The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  34

  WALKING HOME FROM SKATING, Penny, Ginny, and Brenda stopped outside the Oasis, under the broken neon sign with its buzzing palm tree. A warm afternoon light flooded beneath the striped awning and caught the display of old-fashioned ice-cream-making equipment in the show window.

  “So I guess you can’t come in,” Brenda said to Penny. She sounded stern, like somebody’s mother.

  “I can come in,” Penny said, pushing past her.

  Inside, she peered with the others into the long glass counter at the jujubes and sea-foam and licorice straps and candy pipes and candy cigarettes in little packages that said Camels and Lucky Strike. Putting her hand in her pocket, she touched her packet of cookies. She knew she should eat them, she could feel an insulin reaction coming on, but she was sick of Arrowroots. Besides, the cookies weren’t in any shape to be eaten. Penny had left the packet in her boot while she was skating. When she’d come back, she’d forgotten it was there, and put her foot into her boot and mashed it.

  Outside, they ran into Ginny’s aunt, Karen Jones, who was pushing her baby, Jennifer, in a pram. While Brenda and Ginny leaned over and made a fuss over Jennifer, trying to get her to react, Penny hung back. The baby watched them all solemnly, her huge, grave eyes looking out from her bonnet. She seemed uncertain about all the commotion. It seemed so sad to be a baby, Penny thought, to be so helpless, while people came and stuck things in your face. When the baby looked at her, Penny smiled, and Jennifer, her toothless mouth opening and her eyes rolling up, laughed a silent laugh.

  They walked down Water Street. Brenda and Ginny took bites out of their Choco Rolls, which looked like little round slices of chocolate cake with a swirl of white icing through them. Penny kept looking at the other girls’ mouths: their voices had started to sound far away, as if coming down a pipe. And she was having trouble lifting her legs. On the bridge to the Island she stumbled.

  “Clumsy-boots,” Ginny said. She held out her Choco Roll. “Want some?”

  “She’s not supposed to have candy,” Brenda said.

  “I’m having a reaction,” Penny said. She meant she should have a bite of Choco Roll. She needed sugar, fast, so her insulin would have something to work on. But Ginny had already gone on eating; Penny couldn’t find the words to stop her.

  They reached Brenda’s house with its high porch and windows where the beige curtains were always shut tight. Ginny and Brenda started up the walk. Penny kept on down the street. Getting home was the most important thing now. “Where are you going?” she heard Ginny’s voice calling after her.

  Penny turned and saw her friends standing behind a snowbank. They appeared strange to her, with their white skates hanging like chunks of snow over their chests and their faces punctured with eyeholes and mouth-holes and nose-holes. She turned away.

  “I know who your father’s girlfriend is!” Brenda sang.

  Penny heard the taunt as something small and bright and distant — nothing to do with her. She kept going. There was something she was supposed to eat. She thought of a cookie: the sort of soft yellow cookie babies ate, with scalloped edges. And this cookie existed somewhere, she was sure of it. The cookie was out there somewhere ahead of her, the cookie was home, and home was out there in the sun that had turned Water Street to a white blaze.

  She thought, Girlfriend? Who your father’s girlfriend is? Sometimes her father called her his girlfriend. He said he’d take her out on a date, and Penny would say, No, you can’t! Daddys can’t do that! But she liked being teased.

  Her legs were getting heavier with each step, like trying to run in Lake Erie when the water was up to her waist. She could see her house now, a shadow in the dazzling heaps of snow. Then she fell down — the curb had caught her toe — fell to her hands and knees. She stared at the white, nicked-up toe of her skate that had fallen to the sidewalk: where had that come from? She was so heavy and sleepy now that she got right down on the sidewalk and curled up. But no — she couldn’t sleep — she had to keep going. She rolled on her back and looked up into the blue, cloudless sky. It went on and on, as big as Lake Erie, and it seemed there was nothing to do now but sink into it. The sky got closer. At the same time, it got farther away, like Lake Erie when they drove away from it after a holiday, its light growing more distant out the back window of the car and a lump rising in her throat to think their holiday was over and it would be a year, a whole year of school and winter until they could come here again, to the blue lake where the waves danced and sparkled in, her dad had once said, from America.

