The Island Walkers (12 page)

“Where are you from?” Mann said. He glanced at Joe, as if inviting him to participate.

She gave a short laugh at that, as if this were at once the most simple and most complex question in the world: really, it had no answer. “I was
born
in Montreal,” she said, with an arch emphasis, as if getting born were a kind of joke, “but my father’s worked all over the place. Abroad mostly. I’ve lived almost as much in Europe as here. My mother’s French.”

“Aha,” Mann said. He looked again at Joe, with a kind of shining blankness. Joe felt he was invisible to them both. He had never been to Europe, which was a mythical land to him, a land of wars and towers. He felt completely out of his depth. He shifted and smiled vaguely as they talked, and hoped she couldn’t smell his shirt.

“So what brings you to Attawan?” Mann said.

“Oh, my father’s working here now. He’s an accountant. His company’s just bought some mills here.”

“Bannerman’s,” Mann said. “Joe’s father works there too.”

“Really,” she said, sounding not at all interested. But at least she looked at him again.

“He’s in the sweater mill,” Joe said, his face heating. He wished Mann had never mentioned his father. He wanted no past just now; he just wanted to stand here, as new as she was.

There was a pause, excruciating to Joe, who felt he should keep the conversation going. He grinned but could think of nothing to say.

“Say, listen,” Mann said, rousing himself. “I’m taking a picture of everyone here, it’s a tradition with my graduating classes. If you wouldn’t mind —”

Anna Macrimmon stood with her back against the dilapidated belvedere. Her playfulness had suddenly evaporated, replaced by a kind of moody tolerance of the process, as she squinted against the sun, turning away the cheek with the birthmark. When it was over, Mann said, blushing inexplicably, “Well. Good. I’m sure Joe would like to show you around.” He left within seconds.

Anna Macrimmon looked at Joe.

“I’ve seen you before,” she said flatly.

He thought of denying it, but with a nod his admission escaped him.

“Where?” she said rather grimly.

“That —”

“No, no, let me guess!” She went on looking at him, as if his face were a painting. He
knew
he was blushing, knew the pimple under his eye was getting bigger, knew his smell must soon reach her, if it hadn’t already.

“The bridge,” she said. “That time with the McVeys —”

“I didn’t yell anything,” he said.

“You were in the water,” she said, squinting at him.

“I was telling them to stop —”

“
Were
you!” she cried skeptically.

“Scout’s honour,” he said, raising two fingers.

She was looking at him mischievously now. “You know, the McVeys were
quite
upset.”

There was a hint of accusation here. He nodded.

“So why were you doing it? Why were
they
doing it?”

He shook his head, as if to say, Stupid kid’s stuff, who can explain it? But she was not going to let him off so easily. “Walk with me,” she said. “Tell me.”

They went down the wide, grassy path. The back of her hand brushed his.

“I’m waiting,” she said.

He knew perfectly well why the others had taunted the McVeys: they disliked them for their wealth, their snobbery, for the fact that Doc McVey was landlord to several of their families, for the fact that they’d come down to the river to gawk.

“There’s too much history to it,” he said.

“That sounds fascinating —”

“It’s sort of a neighbourhood thing. Stupid, really.”

“You mean like a class thing?”

He thought she meant “class” as in school.

“Most of those kids weren’t in their class, the McVeys’ class.”

“That’s what I mean,” she said. She looked at him, wondering. “They’re what? Working class?”

He was sure he was going to burn up in front of her. He never used the term “working class,” though he knew perfectly well what she was getting at. Working class was lower than middle class. His father was working class; his mother was, or had been, middle class: what did that make him, a kind of mongrel?

“It’s stupid, really,” he said. “It’s because Doc McVey owns a lot of houses. Some of those people pay rent to him. They think he charges too much.”

“Aha!” she said. “And does he?”

“I have no idea. We own our own house.”

She studied him as they walked along.

“I’m sorry, I’m embarrassing you. We’ll talk of something else.”

“Not embarrassed,” he lied. But he was relieved when she turned her attention to the outbuildings of the Bannerman estate. They moved towards the great house, its high-pitched slate roofs looming over the treetops, passing by an assortment of sheds, and the gardener’s stone cottage. She peered in the windows, where glass shelves held African violets and knick-knacks, into the gloomy little rooms beyond. Her forwardness amazed him. He knew they were trespassing but did not say so. In her curiosity she seemed unconscious of such concerns, and he felt he should be too, as if she were teaching him about some wider form of freedom.

