Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online

there. It’s one of the better places.
    “If this is better, what’s worse?” says Rennie, and they both laugh.
    Rennie asks him where home is. It’s all right to ask such questions, since Rennie has already decided this does not have the flavour of a pickup. File it under
attempt at human contact
. He just wants someone to talk to, he’s killing time. Which is fine, that’s all she’s doing herself. If there’s anything she doesn’t need in her life right now, it’s another one of what Jocasta would call
those
. Nevertheless, she’s conscious of a desire to stick her head down under the tablecloth, to see what his knees look like.
    “Home?” says Paul. “You mean, where the heart is?”
    “Was that a personal question?” says Rennie. She starts to eat the dessert, which appears to be made of sweetened chalk.
    Paul grins. “Most of the time I live on a boat,” he says. “Over at Ste. Agathe, the harbour’s better there. I’m just here for a couple of days, on business.”
    Rennie feels she’s expected to ask what sort of business, so she doesn’t. She’s decided he will be boring. She’s met people with boats before and all they ever talk about is boats. Boats make her seasick. “What sort of boat?” she says.
    “Quite a fast one. Actually I have four of them,” he says, watching her. Now she’s supposed to be impressed.
    “I guess that means you’re filthy rich,” she says.
    This time he laughs. “I charter them out,” he says. “They’re all out now. It’s a pain in the ass in some ways. I don’t like tourists. They’re always complaining about the food, and they throw up too much.”
    Rennie, who is a tourist, lets this pass. “How did you get four?” she says.
    “You can pick them up cheap around here,” he says, “from the dead or the disgusted, retired stockbrokers who have heart attacks or decide it’s too much trouble scraping off the barnacles. There’s a bit of owner piracy too.”
    Rennie doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of her ignorance, but he smiles at her with his tan folding into pleats around his eyes, he wants her to ask, so she relents and asks.
    “People stealing their own boats,” he says. “They collect the insurance. Then they sell the boat.”
    “But you would never do a thing like that,” says Rennie. She’s paying more attention. No gold earring, no wooden leg, no hooks on the ends of the arms, no parrot. Still, there’s something. She looks at his hands, square-fingered and practical, carpenter’s hands, on the tablecloth, not doing anything.
    “No,” he says. “I would never do a thing like that.”
    He smiles a little, his eyes are light blue, and she recognizes something about him, a deliberate neutrality. He’s doing what she does, he’s holding back, and now she’s really curious.
    “Do you have a job?” she says.
    “If you have four boats you don’t exactly need a job, around here,” he says. “I make enough on the charters. I used to have one, I was an agronomist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They sent me as an adviser. I was supposed to be telling them what else they can grow here besides bananas. I was pushing red kidney beans. The catch is, nobody really wants them to grow anything here besides bananas. But they wouldn’t send me anywhere else, so I kind of retired.”
    “Where were you before that?” says Rennie.
    “Here and there,” he says. “A lot of places. I was in Viet Nam, before the war, the official one that is. After that I was in Cambodia.” He says this still smiling, but looking at her straight on, a little belligerently, as if he’s expecting her to react, with horror or at least disgust.
    “What were you doing there?” says Rennie pleasantly, putting down her spoon.
    “Advising,” he says. “I was always advising. It’s not the same as having people do what you say.”
    “What about?” says Rennie; she feels now as if they’re on the radio.
    There’s a small pause,