The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  Hearing the sound again, he looked up. Under the high ceiling, a drive-belt hummed, awaiting the moment when its power would be channelled to the machines below. Inches above it, on a sprinkler pipe, sat the trapped pigeon. Alf could clearly make out its slender head, cocking sideways to look down on him with tiny, burning eye.

  The next morning, when Pete didn’t show up on the Lions Park footbridge, Alf went on by himself. It was the same the next morning, and the next. Pete was driving to Bannerman’s now. Each day, arriving at the mills, Alf saw the Sarasota’s towering tail lights parked in the dead-end lane beside the dyehouse. But he never managed to run into Pete himself.

  He felt he really should call his friend. Pete was prone to these withdrawals. Once, years ago, Alf had criticized Pete for something, and Pete had vanished from his life for nearly a month. Then one day he’d just showed up again, acting as if nothing had happened. Alf supposed that’s how it would go now. One morning Pete would come striding off the Lions Park footbridge, grinning his gap-toothed grin, telling some funny story, and they would go on as before, without a mention of their quarrel. He was worried, though, and sorry, yes definitely sorry, for some of the harsher things he’d said.

  Twice he picked up the phone to call his friend. Twice he put the receiver back down, with a sense of confusion and defeat. He couldn’t sort out apologizing from admitting he was wrong.

  One hot afternoon in the midst of this standoff, he was sitting on the floor of the knitting room, among the parts of a knitting machine he’d spread on newspapers, when the freight elevator floated into its bay. Behind the safety gates, Alf caught a flicker of bodies moving. Then the gates were flung back and a group of men stepped out. Their dress shirts, turned up crisply at the cuff, broadcast a shock of white into the room. There was a young woman with them: tall, in an extremely short skirt, her long legs stalking forward in black mesh stockings. A bald, tanned, handsome man touched her back and leaned over to whisper something into the teased cloud of her hair. She put back her head and opened her mouth in a silent, cheerless laugh, showing a wealth of teeth.

  Twenty feet away, Alf instinctively drew up his legs, a man exposed in the bath. They had stopped outside the elevator. The bald man, who stood well over six feet, seemed oddly familiar. But the only figure Alf recognized was Gordie Henderson, the assistant manager of the sweater mill. He looked around anxiously, as if searching for shelter in a thunderstorm.

  Spotting Alf, Gordie hurried over.

  “Alf, I need Matt.”

  “Think he went down to the dyehouse,” Alf said, glancing up. Tufts of black hair blocked Gordie’s big nostrils. In truth, Alf had no idea where Matt Honnegger was. The soon-to-be-retired foreman was just as likely to be in the can, relaxing.

  “These people are from Intertex,” Gordie said in a tense undertone. “Top guns. They want a tour.”

  “I’ll see if I can find Matt.”

  “Maybe you could take us around —”

  Gordie had already decided for him. As he waved the others over, Alf struggled to his feet. Unable to find a rag, he hurriedly wiped his hands on his trousers.

  “Alf, this is Mr. Prince —”

  “Bob Prince,” the bald man said in a low, rich voice: a heavy load on casters. Alf remembered where he’d seen him — that photo in the Star the previous spring. It was a bit like meeting someone whose fame had preceded him, a little whirlpool of excitement. Alf was on edge, aware that these men were perched high on a ladder he wanted to climb himself.

  “Mr. Prince is vice-president of ah —,” Gordie faltered.

  “New Acquisitions,” Prince said. He put out his hand.

  “I’m a little dirty,” Alf said, dragging his hand again across his shirt front. The others were watching blankly.

  “A little honest dirt,” Prince said. The hand remained in place: it had become an order. Alf took it. For a lingering moment the other man’s glowing eyes — they were a pale, icy blue, almost exactly the same colour as Alf’s — reached into his with a searchlight’s candour. Alf experienced an obscure shame.

  “Alf’s our head fixer,” he heard Gordie say. “There isn’t anything he doesn’t know about this place.” Alf wondered if Gordie was about to leave him with this bunch.

