Life Before Man by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online Page A

sharpshooting English lord. It was the other one, the dry, skeptical one, the thin one; Professor Summerlee. Howmany times has she stood at the edge of this lake, his thin hand in hers, while together they’ve witnessed a plesiosaur and he’s been overcome, converted at last?
    She still has this book. She didn’t exactly steal it, she just forgot several times to renew it and then was so embarrassed by the librarian’s sarcasm that she lied. Lost, she said.
The Lost World
is lost.)
    The lake glimmers in the moonlight. Far out, on a sandbar, a mysterious white shape flickers.
    William has moved his toothpick again. She hasn’t been paying attention, he’s at least twenty points ahead of her. “Your go,” he says. Satisfaction rosies his cheeks.
    “Fifteen two,” she says.
    “It’s your next crib,” William says, consoling her, as he can well afford to.
    The phone rings. Lesje jumps, dropping the jack of diamonds. “Could you get it, William?” she says. She suspects it’s the wrong-number man; she’s not in the mood for a monotone serenade.
    “It’s for you,” William says, puzzled.
    When she comes back, he says, “Who was it?”
    “Elizabeth’s husband,” Lesje says.
    “Who?”
    “Exactly,” says Lesje. “Elizabeth’s husband Who. You’ve met him; at the Christmas party last year. You remember Elizabeth, sort of statuesque-looking; she’s the one who …”
    “Oh, right,” says William. The sight of his own blood makes him queasy, so he didn’t much appreciate hearing the story of Chris, though Lesje had to tell it to him, she’d been upset. “What did he want?”
    “I’m not sure,” says Lesje.

Sunday, October 31, 1976
NATE
    N ate is running. His bicycle is behind him somewhere in the darkness, parked against a bench. The air is cool, strange against his new scraped face.
    He runs for pleasure, taking it easy, jogging over dying grass grey in the street lights, through fallen leaves whose colors he can barely see but guesses: orange, yellow, brown. They collect the leaves in green garbage bags and truck them away now, but once they raked them into piles and burned them in the streets, the smoke rising wispy and sweetish from the centers of the mounds. He used to run with the others along the street, making sounds like a dive bomber, and then jump, clearing the mounds of leaves like hurdles. Forbidden, but if you missed it didn’t matter, the leaves were only smoldering. Men shaking rakes, telling them to bugger off.
    Who did he run with, twenty or was it twenty-five years ago? Someone called Bobby, Tom something. They’re gone now, faceless; he gives them the nostalgia due to those who have died young. Casualties, though of nothing but his own memory. It’s himself, hislace-up breeks with leather knee patches, those goddamn wool socks always falling down, mittens ice-beaded and soggy from bombarding the enemy, nose dripping over his upper lip, himself running he mourns.
    And after that, no longer for pure fun, sprinting at high school and third man on the relay team, around the track with the stick he would pretend was dynamite, he had to pass it on before it exploded. He was too skinny for football then but he could run. They never won anything, though once they came second.
Mr. Clean
, they called him in the yearbook. His mother thought it was a compliment.
    When he was at law school he used to come here to the same place, Queen’s Park, an oval like a track.
Queens’ park
. He remembers the jokes, the couples he really did see, in trenchcoats, wind-breakers, the casual intersections that aroused in him only a mild curiosity, a mild embarrassment. It was around that time his back started acting up and he stopped running; shortly after he met Elizabeth. An evolutionary mistake, the doctor said, meaning his height; men should have stopped at five feet. Now they were unbalanced. He told Nate that his right leg was infinitesimally shorter than his left, not uncommon in tall men, and