  A kick of panic — she had remembered the cookie. She struggled to her feet and started up the sidewalk to her house.

  She saw a squat, pimply nose with big nose-holes. She saw a small eye-hole and a red scarf. It took her a moment to realize that these details added up to Mrs. Horsfall, their neighbour. Mrs. Horsfall was blocking the narrow passage between their houses.

  “Oooooo. Gah ooh!” Mrs. Horsfall said in her deaf-and-dumb person’s voice.

  “I have to go, Mrs. Horsfall,” Penny shouted. She started forward and fell into Mrs. Horsfall. She could smell her, like a wave coming up to smother her, a wave of sick-making perfume exactly like the smell of the flowers at Uncle Pete’s funeral. Her face pressed into Mrs. Horsfall’s bosom, but what she saw was Uncle Pete’s sharp, waxy face in his coffin.

  Half an hour later, Penny was sitting at the kitchen table, feeling almost normal. She had a headache, but she knew what was going on, clear as a bell. Her mother stood with her hands on her hips looking at her. Penny took another sip of orange juice. “You didn’t touch your cookies,” her mother said, pointing to the crushed packet on the table. “Penny — you let yourself go into a reaction. What were you doing — what happened to your Arrowroots?”

  “I forgot,” Penny said. This was half-true. Below the table, she had crossed her fingers.

  “You could have —” Her mother broke off in frustration. But Penny knew what she’d meant to say, You could have died.

  She felt ashamed for having a reaction, ashamed of frightening her mother, ashamed, even, of having diabetes: all of it was her fault. She moved her empty glass on the table, in a prickly misery of shame, and looked at the window where the wall of the Horsfalls’ house loomed close, with its frosted-up window. With a lurch — she almost felt sick — Brenda’s words came back to her.

  “Does Daddy have a girlfriend?” she said.

  At the stove, her mother stopped stirring a pot.

  “What a ridiculous idea,” her mother said. But her voice sounded high and hard. “Whoever told you that?” Penny put her head down. “Penny, who told you that?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Somebody must have.” Her mother turned to her. “Penny, who was it?”

  “Brenda Stubbs,” she said, barely audible. “I think she was just teasing.”

  “Just the sort of thing you’d expect from Brenda Stubbs,” her mother said.

  Her mother went suddenly to a cupboard. After rummaging for a few seconds she slammed the cupboard shut, walked to the cellar door, and disappeared. Penny could hear the washing machine churning away down there, glug-glug, glug-glug, like some bored, unhappy person who hated her work.

  She went up to her room, which she saw her mother had tidied. She’d told Penny to tidy it, and Penny had, but her tidying was never good enough. Her mother had put everything away on shelves, her books, her dolls, even her skipping rope had been wound in a neat coil and tied up with string. The neatness of the room oppressed her, it was like nobody lived here, like her mother was acting as if she, Penny, had moved away. She felt so unhappy she flung herself on the bed.

  After a while, she rolled to her back and raised her foot in the air. There was a hole in her red leotard where her big toe showed, and as she wiggled this toe, which seemed to have a life of its own — a funny little toe-person waving around up there, hello — she remembered the soap. Jumping off the bed, she tugged open the drawer of her table and there it
was: her bar of laundry soap.

  One day at the stores, when she and her dad were shopping, they had run into Miss Hobsbawn, and Miss Hobsbawn had told her father about Penny’s fish, told him in her shouting man’s voice about how fine a carver Penny was and looked at Penny with her eyes gleaming ferociously, pleased as punch. And afterwards, Penny’s dad had taken her to the A&P and bought her this big bar of soap. “Don’t carve it right away,” he told her. “Think about it a bit.”