  Prince introduced the others. Their names and faces flashed by him. Jacobson. Martin. Raleigh. Macrimmon. Each of them leaned forward, following their boss’s example, to take his hand. A thin man with rimless glasses looked at him more directly than the others. Then the green eyes fled.

  “And this is Shirley,” Prince concluded, with a hint of affectionate condescension. He offered no last name, as if like a child or a mascot, the young woman at his side did not need one. Shirley preened in her heavy makeup, smiling at a place beside Alf’s head.

  To his relief, Gordie stayed to conduct the tour. The assistant manager led them into the first aisle of machines. Unsure what he was wanted for, but relieved at no longer being the centre of attention, Alf tagged along.

  They stopped by the first machine, a Richardson. In a circular drum, hundreds of latch needles made a soft hushing sound as they worked in rapid synchronization while, above, bobbins swept around and around on a carousel, wafting a faint breeze over their sweating faces.

  “If you could stand up here by me, Alf.”

  His mouth suddenly dry, Alf took his place beside Gordie. To his relief, the assistant manager seemed determined to do all the talking. Alf thrust his hands in his pockets. His fingers found a key, the teeth of which he raked absently with his thumb. A bit of lint drifted across the floor, and on a distant window ledge sun glinted on a pigeon’s neck. Gordie’s high, frantic voice scissored the close air. He was explaining how the mill was organized: knitting at the top, cutting just below, all the stages stacked over each other so that, at the end, the finished sweaters could flow out the door. Alf cast a glimpse at Shirley’s bodice, the artfully undone button there an undoubted happiness.

  Out of nowhere, his father’s drowned body rose. He saw the pale head laid back on the metal table in the back room of McArthur’s Funeral Home, saw the deep, nearly bloodless gash crossing the shoulder and chest like a bandolier. The wound had not killed him, Rick McArthur told Alf. He had drowned first. Then sustained his injury while turning in the currents under the dam. “The old timbers down there,” Rick told him, “they’re thick with spikes.” He had never forgotten that phrase, “thick with spikes.” He would think of it as he crossed the Bridge Street bridge and happened to glance upstream at the dam, foaming benignly across the river. Thick with spikes, as if some monster were down there, bristling with spines: an unimaginable power.

  Momentarily, he felt adrift in space, a ghost among the humming machines. Brushing the sweat from his brow, he looked up. Prince was listening to Gordie in a fume of impatience. The executive’s heavy jaw worked frantically at a piece of gum, and he was casting hard glances around the room. The other men seemed to have caught their boss’s unhappiness: their frowning faces fed off it like scavengers off a half-eaten kill. Only Shirley seemed unaffected. Her girl’s eyes, alive behind the mask of her makeup, had been drawn to the machine working in front of her. She seemed hypnotized by the streaming threads, which raced from the bobbins to be consumed by the drum of pullulating needles. But what mainly fascinated her was the place below the drum, where the tube of patterned cloth appeared as if out of nowhere, inching down between the machine’s iron legs like something newborn.

  They moved deeper into the room, down the aisles of tall machines, under the drive-belts thrumming near the high ceiling. Most of the machines here were older than the Richardsons: with their stationary racks and dark metal they had been churning along since Alf’s father had started as a fixer here, back in the Twenties. The knitters took care to keep clear of the visitors. Occasionally, a hand reached up to place a loaded bobbin on a spike or a face drifted briefly in a distant aisle. But the executives from Intertex might well have had the impression that the machin
es were running themselves.

  Gordie was not doing well. Sweat poured off his high, bony forehead, dripped off his nose into his plaid tie with its red ensign clip. He had been all right describing the overall operations of the mill, but when it came to specific machines and routines, he was out of his depth. And Prince knew it. The executive was watching him coldly now, snapping questions at him like pucks. And when Gordie managed to send back a coherent answer, Prince chopped another at him mercilessly. Gordie — he was the only one of the party wearing a jacket — mopped compulsively at his face and repeated, “Right, right” over and over.

  It was a display of cruelty on Prince’s part, for by now the executive wasn’t even giving Gordie time to answer. The other men stirred uneasily, averting their eyes.

