Bodily Harm (24 page)

After breakfast she walks across the street to the stationery store and buys a roll of packing tape. She goes back to her room and tapes the box shut, trying to make it seem as much as possible like the original job. If the box doesn’t look opened she can always plead ignorance. She orders tea and biscuits in her room and puts in some time looking at her watch. Then she goes to the front desk and tells the Englishwoman she’ll be over at Ste. Agathe tonight but she wants the room held for her.

“You have to pay for it, you know,” the Englishwoman says. “Even if you’re not in it.”

Rennie says she’s aware of this. She considers haggling about the meals, but drops the idea. It’s what the Englishwoman is expecting her to do, she’s tapping her pencil on the edge of the desk, waiting for it. Rennie’s not up to that gooseberry stare.

She lugs the box out of her room and props it against the front desk. She goes back for her bags and checks her camera out of the safe; she leaves the passport, it’s safer here. Then she goes down the stone stairs to look for a taxi.

There are no taxis, but there’s a boy with a wheelbarrow. He looks about eight, though he’s probably older, and after hesitating a moment Rennie hires him. She sends him upstairs for the box, which she doesn’t want to touch any more than she has to. The boy is shy and doesn’t talk much. He loads all her things, even her purse, into the wheelbarrow and sets off along the pockmarked road in his bare feet, almost running.

At first Rennie thinks he’s going this fast because he has some notion of making off with her possessions. She hurries behind him, sweating already and feeling not very dignified. But then she notes his thin arms and decides that he’s like rickshaw drivers, he had to go this fast to keep up the momentum. He takes her a back way, between two ramshackle wooden buildings, along a rutted path too narrow and muddy for cars, cluttered with discarded cardboard boxes. Then there’s a tiny house with a family of chickens scratching around it, then a storage warehouse piled with sacks, and they come out onto the pier.

The boy, who has not looked back once, speeds up on the level ground, heading for the boat, which must be the one at the end. Rennie sees the virtue of arriving at the same time he does. Even if he’s honest the others may not be, and there are several of them now, a whole group of young boys, running beside the wheelbarrow, calling out things she can’t understand, grinning back at her as she jogs, puffing now, the edges of her straw hat flapping, chasing her
own purse as it flees ahead of her down the pier, around piles of wooden crates, parked trucks covered with tarpaulins, small mounds of fruit and unknown vegetables discarded and rotting. Opposite the boat the boy stops and waits for her with a smile she can’t interpret, and the other boys draw back into a circle, leaving a gap for her to enter. Is he making fun of her?

“How much?” she says.

“What you wish,” he answers. Of course she overpays him, she can tell by his grin and those of the other boys, delighted and mocking. They want to put things on the boat for her, they’re grabbing for the purse, the camera bag, but she fends them off, she’s had enough of that. She piles her things on the dock and sits down on top of them, feeling like a hen. Now, of course, there’s no way she can leave the pile to ask about the fare and the departure time, and the boy has already run off with his wheelbarrow. She sees why he was going so fast: he wants to get in as many trips as possible before the boat leaves.

Rennie catches her breath. Nobody is watching her, she’s avoided suspicion. She remembers the time Jake got pulled over for speeding, with some hash in the glove compartment. Act normal, he said to her quickly before rolling down the window, and Rennie had to think about that. Normal for her would be getting out of the car and walking as fast as possible in any direction as long as it was away. But she sat there without saying anything at all, and that was acceptable enough, though she’d felt guilt shining around her like a halo.

As she does now. She decides to act like a journalist, for the benefit of anyone watching but also for her own. If she goes through the motions, takes a few pictures, a few notes, maybe she’ll convince herself. It’s like making faces: her mother used to say she shouldn’t do that or her face would grow that way permanently. Is that what happened to you? she’d said once, when she was thirteen, the backchat age her mother called it. But she said it under her breath.

