The Island Walkers by John Bemrose

Author:John Bemrose [Bemrose, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Literary
ISBN: 9781551996936
Publisher: Emblem Editions
Published: 2003-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

30

SNOWFLAKES, ENDLESS SNOWFLAKES came glittering into the light Margaret had left on over the back porch, burning with a steady faithfulness that reproached him. He washed his face at the kitchen sink, scrubbed at it with a dishtowel, then saw he’d put the stain of Lucille’s pink lipstick on the towel. He took the damp towel to the cellar and hid it under his workbench.

Climbing back up to the kitchen, he met Margaret in her dressing gown.

“Oh, it’s you.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“I wasn’t asleep. I’m worried about Joe. This snow.”

“Where is he?”

“He told you,” she said critically, studying him for a moment before she crossed to the window. Since he’d fought with Joe on New Year’s Eve, she’d seemed more distant, just like Joe himself: the civilized side of the family, the Selwoods, closing ranks against the barbarian Walkers. “He and Liz McVey were driving to Toronto. Some kind of concert.”

He watched her cup her hands on the glass and peer out, then turn to him.

“Are you all right?”

“I was just taking a towel downstairs. I got some grease on me, I was sponging it off —” He felt a need to explain everything, everything but.

There was an awkwardness between them, a mismatch of rhythms. He was standing at the top of the stairs, and felt frozen there as if he no longer had volition or reason to move. As if movement might betray him.

“Are the roads bad?”

“No, no. He’ll be fine.”

He bestirred himself, moving to the sink and taking down a glass, glad of the distraction. Yet again he had the feeling of being frozen in place, as if he had never been anywhere but here, watching the white rush of water from the tap, watching it splash and overflow his glass, sensing her gaze across the room.

The world seemed unreal, the glass in his hand both heavier and lighter than it really was. He felt he might drop it. As it touched his lips, he thought of Lucille Boileau, the dark mass of her hair spilling over his groin.

“He seems awfully serious about her,” she was saying. “I don’t know why he doesn’t bring her by. I wonder if he isn’t ashamed of us.”

“Ashamed?” he said, turning. He had hardly been listening.

She left the room. For a long time he remained motionless. Behind him, the tap dripped: he’d been meaning to fix it for weeks. The wind shrieked briefly under the door. He went back to the cellar and took out the towel. It was dark with wetness, impossible to tell if the lipstick was gone. He hung it from a nail. Thoughts of Lucille Boileau kept coming back to him — the way she had undone her bra, her eyes fixed with mischievous triumph on his, as she knelt before him on her creaking rick of a bed. The memory of pleasure was in him, a pleasure of its own.

He bent to the space under his workbench and found the old metal tackle box that had belonged to his father.

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