The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  Later, he stood talking to Doyle by the river. Below them, the shallow current collared rocks with foam. Alf felt a certain poignancy. Something was coming to an end. After this picnic, Doyle would get in his dusty car, and he might never see him again, though they had promised to get together.

  “So I can’t persuade you to change your mind, you bastard,” Doyle said. Despite Alf’s lack of interest, the organizer had kept pestering him to join him as a staff organizer for the UKW.

  Alf grinned at his friend’s persistence.

  “I don’t think organizing’s for me,” he said. “I never got over the feeling I was just bothering people.”

  “Pah! People need to be bothered. Someone has to wake them up.”

  Linda Connaught, the new secretary of the local, called Doyle away. He was to be starter and general announcer for the races. Jamie ran up to Alf with Billy Boileau. Billy’s dark eyes fixed on Alf’s chest.

  “There’s a father-and-sons three-legged race!” Jamie said.

  “You think we can win, eh?”

  “Sure!”

  Alf looked at Billy. “Shall we get you a partner then?”

  Billy glared into the air, at nothing. “C’mon, I bet we could get Dick Harmer to run with you.”

  “Nope,” Billy said in that trapped, hard voice of his. With his fists jammed and working in his pockets, he seemed to be expecting something that had not been offered, demanding it.

  Over at the course, Alf tied Jamie’s leg to his. There wasn’t much time to practise. The mothers-and-daughters race was already being run. Penny had found a partner in Alf’s old school chum Annie Stone, they stumbled their way along in the middle of the pack, and soon the fathers and sons were ready to start. Bellowing, “Go, Brothers!” Malachi Doyle dropped his big arm and the horde of men and boys hopped over the grass, towards the strand of red yarn held taut by Mary Carr’s twin daughters. Alf and Jamie finished fourth or fifth, Alf laughing so hard he nearly fell over, while Jamie kept yelling at him, put out at his lack of seriousness. For prizes, all the children received mechanical crickets that soon filled the park with their clicking.

  Afterwards, Jamie went off to the swings with a group of other boys. Alf noticed Billy sitting up on a picnic table by himself, intently watching the others. He brought him a cricket.

  The boy looked at the toy in Alf’s outstretched hand but did not take it. Alf set the cricket on the table and climbed up beside him.

  “There’s going to be regular races. You don’t need a partner for them.”

  Billy made his trapped-in-the-throat sound: Heh.

  “I’ll bet you’re pretty fast.”

  It was like talking to a post. But again Alf found himself drawn, almost painfully, to this skinny little boy with the mop of luxuriant hair, sitting hunched beside him with his hands on his knees, and a faraway, slit-eyed look in which Alf glimpsed just the trace of a smile. Alf began to talk about the different kinds of runners: the sprinters, and the long-distance runners, the ones who could keep going all day, like Tom Longboat. Tom Longboat was an Indian, Alf dared to say, and caught for his reward a slight turn of Billy’s head. So he told him about the great Tom Longboat, how he was from a reserve not far from here, how he’d beaten all the great marathoners of the day, including the Englishman Alf Shrubb, flying along in the tradition of the great Indian runners who in the old days had carried messages long distances between villages without stopping to eat and only drinking what they could scoop from streams as they splashed through them.

  Once, twice, Billy glanced up at him, suspicious interest in his narrowed eyes. But a deeper gleam was there too, perhaps it was delight. Alf reached out and touched him affectionately on the back. It was like making contact with a little dynamo. The tension there was palpable, in the hard flesh.

  “So maybe you could give it a try,” Alf said. “I think they’re almost ready.”

  Doyle, holding up his clipboard, was calling out in his raw voice for runners. First, girls, eight to eleven. Then boys. Jamie and his friends were trooping back from the swings. Alf noticed his son eyeing him and Billy warily. Just then, Billy jumped off the table and walked rapidly towards the trees at the south end of the park. He was like a wild animal, bolting at God only knew what tremor of danger. In a few seconds he had disappeared into the trees that climbed the flank of Lookout Hill.

