Crossings Read Free

and gathered Peter up, stroking him, saying, ‘It’s going to be all right. It’s all right, it’s going to be all right.’
    I found a taxi. He seemed to know all about it. We drove to the sea. I went down the ramp as if it were the most normal thing in the world. There was a man in a hut, at the bottom of the ramp. A little hut with calendars and a telephone. I hired the man to fly me to the island, as if it were something I had done every day of my life. I had just locked the door and walked away, leaving all my things, the fake Sarukhan rugs, the Renoir reproduction, all my stories, the bills that were going to come through the mail slot. I had walked away, as other people did, as Mik had done all his life. A shriek of freedom in my head. So this was what it was, freedom. To walk away and leave everything behind, to go to a man and say, Kill me.
    A week before I had phoned him. It was a radio telephone and he had to take the call in the cookhouse. Everyone in the cookhouse could listen in. Everyone on all those lonely islands could listen in.
    â€˜It was all sound and fury, signifying nothing,’ I said. But he didn’t understand.
    â€˜What? What?’ he said, his voice strange and crackling through the lost northern air.
    â€˜I’m not pregnant,’ I said. And everyone heard. He was humiliated.
    The men went into the forest and the women stayed in the compound. It was forbidden to go into the forest if you were a woman. Once I climbed the road into the forest, the cats leaping in and out of the trees beside me, running ahead and then dashing back, suddenly elemental, or following me, as dogs do, then rushing away again, their tails fluffed absurdly, scuttering back to the forest and leaping at me, the prey, arched-back, stiff-legged, doing the sideways daring dance of Siamese. I walked up into the forest until I saw them, the men, in their great yellow machines, grunting and roaring, tearing at the earth, ripping and gouging. I hid behind a tree and watched them, men alone in their secret world, and I was afraid. Men engaged in their mysterious rites, tearing great holes in the earth.
    The ground shook beneath them. I felt the shudder in the tree I was hiding behind. Like creatures from some fantastic world, the men moved, grunting, laborious, in metal helmets and thick boots. No one human could have such large feet, it was impossible.
    But that was later. Now I was going to the island, I was putting myself into his hands, great thick hands, hands that grasped you and brought you down, hands like weapons. Not fists. Nothing that looked like that could be called ‘a fist.’ A fist is small, with knuckles, the bones shine whitely through the skin. Thin and delicate. Mik’s hands were weapons.
    â€˜You can’t destroy me,’ he had said. ‘I’ve been destroyed by experts.’
    Sometimes at night I cry God, God, and before my mind can stop it, He comes and holds me. Over each nipple is a tattoo: one says
Cream
and the other says
Coffee.
    Later, that day in the forest, I crept away, unseen. I went back to the compound and had tea with the boss’s wife. She made doilies.
    â€˜How do you get them to stand like that?’ I said. It was all mys­terious to me, the world of women. Women who wait in com­pounds for men. I belonged nowhere.
    â€˜You starch them,’ she said.
    They were curved and bowed into elaborate arches and scallops, and they were everywhere, on the backs of the chairs, on the back of the sofa, on the arms, on the radio, on the side tables, everywhere. In their centres were ceramic fish or ashtrays, bowls and figurines. They said ‘Campbell River, B.C.’ or ‘Victoria, B.C.’
    But now the little plane is taking off. Inside it is wired. The chair I am sitting on is actually wired to the floor. Peter is yowling in the back. Lolly is mewing plaintively. Sally is stoic, resigned. I think, Held together with baling