Free The Island Walkers by John Bemrose Page A

that allowed him a brief, thrilling glimpse of her small breasts, waited as she slid under the sheet beside him, her hair dark on the pillow as he reared on one elbow to begin his courtship, waited another moment or two to let her settle, in the near-dark where she waited, as always, with a stillness that moved him.
    A curtain belled from the window as he bent to kiss her. Her lips picked softly at his.
    His hand crept over her stomach, where the skin was extraordinarily soft, slack, discoloured, he knew, with marbled streaks: it was what having children had done.
    She grasped his wrist.
    “You know I don’t like that.”
    “Right. Sorry.”
    He moved his hand to the bottom of her rib cage, under her breasts. There was a tension in her, which seemed to evaluate his every move. He had noticed it the first time he had ever touched her, dancing together that night of the servicemen’s party in Henley-Under-Downs: an electric pulse that seemed to push him away as he struggled to lead her. They had fought each other around the floor.
    But he had loved her that first night, the clear, vibrant openness of her face and wide-set eyes, which seemed to look towards the future, towards him, with an adventuring gladness ready for anything, anything . And her air of refinement — that trim, high-shouldered dress, cinched at the waist, the sharp plunge of her bodice over a chest of pale, unimaginable smoothness. She seemed so much finer than any of the other girls in the crowded hall. So he learned to put up with her strangeness, her physical wariness. In a way, he felt he had been stalking her, courting her, ever since — still trying to come close.
    Her lips touched and tempted his with a bird language of their own. And she had learned how to hold him, her slender fingers firm. He found her exciting, and her physical elusiveness had become part of this, an infinite tease.
    When he was in her, he moved slowly, postponing his own climax in the hopes he might help her to her own. He wasn’t actually sure she could come, though she insisted she did, or at least insisted she had pleasure enough. She was working hard beneath him, her long body trembling with that high-strung alertness, that almost negative magnetic force. He sensed she was pushing herself harder than usual,hungering perhaps for some kind of breakthrough, and he stayed with her. Finally she told him she was getting sore. “You finish, dear,” she whispered. “Are you sure?” “Yes, yes.” But he was so numb himself he had to work a good while longer before he finally crested and passed quickly, too quickly, through that place where he had never been able to stop.

7

    JAMIE WATCHED ANDY WILSON slide his bike into the stands and walk away through the crowded Boys’ Yard, throwing back his orange mop of hair with a jerk of his head. Moving in closer, Jamie touched the racing tires thin as snakes, the cherry-red frame, not a scratch. Andy Wilson lived in the North End. Snob Hill, some of the boys called it, not the boys who lived there, but the boys who lived lower in the town, where the rivers were, the brown and misty rivers that smelled of mud and rotting things. His mother had bawled him out when he’d said Snob Hill. She said she was sure people up there wouldn’t like it. She said they were no more or less snobby, no better or no worse, than anybody else. Maybe. But they were different. When the Grade Three boys from the North End played tag, they didn’t ask anybody else to play with them. They ran back and forth between the fences of the Boys’ Yard, shouting each other’s nicknames, Pud and Clumbs and Schooner and Drums. It was like a private party, a party where everyone pretended to have a good time, even if he wasn’t. There was a lot of pretending about the boys from the Hill, he felt. They were always together, talking loud, getting something organized.
    His own bike — he didn’t ride it to school — had once been Joe’s, a CCM with a banged-up