of each kind. Instantly excited, Billy picked up a boy’s black rubber boot. At the heel was a little red rubber spur. Jamie, too, was intrigued — boots with spurs! — and as they examined the boot, passing it back and forth, they didn’t notice that Mr. Jarrod had come out, not until a voice roared. Looking up, Jamie saw Mr. Jarrod’s round face with its little moustache just like the cork smudge Jamie’s mother had marked under his nose at Halloween. “You bloody Indian,” he yelled, tearing the boot out of Billy’s hands. He looked only at Billy, yelled only at Billy, as if Jamie wasn’t there. “If I catch you around here again I’ll call the police.”

  They ran up the street and around the corner of the last store, where the road fell to a flat place by the river. Billy stomped up and down with gritted teeth, his eyes crazy-blind. Jamie stayed away from him.

  “I’ll kill him,” Billy said in a strangled voice. He stomped off to the river and spat at it. After a while they went along the river. They heaved in chunks of frozen snow, and watched them darken and bob away like little icebergs.

  It seemed cold and unhappy by the Shade, the current hurrying by with a faint licking sound. Jamie looked upstream, past the dam where his grandfather had drowned, past the rail trestle to the edge of the pine forest where he and Billy had tried to cut the Christmas tree. The old man’s house was that way, hidden from him now by the trees, but he could sense it there, waiting for him. “I gotta go home,” he said.

  As they came back, they saw a black dog having a crap. It had all four feet bunched together and was straining away with a funny look on its face, while a reddish turd hung down behind. When the dog was finished, they went over and had a look. Then Billy went off and picked up an empty cigarette packet that had blown into a bush. He went over to the poo and, using the packet like a little shovel, cut away a portion of the poo, scooped it up, and started back towards the stores. Following behind, Jamie kept asking what he was doing, but he was afraid he knew what Billy was doing, he was going after Mr. Jarrod with a piece of dog poo. But Billy didn’t do that. He walked past the door of the store, right up to the line of boots on the table, and dumped the poo into the biggest boot. They ran like hell, around the corner, across the bridge, down the bank to a place underneath the bridge. And there, on the bare, frozen earth, safe from all big people, they stomped back and forth, whooping their heads off.

  32

  PENNY, GINNY, AND BRENDA were in Ginny’s big bedroom, with its framed pictures of ballerinas in pink-and-lime tutus, and a pink frill — like a giant’s tutu — around the dressing table. They were having a sleepover. Ginny’s mother and father had gone out for an hour. “We have to be quick,” Ginny said. It was Penny’s first time with the Bare-Naked Club. Ginny looked at Penny with that secretly amused smile, as if she found her a bit backward, but nice just the same. Brenda was sitting on the bed, unbuckling her shoes.

  Watching herself in the mirror, Ginny unbuttoned her blouse. An excitement was in the air. Penny wasn’t sure she liked it, this feeling she was on the verge of things she didn’t know about, wasn’t supposed to do.

  “C’mon, don’t be shy.”

  Sitting on the edge of a chair, Penny bent to her shoes. She was shy. She took baths by herself now, not with Jamie like she had when she was little. She didn’t even like her mother to see her now, with no clothes on. Sometimes, when she got undressed in her room, she could hardly stand having no clothes on. The air on her — all over her — seemed to be gently touching her, there and there, where she hardly dared touch herself.

  She was breathing a bit harder now. The other girls were down to their underwear. Under her white cotton undershirt, Ginny had bumps where her breasts had started to grow. Penny couldn’t keep her eyes off them.

  “C’mon, you’re getting behind,” Ginny said. She slid her underpants down her long legs and stepped out of them with a little laugh.

  Penny took off her undershirt. On the bed behind Ginny, Brenda was already bare-naked. She was running strands of her hair through her fingers and staring absently at Penny. When she discovered Penny looking back, her face went blank.

  “Take off your panties,” Ginny said.