  Penny put the bar on her table. She took out her small jackknife and picked out its blade. She was excited now, as excited as at Christmas when she was the first downstairs into the living room where the presents waited in the dimness under the tree. She looked at the soap. Everything else was gone. Brenda Stubbs and Ginny Lamport were gone, and her diabetes was gone and her mother was gone. She was alone in her room, with her feet twined around the legs of her chair, staring in the stillness of happiness at a bar of yellow laundry soap.

  35

  THE WINDOWS in Matt Honnegger’s office gave onto the flat, gravelled roof of the dyehouse, where pigeons waddled in the late-winter sun. Alf watched them absently.

  “I’m afraid I’m stuck here again,” he told Margaret into the phone. A new bird, white as chalk, sailed with breathtaking grace to a landing. It watched the others skeptically, head bobbing like a boxer’s. He had stood just here, watching these same birds, when Margaret had phoned with the news that Pete was dead. Time had stalled. He had always stood just here, watching these birds at their puzzling rituals.

  She said, “Well if you get free later, come home, will you?”

  Her voice young, plaintive. He closed his eyes.

  “Sure I will.”

  Each time he lied to her, he felt he was driving a small, sharp blade into her flesh. It was so sharp she could not feel it, and yet she was aware of it, he suspected, as if the sensation came to her from a long way off. At these moments, oddly, he knew he loved her.

  He worked until nearly two, then punched out and drove off in the Biscayne, along Willard. The sun beat off the wilting snow, off abandoned porches: the Tuesday afternoon had filled with a Sunday languor, as if the purpose of life had failed. As he always did, he passed Lucille’s street, Pine, finally turning up a stony lane that rose along the rail embankment towards the old pioneer cemetery. He turned into the dilapidated garage behind Lucille’s house and sat for a while in the dimness, looking at the horned beast in the corner: the canvas-shrouded motorbike Lucille’s brother, Frank, had ridden until a couple of years ago, when he’d died in a hunting accident up north. It was two minutes after two. Billy would be at school, while Lucille — who was now working part-time at Don’s Variety — would be waiting for him. Advancing across her small backyard, past Fuzz’s empty doghouse, he found the kitchen door locked: unusual. Light smeared the linoleum in the empty hall. For a moment she seemed not only not at home but gone in some more permanent way, dead or injured, and in his head a voice offered alibis to some faceless prosecutor. I only arrived at two; they saw me at the mill at ten to two. You can check the time card.

  Then Lucille came down the hall. Her tight grey T-shirt had moulded to the abrupt mound of her breasts, showing the wrinkles in her bra. With a lightness like happiness, the arrow of desire fled through his chest.

  She twisted open the lock.

  “Trying to keep me out?”

  She cast him a hard glance and began to clear the kitchen table. Plates and glasses crashed into the sink. She turned on a tap.

  “You okay?”

  She did not answer. He found a towel and dried for her. He had no idea what he’d done, but his guilt was on a hair-trigger these days. Penitent, cagey, he put up a glass.

  “What is it?” he said, smiling.

  She set a plate in the rack and stared straight ahead of her.

  “I want to go out.”

  “Out —”

  “You know, like people do. I’d like to get in that car of yours and go —” She waved her hand airily. Soapy water flew onto his cheek. “Out for a drive.”

  “We’d be seen,” he said gently.

  “Maybe we should be,” she said, attacking a pan. “I think I’d like to be seen.”

  “But there’s Margaret,” he said. He spoke his wife’s name warily, hating to bring her into it. He never talked about Margaret with Lucille. It had seemed a way of protecting them both.

  Lucille shrugged.

  He did not love Lucille Boileau. At that moment, watching her shrug off Margaret, he half-hated her. But he wanted her — with a fury of disappointment that made his mouth dry.

  “We can talk about it,” he said.

  “What’s to talk about? I get my coat, we go out.”

  Her eyes burned on his now, furiously challenging though at the same time there was something misfocused in them, something that missed him, by a hair.