  Jamie, who had turned nine that month, came second, despite being matched with older boys. The lad was obviously a sprinter, Alf thought, as his Uncle Joe had been. And for a moment, Alf saw his brother cross the finish line at the high-school track meet: his head tossed back, his mouth open in a crazy, tortured smile of triumph. Afterwards, he’d stuffed his red ribbons in a drawer as if they were nothing.

  Jamie came over to the table, his face shining with pride.

  “Ah, you’ll do better next time,” Alf told him, as if he’d failed by coming second — and felt his own heart sink as he saw the shadow cross his son’s face. Why had he said that, when in fact he was proud of him? He tried to make it up, praising the boy, ruffling his hair. But the damage had been done. Alf watched him go off towards the crowd with his prize, a red balloon, bobbing behind him.

  He sat on disconsolately. Why did he hurt people — his own family most of all? It was as if there was a blade in his hands that had a life of its own. He looked off towards the woods flowing up the side of Lookout Hill. He’d been kind to Billy Boileau, and cruel to his own son. What in hell was he trying to do? He thought of Billy in the woods — he imagined him walking hard up the narrow trails, or sulking on a rock. The image pierced him, but he suppressed it, feeling disloyal to Jamie.

  Well, he would make it up to the boy. He looked around. The last race had just finished. The crowd was dissolving and Doyle was walking away in deep conversation with two other men, his voice growling under theirs. A cloud was just passing over the sun, the park had slipped into shadow. He was unable to pick out Jamie among all the people — it seemed as if he had made the boy vanish by his cruelty.

  It was then he saw Lucille. He had not spoken to her for months, though in truth he’d never stopped thinking about her. And here she was, as if emerging from one of his own daydreams, striding towards him. He half-expected a rebuke. Unusually for her, she was wearing a dress: short, scoop-necked, her brown knees flashing as she walked.

  He knew she was working again at Bannerman’s, in her old job as a seam-stitcher. Alf himself had put her on the list the negotiators had asked for. Her smile shocked him. He wondered if she’d found out he’d helped her.

  “Do you know where Billy’s got to?”

  He supposed she had noticed him with the boy. But he felt it was him, really, she had come to see.

  “He went off to the woods.”

  “That kid — he’s a regular escape artist!”

  Her black eyes, suddenly empty of expression, searched his. He had left her without an explanation, simply walked away. He felt he deserved hostility from her, but there was something else here instead, girlish, wondering. Shame heated his face, but he was glad, very glad, to see her.

  It was threatening rain. The air was soft, close; the park felt wrapped in sadness. His hands had grown heavy. He was aware of her bosom, rising below her smooth, exposed chest, and of a faint twist in the left side of her mouth.

  “So I guess you’re a hero now,” she said.

  Was she speaking ironically? He could not meet her eyes.

  “I wouldn’t say so,” he said.

  “Why did you leave me?” she said, looking straight at him.

  “I’m sorry, Lucille. I —”

  “Well, you’re a busy man.” She turned away and stared at the crowd for a moment while he watched her. He wanted her, and was appalled at himself that this should crop up again. “I really hated you for going,” she said. “I sort of thought — well, stupid me, eh?”

  “There’s nothing stupid about you,” he said.

  “I just thought we might have, you kno
w, talked about it.”

  “I was a bastard,” he said.

  The space between them filled with an awkward silence.

  “Well,” she said, “I guess I better find Billy.”

  “I’ll help you,” he said.

  As they walked off together, he realized people must be watching. Before, he had taken great pains to hide his connection to her. Now he told himself they were only going into the woods to hunt for her boy: they were innocent entirely. Careful not to touch each other even accidentally, they walked across the dry grass, her sandals slapping at her heels. They did not speak, and again he felt that strange blankness, almost a deadness, that descended on his mind whenever he was with her. He wondered if she were only tolerating him now. Men stuck to her, clung to her like burrs: it was something she was used to. He didn’t care. That was the main thing, he didn’t care. At the woods they had to separate, to enter the mouth of the trail. He followed her down the dim path that smelled of mud in hidden springs, watching the white tag of her dress where it had stood up against her neck, white on brown.

