Surfacing by Margaret Atwood Page A

students clumsy or sniggering practising on your body, they take the baby out with a fork like a pickle out of a pickle jar. After that they fill your veins up with red plastic, I saw it running down through the tube. I won’t let them do that to me ever again.
    He wasn’t there with me, I couldn’t remember why; he should have been, since it was his idea, his fault. But he brought his car to collect me afterwards, I didn’t have to take a taxi.
    From the forest behind us came the sound of sporadic chopping: a few blows, the echoes, a pause, a few more blows, one of them laughing, echo of the laughter. It was my brother who cut the trail, the year before he left, the axe hacking and the machete slashing through the undergrowth marking his progress as he worked his way around the shore.
    “Haven’t we done enough?” Anna asked. “I bet I’m getting sunstroke.” She sat back on her heels and took out the un-smoked half of her cigarette. I think she wanted us to exchange more confidences, she wanted to talk about her other diseases, but I kept on weeding. Potatoes, onions; the strawberry patch was a hopeless jungle, we wouldn’t do that; in any case the season was over.
    David and Joe appeared in the long grass outside the fence, one at either end of a thinnish log. They were proud, they’d caught something. The log was notched in many places as though they’d attacked it.
    “Hi,” David called. “How’s the ol’ plantation workers?”
    Anna stood up. “Fuck off,” she said, squinting at them against the sun.
    “You’ve hardly done anything,” David said, unquenchable, “you call that a garden?”
    I measured their axework with my father’s summarizing eye. In the city he would shake hands with them, estimating them shrewdly: could they handle an axe, what did they know about manure? They would stand there embarrassed in their washed suburban skins and highschool clothes, uncertain what was expected of them.
    “That’s great,” I said.
    David wanted us to get the movie camera and take some footage of both of them carrying the log, for Random Samples; he said it would be his cameo appearance. Joe said we couldn’t work the camera. David said all you did was press a button, an idiot could do it, anyway it might be even better if it was out of focus or overexposed, it would introduce the element of chance, like a painter throwing paint at a canvas, it would be organic. But Joe said what if we wrecked the camera, who would pay for it. In the end they stuck the axe in the log, after several tries, and took turns shooting each other standing beside it, arms folded and one foot on it as if it was a lion or a rhinoceros.
    In the evening we played bridge, with the set of slightly greasy cards that had always been there, blue seahorses on one deck, red seahorses on the other. David and Anna played against us. They won easily: Joe didn’t know how, exactly, and I hadn’t played for years. I was never any good; the only part I liked was picking up the cards and arranging them.
    Afterwards I waited for Anna to walk up to the outhouse with me; usually I went first, alone. We took both flashlights; they made protective circles of weak yellow light, moving with our feet as they walked. Rustlings, toads in the dry leaves; once the quick warning thump of a rabbit. The sounds would be safe as long as I knew what they were.
    “I wish I had a warmer sweater,” Anna said, “I didn’t know it got so cold.”
    “There’s some raincoats,” I said, “you could try those.”
    When we got back to the cabin the other two were in bed; they didn’t bother going as far as the outhouse after dark, they peed on the ground. I brushed my teeth; Anna started taking off her makeup by the light of a candle and her flashlight propped on end, they’d blown out the lamp.
    I went into my room and got undressed. Joe mumbled, he was half asleep; I curled my arm over him.
    Outside was the wind, trees moving in it, nothing else. The