Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [101]
Now Zenia is back, and hungry for blood. Not for West’s blood: West is an instrument merely. The blood Zenia wants to drink is Tony’s, because she hates Tony and always has. Tony could see that hatred in her eyes today, at the Toxique. There’s no rational explanation for such hatred, but it doesn’t surprise Tony. She seems to have been familiar with it for a long time. It’s the rage of her unborn twin.
Or so thinks Tony, removing the vestiges of Otto the Red’s fallen army with her tweezers, installing the Saracens in their freshly captured territory. The flag of Islam flies above the corpse-strewn Italian beaches, while Otto himself escapes by sea. His defeat will inspire the Slavic Wends to make another looting and pillaging foray into Germany; it will motivate uprisings, rebellions, a return to the old cannibal gods. Brutality, counter-brutality, chaos. Otto is losing his grip.
How could he have won this battle? Hard to say. By avoiding recklessness? By drawing the enemy out first to estimate its strength? Strength and cunning are both essential, but each without the other is valueless.
Tony herself, lacking strength, will have to rely on cunning. In order to defeat Zenia she will have to become Zenia, at least enough to anticipate her next move. It would help if she knew what Zenia wanted.
Tony turns out the cellar lights and climbs the stairs to the kitchen, where she runs herself a glass of water out of the spring-water dispenser foisted on her by Charis. (As full of chemicals as anything else, she knows; but at least there’s no chlorine. Eau de Swimming Pool, is what Roz calls the Toronto tap water.) Then she unlocks the back door and creeps out into the yard, into its flora of dry thistles and tree trunks and unpruned shrubs, its fauna of mice. Raccoons are regulars; squirrels make untidy nests in the branches. Once they had a skunk back here, hunting for grubs, rolling up what vestiges of turf remain; once a chipmunk, miraculous survivor of the neighbourhood gamut of cats.
It refreshes Tony to sneak around at night, from time to time. She enjoys being awake when others are asleep. She enjoys occupying dark space. Maybe she will see things other people can’t see, witness nocturnal events, gain rare insights. She used to think that as a child, too – tiptoeing through the house, listening at doors. It didn’t work then, either.
From this vantage point she has a novel view of her own house: the view of a lurking enemy commando. She thinks about how the house would look if she or anyone else were to blow it up. Study, bedroom, kitchen, and hall, suspended in fiery mid-air. Her house is no protection for her, really. Houses are too fragile.
The kitchen lights go on, the back door opens. It’s West, a gangling silhouette, backlighted, his face indistinct. “Tony?” he calls anxiously. “Are you out there?”
Tony savours his anxiety, just a little. True, she adores him, but there’s no such thing as an unmixed motive. She waits for a moment, listening, in her moonlit weedy garden, blending – possibly – with the dappled silvery shadows cast by the trees. Is she invisible? The legs of West’s pyjamas are too short, and so are the arms; they lend him an untended air, like that of a Frankenstein monster. Yet who could have tended him – over the years, and apart from finding some pyjamas that would fit – better than Tony? If she had done it unwillingly she might deserve to feel aggrieved. Is that how grievance works? I’ve given you the best years of my life! But for a gift you don’t expect a return. And who would she have given them to otherwise, those years?
“I’m here,” she says, and he comes outside and down the back porch steps. He has his slippers on, she’s relieved to see, although not his dressing gown.
“You were gone,” he says, stooping down towards her, peering. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Neither could I,” she says. “So I did some