That evening after supper, Joe climbed over the dyke and stood watching the river. Upstream, a small rapid turned its liquid body between rocks: a flashing of white in the dimness. Everything had changed. Because of the half-hour they had spent together, everything he looked at — the hill lifting in darkness, the ghostly band of children traipsing noisily over the footbridge to Lions Park, the sky’s last, red wound — bore her sign.

She was not in class the next day. Taking attendance on his clipboard, Mr. Kay glanced over his horn-rims at her empty desk and hiked his eyebrows slightly — a mere twitch of surprise before his round face subsided into the stoic blandness behind which adults lived their remote lives. To Joe, it was as if the teacher had passed nonchalantly by a burning building.

That morning, everything was saturated with her absence: a deserted classroom, the jumpers of the girls phys. ed. class as they flowed across a sun-beaten field, the tribal echo of laughter from a washroom, an absence that still contained the promise of her, for it seemed possible she might materialize unexpectedly, as she had the first time, and the second too. He wondered if she had decided not to come back at all. Her powers in this matter seemed absolute, she was everywhere and nowhere, as fluid and invisible as his mood, a clear
sea on which he drifted, becalmed. In biology he sliced his finger on a scalpel. The blood, a small red sac at his knuckle, surprised him, because it
was
him. It was a shock to remember that he had his own body, his own separate life.

At noon, Sandy waited for him in the little park across from the school: a waif in a shapeless plaid dress, coming forward with a hopeful half-smile, from under the caved shadow of a maple. He was appalled by her ordinariness, by her very existence, so small and finite and limited. Her powers touched nothing beyond her, not a single blade of grass.

He fell silent as they trudged along Shade Street, past mansions presiding with humourless reserve over long, sloping lawns. Overhead, a cicada poured its electricity into the late-summer heat. He felt the past had reached out to claim him. He had become someone else with Anna Macrimmon; now he was his old, humdrum self again, sweating and disconsolate in his best shirt, a dark-green corduroy that was too hot for the day and not nearly good enough for his purposes. What had happened with Anna Macrimmon had been a dream, an illusion. This was real: the armhole of Sandy’s sleeveless dress, where the band of her sweat-stained bra showed; her bright, chattering voice saying nothing he cared about.

They passed the mouth of Senator’s Lane. Boys were flinging sticks into a tree. Clumps of leaves fell, chestnuts in their spiky rind like the heads of medieval war clubs. She said, “I guess I was expecting you last night?”

Her very gentleness, her care for his mood, irritated him.

“What for?”

Her flat face lifted to him, an offering of herself.

“My essay?”

“What essay?” he scowled, trying to evade his rising guilt. It reached him anyway. “I’m sorry. I forgot. I was busy.” And a moment later, more gently: “Did you finish it?”

She shook her head, like a child, he thought.

“It’s not due till next Monday.”

“Maybe we can do it on the weekend,” he said. Immediately, the thought of even a few more days with her oppressed him.

Anna Macrimmon returned the next morning. Joe was sitting at his desk in Mr. Kay’s room, waiting for the class to begin, when on some instinct he turned to see her making her way among the students who had not yet taken their seats, threading a course with her books held, in that way girls had, to her chest.

Her face restored itself to him in a heart’s leap of glad recognition: of course,
that’s
what she looked like! In the intervening day, so many particulars had slipped from memory. Now her face reclaimed its own reality: the neat helmet of her ash-blonde hair, her dark brows, and of course the mark on her cheek, which appeared just now like the image of a small, pale, half-ruined flower.

Yet she was different. It was her clothes. The green sheath had been replaced by a crisp white blouse with sleeves that ended partway down her forearms, a full skirt in some rich shade of green, threaded with hints of other colours, with a broad belt. He watched in astonishment as she came closer. Her change in appearance seemed like the evidence of some mysterious fecundity, like the flowering of day lilies in his mother’s garden, each morning new blossoms in new places, lifting their trumpets on the still air.

After the class, he caught up to her in the hall.