She looks around her for possible subjects, takes out her camera, fiddles with the lens. There’s the boat, for instance, which is tied to the pier with looped ropes thick as a wrist. It was black once but is now mottled with rusty brown where the paint has weathered. The name is fading on the bow:
Memory
. Rennie feels about it much as she felt about the plane she came on: can it really float? But it makes the trip, twice a day, to the blue shape in the distance, there and back. Surely people would not use it if it weren’t safe.

The deck is a jumble of wicker hampers, suitcases and bundles. Several men are tossing cardboard boxes aboard and stowing them through the open hatchway and under the outside benches. Rennie takes a picture of them, shooting into the sun, catching a box in midair with two pairs of outstretched arms framing it, thrower’s and catcher’s. She hopes the picture will look dramatic, though she knows that when she tries for such effects they usually don’t turn out. Overexposure, Jake says. On Ste. Agathe she’ll take pictures of the restaurants, if any, and of old women sitting in the sun peeling lobsters, or peeling anything within reason. She knows there will be old women peeling things but she’s not dead certain about the lobsters.

There’s a hand on her shoulder and Rennie freezes. She’s been watched, they know, she’s been followed. But then she hears the voice, “Hi there,” and it’s Lora, in cerise today with blue orchids, smiling away as if she’s supposed to be here.

Rennie stands up. “I thought you were over on Ste. Agathe,” she says. It will take a moment but very soon she’ll be angry.

“Yeah, well, I got held up,” says Lora. She’s glancing around, down, she’s already checked out the box, swiftly and casually. “I missed the boat. Anyway, Elva got better.”

Both of them know this is a lie. But what should she do now? One question too many may take her somewhere she definitely doesn’t want to go. There’s no way she wants Lora to find out that
she knows what’s in the box, that she knows she’s been used. The less she admits to knowing the better. When people play with guns, sooner or later they go off, and she would rather be somewhere else at the time.

Lora’s scanning the pier now, noting who’s there, who isn’t. “I see you got Elva’s box okay,” she says.

“No problem,” says Rennie, amiably, neutrally. “I guess we can just have it put down there in the hold?”

“Keep it with you,” says Lora. “Things disappear around here. Anyway Elva always comes down for her box, she gets impatient if she has to wait around for them to unload all that stuff. She hates standing out in the sun.”

Lora doesn’t offer to take charge of the box. She does however get it lifted on board and stowed under the seat, Rennie’s seat, the wooden bench running along the side. Upwind, says Lora, and outside. That way you don’t get wet and it’s not so smelly. “Never sit in the cabin,” she says. “You just about choke to death. If we’re lucky they’ll only use the sails.”

“Where do we pay?” says Rennie.

“They collect once you’re on,” says Lora. She’s looking around the pier again.

Without any signal people begin to board. They wait until the boat rocks towards them, then jump the gap of water where seaweed washes out from underneath the pier, swatches of rubber hair. When it’s Rennie’s turn, one of the men grabs her purse, wordlessly, then grips her arm to pull her across.

The deck fills with people, most of them brown or black. They sit on the benches, on the crates and canvas-covered baggage, anywhere, and Rennie begins to remember stories about overloaded boats capsizing. The two German women from the hotel appear, looking around for seats. The retired American couple from the reef boat climb on board too, still wearing their baggy wide-legged
shorts, but they choose to stand. Already they’re peering up into the sky.

“Is it usually this crowded?” Rennie asks.

“This is extra,” Lora says. “They’re going home to vote. The election’s tomorrow.”

The men are casting off, there are legs and feet beside Rennie’s head, the thick ropes come aboard. A pink-faced fattish man in a greasy white hat and a dark blue jacket has come up through the hatchway, which they’re now closing, pulling a tarp over it; he shoves himself among the people, squeezing past legs, climbing over bodies, collecting the money. Nobody is giving orders, least of all him, though suddenly there are about ten men all undoing knots. The edge of the pier is crowded, everyone’s shouting. Water grows between the boat and the shore, a split, a gap.