  Penny did as she was told and sat with her shoulders scrunched up and her hands between her legs. A shivering was going up and down her legs and through her shoulders and she couldn’t take her eyes off Ginny’s bare chest.

  “Come look at yourself in the mirror,” Ginny said.

  They were all at the mirror now. Ginny and Brenda were laughing and hardly able to stand straight: feeling each other’s smoothness against their skins. Penny looked at herself in the glass, at her nonexistent breasts puckering in her thin chest, and at her straggly brown hair that was neither straight nor curly, and at her face with its wide blue eyes, looking back at her as if she — that bare-naked girl in the mirror — were looking at Penny and wondering what she was doing out there, not joining in the fun.

  Later, after Mr. and Mrs. Lamport came home, they made popcorn — Penny had a special, measured amount in her own bowl, no butter — and ate it up in Ginny’s room while they leafed through old magazines. Later, in the dark, Penny lay on her side in the little bed that had been Ginny’s when Ginny’s sister Ella was at home, listening to the other girls talk in the big bed. They were chatting about boys, and it was all a bit alien to her. They seemed to have noticed and thought about so much that she hadn’t — who liked whom, who was good-looking — though when Ginny said she was pretty sure Bobby Tuckett “had a crush” on Penny, Penny went hot under the sheets. “No,” she cried, really outraged. “I hate Bobby Tuckett! “Why?” Ginny said. “He’s so cute!” Penny fell silent, stunned by the idea Bobby Tuckett liked her. Stunned by the idea that he was cute.

  After some time there was silence, the scraping of a snowplough. Penny had started to drift off when she heard an eruption of giggling and scuffling from the other bed. Then Ginny said in a loudish whisper, “Oh darling!” which set the two of them, Ginny and Brenda, snickering into their pillows. Then there was silence again, and more scuffling, and Penny heard Brenda say, “I don’t like tongues.”

  “Shhh …,” Ginny said.

  And Brenda said, “She’s asleep.”

  “Is she?”

  “I don’t think Bobby Tuckett likes her.”

  “Sure he does,” Ginny said.

  “No, he doesn’t. Who’s gonna like someone with diabetes?”

  There was silence for a while. Then Penny heard Ginny say, “My mother says diabetics can’t have babies.”

  In the morning, the other girls pressed close as Penny gave herself her needle. She felt odd at having to do it in front of them — her mother usually left her alone with her syringe — but they had asked if they could watch. Mrs. Lamport watched too, hovering nearby and saying, “Girls, pay attention now, she has to do this every morning” — the three of them peering as Penny stuck her needle into the little bottle of insulin, plunged it right through the rubber top, and drew back the plunger of the syringe to the right amount, thirty-four units, and pulled the needle out and brought its tip to the outside of her upper arm.

  “I can’t watch,” Brenda said.

  They were all spellbound: Mrs. Lamport with her big front teeth, and Ginny, her pretty face drained of colour, and Brenda, her red-rimmed eyes looking from the hovering needle to Penny’s eyes and back again.

  Sometimes, at home
, she hesitated for a long time before pushing the needle in. She was afraid of the pain — the thin, slicing pain that sang through her arm or leg. She tried not to believe in this pain. She told herself, she told her mother, she told her brother Jamie, “I like needles.” But as often as she said this, she knew she did not like needles, she hated them.

  Now, seeing their fearful, fascinated faces, she experienced a rush of triumph.

  “I like needles,” she said calmly, and pushed it in.

  33

  THE RAPID PIPING of the organ climbed above the church, into the February sky. Bach, Margaret thought, pausing on the sidewalk, and it was as if an old, dear friend she had not seen for years had surprised her. The lower notes were muffled by the thick cobblestone walls, but the clear treble ran on and on, a joy that never exhausted or repeated itself.

  She entered the church as quietly as she could, so as not to disturb Helen. Near a brass railing she paused again to listen. Now the bass was clearly audible, running on its own merry way, tossing themes back and forth with the treble. It seemed a wintry music, sunlight glancing off icicles, that also contained by some mysterious alchemy the depths of summer.

