Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [106]
She tiptoes from the bedroom and along the narrow hallway, and down the stairs. When she moved in here with Billy, six months ago, there were several layers of worn linoleum covering the floorboards. Charis stripped off the linoleum and pulled out the nails that were holding it in place, and scraped away the black tarry goo that had oozed from it, and painted the hall floor blue. But she ran out of paint halfway down the stairs, and she hasn’t got more paint yet, and the bottom stairs still have the outlines of the old linoleum stair treads. She doesn’t mind them, the traces; they are like signals made by those who lived here long before. So she’s left them alone. It’s like leaving a wild patch in the garden. She knows she is sharing the space with other entities, even if they can’t be seen or heard, and it’s just as well to show them you’re friendly. Or respectful. Respectful is what she means, because she does not intend to get too cosy with them. She wants them to respect her, as well.
She goes into the kitchen, which is freezing cold. There’s a kind of furnace in the house, beside the water heater, in the dank, dirt-floored lean- to – the root cellar, Charis calls it, and she is indeed keeping some roots in it, some carrots and beets buried in a box of sand, the way her grandmother used to – but the furnace doesn’t work very well. Mostly it blows lukewarm air through a series of grids in the floor, and makes dustballs; anyway, it seems like a waste of money and also like cheating to turn on the furnace before it’s absolutely necessary. You should make use of what is naturally provided, if possible, so Charis has been scavenging dead wood from under the trees on the Island and using the ends of boards left over from building the henhouse, and breaking the odd dead branch off her apple tree.
She kneels before the cast-iron cookstove – it was one of the things that made her want this house, the wood stove – though it turned other people off, people who wanted electric stoves, so the rent was low. Figuring out how to work it was hard at first; it has its moods, and sometimes makes large clouds of smoke, or goes out completely even though it’s packed with wood. You have to cajole it. She scrapes out yesterday’s ashes, into a saucepan she keeps handy – she’ll sprinkle some into the compost heap later, and sift the rest for a potter she knows, to make into glazes – and stuffs some crumpled newspaper and kindling and two thin logs into the firebox. When the fire has caught she crouches before the open stove door, warming her hands and appreciating the flames. The apple wood burns blue.
After a few minutes she gets up, feeling a stiffness in her knees, and goes over to the counter and plugs in the electric kettle. Although there’s no electric stove the house has some basic wiring, a ceiling fixture in every room and a few wall sockets, though you can’t plug in the kettle and anything else at the same time without blowing the fuses. She could wait for the iron kettle on the wood stove to boil, but that might take hours, and she needs her morning herbal tea right now. She remembers a time when she used to drink coffee, at university, a long time ago, in one of her other lives, when she lived in McClung Hall. She remembers the fuzzy feeling in her head, and the hankering for more. It was an addiction, she supposes. The body is so easily led astray. At least she never smoked.
Sitting at the kitchen table – not the round oak table she would like to have, but an interim table, an artificial table, an immoral table from the fifties, with chrome legs and black curlicues baked into its Formica top – Charis drinks her herbal tea and attempts to focus on the day ahead. The mist makes it more difficult: it’s hard for her to tell the