Behind the line of people a maroon car is driving slowly out onto the pier. It stops, a man gets out, then another; their mirror sunglasses are turned towards the boat. Lora bends down, scratching at her ankle. “Damn fleas,” she says. The motor starts and the cabin immediately fills with smoke.

“See what I mean?” says Lora.

Ste. Agathe emerges out of the blue hazy sky or sea, rising slowly, sinking slowly, at first only an indistinct smudge, then clearer, a line of harsh vertical cliffs flat-topped and scrubby past the glassy slopes of waves. It looks dry, not like St. Antoine, which from this distance is a moist green, its outline a receding series of softly rounded cones. Queenstown is now just a sprinkling of white. Rennie decides the pale oblong on the hill above it must be Fort Industry. From here the whole place looks like a postcard.

They’ve turned off the motor and are coasting, the three sails bellying out like old sheets on a line, patched and stained, revealing too many secrets, secrets about nights and sicknesses and the lack of money. They remind Rennie of the lines of washing seen from trains, the trains she used to take for Christmas visits home during university, since no planes go to Griswold. Dryers were invented not because they were easier but because they were private. She thinks about her mother’s red knuckles and her phrase for disreputable stories:
dirty laundry
. Something you weren’t supposed to hang out in public. Her mother’s red knuckles were from hanging the sheets out on the line, even in winter, to get the sun she said, but of course her sheets were always very clean.

Lora says this is a calm day, but Rennie feels queasy anyway; she wishes she’d had the foresight to take something, there must be a pill. The people sitting on the downwind side get the occasional bucketful of spray as the boat creaks and lurches heavily into a trough.

Lora is sitting beside her; she’s taken a small loaf of bread out of her purple bag and is breaking pieces off of it and chewing them. At their feet four men are lying on the floor, half on top of the canvas-covered suitcases, passing around a bottle of rum. They’re already quite drunk and they’re getting drunker, they’re laughing a lot. The bottle sails past Rennie’s head into the sea, they’ve already got another one, Lora offers the bread silently to Rennie, who says no thanks.

“It’ll help you out,” says Lora. “If you’re not feeling too good. Don’t look down, look out at the horizon.”

Right beside them there’s a small boat, no bigger than a rowboat it seems to Rennie, with a reddish-pink sail; two men are on it, fishing. The boat rolls and tips, it looks very unsafe.

“It’s boats like that they hunt the whales in,” Lora says.

“You’re joking,” says Rennie.

“Nope,” says Lora. She tears another piece off the loaf. “They have a lookout, and when they see a whale they get into those boats and row like shit. Sometimes they even catch one, and then there’s a big feast.” Rennie doesn’t want to think about anyone eating anything.

Down by their feet there’s more laughter. One of the men, Rennie sees now, is the deaf and dumb man, the man they were beating up. He has a cut on his forehead, but apart from that he doesn’t seem any worse off than the others, he’s drunk as a skunk and grinning away, no teeth at all now. The old American couple in their wide-legged shorts step carefully over the bodies on their way to the stern. “Careful, Mother,” says the man, gripping the thin freckled elbow. Laughter rises around their four white chicken-shank legs. Rennie tugs at her skirt, pulling it down over her knees.

And then Paul comes out of the cabin. He too pushes past the knees, picks his way over the lolling bodies. He nods to Rennie and Lora but keeps on going, he’s in no hurry, he wanders back to the stern, ducking under the mainsail boom. Rennie didn’t see him get on. He must have been down there all the time, when the boat was tied up at the pier.

Suddenly she’s hungry, or at least the rocking emptiness, the absence of a centre of gravity, feels now like hunger. She never liked roller coasters either. “I’ll take you up on the bread,” she says.

“Have the rest,” says Lora handing her the heel of the loaf. “It swells up inside, you know?” She gets out her cigarettes and lights one, tossing the match over the side.