The Island Walkers (40 page)

Perhaps she hadn’t done her job, as a woman. Perhaps she hadn’t worked hard enough at pleasing Alf, or at pleasing herself. She felt she had let her husband slip away through a net she might have mended. She pressed a little harder, with the back of her wrist. He smacked his lips and wiggled away.

The thought had occurred to her that if she confronted him — if there was a blow-up — he might move out. And where would that leave her? There was a woman, Edna Carnegie, who lived in the North End — who
had
lived in the North End, in a lovely old house with blue shutters, until her husband ran off with a hairdresser from Johnsonville. And now Edna Carnegie and her two children lived in a small house on Willard, beside the mills. Margaret saw her often, a tall, handsome figure buoyed by a desolate pride. Apparently she was working in a factory in Johnsonville.

She had always thought of Edna Carnegie with a kind of indulgent pity, but here she was, only a whisker away, perhaps, from the same fate. What could she do if she was left on her own — give music lessons? That would scarcely bring in tuppence! She lay looking up at the ceiling, where a thin spoke of light from the street had fallen. Life was so precarious: you thought you were as safe as houses, you had your family, your friends, your routines, they surrounded you like the walls of a fortress, but the whole time you and everyone else was hanging by a thread. “Oh God,” she whispered. “Bless Alf and me. Help us —” Breaking off, she turned on her side. Her tears were coming freely now, a wild unhappiness. “Bless Edna Carnegie,” she murmured. Suddenly, she was aware of the wide frog mouth of Carrie Crean. It seemed to be in the room with her, only inches away. Startled, she lifted her head and stared into the dark.

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
.