Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [104]
As she’s trying to decide what to do next, a bicycle courier starts swearing at her for no reason at all. Jesus lady, watch the fuck out! It’s an omen: she’s done enough for today.
She walks down to the ferry dock, buffeted as if by wind. Being in the city is so abrasive; it’s like dust blowing into your face, it’s like dancing on sandpaper. Although she’s not sure why, she minds being called lady even more than she minds being called crazy broad. Why is this word so offensive to her? (Listen, says Shanita’s voice, with amused contempt. If that’s all you ever get called!)
She’s feeling baffled and inept, and slightly frightened. What is she supposed to do with what she knows? What is she supposed to do next? She listens, but her body tells her nothing, even though it was her body that got her into this, with its mischievous yen for caffeine, its adrenalin rushes, its megalomania. Some days – and this is becoming one of them – having a body is an inconvenience. Although she treats her body with interest and consideration, paying attention to its whims, rubbing lotions and oils into it, feeding it with selected nutrients, it doesn’t always repay her. Right now her back – for instance – hurts, and there’s a cold dark pool, an ominous pool, a pool of browny-green septic acid, forming somewhere below her navel. The body may be the home of the soul and the pathway of the spirit, but it is also the perversity, the stubborn resistance, the malign contagion of the material world. Having a body, being in the body, is like being roped to a sick cat.
She stands on the ferry, leaning on the railing, facing backwards, watching the wake rise and subside into the notoriously poisonous lake, tracing and obliterating itself in the same gesture. Light glitters on the water, no longer white but yellowing; it’s afternoon and there goes the sun, there goes this day, down to where all the other days have gone, each one carrying something away with it. She will never get any of those days back, including the ones she should have had but didn’t, days with Billy in them. It was Zenia who made off with those days. She took them away from Charis, who now doesn’t even have them to look fondly back on. It’s as if Zenia has crept into her house when she wasn’t there and torn the photos out of her photo album, the photo album she doesn’t possess except inside her head. In one single snatch and grab, Zenia stole both her future and her past. Couldn’t she have left it a little longer? Just a month, just a week, just a little more?
In the spiritual world (which she has now entered, because the ferry, with its soporific motor and gentle sway, often has this effect on her), Charis’s astral body falls to its knees, raising imploring hands to the astral body of Zenia, which burns red, a red crown of flames like spiky leaves or old-fashioned pen nibs flaring around her head, with emptiness at the centre of each flame. More time, more time, Charis pleads. Give back what you took!
But Zenia turns away.
29
The history of Charis and Zenia began on a Wednesday in the first week of November in the first year of the seventies. Seventy. Charis finds both parts of this number significant, the seven and the zero as well. A zero always means the beginning of something and the end as well, because it is omega: a circular self-contained O, the entrance to a tunnel or the exit from one, an end that is also a beginning, because although that year saw the beginning of the end of Billy, it was also the year her daughter August began to begin. And seven is a prime number, composed of a four and a three – or two threes and a one, which Charis prefers because threes are graceful pyramids as well as Goddess numbers, and fours are merely box-like squares.
She knows it was a Wednesday, because Wednesdays were the days she went into town to earn some money by teaching two yoga classes. She did that