  Finally a question came that Gordie seemed not to hear. The little man stood with an odd half-smile on his wet face, gazing at a place below him as if at his own impending doom. He half-seemed to welcome it.

  “Sorry,” he said, looking up.

  Alf said quietly, “Mr. Prince wants to know how we handle rush orders.”

  Prince said, “Maybe you could tell us, Alf. I think it’s time we heard from the man on the floor.” Prince’s gaze, in all its remorselessly shining insistence, had swung to him. The others, too, looked at Alf, perhaps with a touch of hope, like a crowd looking at a new challenger, a new victim.

  Alf told them about rush orders. Remembering how irritated Prince had seemed with Gordie’s meandering, he kept his answer short and to the point, and when he had finished, Prince had another question ready and he answered that too, snapping it back as efficiently as he could. Prince glowed. He cast a knowing glance at the others, as if to say, There, that’s what we want — as if he were taking credit for having created Alf’s answers and maybe creating Alf too, shaping him up out of the chaos of this hot, almost-wasted afternoon. They went on down the aisle, stopping at another machine. Alf tried to turn Prince’s next question back to Gordie, but Prince said, “No, no, you’ve got the ball now,” and of course there was no choice. He was leading the tour.

  He expected that at any minute a question would come that he could not answer, or that Prince would throw him more questions than anyone could answer, but the attack never came. Prince had turned genial, interested. His blue eyes shone as he listened to Alf with a proprietorial enthusiasm. It was as if another man altogether had appeared in the white shirt and faultless tan trousers. He even began to make jokes. The others responded with an exaggerated, relieved hilarity, and after a while Alf relaxed too. He realized that Prince had no intention of humiliating him. He realized he was on home ground. He’d tended these machines for years, he’d taken them apart and fit them back together and knew them as well as the heavy Lee-Enfield he had once lugged around Europe, the parts of which he could have assembled blindfolded. But he had never put his knowledge into words before, not to such an extent, and now, a new thing, he saw his years of experience transformed, almost effortlessly, into the currency of language, and it was exciting to him, liberating.

  Prince stopped abruptly. Everyone else stopped too, as the boss gazed around with a self-satisfied smile. “Shirley,” he said, “I’ve been thinking,” and it was evident his words were meant not just for her but for the whole party. His voice held an invitation to them to prepare the tribute of their laughter.

  “Don’t you think it’d be a good idea to get one of these things for the apartment?” He indicated the tall machine churning away beside him, disgorging its tube of soft white cloth. “Save you all that shopping.”

  Even Gordie laughed. Alf saw him at the rear, grinning like a kid desperate to be one of the gang.

  Before he left with his party, Prince paid Alf a compliment that made Alf’s face burn. “This is the salt-of-the-earth sort,” the executive said, looking around at everyone, “that keeps a company going. Without the Alf Walkers, you might as well call it quits.” The tour had cost him an hour he could hardly afford, but he was cheerful enough about having to stay late. The future was suddenly looking awfully rosy. It was nearly eight before he left the mill and made his way along Bridge, stopping by the plate-glass windows of Bud Mackie’s Motors.

  In the showroom, a navy-blue Impala rotated slowly. One door was open, revealing the instrument panel, seats swathed in creamy leather. And what clean lines the car had, compared to his old Biscayne! Yes, fins were definitely out — even the snug, horizontal fins of his Biscayne seemed clumsy and old-fashioned now. He gazed at the flawless, flowing surfaces: the deep-blue panels disappearing and reappearing endlessly, as in a dream.

  6

  “I SUPPOSE HE’S ALWAYS buttering people up like that. Saves having to pay them more.”

  “Don’t be so modest,” Margaret told him. “You deserve it, Alf.”

  She was sitting opposite him, while he shook HP Sauce on his dry chop and tried to suppress the tide of his excitement. He hadn’t meant to tell her about Prince’s compliment, he felt too much like a schoolboy bringing home news of some minor triumph, but it had just popped out.

  Through the screens came the distant cries of children at play in the park across the river. Backlit by late sun, Margaret was sitting forward in her chair, with her elbows on the table, her forearms crossed, her hands spread on her shoulders in a way that made her seem young, eager.

