Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [54]
“Sometimes I think he’d like me to die,” Anna said, “I have dreams about it.”
We walked back and I built up the fire and mixed some cocoa, using powdered milk. Everything was dark now except for the flames, sparks going up in spirals, coals underneath pulsing red when the night breeze hit them. We sat on the groundsheets, David with his arm around Anna, Joe and I a foot apart.
“This reminds me of Girl Guides,” Anna said in the cheerful voice I once thought was hers. She began to sing, the notes hesitant, quavering:
There’ll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover
Tomorrow, when the world is free. …
The words went out towards the shadows, smoke-thin, evaporating. Across the lake a barred owl was calling, quick and soft like a wing beating against the eardrum, cutting across the pattern of her voice, negating her. She glanced behind her: she felt it.
“Now everybody sing,” she said, clapping her hands.
David said “Well, goodnight children,” and he and Anna went into their tent. The tent lit up from inside for a moment, flashlight, then went out.
“Coming?” Joe said.
“In a minute.” I wanted to give him time to go to sleep.
I sat in the dark, the stroking sound of the night lake surrounding me. In the distance the Americans’ campfire glowed, a dull red cyclops eye: the enemy lines. I wished evil towards them: Let them suffer, I prayed, tip their canoe, burn them, rip them open. Owl: answer, no answer.
I crawled into the tent through the mosquito-netting; I groped for the flashlight but didn’t switch it on, I didn’t want to disturb him. I undressed by touch; he was obscure beside me, inert, comforting as a log. Perhaps that was the only time there could be anything like love, when he was asleep, demanding nothing. I passed my hand lightly over his shoulder as I would touch a tree or a stone.
But he wasn’t sleeping; he moved, reached over for me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I thought you were asleep.”
“Okay,” he said, “I give up, you win. We’ll forget everything I said and do it like you want, back to the way it was before, right?”
It was too late, I couldn’t. “No,” I said. I had already moved out.
His hand tightened in anger on my arm; then he let go. “Sweet flaming balls of Christ,” he said. His outline lifted in the darkness, I crouched down, he was going to hit me; but he turned over away from me, muffling himself in the sleeping bag.
My heart bumped, I held still, translating the noises on the other side of the canvas wall. Squeaks, shuffling in the dry leaves, grunting, nocturnal animals; no danger.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The tent roof was translucent, wet parchment, spotted on the outside with early dew. Bird voices twirled over my ears, intricate as skaters or running water, the air filling with liquid syllables.
In the middle of the night there was a roar, Joe having a nightmare. I touched him, it was safe, he was trapped in the straitjacket sleeping bag. He sat up, not yet awake.
“This is the wrong room,” he said.
“What was it?” I asked. “What were you dreaming?” I wanted to know, perhaps I could remember how. But he folded over and went back.
My hand was beside me; it had the cured hide smell of wood-smoke mingled with sweat and earth, fish lingering, smell of the past. At the cabin we would soak the clothes we’d been wearing, scrub the forest out of them, renew our coating of soap and lotion.
I dressed and went down to the lake and dipped my face into it. This water was not clear like the water in the main lake: it was brownish, complicated by more kinds of life crowded more closely together, and it was colder. The rock ledge dropped straight down, lake of the edge. I woke the others.
After I’d cleaned the fish I dipped them in flour and fried them and boiled coffee. The fish flesh was white, blue-veined; it tasted like underwater and reeds. They ate, not talking much; they hadn’t slept well.
Anna’s face in the daylight