Read Online Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance by Lloyd Jones - Free Book Online Page A

chill. It condensed along her spine. The embers from the fire behind the log in the entrance had died down. She folded her arms and began to think aloud. It was too dark to go back home tonight. She didn’t want to climb up the cliff or walk all that way without light.
    â€˜Go back?’ said Billy Pohl. He sounded amazed. ‘You can’t go back, Louise. What’s the matter with you. They saw you. They saw you with our friend here.You can’t go back.’
    â€˜Go back,’ said Schmidt. ‘Of course we must go back. I have appointments. There are pianos to see. People are…Oh Christ,’ he said. ‘Oh Christ.’ He plonked himself down dejectedly in the sand.
    Billy ignored the stranger to concentrate on Louise. ‘You go back, Louise, and we might as well walk back with you to our graves. You do know that, don’t you?’

9
    She did not know Billy Pohl or Henry Graham that well. Isolation added to the mystery of the Grahams who lived outside the town boundary in almost derelict circumstances. A wooden shack folding into the bush, a solitary square of pasture, the white-freckled trunks of kahikatea. They were bee-keepers. Also, they didn’t eat meat or so it was rumoured.That was more or less Henry, then. Billy Pohl she knew as a man of casual habits. Sometimes he would appear on the brink of growing a beard, then, the next time she saw him he was shaven, clean as a whistle, the line of his jawbone sporting and gleaming. With Billy you just never knew what lay around the corner. It was usually Billy’s chair you heard scrape the floor at the Meetings. Some are able to occupy silence and rug themselves up in it. Billy was not one of them.
    She joined the circle by the fire. Against the cave wall played the flickering shadow of their bowed heads as they sought the comforts of silence. Habits are what you fall back on in a moment of crisis.
    She made room for Schmidt but he stuck his hands in his pockets and took himself off to the mouth of the cave to sulk.
    That first night, they lay their heads on their folded arms. Sleep came and went. She heard Schmidt get up in the night and move around. She closed her eyes and drifted off again. The next time she woke she raised her head—the mouth of the cave was evenly divided between sky and sea—and she saw him telescoped, sitting on a rock, the moonlit tide washing around him.
    Later that morning she was gathering firewood when she heard footsteps in the shingle behind her. She turned, and there he was, holding his hands to her, advancing with an expression of distress. ‘I’m sorry, Louise. This is all my fault. I am so sorry.’
    Every morning they wake up with the sound of the ocean roaring in their ears. It is the sound of the world in these parts—huge, unpopulated, lonely. They lie there, for the moment too stiff to move, too cold to make the effort even though they know that once they get up and start moving their aches will disappear. They wake with sand in their ears, up nostrils, a grit on their fingers, hands and arms. Skin like sandpaper; their hair stiff. An irritating graininess in their scalp. The itching never stops. Billy Pohl and Henry Graham complain of their filthy trousers; the awful drag of material on their skin is even changing the way they walk. They complain of sores on their legs and soon the discomfort is working its way into their faces, stretching the skin, focussing the eyes, souring mouths.
    They raise their heads a few inches and look past their bent knees to the ocean. Another December day lies exhaustingly ahead. By midday Louise is ready to lie down again. She’s done everything there is to do. She is ready to lie down and sleep. By midday she finds herself wishing for nightfall. The afternoon is no use to her. There is nothing to do but to wait.
    Meanwhile the hills, the tireless ocean, the broad sky all carry the same message. Look at where you are. You’re