  “But if Margaret finds out —” He smiled again, placating. Why should he ruin his marriage for the sake of their pleasant afternoons? He was pained that she couldn’t see this.

  “Queen Margaret,” she said, mocking. She studied him a moment. “You know, if all it is is sex, maybe you should pay me. You sneak over here, we go bang-bang, you pay me. A lot more honest, eh?”

  “Lucille —” He felt she was tearing something valuable, in her anger.

  “I’ve done it, you know. Out West there: Winnipeg, Edmonton. The good Johns of Winnipeg!”

  Those black eyes held his.

  “You’re shocked,” she said, with satisfaction.

  “No,” he said. “Yes.” His face had gone hot.

  She was still staring at him, darkly triumphant, as if she’d cut herself on purpose. “I started when I was thirteen. I can always start again.”

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Hurt yourself.”

  The look in her eyes changed slowly from triumph to mockery. She began to laugh, hoarsely and without joy. Then stopped.

  “You kill me,” she said. She tossed a sponge into the sink. “You don’t want me to hurt myself. I wonder why that is. Do you love me?”

  Helpless, he met her eyes shining with sarcasm. All her life, its desperation and defiant survival, seemed revealed in her face, daring him to gainsay it. Below her lower lip was a small scar in the shape of the letter C. She had told him it was from a skating accident. Now he doubted it. He doubted everything he knew about her.

  And she knew he didn’t love her: it was her trump card.

  “I care for you,” he said.

  She snorted in disgust and walked away from him, towards the bare beige wall mapped with cracks. On a calendar he saw a photo of a jet fighter, silver on blue, like a holy medal.

  She turned back to him, “You see, I’ve been here before. Except most of the others — I don’t mean out West — I mean here in town —” She stopped and looked at him again. He felt he was being reconsidered, judged. She said, “I came back here to start over, you know. No more Johns, just good honest boys. That’s what I was going to have — good honest boys.” A cold hostility lit her eyes. He felt neither good nor honest. “They at least thought they loved me,” she said. “At least they said they did. And who knows, maybe they did. I’m really not so bad, you know.”

  “No,” he managed. Gazing for a moment out the window, a smile of pain twisting her face, she seemed not to hear him. An icicle fell, passing her head like a dagger.

  “Then do you know what happens?” she said, turning back to him. “Do you know what always happens? They leave me!” Grinning, she flung out her hand; it fell and struck her thigh. “They up and leave me, all of them. Do you know why that is?”

  He shook his head and stood waiting. Everything he thought of saying seemed trivial.

  And besides, he knew that he, too, would leave her. He felt there was something missing in her: an absence where, for a man, there could be no rest.

  “If I can do anything,” he said finally. This seeme
d so pathetic he dared not meet her eyes.

  “I told you,” she said. “You can take me for a ride.”

  He thought he would take her straight into the country, where they were less likely to be seen. But she insisted on a town route, she needed cigarettes from a particular store that “gave her a deal,” she said. Glumly obedient, wondering what this “deal” was, he took the Biscayne across the Bridge Street bridge and up Shade, then over to Station. She raised her broad face to the windshield, in a show of defiance. She was going to have a good time, a pleasant, normal time, or at least look like she was. Her eyes like black glass.

  An old man was shuffling up Station Hill. Bent at the waist, so that his face peered straight down at the sidewalk, he planted his cane in front of him, then caught up to it with shuffling baby steps. He travelled miles this way, like a snail: Ralph O’Grady.

  “Give him a ride,” Lucille demanded.

  “He’s all right.”

  “No, stop!”

  He stopped. He’d always felt it was only a matter of time until his secret came out, though he never imagined it coming out on an afternoo in spin with Ralph O’Grady. But he felt helpless to resist. He knew he was going to leave her, was already guilty about that. Guilty, too, about getting her fired. He thought about the revelation she’d once worked the streets. He felt he owed her something, for the life she had had. But all these reasons were pathetic, weren’t they? Put into the scales against even a featherweight of love, they were nothing.