Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [36]
The notebook is for her to write her thoughts in, but so far she hasn’t written any. She hates to spoil the beauty of the blank pages, their potential; she doesn’t want to use them up. But now she uncaps her pearl grey pen, and prints: Zenia must go back. She once took a course in italic handwriting, so the message looks elegant, almost like a rune. She does one letter at a time, looking up between the words, over the tops of her reading glasses, so nothing going on across the street will escape her.
At first more people go in than out, and after that more people go out than in. None of the people who go in is Billy, not that she is realistically expecting him, but you never know. None of the people who come out is Zenia.
Her coffee arrives and her body tells her to drop two lumps of sugar into it, and so she does, and then she drinks the coffee quickly and feels the hit of caffeine and sucrose rush to her head. She’s focused now, she has X-ray vision, she knows what she has to do. Neither Tony nor Roz can help her, they don’t need to help her with this, because their stories, the stories with Zenia in them, have endings. At least they know what happened. Charis doesn’t, Charis has never known. It’s as if her story, the story with Billy and Zenia in it, was going along a path, and suddenly there were no more footprints.
At last, when Charis is beginning to think that Zenia must have slipped out the back or else vaporized, the door opens and she comes out. Charis lowers her eyes slightly; she doesn’t want to rest the full weight of her supercharged eyes on Zenia, she doesn’t want to give herself away. But Zenia doesn’t even glance in her direction. She’s with someone Charis doesn’t recognize. A young fair-haired man. Not Billy. He’s too slightly built to be Billy.
Though if it were Billy, he would hardly be young any more. He might even be fat, or bald. But in her head he has stayed the same age as he was the last time she saw him. The same age, the same size, everything the same. Loss opens again beneath her feet, the pit, the familiar trapdoor. If she were alone, if she weren’t here in the Kafay Nwar but home in her own kitchen, she would bang her forehead softly on the edge of the table. The pain is red and it hurts, and she can’t just wipe it away.
Zenia isn’t happy, Charis thinks. It’s not an insight, it’s more like a charm, an incantation. She can’t possibly be happy. If she were allowed to be happy it would be completely unfair: there must be a balance in the Universe. But Zenia is smiling up at the man, whose face Charis can’t quite see, and now she’s taking his arm and they’re walking along the street, and from this distance at least she looks happy enough.
Compassion for all living things, Charis reminds herself. Zenia is alive, so that means compassion for Zenia.
This is what it does mean, though Charis realizes, on taking stock, that at the moment she feels no compassion whatsoever for Zenia. On the contrary she has a clear picture of herself pushing Zenia off a cliff, or other high object.
Own the emotion, she tells herself, because although it’s a thoroughly unworthy one it must be acknowledged fully before being discarded. She concentrates on the image, bringing it closer; she feels the wind against her face, senses the height, hears the release of her arm muscles inside her body, listens for the scream. But Zenia makes no sound. She merely falls, her hair streaming behind her like a dark comet.
Charis wraps this image up in tissue paper and with an effort expels it from her body. All I want to do is talk to her, she tells herself. That’s all.
There’s a confusion, a rustling of dry wings. Zenia has left the oblong of the Kafay