Free The Last Woman by John Bemrose Page B

one remaining eye. “You go over there.” He stood where she indicated, on the opposite side of her bed, while she removed her clothes with a confident briskness, standing at last in her panties and bra. When she discovered him watching, she blushed and covered her chest with her arms. Stripping to his shorts, he slid under the sheet beside her.
“I bet you’re pretty experienced at this,” she said.
“A bit.”
“Let’s do it then.”
Afterwards, she wept between bouts of laughter. On the sheet was a bloodstain shaped like a pear. He stroked and held her. She pushed him on his back and examined him between his legs: something electric and fierce in her look now, something at once fascinated and repelled as she lifted his penis between her fingers and studied the wrinkled sac beneath.
In the following weeks, when she met his boat, he could sense her impatience. Usually they went up to her bedroom, though if her father was home they would trek off to a cove at the back of the island where she had cached an old sleeping bag. Her appetite astonished him: it outran his own, or at least her capabilities did. Once, when a boat was idling through the marsh, she insisted they keep going – though they could hear voices, and though his back must have been intermittently visible above the rock.
Another day, in her room, hearing her father arrive, they hardly had time to get into their clothes. When they came downstairs, Mr. Scott looked up from a map he had spread out on a table. “Just showing Billy some books,” Ann sang with forced casualness. Billy liked Charles Scott and had assumed he liked him, but at that moment, meeting the gaze of the figure hulking straight-armed over the map, he experienced a chill, and he recalled faces that had looked at him that way in the Falls, faces pent with unspoken disapproval and even, in some cases, rage, as though his very existence was an affront. And something connected to this look must have happened between Ann and her father, for the next time Billy saw her, she told him she couldn’t see him for a while. She was having company at Inverness – an old girlfriend – and she had to finish some drawings for her portfolio. She seemed flustered: smiling and reddening as they stood together on the boat-house path, casting down her eyes, as if embarrassed not just at what she’d told him but at something she could not say. He was certain it was over. For things ended; he knew it beyond doubt. There was nothing you could do about it. Turning, he walked away.
She pleaded for him to stop, and when he kept going, she grabbed his arm. “Billy. Billy, listen.” He turned and saw the anxiety in her face. “Do you know Mad Jack’s Island –”
The next afternoon he arrived first, in his boat, and some time later, waiting on a granite slope, saw her approachfrom the south in her red canoe. She had brought the old sleeping bag they had used on Inverness. They spread it in a little hollow beneath a pine whose low, floating bough dropped a flickering net of light over the plaid lining. From their shelter, they could survey the passages, the unoccupied islands – the whole archipelago stretching north and south. But where they were, they were snug, hidden.
Through July and into August, when the air filled with the clacking of grasshoppers’ wings, they met under the pine. It seemed to him that everything spoke of their state – the islands baking in heat; the cool dark water where they swam without suits; the great, smooth waves of rock, bearing away their mobs of pine. He had often felt that the trees were aware of him – that they could hear him and were attuned, even, to his thoughts – and that he in turn could tell, sometimes, what they were saying – but with her this intensified. The pine that shaded them made a third.
And yet: there was something in her he could not reach, and so his joy was never complete. At times she seemed alone in her pleasure, watching him with a bored,