  58

  JAMIE WATCHED THEM GO into the woods. His balloon tickled its string lightly through his hand and slipped away, unnoticed. By the time he reached the trees, it had sailed, a red dot, high over the river and the Island.

  He climbed through the dim mass of trees. After a while he stopped, below a tall clump of cedars. Water slimed and rutted the trail. The fragile, tentative tap of a woodpecker came from space grown ominous.

  Billy had said, He’s going to be my father now. Now it had happened, he felt. He’d watched Billy go into the woods. Now his father and Billy’s mother had gone after him. The three of them were together.

  He heard a laugh. It came from just up ahead — his father’s laugh! And for a second he felt everything was going to be all right — that’s what his father’s laugh meant to him — and he remembered a time when they had gone swimming at Devil’s Cave. His father had stayed a long time underwater, then burst up, the water pouring off his head, laughing. He floated up the trail. A flicker in the leaves told him his father was close by. Stopping, he turned a little and saw his father and Billy’s mother. They were standing right in front of him, facing each other, and his father’s hand was on her face, touching her cheek.

  “Dad,” someone said.

  For a minute he thought it was Billy who had spoken: that hard little voice. But it was himself, Jamie, his voice like a stone.

  His father’s hand dropped from her cheek. They looked at him.

  “Jamie, hey! We’re just looking for Billy.”

  Looking for Billy in Billy’s mother’s face. He stared at his father, who came forward with a grin. “Hey guy, you seen Billy?”

  His father mussed his hair.

  They went back down to the park together, the three of them. Billy could find his own way home, his mother said.

  In the park, she went off. His father took him across the bridge and off the Island to the stores. He wondered, Were they still looking for Billy? His father took him into the Oasis and bought him a double-scoop chocolate — for doing so well in that race, he said. They walked back towards the Island. On the bridge, his father stopped and leaned on the rail. He lit a cigarette and tossed the flaming match towards the water. Jamie stood licking his cone and watching his father’s face. Ice cream melted cold on his fingers, and somewhere down the shadowy race a mourning dove cooed three times.

  “What you saw there,” his father said, “that was just Billy’s mother being sad about something. It’s okay, really. We don’t have to mention it to your mother. Okay?”

  Jamie licked at his cone. “Are you still my dad?” he said, in his strange, new voice. It seemed, almost, to come from outside him. The mourning dove had stopped.

  He was falling, falling through the mild air. His father laughed. A large hand caressed the back of his head. “What a crazy idea!”

  59

  THESE DAYS — the long summer holidays of sun and burnt lawns and the whining lathes of the cicadas in their high, secret workshops — Joe would have spent every hour he had with Anna, who was leaving in a month. But he had to work. He had to prowl the dim aisles of Bannerman’s shipping department, invoices in sweaty hand, taking down sweaters and T-shirts from their shelves, fitting them into cardboard boxes stamped with the logo of the Boy Scout with the banner. The place was miserably hot under its flat roof and, despite the pine scent of Dustbane sprinkled liberally everywhere, stank of human waste. The toilet faced directly into the workplace, its saloon-style doors revealing the dropped trousers and shins of whoever was inside. The shins always looked vulnerable, pathetic, the source of endless jokes — Show us your knees, Maggie — which Joe quickly grew tired of.

