In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [33]
He turned his head and watched her face on the pillow looking up at the ceiling.
– In a way I knew I’d be injured when I saw you again. I had dreams about coming up to you at dances and being beaten back.
She leaned over and touched his chest.
– The doctor put on a good dressing.
– Does Small know you’re here with me?
– Probably, but don’t talk about him, Patrick. I’ll go back in the morning.
When she looked at his face a short while later he was asleep. The medication had made him drowsy all evening. She kept watching him a long time. Around three in the morning she felt his body against her. They touched, both moving careful of his wounds, all over each other as if meeting in a dream. Later she made her way to the bathroom and came back in a silhouette. He was comfortable and tired.
– Goodnight, Clara.
– Goodnight, Patrick Lewis. My friend.
He slept gripping her hand.
She dressed in the darkness and left without waking him. The sun came up over Goose Island, hitting the tin roof of Mr. Moir’s house as she walked home, past the Grants and the Meeks. She saw young George Grant with his brother Russell coming back with the cows and they spoke for a few minutes. She continued to the bend in the road and down the curling path to the house they lived in and would probably move from now. She felt somehow deliriously happy between the two points of this journey.
When she reached the house she didn’t go in but went down to the beach and sat facing the water, leaning against the red boat. It was cold but she had her coat on and she was thinking. Not knowing what was happening now at the hotel, that with the light Patrick had awakened to find the sheets thick with blood which had escaped from his dressings, from their moving together in the darkness, discovering even the print of her hand perfect on the wallpaper, a print of blood on the English flowers of his bedroom where she had leaned to balance herself in their lovemaking as she crouched over him. The dressings hung off him like a limp white rib while Ambrose came down from the house and saw her sitting there thinking, looking at Patrick’s river.
2
PALACE OF PURIFICATION
IN THE TUNNEL under Lake Ontario two men shake hands on an incline of mud. Beside them a pickaxe and a lamp, their dirt-streaked faces pivoting to look towards the camera. For a moment, while the film receives the image, everything is still, the other tunnel workers silent. Then Arthur Goss the city photographer packs up his tripod and glass plates, unhooks the cord of lights that creates a vista of open tunnel behind the two men, walks with his equipment the fifty yards to the ladder, and climbs out into sunlight.
Work continues. The grunt into hard clay. The wet slap. Men burning rock and shattering it wherever they come across it. Filling hundreds of barrels with liquid mud and hauling them out of the tunnel. In the east end of the city a tunnel is being built out under the lake in order to lay intake pipes for the new waterworks.
It is 1930. The cut of the shovel into clay is all Patrick sees digging into the brown slippery darkness. He feels the whole continent in front of him. They dig underneath one of the largest lakes in North America beside a hissing lamp, racing with the speed of their shadows. Each blow against the shale wall jars up from the palms into the shoulders as if the body is hit. Exhaustion overpowers Patrick and the other tunnellers within twenty minutes, the arms itching, the chest dry. Then an hour more, then another four hours till lunch when they have thirty minutes to eat.
During the eight-hour shifts no one speaks. Patrick is as silent as the Italians and Greeks towards the bronco foremen. For eight hours a day the air around them rolls in its dirty light. From somewhere else in the tunnel there is the permanent drone of pumps attempting to