Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [213]
Her mother walks into the darkening room, the heels of her shoes ticking on the floor, wearing her maroon hat with the spotted veil. She sits down on the piano bench beside Tony; her face glimmers, obscured, its features blurring. Her leather hand, cool as mist, brushes Tony’s face, and Tony turns and holds onto her, holds on ferociously because she knows what happens next; but out of the front of her dress her mother takes an egg, an egg that smells like seaweed. If Tony can have this egg and keep it safe, the burning in the house will stop, the future can be avoided. But her mother lifts the egg up into the air, teasingly overhead, and Tony isn’t tall enough to reach it. “Poor thing, poor thing,” says her mother; or is it poor twin? Her voice is like a pigeon cooing, soothing and inexorable and infinitely mournful.
Somewhere out of sight the flowers have grown out of control and the house is on fire. Unless Tony can stop it, everything that once was will burn. The unseen flames make a fluttering sound, like ruffling feathers. A tall man is standing in the corner. It’s West, but why is he wearing those clothes, why is his hair black, why does he have a hat? There’s a suitcase beside him on the floor. He picks it up and opens it: it’s full of sharpened pencils. Reverof, he says sadly; though what he means is Farewell, because Zenia is there at the door, wound in a silk shawl with a long fringe. In her neck there’s a pinkish grey gash, as if her throat’s been cut; but as Tony watches, it opens, then closes moistly, and she can see that Zenia has gills.
But West is going, he’s putting his arm around Zenia, he’s turning his back. Outside, the taxi is waiting to take them to the snowy hill.
Tony needs to stop them. She holds out her hand once more and her mother puts the egg into it, but the egg is too hot now because of the fire and Tony drops it. It rolls onto a newspaper and breaks open, and time runs out of it, wet and dark red. There are gunshots, coming from the back of the house, and marching boots, and shouting in a foreign language. Where is her father? Frantically she looks around for him but he is nowhere to be seen, and the soldiers are already here to take her mother away.
Charis is lying in her white vine-covered bed, arms at her sides, palms open, eyes closed. Behind her eyes she is fully aware. She feels her astral body rise out of her, rise straight up and hang suspended above her like a mask lifted from a face. It too is wearing a white cotton nightgown.
How tenuously we inhabit our bodies, she thinks. In her body of light – clear, like gelatin – she glides out through the window and across the harbour. Below her is the ferry; she swoops and follows in its wake. Around her she hears the rushing of wings. She looks, expecting seagulls, and is surprised to see a flock of chickens flying through the air.
She reaches the other shore and floats along over the city. Ahead of her is a large window, the window of a hotel. She fetches up against the glass and beats her arms for a moment, like a moth. Then the window melts like ice and she passes through.
Zenia is in here, sitting in a chair, wearing a white nightgown just like Charis’s, brushing her cloudy hair in front of the mirror. The hair twists like flames, like the branches of dark cypresses licking heavenwards, it crackles with static electricity; blue sparks play from the tips. Zenia sees Charis and motions to her, and Charis goes close and then closer, and she sees the two of them side by side in the mirror. Then Zenia’s edges dissolve like a watercolour in the rain and Charis merges into her. She slides her on like a glove, she slips into her