Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [132]
Marian gasped and took an involuntary step back: they were standing on the very edge of a cliff. The ground ended abruptly beyond their feet. Below them was a huge roughly circular pit, with a spiral path or roadway cut round and around the sides, leading to the level snow-covered space at the bottom. Directly across from where they were standing, separated from them by perhaps a quarter of a mile of empty space, was a long shed-like black building. Everything seemed closed, deserted.
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s only the brickworks,” Duncan said. “That’s pure clay down there. They go down that road with steam shovels and dig it out.”
“I didn’t know there was anything like that in the ravines,” she said. It seemed wrong to have this cavity in the city: the ravine itself was supposed to be as far down as you could go. It made her suspect the white pit bottom also; it didn’t look solid, it looked possibly hollow, dangerous, a thin layer of ice, as though if you walked on it you might fall through.
“Oh, they have lots of good things. There’s a prison down here somewhere, too.”
Duncan sat down on the edge, dangling his legs nonchalantly, and took out a cigarette. After a moment she sat down beside him, although she didn’t trust the earth. It was the kind of thing that caved in. They both gazed down into the gigantic hole scooped into the ground.
“I wonder what time it is,” Marian said. She listened as she spoke: the open space had swallowed up her voice.
Duncan didn’t answer. He finished his cigarette in silence; then he stood up, walked a short way along the brink till he came to a flat area where there were no weeds, and lay down in the snow. He was so peaceful, stretched out there looking up at the sky, that Marian walked over to join him where he was lying.
“You’ll get cold,” he said, “but go ahead if you want to.”
She lay down at arm’s length from him. It did not seem right, here, to be too close. Above, the sky was a uniform light grey, made diffusely bright by a sun concealed somewhere behind it.
Duncan spoke into the silence. “So why can’t you go back? I mean, you are getting married and so on. I thought you were the capable type.”
“I am,” she said unhappily. “I was. I don’t know.” She didn’t want to discuss it.
“Some would say of course that it’s all in your mind.”
“I know that,” she said, impatient: she wasn’t a total idiot yet. “But how do I get it out?”
“It ought to be obvious,” Duncan’s voice said, “that I’m the last person to ask. They tell me I live in a world of fantasies. But at least mine are more or less my own, I choose them and I sort of like them, some of the time. But you don’t seem too happy with yours.”
“Maybe I should see a psychiatrist,” she said gloomily.
“Oh no, don’t do that. They’d only want to adjust you.”
“But I want to be adjusted, that’s just it. I don’t see any point in being unstable.” It occurred to her also that she didn’t see any point in starving to death. What she really wanted, she realized, had been reduced to simple safety. She thought she had been heading towards it all these months but actually she hadn’t been getting anywhere. And she hadn’t accomplished anything. At the moment her only solid achievement seemed to be Duncan. That was something she could hang on to.
Suddenly she needed to make sure he was still there, hadn’t vanished or sunk down beneath the white surface. She wanted verification.
“How was it for you last night?” she asked. He had not yet said anything about it.
“How was what? Oh. That.” He was silent for several minutes. She listened intently, waiting for his voice as though for an oracle. But when he spoke at last he said, “I like this place. Especially now in winter, it’s so close to absolute zero. It makes me feel human. By comparison. I wouldn’t like tropical islands at all, they would be too fleshy, I’d always be wondering whether I was a walking vegetable or a giant amphibian. But in the snow you’re as near as possible to nothing.”
Marian was puzzled. What did this have to do with it?
“You want me to say it was stupendous, don