  Helen botched a run, started over, botched it again.

  “Damn!”

  Margaret laughed and moved forward to the steps.

  “Oh you’re here!”

  “I’ve been listening. It was absolutely —”

  “A mess!”

  “No, no. It was lovely,” Margaret said with feeling. She slipped off her coat and laid it on a choir bench. “Are you playing it for the wedding?” Her friend turned to her in the pool of light at the console.

  “No, lucky for all concerned. Anyway, I don’t suppose the Clarkes or the Williamses have ever heard of J.S. Bach.” Helen screwed up her thin mouth abruptly, as though suppressing some more sarcastic comment, and held out some sheet music for Margaret. She was Margaret’s age exactly, forty-two: a prematurely grey-haired woman with skimpy bangs and a slight stoop. Her husband was the editor of the Attawan Star. Often she and Margaret went off to Kitchener or Hamilton or Toronto in Helen’s Buick, to operas and concerts. They had adopted a jolly, bantering, slightly superior tone, two women who shared a love of music and had little tolerance for humbug.

  Margaret looked at the music Helen had given her: “Seven Wishes for You” by Anne-Marie Fletcher-Valois.

  “Never heard of her. Are we going to do all seven?”

  “If we want to get paid.”

  Helen picked out the melody with her right hand while Margaret read it over her shoulder. Finally she took her copy and stepped away from the organ. The empty pews seemed ready to listen. In a stained-glass window, a book carried by a bearded apostle shone like a ruby. She lifted her face a little as she sang and her body swayed slightly. Her family often teased her about “wriggling around” and she tried not to. But it was the effect of singing itself, the pleasure she felt as she became an instrument for the music, even the unexceptional music of Anne-Marie Fletcher-Valois.

  “Seven Wishes for You” listed, as promised, seven wishes the newly married couple made for each other. It was a sluggish, sentimental piece, but there was a run of notes in the refrain she liked immensely, which gave a haunting lilt to the word “you.” Each time she sang the word, shivers ran over her face and chest.

  On the sixth wish, she ran into a problem. The verse ran: “I’ll listen to you, I’ll hear your troubles/ Even when you’re far away.” It was innocuous enough, but on the first syllable of “Even,” her voice broke and she stopped.

  The organ died out behind her.

  “Sorry,” Margaret said. Unaccountably, her face was burning. She made a point of not turning to Helen. “Just give me a little introduction.”

  It was worse the second time. As she broached the word “Even,” a shudder went through her and she only stopped it from turning into a wail by clamping her mouth shut. She sat down.

  “Are you all right?”

  “It’s the oddest — I’m sorry.” She could hardly talk yet, but leaned over in the stall. Helen came and sat beside her.

  “I just felt faint,” Margaret managed. “The oddest —”

  “Would you like some water?”

  As Helen hurried to the parish kitchen, Margaret bent over, pressing her forehead on the hard, cool back of the next bench, struggling to fight down the impulse to weep. Tears wouldn’t do, and especially they wouldn’t do in front of Helen, any more than a true confession would do. She considered Helen her closest friend, but still, theirs was not that kind of friendship, she felt.

  They decided to stop for the morning. Walking home, Margaret turned aside to the rail of the Shade Street bridge. Below, the Atta steamed from a narrow fissure in the ice, as it made its peaty way towards its meeting with the Shade. For some reason, the water drew her thoughts to England — gave her a sharp intuition of the English spring, with its distinctive smell of earth and damp woods and petrol fumes — and for a few minutes she was swept along by a deep nostalgia for her girlhood — for her mother and father, both dead now, for the green of a certain field, for the high, chalk-veined downs behind her house with their glimpses of the distant channel, that grey, strangely heartening infinity. As she wept, she dug frantically through her purse for a handkerchief, thinking, This won’t do, This won’t do. All she could find was a paper napkin.

