Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood [34]
I closed my eyes, knelt for a moment on the top of the wall, swaying dizzily, and dropped backwards.
I felt myself caught, set down and shaken. It was Peter, who must have stalked me and waited there on the side street, knowing I would come over the wall. “What the hell got into you?” he said, his voice stern. His face in the light of the streetlamps was partly angry, partly alarmed. “Are you all right?”
I leaned against him and put my hand up to touch his neck. The relief of being stopped and held, of hearing Peter’s normal voice again and knowing he was real, was so great I started to laugh helplessly.
“I’m fine,” I said, “of course I’m all right. I don’t know what got into me.”
“Put on your shoes then,” Peter said, holding them out to me. He was annoyed but he wasn’t going to make a fuss.
Len heaved himself over the wall and landed on the earth with a thunk. He was breathing heavily. “Got her? Good. Let’s get out of here before those people get the police after us.”
The car was right there. Peter opened the front door for me and I slid in; Len got into the back seat with Ainsley. All he said to me was, “Didn’t think you were the hysterical type.” Ainsley said nothing. We pulled away from the curb and rounded the corner, Len giving directions. I would rather have gone home, but I didn’t want to cause Peter any more trouble that night. I sat up straight and folded my hands in my lap.
We parked beside Len’s apartment building, which as far as I could tell at night was of the collapsing brown-brick ramshackle variety, with fire escapes down the outside. There was no elevator, just creaky stairs with dark wooden railings. We ascended in decorous couples.
The apartment itself was tiny, only one main room with a bathroom opening to one side and a kitchen to the other. It was somewhat disarranged, with suitcases on the floor and books and clothes strewn about: Len evidently hadn’t finished moving into it yet. The bed was immediately to the left of the door, doubling as a chesterfield, and I kicked off my shoes and subsided onto it. My muscles had caught up with me and were beginning to ache with fatigue.
Len poured the three of us generous shots of cognac, rummaged in the kitchen and managed to find some Coke for Ainsley, and put on a record. Then he and Peter began to fiddle with a couple of cameras, screwing various lenses onto them and peering through them and exchanging information about exposure times. I felt deflated. I was filled with penitence, but there was no outlet for it. If I could be alone with Peter it would be different, I thought: he could forgive me.
Ainsley was no help. I saw she was going to keep up her little-girls-should-be-seen-and-not-heard act, as the safest course to follow. She had settled into a round wicker basket-chair, like the one in Clara’s back yard except that this one had a quilted corduroy cover in egg-yolk yellow. I’d experienced those covers before. They’re kept on by elastic, and they have a habit of slipping off the edges of the chair if you wiggle around too much and closing up around you. Ainsley sat quite still though, holding her Coca-Cola glass in her lap and contemplating her own reflection on the brown surface inside it. She registered neither pleasure nor boredom; her inert patience was that of a pitcher-plant in a swamp with its hollow bulbous leaves half-filled with water, waiting for some insect to be attracted, drowned, and digested.
I was leaning back against the wall, sipping at my cognac, the noise of voices and music slapping against me like waves. I suppose the pressure of my body had pushed the bed out a little; at any rate, without thinking much about anything I turned my head away from the room and looked down. I began to find something very attractive about the dark cool space between the bed and the wall.
It would be quiet down there, I thought; and less