The Island Walkers by John Bemrose Page A

should. She’s right over there.”
    To Joe’s horror, Smiley pointed.
    Joe looked off miserably across the lawn, over trembling islands of shade and sun, into a lilac bush. He wanted to start the day, his life, over again.
    “Not there. Over there.”
    “For Christ’s sake, I know where she is. Stop pointing!”
    After a moment Smiley said, “I wonder what that thing is on her face — you see that?”
    “No.”
    “Look at it. It’s like some kind of burn.”
    Joe lurched to his feet and started to walk quickly towards the house, picking his way among groups of students. Just then Mann emerged, carrying a pitcher of ice water. Normally Joe was happy to see the teacher. He liked to stop after class to talk with him, finding in his power of listening — that stillness — something that made his own thoughts rise and come clear. But he wasn’t ready for Mann now. He asked where the washroom was.
    Mann put down his pitcher and led Joe through the house, which sprawled to the rear through a series of additions. The teacher moved with surprising swiftness, his small feet in their worn, pointed shoes pattering on the tiles. The bathroom was behind the kitchen. “The old summer kitchen,” Mann said, and as he stepped back to let Joe pass, the teacher touched him lightly on the back.
    Joe closed the door, fit the bolt, stripped off his shirt, and began to wash his face and upper torso, sloshing up water almost wildly. His face in the mirror seemed an assembly of imperfections. Under his right eye, a pimple raised its minaret of shame. Patting himself dry, he studied a framed photo hanging beside the window. Two young men, both wearing shorts and white shirts, their arms draped loosely over each other’s shoulders, grinned back at him with abandoned smiles of pure happiness. Behind them soared the white, tentlike summit of a distant mountain. He saw with a start that one of themen was Mann: Mann with dark curly hair, his eyes less pouched, Mann in the bright disguise of youth. The other man had the kind of smooth, almost feminine face Joe remembered from a painting he’d seen in a book: the unearthly face of an angel by Raphael. This is crazy, he thought, breaking suddenly from the image with a sense of alarm. I’ll speak to her. I have to speak to her.
    He passed through the house with a feeling that he was living under a sentence, a feeling that he was being dragged forward in a kind of dream-state by his decision. And yet, the whole time, he told himself he was free: maybe he’d speak to her, maybe he wouldn’t. He was afraid of his own cowardice, and half-looking forward to its intervention. When he reached the front step he glanced across the lawn and saw with thudding heart that she had got up, that she was moving away from the others with a paper cup in her hand, following the hedge that ran from Mann’s yard into the adjacent property.
    And then Mann was there. The teacher held up an old-fashioned-looking camera, with an accordion chamber of black fabric, and asked if he could take Joe’s picture. He’d taken every graduating class for years now, he said, candid shots, it had become a tradition. He positioned Joe against the door, softly gripping his biceps to move him back a little. As Mann frowned into his viewfinder, Joe watched Anna Macrimmon drift down the line of hedge, her head raised and tilted a bit to one side, as if skeptically.
    “There we go. Handsomest fellow in the class,” Mann said with a grin. A moment later, laconically: “I see we have a new girl.”
    “Yes.” Joe evaded the teacher’s eyes.
    “Why don’t you introduce me to her?”
    “I don’t really know her. She just came.”
    “Then we’ll introduce each other.”
    Walking with Mann under the locusts, he was under sentence again, marching out to his execution. They passed Smiley, who looked up from his sandwich. “Yugga,” his friend said quietly. As if he knew.
    She was walking along the other side of a large garden,