  By eleven-thirty she was busy in her kitchen, getting the children’s lunch. Penny’s took a special effort — everything had to be weighed on the spring scale, whose round, numbered face dominated the counter — and dessert was always a problem, since Jamie still clamoured for sweets. The dietician at the hospital had told her that the rest of the family should go on eating as usual, but when Margaret had set a lemon meringue pie on the table, Penny’s face had fallen. Margaret had sworn never to torture her again.

  Noon came with the plunging howl of Bannerman’s whistle. A few minutes later Alf called to say he had to work through the lunch hour. She leapt at his voice, but though he was cheerful and warm enough, she felt he was impatient to hang up.

  Then Penny came through the door, pigtails bouncing. The eleven-year-old launched into a story about a schoolyard quarrel and a moment later Joe and Jamie came in pink-faced, having raced each other from the edge of the Island. Margaret watched herself go into gear — the cheerful mother setting out bowls of tomato soup and plates of baloney-and-cheese sandwiches, listening and commenting on the stories they had brought. Then her children were gone, in a gust, and she was alone. Life itself seemed emptied away. A dozen jobs called to her, but she sat at the kitchen table in a trance, the sadness that had threatened her almost violently all morning a calm pool now, a pool that seemed to hold everything, the white daylight at the window, the crumbs strewn around the oilcloth like bits of sand or dirt that had blown in.

  She had an urge to call Alf. “Don’t be daft,” she scolded herself, in her brisk English way. “Don’t behave like some daft girl!” She never phoned the mill, except in emergencies. Two minutes later, she picked up the phone.

  Matt Honnegger, the knitting-room foreman, told her Alf had left an hour before. “Funny,” Matt said, “I thought he’d gone home.”

  She didn’t see him until he showed up at five-thirty. He was in a good mood, almost too good, and he’d brought her a bar of Cadbury’s milk chocolate in its dark-blue and silver wrapper, just like the old days. Margaret couldn’t resist the tide of his good spirits. At the supper table, while Jamie was telling them about every turn and twist of some TV show, Alf looked at her and winked in happy complicity. Suddenly she felt insulted, patronized. It was the sort of wink you might give a child.

  The next morning after the children had left for school, she walked over to the Flats. Passing the arena — its whitewash walls blinding in the sun — she turned down the lane that led to the mills. No one was in sight, though she could hear the thrashing of machines from open windows. Furtive now, almost dizzy with tension, she pushe
d through a heavy door into the vestibule of the sweater mill. The wooden rack of time cards hung beside the clock. She searched the array of yellow cards until she found her husband’s: Walker A. #117. Pulling it out, she swiftly put it back again — someone was on the stairs above — but the footsteps faded and again she retrieved the card and found the day she was looking for: yesterday. The unevenly inked numbers printed by the clock showed that Alf had left the mill at one-forty, and not returned until five after three. She put the card back in its slot and pushed outside, blinking in the sun reflected from the snowbanks.

  She had a hundred questions for him, seething inside her, but dared not ask them until they were safely alone together. And even then — it was ten o’clock that night and she was creaming her face at the dresser while Alf read a paperback in bed behind her — she hesitated, sensing a danger, as if a wrong word might plunge her into a situation she would regret.

  She watched him in the mirror. He lay on his back with one knee up under the quilt, idly massaging the top of his head with one hand. His eyelids had sunk as he read, giving him a vaguely drunken look that irritated her.

  She heard her voice say, cheerfully disinterested, to the deep glass, “So, did you ever get lunch yesterday?”

  He grunted, scarcely hearing, apparently.

  “Alf —,” more sharply.

  For a moment, the blue of his eyes shocked her in the mirror. Such eyes that husband of yours has, Helen had said to her once. Faraway-looking eyes, of a pale, electric blue. She knew other women found him attractive, more attractive perhaps than she did herself. And now those eyes were suddenly fresh to her, a shock and a rebuke.

  “Yesterday, when you had to work through the noon hour, did you ever get lunch?”