In the Skin of a Lion (19 page)

Every Sunday they still congregated at the waterworks. They walked over grills under which foam rushed, they opened doorways to waterfalls. The building, now three-quarters finished, spread ceremonial over the rise just south of Queen Street, looking onto the lake. Because of its structure the main pumping station could be filled with lamps and no light would be betrayed to the outside world. The sound of pumps churning drowned out the noise of their meetings.

On Sundays, as darkness fell, the various groups walked up to the building from the lakeshore where they would not be seen. There was food, entertainment, political speeches. A man who mimicked the King of England stepped forward with a monologue summarizing the news of the past week. Numerous communities and nationalities spoke and performed in their own languages. When they finished, the halls were cleaned up, the floors swept.

Patrick and Alice walked home along Queen Street. The girl was asleep in Patrick’s arms, so at some point, tired from her weight, they would sit on a bench and lay Hana out, her head on Alice’s lap. He loved this part of the city, the evening streets an extension of his limbs.

A July night. On what summer night was it that she spoke of Clara and how she missed her? All these incidents and emotions to cover and the story like a tired child tugging us on, not letting us converse with ease, sleeping on our shoulder so it is difficult to embrace the person we love. He loved Alice. He leaned against her and he could feel her hair still wet from the sweat of the performance.

Now he aches for her smallness, her intricacy – he needs a second glance whenever he thinks of her. In the middle of a field she removes her blouse. Sightings of her breasts.
Trompe l’oeil
. An artist has picked up a pencil and made a fine crosshatched shadow and so they come into existence. He sits and watches her sniffing the wind across a field. The woman he looked through when in love with Clara. Clara’s eclipse. The phrase like a flower or event named during the last century.

During Cato’s funeral, while Alice held the infant Hana, there was an eclipse. The mourners stood still while the Finnish Brass Band played Chopin’s “Funeral March” into the oncoming darkness and throughout the seventeen minutes of total eclipse. The music a lifeline from one moment of light to another.

Now he aches for her, for those days that belonged to the moon. They would sit side by side in a Chinese restaurant, empty but for the two of them. Wanting to face each other but
wanting to hold each other and having to decide on one pleasure. The intricate choices of desire.

I don’t think I’m big enough to put someone in a position where they will hurt another
. That’s what you said, Alice, that made me love you most. Made me trust you. No one else would have worried about that, could have said it and made me believe it, that first night in your room. Every bird and insect froze into the element of air at that moment when the sentence slid up, palpable out of your mouth. You unaware you were expressing a tenderness, thinking you were being critical of yourself.

And another gesture of yours at a dance. I was dancing with someone else and could see you, dying to dance, and stepping up to a man and delicately tapping him on his shoulder, a shy yet determined expression on your face.

They sit in a field. They sit in the red and yellow and gold decor of the restaurant, empty in the late afternoon but for them. Hunger and desire spiriting him across the city, onto trolley after trolley, in order to reach her arm, her neck, this Chinese restaurant, that Macedonian café, this field he is now in the centre of with her. There are country houses on the periphery so they have walked to its centre, the distant point, to be alone.

He will turn while walking and see the fragility of her breasts – the result of a pencil’s shading.

She drops into his arms, held out stern as a school desk. He walks then, he dances with the wheat in his hands. When he was twelve he turned the pages always towards illustration and saw the heroes carry the women across British Columbian streams, across the foot of waterfalls. And now her hand above her eyes shielding out the sun. Her shirt on her lap. He has come across a love story. This is only a love story. He does not wish for plot and all its consequences. Let me stay in this field with Alice Gull.…

REMORSE

H
E HAD ALWAYS
wanted to know her when she was old. Patrick sits in her green room, in front of leaves and berries in the old river bottle – a bouquet of weeds collected by Alice the day before her death. Sumac and valley grasses that she picked under the viaduct. When night comes he lights the kerosene lamp which throws a shadow of this still-life against the wall so it flickers dark and alive.

