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2004 Man Booker Prize Longlist
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The Island Walkers Information and Review (continued)
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Selected Quotes (continued) |
Spotting Alf, Gordie hurried over.
'Alf, I need Matt.'
'Think he went down to the dyehouse,' Alf said, glancing up. Tufts of black hair blocked Gordie's big nostrils. In truth, Alf had no idea where Matt Honnegger was. The soon-to-be-retired foreman was just as likely to be in the can, relaxing.
'These people are from Intertex,' Gordie said, in a terse undertone. 'Top guns. They want a tour.'
'I'll see if I can find Matt.'
'Maybe you could take us around.' Gordie had already decided for him. As he waved the others over, Alf struggled to his feet. Unable to find a rag, he hurriedly wiped his hands on his trousers.
'Alf, this is Mr. Prince -- '
'Bob Prince,' the bald man said in a low rich voice. Alf remembered where he'd seen him -- that photo in the Star the previous spring. It was a bit like meeting someone whose fame had preceded him, a little whirlpool of excitement. Alf was on edge, aware that these men were perched high on a ladder he wanted to climb.
'Mr. Prince is vice president of -- ah --,' Gordie faltered.
'New acquisitions.' Prince said. He put out his hand.
'I'm a little dirty,' Alf said, dragging his hand again across his shirt front. The others were watching blankly.
'Honest dirt,' Prince said. The hand remained in place; it had become an order. Alf took it. For a lingering moment the other man's eyes -- they were a pale, icy blue, almost the same color as Alf's -- reached into his with a searchlight's candor. Alf experienced an obscure shame.
'Alf's our head fixer,' he heard Gordie say. 'There isn't anything he doesn't know about this place.' Alf wondered if Gordie was about to leave him with this bunch.
Prince introduced the others. Their names and faces flashed by him. Jacobson. Martin. Raleigh. Macrimmon. Each one leaned forward, following the boss's example, to take his hand. A thin man with rimless glasses looked at him more directly than the others; then the green eyes fled.
'And this is Shirley,' Prince concluded, with a hint of affectionate condescension. He offered no last name, as if, like a child or a mascot, the young woman at his side did not need one. Shirley preened, smiling at a place beside Alf's head.
To Alf's relief, Gordie stayed to conduct the tour. The assistant manager led them into the first aisle of humming machines. Unsure why he was wanted but relieved at no longer being the center of attention, Alf tagged along.
They stopped by the first machine, a Richardson . In a circular drum, hundreds of latch needles made a soft hushing sound as they worked in rapid synchronization, while above them blue bobbins swept round and round on a carouse, wafting a faint breeze over their sweating faces.
'If you could stand up here by me, Alf.'
His mouth suddenly dry, Alf took his place beside Gordie. To his relief, the assistant manager seemed determined to do all the talking. Alf thrust his hand in his pockets. His fingers found a key, the teeth of which he raked absently with his thumb. A bit of lint drifted across the floor; on a distant window ledge, sun glinted on a pigeon's neck. Gordie's high, frantic voice fluttered on the close air. He was explaining how the mill was organized: knitting at the top, cutting just below, all the stages stacked one below the other so that at the end the finished sweaters should flow out the door. Alf cast a glimpse at Shirley's bodice, the artfully undone button.
Out of nowhere, his father's drowned body rose. He saw the pale head laid back on the metal table in McArthur's Funeral Home, saw the deep, nearly bloodless gash crossing the shoulder and chest like a bandolier. The wound had not killed him, Rick McArthur told Alf. He had drowned first and then sustained his injury while turning in the currents under the dam. 'The old timers down there,' Rick told him, 'they're thick with spikes. He had never forgotten that phrase, thick with spikes. He thought of it as he crossed the Bridge Street bridge and happened to glance upstream at the dam, foaming benignly across the river. Thick with spikes, as if some monster were down there, bristling with spines.
Momentarily he felt adrift in space, a ghost among the machines. Wiping the sweat from his brow, he looked up. Prince was listening to Gordie in a fume of impatience. The executive's heavy jaw worked at a piece of gum, while he cast hard glances around the room. The other men seemed to have caught their boss's unhappiness: their frowning faces fed off the remains like scavengers with a half-eaten kill. Only Shirley seemed unaffected. She seemed hypnotized by the machine working in front of her, by the streaming threads that raced from the bobbins into the drum of pullulating needles. But what mainly appeared to fascinate her was the place below the drum, where the tube of patterned cloth appeared as if out of nowhere, inching down between the machine's iron legs like something newborn."
"They lay on their backs, watching the stars. They picked out the Big Dipper, Ursa Major, aslant across the sky, and the North Star, beaming feebly. Orion, tilted in the South, with his sword belt. She pointed out constellations he did not know, pressing close so he could sight along her arm. The Milky Way was a vast twinkling road as it past, she said, not only the dark fields of space but through their bodies a well, entering just at the bottom of the breast bone and exiting out their backs. Could he feel it? He thought he could.
After a while, they changed positions, sitting up with their backs to the Shade monument, trading the bottle back and forth. When she laughed at some joke he made -- laughed with an almost shocking abandon -- he realized she was getting drunk. He felt tipsy himself, released to a giddy freedom beyond his usual restraint and deference. They drank toasts to the stars and to individual constellations. He told her his old childhood fantasy, that the night sky was really like the roof of a great tent, and the stars were pinholes where the light came through from beyond. She was intrigued by the idea of a light from beyond: a light so bright it could not be borne by human eyes, she said, like the radiance people attributed to the naked presence of God. That set her off wondering about the power of God; if there was a God, was he wholly benign, as people generally supposed, or a dangerous and even destructive force that might on a whim destroy people's happiness -- hadn't he done that to Job, for the sake of a mere bet? -- or burn the earth to cinders. Her imagination was apocalyptic. She began to talk about nuclear war and how it was impossible to think about -- all those Russian and American missiles pointed at each other. The end of the world, at any given minute, was only a few minutes away. She was appalled by this, and yet she thrilled to the idea of such power, as if the devastation sleeping in those warheads were simply another facet of nature, great and mysterious like the stars.
They lay down and kissed for a while. Suddenly she rolled away on her back. He made to roll on top of her, but she pushed him off, instructing him to lie beside her.
'On your back,' she said. 'Lie perfectly still, your arms at your sides.'
He remained quiet, looking up at the stars. One was blinking: a high jetliner, picking its way through the constellations. Its roar sounded soft and far away.
'We're lying like they're lying,' she said. 'Only a few feet above them.'
'I don't like pretending I'm dead,' he said, after a while.
'We are dead,' she said, very quietly. He felt his breathing stop. The winking jetliner crossed the sky, in the remoteness of another life. |
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