  One low, filthy window looked out on the straw-pale playing fields behind the arena. By putting his face close to the left side of the glass he could peer over the arena roof and just make out the cloud of trees obscuring the North End. They seemed alive with Anna’s presence, like the blank sky above, and the steep roofs of the Bannerman mansion nestled in foliage. He was impatient to get up the hill again, to renew the spell at its source. He kept glancing above the shipping-room door, where the hands of a large clock jerked arthritically through the day, and was startled by a paradox: he was wishing the hours away, but every one of them, when it was past, was another sixty minutes deducted from her time in the town. She and her mother, who was going back to visit family, had already bought their tickets.

  When the five o’clock whistle went, he was always first down the stairs, first across the playing fields. At home: a shower, fresh clothes, then a quick bite and out again. His mother kept asking if he didn’t want to invite Anna home for supper. “Such a lovely girl” she said warmly, more than once, “clever too.” But Joe resisted. “Love you,” he’d tell her as he brushed past with a quick kiss. He did love her, it was easy these days, love seemed to spill from him without effort: he even loved the cozy, familiar kitchen with its banged-up furniture, he loved his brother’s bicycle, abandoned on its side on the dry grass …

  Something had shifted between him and Anna. It was their love-making in the mills that had done it, he felt — pitching them into a new level of intimacy. He had never forgotten Liz’s words: Anna can’t love. It was a man, not a boy like you. Well, he had proven her wrong, hadn’t he? And now, surely something could be worked out about France. He told Anna he could visit her in Paris; maybe he could become a student there himself in a year or two, if he could find the money. Yet his enthusiasm never generated anything definite from her side. They made love a few times more, in her bedroom when her parents were out, and once, at his insistence, in the lowlands beside the Shade where they’d first got together on the night of the graduation party. But even so, he began to fear that, for her, nothing essential had changed. She actually seemed to be looking forward to going away. He wondered if she felt any pangs at all. Couldn’t she see, couldn’t she guess, what he was going through? His desperation grew cagey, his desperation, and, yes, his jealousy. He wondered if her old boyfriend was still in the cards — the man-friend Liz had mentioned. He wondered if it was the man in the picture on her desk.

  One Sunday afternoon they were reading in her bedroom. Sitting at her desk, he could hear Anna flipping pages on the bed behind him. Unable to concentrate, he kept studying the photograph in its gold frame — the picture he’d first seen that winter afternoon he’d brought her the heather. He worried over the handsome face of her friend, the heavy eyebrows, the unreadable expression of the rather deep-set eyes, the sense of casual ownership implied by the loose draping of his hand over Anna’s shoulder. In her head-scarf she had the air of a convalescent, bundled against the chill.

  The man was movie-star handsome, Joe thought, but there was something vacant in his face, as though it had been hollowed out from within. It was a mask of handsomeness, from which unhappy eyes stared. He had constructed a theory. This man was the man Liz had referred to. Anna
had fallen in love with this man, and he had abandoned her. She had had a terrible time. Here, in the photograph, her unhappiness was already coming upon her, because the man — this man with his cold, careless face — was in the process of leaving her. She had been a long time recovering, and now she was wary of love, of love’s abandon, because she could not allow herself to go through it again. Even if she loved Joe (and he was almost convinced she did), she could not let herself feel it. He needed to go slowly, to be patient. She needed patient, tender care and of course he was willing to give it to her, only there wasn’t much time left to be patient in.

  Twice he nearly spoke, to the rustling on the bed behind him. Each time he hesitated. Any attempt to enter her intimate space always seemed to embroil him in new sorrows. She was a nest of tripwires. You never knew what anger or rebuke you might set off. But he had to know.

  Offhandedly, he sang out, “Say, who’s this handsome friend of yours?”

  When she didn’t answer, he turned in his chair. She was lying on her stomach, propped on her elbows over her book. She was wearing Bermudas and a sleeveless blouse. Those green eyes looked at him across the carved mahogany of her bed.

  “In the photo,” he said.

  “Enrico,” she said matter-of-factly. “He was my best friend in Europe.”

  She went on looking at him, while he conducted a rapid analysis of her words. She had spoken so casually of this Enrico that he wondered if he had been only a friend.