In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [80]
– Then I lost her.… Someone gave her the wrong bag. A simple mistake. Picked up the wrong bag. So she was carrying dynamite with a timing device, a clock bomb. She was walking with it through the crowds along the Danforth, near Broadview, walking towards the centre of the city. Who knows what she thought she was carrying. They knew she was in danger as soon as it was discovered.
Patrick was almost inaudible, whispering. If he were writing this down, Harris thought, his handwriting would be getting smaller and smaller.
– I don’t want to talk of this anymore.
– Then it will always be a nightmare.
– It will always be a nightmare, Harris. She had a line, an old saying. “In a rich man’s house there is nowhere to spit except in his face.”
– Diogenes.
– I don’t know.
A silence.
– Patrick, talk to me.
– They found me at the tannery, screaming to me about what had happened. And I ran. I ran north along the edge of the valley, no streetcars, all the demonstrations had caused chaos that day. I passed the Geranium Bakery and grabbed her friend Temelcoff to help find her. And the two of us ran all the way up to the Danforth where the crowd was, where she was supposed to be. By the time I got there, I had nothing in me to shout. Alice! I couldn’t even whisper it. We kept leaping up to look for her over the heads of the crowd. She was carrying the clock bomb, not even knowing what it was, and soon everything she held would rocket out into her. Temelcoff and I jumped up and down, the mob around us, now and then seeing each other’s frantic faces.… Then I heard the explosion. Not far away, near enough to have found her and picked up that bag and flung it anywhere else on the street.…
Then nobody moved, Patrick remembered, the whole crowd locked in stillness. There was already a distance between Alice bent over, holding her ribs, and the jolted people twenty feet away. As he came towards her she recognized him, her eyes indelible, the wound at her side.
He cradled her gently, he could hardly touch her without causing pain. Most of all he was holding her eyes with his, terrified they would close, would shut him out. One eye was flickering up and down, then the other, as if stuttering. Then the bag ten feet away exploded again.
Harmless. And when he looked back her eyes were closed. Her dead hand gripping the side of his jacket.
He got up and ran, her blood on him, along the horrified corridor in the crowd. The groan subconscious, slubbering out of his mouth. He banged into something very tough which brought his eyes back into focus.
He looked into the face of Temelcoff who held him and wouldn’t let go. Not to capture him but to calm him. Patrick struggling from side to side. The former bridge-builder’s face held together only by the formality of two clear tears. Two little silver coaches.
Then Nicholas Temelcoff let him go and walked over to the body of Alice.
– Patrick …
There was a permanent darkness to the room. A permanent silence. Harris was still, quiet, unable to see. All he knew now was where the voice had been.
On the ceiling high above him was the window with eight half-moons. If he looked up in a while there would be a suggestion of blue. My god he swam here, Harris suddenly realized. That’s how he got in, through the tunnel. What vision, what dream was that? He pressed his repeater watch and it struck five. The sound fell clearly into the room.
The knowledge it would be daybreak soon kept Harris awake. He remained where he was during the next hour and by then the first light was in the room. It nestled in the corners of the ceiling, suggested cupboards, the damn herringbone that seemed to irritate everyone, and then it clarified the alcove where his bed was, where Patrick lay strangely – the lower half of his body crouched, knees drawn up, and the top half sprawled out, head back. There was blood across his neck and shirt. He had cut his throat in the darkness. My god. Harris got up. Then sat down again. No he was asleep. He was asleep! The cuts old. From the journey here. Harris realized that