In the Skin of a Lion (11 page)

He opened the door to her and stepped back quickly, appalled. He had not expected her.

He walked into the empty rooms, gesturing towards the broken things he was trying to assemble, broken glass and crockery, things he had flung long ago, after Clara had gone.

Alice grinned at him. How much did she know about him and Clara anyway.

She moved around the room, touching nothing, as if everything in the sparse living room was potent and part of his cure.

He spoke in bursts. Sentences needed additions, parentheses, to clarify not the information but his state.

There was more than five feet between them. When she moved closer towards a news clipping attached to the wall, he automatically moved further back. He felt dangerous. Alice seemed older, confident. She removed her coat and lay it on the ground by the door. He followed her into the kitchen, pumped water into the saucepan for coffee, and lit the gas. There were no chairs so she sat on the counter opposite, watching him at the stove. She was safe there.

It was his longest speech for months.

His eyes were on everything but her, a bad sign. She slid off the counter and approached him, then stopped, inches away. His eyes caught hers, moved away, and then settled safely on her cheek.

His first smile for months. He leaned forward and clung to
her to stop her vanishing. She was smaller than he imagined. She wasn’t thin, or very small, but he had thought her body against him would be a different size. He could see the red in her hair by the temples, the lines under her eyes.

The water in the saucepan was boiling and they did not move. They stood together feeling each other’s spines, each other’s hair at the back of the neck. Relax, she said, and he wanted to collapse against her, be carried by her into foreign countries, into the ocean, into bed, anywhere. He had been alone too long. This was a time when returning from work he would fall nightly into a cave of dreams, so later he was not sure it happened. It had been sudden, nothing was played out to conclusion, nothing solved by their time together, but it somehow kept him alive. She had come that day, he thought later, not for passion, but to save him, to veer him to some reality. If anyone knew where Clara was, she did.

He had almost walked past Alice the previous week, outside the Parrot Theatre. He had not seen her since the farmhouse near Paris Plains, two years earlier, and he had hardly recognized her. But she had yelled his name.

He shrugged distractedly. His face and eyes were wild, were seeing nothing on the street around him. His clothes old, unironed, the collar bent up.

The ‘yes’ was so he could get away. He had wanted to shake her to pieces, blame her for Clara. It seemed it was all a game of theatre the two of them had performed against him. A woman’s education, removing his cleverness, even his revenge. He had turned and walked away from her.

Now, taking Alice’s smallest finger, he walked with her from the kitchen.

In bed her nature, her transparency, had startled him. As did her sudden animal growl onto his shoulder when she lay on top of him. They lay there in the blank room.

She said that so strangely he would later recall it differently – clothed in sarcasm or tentative love or sadness.

She had lost an earring when she got up. She said it didn’t matter, that it was artificial.

He went to see Clara’s mother in Paris and had a late dinner with her.

Mrs. Dickens got up from the sofa and went into the kitchen. He thought she was angry, felt him rude, so he followed her and started apologizing.

He laughed.

She pulled open the cupboard drawer and handed him the honeymoon photograph. Both of them against some damn rocks. Stump looked okay, but it was her face he kept gazing at. So young, her hair almost blonde then, not dark as it was now. A fuller face, innocent.

But he knew then. Knew exactly where they were. He had been the searcher who had gazed across maps and seen every name except the one which was so well-known it had remained, like his childhood, invisible to him.

Patrick stares at the thin layer of moonlight on the wall. His body feels like the shadow of someone in chains. He had awakened once to Clara whispering at the foot of his bed in this Paris hotel room. Soaking wet. Two in the morning. She’d slid the buttons through the damp holes of her dress.… And another time crawled from their bed to warm her hands on the radiator.… He undreams himself, remembers she has left him.
Gets out of bed and walks to the wall beside the radiator against which she had leaned.

He is standing in their old room at the Arlington Hotel. Without turning on any light he bends down and puts his face close to the wall at stomach level. Here they had pushed in frenzy, sexual madness. He finds the faint impression of her backbone on the white paint.

Ambrose Small holds a wooden match above his head, its glare falling onto the shoulders of his nightshirt. Four in the morning. Above him a silk bag holds naphtha. He has heard noises. His other hand turns a brass handle. Now the flame and gas combine and his room breaks open in yellow light. Patrick Lewis is sitting in an armchair, overcoat on, looking straight at him.

Small draws up a chair. A mutual excitement, as if each were looking into a mirror.

Patrick smiles.

Patrick steps outside into the dark night and sits in one of the two chairs on the grass. He is among blue trees, he can smell gum on the branches. He can hear the river. He knows this place from his childhood, the large house belonging to the Rathbun Timber Company, which he had passed every day during the log drives. A last remnant from that era. He walks to the window and looks in. There is no longer light. Ambrose must have carried the lamp back into the bedroom of the house.

Water from the eaves dribbles onto Patrick’s coat, some on his neck, and he steps back, stretching in the darkness. But there had been no rain. He notices a metal smell. He moves his eyes above the ledge of the window and simultaneously knows it has nothing to do with rain. He smells and feels kerosene pour across his shoulders, hears the rasp of the match that will kill him in the hand of Small who crouches on the roof. Patrick sees it fall like a knighthood towards his shoulders.

He is running along the rock path to the river before he knows for certain he is on fire. His hand pulls the knife out of his pocket and uses it to slice open the coat as he runs. He stops and begins to laugh. He is all right. Then he sees light in the trees around him and knows he is a hunchback of fire, and he runs – past the barrel for burning garbage, past the boat on the sand – and falls stomach down in the shallows, splashing forward. The air caught in his coat is a bubble on fire burning above the water. He turns and falls onto his back.

He remains in the water, only his head visible, scared to allow his shoulders into the air. There is no pain except in his hands which still hold onto the knife. He sticks it into the river bottom. Patrick can feel the cuts in his palm. He can feel the itch on his chest from slashing open the coat.

He looks past his hand just in time. Ambrose is standing on the beach. The bottle with the burning-cloth neck is travelling
in the air and the explosion when it hits the water makes the river around him jump like a basket of fish, makes the night silver. Patrick’s left eye goes linen white, and he knows he is possibly blind there. He reaches for the knife and stumbles out, wading free of the water. Ambrose hasn’t moved. He doesn’t move as Patrick steps up to him and cuts him at the shoulder.

Then Patrick is running towards the old hotel in the village of Bellrock, a mile away. He does not trust himself to use shortcuts over the fields so he stays with the road, running past the house he was born in, over the bridge he had fished off, and up the stairs into the hotel room.