  “I’ll be happier when I see it lead to something definite.”

  “I don’t know why it wouldn’t —”

  “It all depends whether Prince remembers me. I mean, when they get around to deciding on the job. If he has anything to do with it at all —”

  “Honestly, love, I should think you’d get it with or without his help. If they want the best —”

  He frowned at his plate — it seemed to be tempting fate, to be talking like this — but he was pleased at her support. How long had it been since she’d looked at him as if he were her beau again, his head full of plans? He kept frowning, but he was irrepressibly buoyant. When he’d finished eating, he went out to the garden. Dusk had sifted from the opaque, shadowy mass of Lookout Hill. The sharp, earthy scent of tomato was in the air. He cupped his hand under one of the great lobed beefsteaks, hefting its coolness, and to his surprise it released itself into his palm.

  Later, in bed, he sat listening to the thin cry of his wife’s zipper from the walk-in closet where she undressed. Slipping from under the covers, he crossed the floor and peered around the door. She was just bending to step out of her half-slip. He gazed at her wide upper back, cut by the stark white statement of her bra.

  “Would you like a cuddle?” It was their word for making love. They had not made love for weeks, there hadn’t seemed time or energy for it, the feeling.

  She hesitated, and he seemed to hover over an emptiness. The worst of it was, he felt he was asking her for his reward, for bringing her good news.

  “Well I was counting on it,” she said, giving him a smile over her bare shoulder. He wasn’t sure he believed her. But he crept back to bed, satisfied enough.

  He waited for her under the sheet, already hard, waited as she went down the hall to the bathroom, waited as she turned on the taps and flushed the toilet and squatted to put in her diaphragm with a sound of cracking knees, waited as she came back up the hall, detouring to check on Jamie and Penny, waited as she closed the door and slipped out of her dressing gown in the dimness that allowed him a brief, thrilling glimpse of her small breasts, waited as she slid under the sheet beside him, her hair dark on the pillow as he reared on one elbow to begin his courtship, waited another moment or two to let her settle, in the near-dark where she waited, as always, with a stillness that moved him.

  A curtain belled from the window as he bent to kiss her. Her lips picked softly at his.

  His hand crept over her stomach, where the skin was extraordinarily soft, slack, discoloured, he knew, with marbled streaks: it was what having children had done.

  She grasped his wrist.

  “You kno
w I don’t like that.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  He moved his hand to the bottom of her rib cage, under her breasts. There was a tension in her, which seemed to evaluate his every move. He had noticed it the first time he had ever touched her, dancing together that night of the servicemen’s party in Henley-Under-Downs: an electric pulse that seemed to push him away as he struggled to lead her. They had fought each other around the floor.

  But he had loved her that first night, the clear, vibrant openness of her face and wide-set eyes, which seemed to look towards the future, towards him, with an adventuring gladness ready for anything, anything. And her air of refinement — that trim, high-shouldered dress, cinched at the waist, the sharp plunge of her bodice over a chest of pale, unimaginable smoothness. She seemed so much finer than any of the other girls in the crowded hall. So he learned to put up with her strangeness, her physical wariness. In a way, he felt he had been stalking her, courting her, ever since — still trying to come close.

  Her lips touched and tempted his with a bird language of their own. And she had learned how to hold him, her slender fingers firm. He found her exciting, and her physical elusiveness had become part of this, an infinite tease.

  When he was in her, he moved slowly, postponing his own climax in the hopes he might help her to her own. He wasn’t actually sure she could come, though she insisted she did, or at least insisted she had pleasure enough. She was working hard beneath him, her long body trembling with that high-strung alertness, that almost negative magnetic force. He sensed she was pushing herself harder than usual, hungering perhaps for some kind of breakthrough, and he stayed with her. Finally she told him she was getting sore. “You finish, dear,” she whispered. “Are you sure?” “Yes, yes.” But he was so numb himself he had to work a good while longer before he finally crested and passed quickly, too quickly, through that place where he had never been able to stop.