Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [21]
“I’m twenty-six,” he said dolefully.
I gave a visible start, and as if the answer had stepped on some hidden accelerator in me I babbled out a high-speed version of the blurb about being from Seymour Surveys and not selling anything and improving products and wanting to ask a few simple questions about how much beer he drank in an average week, thinking while I did so that he didn’t look as though he ever drank anything but water, with the crust of bread they tossed him as he lay chained in the dungeon. He seemed gloomily interested, much as one would be interested (if at all) in a dead dog, so I extended the average-weekly-consumption card towards him and asked him to pick his number. He looked at it a minute, turned it over and looked at the back, which was blank, closed his eyes, and said “Number six.”
That was seven to ten bottles per week, high enough to qualify him for the questionnaire, and I told him so. “Come in then,” he said. I felt a slight sensation of alarm as I stepped over the threshold and the door closed woodenly behind me.
We were in a living room of medium size, perfectly square, with a kitchenette opening off it on one side and the hallway to the bedrooms on the other. The slats of the venetian blind on the one small window were closed, making the room dim as twilight. The walls, as far as I could tell in the semi-darkness, were a flat white; there were no pictures on them. The floor was covered by a very good Persian carpet with an ornate design of maroon and green and purple scrolls and flowers, even better, I thought, than the one in the lady down below’s parlour which had been left her by her paternal grandfather. One wall had a bookcase running its whole length, the kind people make themselves out of boards and bricks. The only other pieces of furniture were three huge, ancient and overstuffed easy chairs, one red plush, one a worn greenish-blue brocade, and one a faded purple, each with a floor lamp beside it. All exposed surfaces of the room were littered with loose papers, notebooks, books opened face-down and other books bristling with pencils and torn slips of paper stuck in them as markers.
“Do you live here alone?” I asked.
He fixed me with his lugubrious eyes. “It depends what you mean,” he intoned, “by ‘alone’.”
“Oh, I see,” I said politely. I walked across the room, trying to preserve my air of cheerful briskness while picking my way unsteadily over and around the objects on the floor. I was heading towards the purple chair, which was the only one that didn’t have a rat’s nest of papers in it.
“You can’t sit there,” he said behind me in a tone of slight admonishment, “that’s Trevor’s chair. He wouldn’t like you sitting in his chair.”
“Oh. Is the red one all right then?”
“Well,” he said, “that’s Fish’s, and he wouldn’t mind if you sat in it; at least I don’t think he would. But he’s got his papers in it and you might mess them up.” I didn’t see how by merely sitting on them I could possibly disorganize them any more, but I didn’t say so. I was wondering whether Trevor and Fish were two imaginary playmates that this boy had made up, and also whether he had lied about his age. In this light his face could have been of a ten-year-old. He stood gazing at me solemnly, shoulders hunched, arms folded across his torso, holding his own elbows.
“And I suppose yours is the green one then.”
“Yes,” he said, “but I haven’t sat in it myself for a couple of weeks. I’ve got everything all arranged in it.”
I wanted to go over and see exactly what he had got all arranged in it, but I reminded myself that I was there on business. “Where are we going to sit then?”
“The floor,” he said, “or the kitchen, or my bedroom.”
“Oh, not the bedroom,” I said hurriedly. I made my way back across the expanse of paper and peered around the corner into the kitchenette. A peculiar odour greeted me – there seemed to be garbage bags in every corner, and the rest of the space was taken up by large pots and kettles, some clean, others not.