Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [77]
“I’ll ask them,” said Susan. She stood silently, listening. “They say it’s all right, but they want the channel moved out into the yard. They don’t want it moved too far away. They like the neighbourhood.”
“It’s a deal,” said Nell. Even the entities had real-estate preferences, it seemed. “What do we do next?”
What they did next was a kind of circular dance, complete with some bell jingling; Susan had the bells in her purse. “There,” she said. “The channel’s closed. But just to make sure …” She took out some bundles of sage and laid them in the kitchen drawers. “That should hold them at bay for a while,” she said.
“Thank you,” said Nell.
It’s all right now,” Nell told Lillie.
“You are so kind,” said Lillie.
But it wasn’t all right. Lillie was still afraid of the house. There was something in it that wasn’t Oona. There was something older, something darker, something more terrible. There was something that had been stirred up; it had awakened, it had come to the surface. There was blood.
Later, Nell would tell people that this must have been the first stages of Alzheimer’s, or whatever it was that shortly took Lillie away from them, out of this world as she had known it. She went to a better place, however; a place devoid of the past, or of some parts of the past. In this place, several of the people she’d known long ago were still alive. Her husband was still alive. He was waiting for her to get home, she said. He didn’t like her to be out by herself, he liked her to be there in the living room, with the familiar china ornaments, especially after dark.
Lillie’s grown-up children made arrangements. They got a care-giver so Lillie could stay in her own house. That would be more comforting to her, they thought. She took up painting with water-colours, a thing she had never done before. The pictures she painted were bright and cheerful, filled with sunlight; they were mostly pictures of flowers. When Nell went to see her, she would smile happily. “I made some cookies, special for you,” she’d say. But she hadn’t made any.
Oona’s house has been bought by two gay men – two artistic gay men, friends of Nell’s and, as it turned out, former clients of Lillie’s – who love the light that comes in on the second floor at the back. They’ve made a studio there. They’ve pulled out some walls, and added on, and put in a skylight, and redecorated. They have an unusual arrangement for their cat – a cat box that slides in and out of the wall when the cat activates it with a sensor. The cat behaves strangely in the glassed-in breakfast nook, they tell Nell: it sits and stares out the window as if it’s watching something.
“It’s watching the entities,” says Nell, who is over having tea and admiring the renovations. “We moved them out into the yard. That’s where they wanted their channel.”
“What?” say the gay men. “The aunties? Don’t tell me we’re overrun by aunties!” They laugh.
“No, the entities,” says Nell.
Then Nell tells them the story of Oona, and Tig, and herself, and Susan the crystal lady – they love the part about Nell dancing in a circle with the jingle bells – and also the story of Lillie. She changes the story a bit, of course. She makes it funnier than it seemed at the time. Also, everyone in it is nicer than they really were. Except Lillie; there’s no need to improve Lillie.
The gay men like the story: it’s bizarre, and they like bizarre. Also it’s a story about them, since it’s a story about their house. It adds character to a dwelling, to have a story attached. “We’ve got entities!” they say. “Who knew? If we ever sell the house we’ll put it in the ad. Charming studio. Built-in cat box. Entities.”
But what else could I do with all that? thinks Nell, wending her way back to her own house. All that anxiety and anger, those dubious good intentions, those tangled lives, that blood.