Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [38]
Then I get up, and ask Tig how he slept, and we have toast and coffee together, and go about doing the many mundane and practical things there are to be done.
The dream frightens me, though. It brings with it a nebulous dread. What if it’s not in the past, this other place? What if it’s still in the future? After all?
Monopoly
Nell and Tig ran away to the country. Or as Nell told it later, Tig ran away to the country and after a while Nell joined him there. It was not a foregone conclusion. It could have turned out differently. Nell had been of two minds about going. She’d foreseen the difficulties. She’d had other choices. That was her story, one she came to believe as time went by and positions hardened.
In reality she hadn’t foreseen any difficulties. She’d been sleepwalking. She’d been in love, a state of being she thought of as wiping the mind clean of any of the soothsaying abilities or even ordinary common sense it might otherwise have had. Moving to the country with Tig had been like jumping out of a plane, trusting that the parachute will open. And it must have been the right thing to do because Nell didn’t end up lying smashed on the ground, and anyway here they are, here they both still are, after all these years. Once a certain amount of time has passed you can look back, you can laugh about things, she would say.
That was her other story, her second story; it played alternately with the first, like an old double bill at the movies.
Moreover, Tig didn’t exactly run away. He ambled away. It was a slowed-down, freeze-framed movement, like a solitary Chinese person doing Tai Chi on a lawn. As any bank robber can tell you (Nell would say), the best thing to do when running away is not to run. Just walk. Just stroll. A combination of ease and purposefulness is desirable. Then no one will notice you’re running. In addition to which, don’t carry heavy suitcases, or canvas bags full of money, or packsacks with body parts in them. Leave everything behind you except what’s in your pockets. Lightest is best.
Tig rented a farm, or what used to be a farm. The rent wasn’t much: the man who owned it wasn’t any sort of a farmer. He was a businessman – it was unclear what the business was – who hadn’t decided whether he would turn the property into a weekend place for himself and his much-younger quasi-wife or else relocate in Mexico. He just wanted someone in the house so the local teenagers wouldn’t break in and trash the place, as had been the case with several hapless absentee owners down the road. He didn’t want to arrive some Saturday with a real-estate agent primed to evaluate the place and find FUCK YOU written in mustard from a squeeze bottle on the windows and human shit smeared on the walls and a scattering of roach ends and a smouldering hole in the wide-board pine floor. That was how he’d put it to Tig.
The businessman had already sold off most of the farmland. Only twenty acres were left – some fields, a woodlot. The fields hadn’t been worked for some time, and Queen Anne’s lace and sow thistles and burdocks, and saplings – hawthorns, native plums, wild apples – were growing up all over them.
There was a house with a lean- to shed at the back, and a huge barn with enormous beams and weathered planks and a tin roof. The house was on a hill, overlooking the pond that the businessman had put in. On the other side of the road was a line of giant hydroelectric pylons that stretched from one horizon to the other. You could think of it as spoiling the view or you could just incorporate it, Nell said to Tig, depending on how you felt about surrealism.
The house was a two-storey red-brick farmhouse with a centre gable – standard issue for the late nineteenth century in that part of the province, said The Ancestral Roof – a book Nell purchased and consulted frequently during her first winter with Tig, when she still thought life on a farm represented some