Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [39]
In a further outburst of interior decoration he’d cut a piece out of the main crossbeam of the barn, causing the barn walls to lean outwards – sooner or later the whole thing would collapse – and had stuck the section of barn beam as a mantelpiece over the cramped fireplace, which didn’t work anyway.
A central staircase led up to the second floor. The stairs were uncarpeted wood, painted slate blue. There would have been four small bedrooms up there in the days of washbasins and tin tubs and outhouses, but one of these was now a drafty bathroom.
Of the three remaining bedrooms, one was Tig’s, with nothing in it but a mattress on the floor. The second was reserved for Nell, as a sort of office or study – she needed a desk where she could spread out the page proofs she was working on. The desk was an old door laid across two filing cabinets, which gave her lots of room: they’d found the door in the shed and removed the knob, and the filing cabinets had come from a garage sale in the city, so the desk had cost almost nothing. This was good, because Nell did not make a lot of money, and most of Tig’s income – sporadic at best – went elsewhere.
In addition to the desk, the office or study had a spare bed in it, a single bed that might also have been described as a couch or a daybed. It sagged in the middle and was covered with worn maroon velvet and smelled of wet dust, and Nell vowed that she would get rid of it or at least cover it up as soon as possible. When might as soon as possible be? When she had moved into the farmhouse, with Tig, finally; though every time she had this thought, she amended the when to an if.
The third bedroom had two double bunks in it: these were for the children and their visiting friends. The children were Tig’s. It was on their account he’d run away so slowly and had not taken anything with him, and it was to them that most of his money was diverted.
What he’d run away from was his marriage. He’d had to get out of this marriage or it would have pulled him down, sucked the blood out of him, gutted him completely. All of these metaphors – suggestive, to Nell, of giant squid, of vampire bats, of fish processing – were Tig’s. He had an oblique way of talking about his marriage, which in any case he did not do often. He never said my wife or used the wife’s name in this connection, because it wasn’t his wife as such that would have finished him off, it wasn’t Oona all by herself that had done the pulling and sucking and gutting: it was the two of them together. It was the marriage, which Nell pictured as a large thorny growth – a cross between a dense, dark-green bush or shrub and a thundercloud-shaped cancer, with the adhesive qualities of tile cement and a number of tentacles, like a ball of leeches.
Nell felt intimidated by this marriage, and small and childish in comparison with it. It had a certain oversized and phosphorescent splendour about it, like a whale decaying on a beach. It made her seem pallid, at least to herself: pallid, banal, insipidly wholesome. She did not have nearly as much operatic and tenebrous and sanguinary melodrama to offer.
Tig’s children came up to the farm on the weekends and slept in the bunk beds, with or without their friends. Both of them were boys – two blond-haired, angelic-looking boys, aged eleven and thirteen. Tig took pictures of them, and developed the pictures himself in the darkroom he’d set up in a curtained-off corner of the earth-floored farmhouse cellar, and showed the pictures to Nell: the kids in October, playing in the barn, jumping around on the piles of mildewed hay left