The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [84]
During these moments, with the girl hoisted up into her father’s arms, I kept looking back to Mr. Giggs on the bridge. It was clear everything that would happen now would be determined by him.
“Get down!” he yelled. But Niemeyer refused. He stayed as he was. He looked at the sea below him. The girl looked at nothing. Giggs kept the pistol pointed at the prisoner. There was a gunshot. And as if on a signal, the ship jerked and began moving forward again.
I was turning back to look at Niemeyer, when I saw Emily. Her face was intently watching something on the far side of the deck. I swept my eyes over to that location, and just as I did, I saw Miss Lasqueti fling something out of her hands into the sea. If I had turned even a second later, if I had paused, I would not have seen this.
Niemeyer was very still, as if waiting for the pain. The eighteen-inch chain that held his hands together hung down in front of him. Had the bullet missed him? He looked towards Giggs, who seemed to be clutching his arm. Had the gun misfired? Giggs’s pistol had hit the deck below the bridge and discharged a shot into the darkness. Nearly everyone was watching either Niemeyer and the girl or the bridge. But my eyes stayed with Miss Lasqueti and saw her quick recovery back to innocence, as if just one of the spectators, so that what I had seen felt like a hallucination. The gesture of an arm flinging something, some object, into the sea could have meant nothing. Except that Emily had been watching her too. It could have been one of her half-read books, or it could have been her pistol.
Giggs was gripping his injured arm. And Niemeyer was balanced on the stern railing. Then the prisoner, never letting go of his embrace of the girl with his manacled hands, leapt into the sea.
Emily’s eyes must have watched all that had taken place with an awareness of what was occurring. But afterwards she said nothing. In all the comings and goings after that leap to their deaths in the attempted escape, Emily said not a word. During the previous week I’d often witnessed her bend towards Asuntha to talk or to listen to her, and had seen my cousin again and again in the presence of Sunil. But whatever Emily’s role had been in that event, it was to exist unspoken, throughout most of our lives. Did I witness something else below the surface of what had happened that night? Was it all part of a boy’s fervent imagination? I swung around, looking for Cassius, and then went towards him, but my friend seemed quietened by what had happened and withdrew from me, as if I was a stranger.
This journey was to be an innocent story within the small parameter of my youth, I once told someone. With just three or four children at its centre, on a voyage whose clear map and sure destination would suggest nothing to fear or unravel. For years I barely remembered it.
The Breaker’s Yard
I BOARDED THE Queen of Capilano at Horseshoe Bay at about a quarter to two, and, as the ferry left Vancouver, I climbed the stairs to the sun deck. I was in a parka and I let the wind beat the hell out of me as the boat rumbled into a blue landscape of estuaries and mountains. It was a small ferry with several rules of warning posted here and there to tell you what you could and could not do. There was even a sign disallowing clowns on the boat, apparently the result of some fracas a few months earlier. The ferry entered the channel, and I stayed