Let me now re-emphasize the extreme looseness of the structure of things
. Whispered to him once.

He undresses and climbs into the bed where there is the smell of her, where he is unable to sleep. He stays in her room, he escorts her last flowers through death and afterlife, after whatever spirit in them has evaporated out of their brownness. He knows he doesn’t have long before he loses the exact memory of her face. His mind moves closer to the skin at the side of her nose where the scar lies. She was always too conscious of it, a line she assumed unbalanced her face. How can he evoke her without this fine line?

He had wanted to know her when she was old. At lunches she would argue her ideas against him, holding up her glass, “To impatience! To the evolving human!” while he was intent on her shoulder, romantic towards the dazzle of her hair. Her grin was always there when he spoke of growing old with her – as if
she had made some other pact, as if there was another arrow of alliance. He couldn’t wait to know her when, in years to come, they would be solvent, sexually calmer, less like wildlife. There was always, he thought, this pleasure ahead of him, an ace of joy up his sleeve so he could say you can do anything to me, take everything away, put me in prison, but I will know Alice Gull when we are old. Even if we cannot be lovers I will come each afternoon, come as if courting, and over lunch we will share our thoughts, laughing, so this talk will be love.

He had wanted that. And what had she wanted?

Now there is a moat around her he will never cross again. He will not even cup his hands to drink its waters. As if, having travelled all that distance to enter the castle in order to learn its wisdom for the grand cause, he now turns and walks away.

Patrick steps out of the Verral Avenue rooms. He enters Union Station and, once he is travelling, the landscape slurs into darkness. He focuses thirty yards past the train window until his mind locks, thinking of nothing, not even the death of Alice. By his feet is a black cardboard suitcase. He can think now only of objects. Something alive, just one small grey bird on a branch, will break his heart.

The night train travelling north to Huntsville contains a regatta crowd – men in straw boaters and silk scarves jubilant around him. They weave towards the sleeping cars, passing Patrick who stands in the corridor, their drunk bodies brushing against him. He gazes through his reflection, hypnotized by the manic parade of sky and rock and tree and moon. No resolution or pause.
Alice
.… He breathes out a dead name. Only a dead name is permanent.

Rectangles of light sweep along the earth. He walks to the end of the corridor, opens the door, and stands in the no man’s land between carriages, holding onto the stiff accordion-like walls, within the violent rattle of the train.

Alice had an idea, a cause in her eye about wealth and power, forever and ever. And at the end as she turned round to him on the street hearing her name yelled, surprised at Patrick being near, there was nothing completed or attained. And he could think of nothing but the eyes looking for him above the terrible wound suddenly appearing as she turned.

They arrive in Huntsville at three in the morning. Patrick watches a porter travel the corridor of sleeping berths, tagging the shoes left out to be cleaned, and return a few minutes later with a sack into which he throws them all. The passengers will not be awakened until seven.

The stewards sit on the steps of the train polishing shoes.
They speak quietly, smoking cigarettes. Patrick sees them in the yellow spray of the station lamp. He strolls to the end of the platform where there is darkness. Bush. He feels transparent, minuscule. Civilization now, on this August night, is two men cleaning shoes as they sit on the steps of a train. He looks at them from the darkness. He has walked through the pools of light hanging over this platform and light has not attached itself to him. Walking through rain would have left him wet. But light, or a man polishing one tan shoe at four
A.M
., is only an idea. And this will not convert Patrick, whose loss creates venom. At times like this he could put his hand under the wheel of a train to spite the driver. He could pick up a porcupine and thrash it against the fence not caring how many quills were flung into his hands and neck in retaliation.

At eight
A.M
. the passengers walk from the train, sleepy, dazed by their own movement, to the dock belonging to the Huntsville and Lake-of-Bays Navigation Company. Patrick carries his fragile suitcase and boards
The Algonquin
steamer.