The Island Walkers by John Bemrose

wasn’t ready for her. He could sense her, somewhere in the hot press of bodies behind him.
    Mann said, “If you look down at the floor.”
    Joe looked down miserably at the wide, darkly gleaming boards. A drop of his sweat fell.
    “Usually, you’d expect pine floors in a pioneer house like this. But this is oak, two-inch oak laid across oak beams. In fact, again unusually, almost all the wood in the house is oak. Can anybody tell me why that might be?”
    Silence met his question. The brown eyes in the expressionless face swept slowly over them, challenging. While the pendulum clock ticked from the mantelpiece, a faint nervous urgency spread among the students: they knew the teacher was capable of waiting minutes for an answer.
    Joe put up his hand. Mann nodded at someone else.
    Brad Long spoke in his deep, pleasant voice, which easily filled the room with its usual hint of happy scorn — surely it was all so obvious! “There was lots of oak around here — it was handy. And also, being the kind of guy he was, he knew he wanted to be number one, so he put in the best.”
    “Good,” Mann said.
    Joe burned at the lost compliment: he knew as much. But Brad wasn’t through.
    “I guess he wanted us to stand here one day and admire him.” Brad raised his large hands and looked towards the ceiling, as if addressing a gallery of ancestors, looking down appreciatively on the scene from heaven. “Great floors, Abe!”
    The class laughed. Joe thought he heard Anna Macrimmon’s voice behind him, silver among the rest.
    They ate lunch outside. Joe took a sandwich and paper plate from the long table Mann had set out under the locusts and retreated to a shady spot near a concrete birdbath. Anna Macrimmon was still moving through the line. With her were Liz McVey and Sheila Benson, a pretty, sharp-featured girl with bouffanted hair and a hard, snorting laugh. They carried their plates to a little knoll under a treeand sat on the ground, tugging their skirts over their knees. A few minutes later, Joe watched as Brad Long joined them. He lowered his rangy frame onto the dry grass at their feet, stretching himself out with all the ease in the world — a Roman at a banquet — before the prim statuary of their folded legs.
    Brad raised his arm, gesturing lazily to make some point, and Joe saw how the cuff of his pale-blue shirt was turned back with a pleasing yet casual exactness, turned back once and kept there by some magical, gravity-defying power, unlike the cuffs of his own sad shirts, which fell down constantly unless they were rolled up several times. Now Brad’s laugh came, tolerant, self-enjoying, warm. Joe saw Anna Macrimmon shake her head in disbelief or denial, saw the heavy silk of her hair move like something alive. But she was smiling too, or fighting back a smile, as if to say, Go on with you.
    A little way off, a group of Brad’s friends — boys from the North End gang — were watching Brad with barely suppressed merriment, as if he were doing what they hadn’t the nerve to try themselves.
    Joe picked at his tuna-fish sandwich. Ever since he’d seen Anna Macrimmon that first afternoon on the river, she had seemed to exist for him only. And now she had become the property, in a sense, of everybody who cared to look at her, including Brad Long, who had no idea who she was, what her true value was, not really ,
    “Yugga.”
    Smiley. He sat down cross-legged beside Joe, his plate loaded with booty.
    “Food,” he grunted, playing the caveman. Joe looked away.
    Mayonnaise leaked from Smiley’s mouth. “That new girl,” he said, “I keep thinkin’ I’ve seen her somewhere.”
    “How could that be?” Joe said coldly.
    Smiley ate with hunched, predatory enjoyment. “I dunno. It’s weird. She’s pretty good-lookin’.”
    Joe said nothing. Smiley looked up with staring frankness, his mouth open.
    “Don’t you think she’s good-lookin’?”
    “She’s all right. I haven’t really noticed.”
    “You