“Hi there,” he said casually, falling in beside her.

There was something unsurprised and wholly accepting in her glance, as if his arrival were nothing special. He was put off balance.

“Hi
there
,” she said, with an irony he could not grasp.

“Were you sick, or —”

She was searching his face with a simple calm.

“Or what?”

“I missed you,” he said, and blanched at his mistake.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, looking away.

It was hard to keep beside her among the jostling, streaming bodies. A locker clattered shut, and someone nearby growled in an undertone, “Eat your nose!”

They went into the biology lab, with its black desks and deep sinks. A smell of formaldehyde penetrated everywhere, from vats at the front of the room. The class was dissecting cats. Joe pulled out his stool, aware that Anna Macrimmon had stopped several desks behind him. He kept playing and replaying his appalling gaffe. He felt like pounding his head on the desk.

Smiley had fetched their cat. Lying stiffly on its side on a metal tray, it looked drowned, the eyes crimped shut, its soaked, matted fur standing up in points. Joe turned the page of his notebook, looking bleakly over his drawings. The previous week they had cut up frogs: the yellow skin of the bellies pulled back like waistcoats; the gumwad hearts turned grey by the preserving chemical. Such knowledge had nothing to do with Anna Macrimmon, it seemed. She was behind him now and somehow, in her power, she had withdrawn meaning from everything, from his carefully drawn pictures, from Smiley, bent with his knife to the cat.

He let Smiley do most of the dissecting, while he half-heartedly made notes and diagrams. Mr. Brunt drifted by, an intense little man with an oversized head, like a baby bird’s. He chewed a pencil and shouted instructions in an almost incomprehensible, chastising way. It was like being harassed by a barking dog, though one whose bark was far worse than his bite. Joe looked out the window, across the burnt playing fields towards the huddled ranch-style houses of the Shade Survey. A black cat was slinking across a lawn.

From the back of the room, over a low murmur of voices, a girl’s voice spoke up clearly, saying she couldn’t do this, she
wouldn’t
do this. Anna Macrimmon.

He saw her looking across the desks towards Mr. Brunt. Her face had coloured, filled with an expression of disbelief sharpened by anger. She was demanding that the teacher give an accounting of himself.

“This is
disgusting
,” she said for the second time. “Where did you
get
these cats?”

Mr. Brunt removed the pencil from his mouth, gave a hollow chuckle. “You going to faint?” he said. He seemed hopeful she
might
.

“That’s not the point! I can’t do this, not to
her!
”

She was holding up her hands — a scalpel was in one — and looking down at the grey, soaked form in front of her. Everyone watched in amazement. She had spoken to the teacher as if he were an equal, or even an inferior: it was unthinkable.

“Lie down if you’re going to faint,” Mr. Brunt said. His face had grown tomato red.

Anna Macrimmon shook her head. She bent down behind her desk — Joe wondered if she
had
fainted — and a moment later popped up with her books and went swiftly from the room, leaving the door ajar. Liz McVey hurried after her, a silent helper.

“Meatheads,” Mr. Brunt said. It was his favourite phrase of disapproval. He put his pencil back in his mouth, like a stopper into the vial of his fury. “There’s always one,” he mumbled, forcing a grin. No one laughed. No one understood what had happened, but the breaching of the usual borders of obedience and decorum had touched them deeply, as if they had witnessed an act of violence. Only they did not quite know, as they turned back to their trays, where exactly the violence lay.

That night Joe dreamed of a cat. It lay on its side, under a clear, shimmering bath of formaldehyde, not moving. There was a sound of quick, shallow breathing, as if someone were labouring in a high fever. It was not the cat that was breathing — it was still, or almost still, under the warping shine of the chemical. The nightmare did not change focus, or show him anything else. It was like being shut in a brightly lit room hardly bigger than he was.

Anna Macrimmon was excused from dissection and allowed to learn anatomy from her textbook. The next day she sat at the back of the
lab by herself, working at her books with a peculiar, private intensity that made him sad and wistful. She wore a thick, black ribbon bound over her hair. The change seemed to Joe to have something to do with the events of the previous day, as if she were in mourning for the cats, though at the same time there was something sharp and aggressive in the new look: she did not smile, not that he noticed. It was clear he scarcely existed for her.