Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [230]
“I can’t forget about him,” says Charis in a tiny voice. How can she just sit here and let Zenia tear Billy to shreds? The memory of Billy. If that goes, what does she have left of all that time? Nothing. A void.
“Read my lips, he wasn’t worth it,” says Zenia. She sounds exasperated. “You know what I was really there for? To turn him around. And, believe me, he was easy to turn.”
“Turn?” says Charis. She can hardly concentrate; she feels as if she’s being slapped in the face, on one side of the face and then the other. Turn the other cheek. But how often?
“Turn, as in turncoat,” says Zenia, explaining as if to a child. “Billy turned informer. He went back to the States and ratted on all his incendiary-minded little friends, the ones who were still there.”
“I don’t believe you,” says Charis.
“I don’t care whether you believe me or not,” says Zenia. “It’s true, all the same. He traded his pals in to get himself off the hook and make a bit of cash. They paid him off with a new identity and a sordid little job as a third-rate spy. He wasn’t very good at it, though. Last time I ran into him, in Baltimore or somewhere, he was pretty disillusioned. A broken-down acid-head and whining drunk, and bald as well.”
“You did that to him,” Charis whispers. “You ruined him.” Golden Billy.
“Bullshit,” says Zenia. “That’s what he said, but I hardly twisted his arm! I just told him the choices. Billy’s choice was either that, or something quite a lot worse. In the real world most people choose to save their own skins. It’s something you can count on, nine times out of ten.”
“You were with the Mounties,” says Charis. This is the hardest thing to believe – it’s so incongruous. Zenia on the side of law and order.
“Not quite,” says Zenia. “I’ve always been a free agent. Billy was just a sort of opportunity I saw. Those sanctimonious liberal help-a-dodger groups were infiltrated up to their armpits, and I had connections, so I got a peek at the files. I remembered you from McClung Hall – they had a file on you, too, you know, though I told them why waste the paper, not to mention the taxpayers’ hard-earned money, it was like having a file on a jar of jelly – and I was counting on it that you’d remember me. It wasn’t hard to get myself a black eye and turn up in your yoga class. Hell, you did the rest! Now, if you don’t mind, I have to get dressed, I’ve got things to do. Billy lives in Washington, by the way. If you want to stage a joyful reunion with him and his long-lost daughter, I’d be happy to give you his address.”
“I don’t think so,” says Charis. Her legs are shaking; she’s afraid, for a minute, to stand up. Billy lies shattered in her head. Wipe the tape, she tells herself, but the tape won’t wipe. She realizes that she has no weapons, no weapons that will work against Zenia. All Charis has on her side is a wish to be good, and goodness is an absence, it’s the absence of evil; whereas Zenia has the real story.
Zenia shrugs. “Up to you,” she says. “If I were you, I’d scratch him right off my list.”
“I don’t think I can,” says Charis.
“Suit yourself,” says Zenia. She stands up and walks to the closet and starts checking through her dresses.
There is one more thing Charis wants to know, and she summons all of her strength to ask it. “Why did you kill my chickens?” she says. “They weren’t hurting anyone.”
“I did not kill your fucking chickens,” says Zenia, turning around. She sounds amused. “Billy killed them. He enjoyed doing it, too. Tiptoed out before dawn when you were still in dreamland, and slit their throats with the bread knife. Said it was doing them a favour, the way you kept them in that filthy hen slum of yours. But the truth is, he hated them. Not only that, he had a good laugh, thinking about you going into the henhouse and finding them. Sort of like a practical joke. He got a kick out of that.”
Inside Charis, something breaks. Rage takes her over. She wants to squeeze Zenia, squeeze her and squeeze her by the neck until Charis’s life, her own life that she has imagined, all of the good things about her life that