In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [31]
Small draws up a chair. A mutual excitement, as if each were looking into a mirror.
– Where do you want me to begin, says Small, with my childhood?
Patrick smiles.
– I don’t want to talk about you, Small. I want Clara. Something about her cast a spell on me.… I don’t know what it is.
– It’s her unfinished nature, Ambrose says quietly.
– Perhaps.
– Who else knows I am here?
– No one. I came just to talk to her.
– I’ll wake Clara. Go outside, she’ll come out and listen to you.
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.
When Patrick woke, he could still not see properly out of one eye. His wet clothes were bunched on a chair in front of the small grate. Now and then he would get up, wrap the thin quilt around his chest, and sit by the window looking down at the river. The same river, downstream from Small’s house, Depot Creek, scarred where the loggers tore open the banks to build dams. Some kids were fishing knee-deep by the dock. He sat at the window feeling the leak of air through the glass. His hands stiff on his lap seemed to be someone else’s hands that he was looking at in a picture. He heard Clara’s voice on the other side of the door.
He saw his ghost in the mirror. He pushed back the bolt with his shoulder, the quilt like a cape over him.
– Turn the handle, I can’t do that.
As she