Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [21]
David prods at the dead trunk with the machete, poking holes in the bark. Joe sits down on the ground: he’s breathing hard, too much city, and the flies are getting to him, he scratches his neck and the backs of his hands. “I guess that’s it,” I say because I have to be the one to confess defeat, and Anna says “Thank god, they’re eating me alive.”
We start back. He could still be in there somewhere but I see now the impossibility of searching the island for him, it’s two miles long. It would take twenty or thirty men at least, strung out at intervals and walking straight through the forest, and even then they could miss him, dead or alive, accident or suicide or murder. Or if for some unfathomable reason he’s chosen this absence and is hiding, they’d never find him: there would be nothing easier in this country than to let the searchers get ahead of you and then follow at a distance, stopping when they stop, keeping them in sight so that no matter which way they turned you would always be behind them. That’s what I would do.
We walk through the green light, feet muffled on wet decaying leaves. The trail is altered going back: I’m at the end now. Every few steps I glance to each side, eyes straining, scanning the ground for evidence, for anything human: a button, a cartridge, a discarded bit of paper.
It’s like the times he used to play hide and seek with us in the semi-dark after supper, it was different from playing in a house, the space to hide in was endless; even when we knew which tree he had gone behind there was the fear that what would come out when you called would be someone else.
CHAPTER SIX
No one can expect anything else from me. I checked everything, I tried; now I’m absolved from knowing. I should be telling someone official, filling in forms, getting help as you’re supposed to in an emergency. But it’s like searching for a ring lost on a beach or in the snow: futile. There’s no act I can perform except waiting; tomorrow Evans will ship us to the village, and after that we’ll travel to the city and the present tense. I’ve finished what I came for and I don’t want to stay here, I want to go back to where there is electricity and distraction. I’m used to it now, filling the time without it is an effort.
The others are trying to amuse themselves. Joe and David are out in one of the canoes; I should have made them take life-jackets, neither of them can steer, they’re shifting their paddles from side to side. I can see them from the front window and from the side window I can see Anna, partly hidden by trees. She’s lying on her belly in bikini and sunglasses, reading a murder mystery, though she must be cold: the sky has cleared a little, but when the clouds move in front of the sun the heat shuts off.
Except for the bikini and the colour of her hair she could be me at sixteen, sulking on the dock, resentful at being away from the city and the boyfriend I’d proved my normality by obtaining; I wore his ring, too big for any of my fingers, around my neck on a chain, like a crucifix or a military decoration. Joe and David, when distance has disguised their faces and their awkwardness, might be my brother and my father. The only place left for me is that of my mother; a problem, what she did in the afternoons between the routines of lunch and supper. Sometimes she would take breadcrumbs or seeds out to the bird feeder tray and wait for the jays, standing quiet as a tree, or she would pull weeds in the garden; but on some days she would simply vanish, walk off by herself into the forest. Impossible to be like my mother, it would need a time warp; she was either ten thousand years behind the rest or fifty years ahead of them.
I brush my hair in front of the mirror, delaying; then I turn back to my work, my deadline, the career I suddenly found myself having, I didn’t intend to but I had to find something I could sell. I’m still awkward with it, I don’t know what clothes to wear to interviews: it feels strapped to me, like an aqualung