“Yes, you. Who else?”
And I followed her through the parking lot, my heart tripping over itself in excitement. She told me to get into her mother’s convertible Alfa Romeo, started the engine, and accelerated, going through the gears with precision and confidence, as if she had long years of experience. She wasn’t a girl anymore, she was a woman now, with a woman’s body — I could see her thighs under her skirt that had hiked up a little, by accident or design I couldn’t know, and her firm, full breasts under a pale pink cardigan. Burning tension between my legs, an overpowering desire to touch her. She drove at top speed, her brow furrowed, her ponytail with its ends whitened by sun bouncing on the back of her neck. I didn’t know where she was taking me, and didn’t dare ask. Gail Egan! In a car with Gail Egan! Oh, the faces Jean, Paul, and Françoise made when we passed them on the clubhouse’s small gravel road. A flash of childish vanity filled me, the ardent belief that my life was now better than anything I could have dreamed of. I was becoming one of them, one of the kids of Métis Beach. Yes, I, Romain Carrier.
Gail turned left onto Beach Street. We sped past Clifford Wiggs’ property, and I thought of those two swans found dead in the pond early in the summer, and wondered what Gail would think if she knew what I knew. “Bang, bang. On the first shot,” Louis had told me. With arrows. Some thought it could be wild animals, but a wild animal didn’t leave perfectly round holes, and so Louis received a fair share of suspicion. In the end, there wasn’t much proof.
“But why?” I asked, shocked.
He lowered his eyes, wiped his nose with dirty fingers. “They treat men like animals and animals like men. They killed my father, I kill their animals.”
“And what does Wiggs have to do with your father?”
“He’s English. All English are guilty. If they ask you where I was yesterday, I was at your place, okay?” And two days later, when Frank Brodie, Métis Beach’s private policeman, came by my place, I lied, not knowing I’d come to regret it.
We passed John Kinnear’s church, and Gail yelled in the humid air, a sort of primal scream, filled with despair, that made me shudder. Insane, I thought. She’s completely insane. The speedometer kept climbing, and the car burning into the night vibrated on the slick road.
“Do you know how my mother’s selling the marriage, as if it were the most natural thing in the world?” She pinched her nostrils and took Mrs. Egan’s shrill tone, the voice of dinner parties and forced compliments, “My girl, you’ll see, with time, you’ll come to appreciate him. What’s more, you’ll live a life of even greater luxury than your mother! Can you believe it? You’ll be able to buy all the dresses you want, and go and get them in Paris! Oh, my girl, it’s wonderful!”
The Alfa Romeo peeled off Beach Street and raced down Highway 132.
“I envy you, Romain. I know you think your world is small and stifling, but you can leave it if you want, and that would be the best thing for you. You can hope for better. I can’t.”
I said nothing. I didn’t believe her. After a few miles she took a sharp right, climbed Lighthouse Road, and drove to the point that plunged down towards the sea, where the Métis Beach lighthouse stood guard. Gail parked the car a little further down — the tide was high that night — and turned the headlights off. Behind us were the homes of the two lighthouse keepers who spelled each other off, day and night, to keep it running.
The din of the waves crashed against the rocks. The stars in the sky looked like a dance floor. Gail took my hand, and we walked along the beach, avoiding tidal pools. My heart beat so hard I felt its tremor to my shoes. Incoherent, breathless, Gail spoke rapidly in a mix of French and English. She spoke of Don Drysdale whom she would marry, the marriage she didn’t want to a young man of twenty-four she had no interest in. She talked about the cock he would put in her, it would absolutely revolt her, she knew — and she knew because she’d already done it, or almost, with a boy “as nice as you are,” the brother of a friend of hers. It happened in their house in Westmount, her parents weren’t there, and the help would remain silent as usual, for fear of being accused of lying and getting fired. “The children are the bosses too, you understand?” That evening, her friend said she’d done it with the other boy who was there. “All … all the way?” Gail asked. Yes, all the way, but not Gail, she was naked in the brother’s room, but hadn’t been attracted enough to the nice boy to “let him put his … you know.” She spoke without modesty, seemingly filled with despair, tears of rage in her eyes mixed with something wild, something insane. She told more stories, unfinished and shocking, that embarrassed me to the point I doubted I’d actually heard her right. I was trying to think of the right way to kiss her when she grabbed me by the nape of the neck, forced my face against hers, her burning breath like a panting dog, and kissed me urgently, with her tongue.
The next day we learned what had happened to Johnny Babcock and Veronica McKay. On the 132, at the intersection of MacNider road, a car turned left, and the driver didn’t see the Mercedes coming at full speed. The steering column pierced his chest, and Veronica’s neck was broken.
That night, Métis Beach lost its colour as if it had been drained of its blood. Devastated, the Babcocks and McKays returned to Montreal, followed by other families who claimed they simply couldn’t continue enjoying the summer, not after such a tragedy. That night, while the mutilated bodies of Johnny Picoté and Veronica were being extracted from the wreck, the golden youth of Métis Beach were fast asleep, dreaming of the tortured heroes of Rebel Without a Cause. One scene in particular was likely running through their minds, the one where the end of the universe is explained as the anxious young men and women gaze at the celestial vault of the planetarium: “Earth will not be missed … the problems of Man seem trivial and naive indeed.… And Man, existing alone, seems to be an episode of little consequence.…”
The funerals were held ten days later in Montreal. All Métis Beach was there for a whole week of July which, for us inhabitants of the place, seemed as empty as the end of September. A few families returned, but it wasn’t the same — tennis courts remained deserted, boats sat on the shore with their sails lowered like beached whales. Even Mrs. Tees’ garden party was more intimate and sober than usual that summer.
I prayed — in a manner of speaking — that Gail would return. She had lit a fire in me, struck a match, and left me to deal with the consequences alone! A constant, burning heat, a pit in my stomach, and my mother’s suspicious glances when she rifled through my stuff. Once she threw a copy of National Geographic in my face — given to me by Old Man Riddington — because of two pictures of African women with bare breasts, “That’s what you’re really interested in, eh? Don’t tell me it isn’t.”
I’d become a ticking time bomb. An incurable agitation filled me, a tumult between my thighs, not like the pitiful, terrifying erections of my time at the seminary, quickly extinguished by guilt.
My prayers were answered. Gail returned a few days later with her parents, more fragile than before, her eyes strange and absent. She never spoke of the accident, and when the tennis tournament organized by the clubhouse was cancelled, she said with a small, almost cheerful voice, “Johnny would have won anyway, he wins every year,” as if he were still alive and it was all a bad joke, Johnny and Veronica would be back any Thursday now to watch a movie — though those too had been cancelled.
Gail ignored me for days at a time, then, without warning, she came to the store, “Is Romain in?” She dragged me to the beach, pulling at me with an impatient hand, and kissed me passionately, not caring at all if she was seen.
Sometimes she asked me over to the clubhouse to drink a Coke. Other times, if there were friends around, she could ignore me entirely. I simply didn’t understand.
Then she would be waiting for me in front of her house on Beach Street until I passed by, returning on my CCM from old Riddington’s place where I mowed the lawn under a steely sun, and she threw herself on me, sniffing my collar like a dog, apparently excited by the odour of fermented sweat that clung to me. I told her, “No, Gail, I’m disgusting.” But she continued,