In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje Page A

and his men attacked me, leaving me in a back alley. In this dream I hadn’t seen you for a long time and I loved you in your dress. It was a big celebration of some sort, you were with honourable company. I would be looking at your face and a hand would hit me. I would fall to the floor. I’d be lying there looking at your dress, then dragged away. I finally came back and asked you to dance. Two things happened. For a brief while we were dancing. I wanted to hold you close but I did not want to get blood on you and you said, “It’s all right, Patrick,” and then I was watching your face as they began forcing me back to the alley. The dream ended with me plotting with the Chinese to break up the party.

    He opened the door to her and stepped back quickly, appalled. He had not expected her.
    He walked into the empty rooms, gesturing towards the broken things he was trying to assemble, broken glass and crockery, things he had flung long ago, after Clara had gone.
    – What are those things?
    – Glass, a crossword puzzle … a story.
    Alice grinned at him. How much did she know about him and Clara anyway.
    – I’m trying to get my life in order, he said.
    – Well, this should begin it.
    She moved around the room, touching nothing, as if everything in the sparse living room was potent and part of his cure.
    – How long has she been gone? A year and a half?
Two years?
    – Longer. Not long enough.
    He spoke in bursts. Sentences needed additions, parentheses, to clarify not the information but his state.
    – Give me a coffee, Patrick.
    There was more than five feet between them. When she moved closer towards a news clipping attached to the wall, he automatically moved further back. He felt dangerous. Alice seemed older, confident. She removed her coat and lay it on the ground by the door. He followed her into the kitchen, pumped water into the saucepan for coffee, and lit the gas. There were no chairs so she sat on the counter opposite, watching him at the stove. She was safe there.
    – You look tired, she said.
    – Oh, I’m okay. Physically I’m fine, just my mind. I’m lucky, whatever state I’m in my body takes care of itself.
    It was his longest speech for months.
    – I’m the reverse. That’s the only way I can tell if I’m in bad shape mentally, through my body.
    – Well, you’re an actress, right?
    – That’s right.
    His eyes were on everything but her, a bad sign. She slid off the counter and approached him, then stopped, inches away. His eyes caught hers, moved away, and then settled safely on her cheek.
    – The next move, Patrick.
    His first smile for months. He leaned forward and clung toher to stop her vanishing. She was smaller than he imagined. She wasn’t thin, or very small, but he had thought her body against him would be a different size. He could see the red in her hair by the temples, the lines under her eyes.
    The water in the saucepan was boiling and they did not move. They stood together feeling each other’s spines, each other’s hair at the back of the neck. Relax, she said, and he wanted to collapse against her, be carried by her into foreign countries, into the ocean, into bed, anywhere. He had been alone too long. This was a time when returning from work he would fall nightly into a cave of dreams, so later he was not sure it happened. It had been sudden, nothing was played out to conclusion, nothing solved by their time together, but it somehow kept him alive. She had come that day, he thought later, not for passion, but to save him, to veer him to some reality. If anyone knew where Clara was, she did.
    He had almost walked past Alice the previous week, outside the Parrot Theatre. He had not seen her since the farmhouse near Paris Plains, two years earlier, and he had hardly recognized her. But she had yelled his name.
    – Were you at the play?
    – No …
    He shrugged distractedly. His face and eyes were wild, were seeing nothing on the street around him. His clothes