The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [103]
“Crust and all?” said Reenie sharply. Laura never ate the pie crusts from Reenie’s pies. Nobody did. Nor did Alex Thomas.
“I fed it to the birds,” said Laura. True enough: that’s what she had done, afterwards.
Alex Thomas was at first appreciative of our efforts. He said we were good pals, and that without us his goose would have been cooked. Then he wanted cigarettes – he was dying for a smoke. We brought him some from the silver box on the piano, but warned him to limit himself to one a day – the fumes might be detected. (He ignored this stricture.)
Then he said the worst thing about the attic was not being able to keep clean. He said his mouth felt like a drain. We stole the old toothbrush Reenie used for cleaning the silver, and scrubbed it off for him as best we could; he said it was better than nothing. One day we brought him a wash basin and a towel, and a jug with warm water. Afterwards he waited till nobody was underneath and threw the dirty water out the attic window. It had been raining, so the ground was wet anyway and the splash was not noticed. A little later, when the coast seemed clear, we allowed him down the attic stairs and shut him up in the bathroom the two of us shared, so he could have a proper wash. (We’d told Reenie we’d help out by taking over the cleaning of this bathroom, on which her comment was: Wonders never cease.)
While Alex Thomas’s washing-up was going forward Laura sat in her bedroom, I sat in mine, each guarding a bathroom door. I tried not to think about what was going on in there. The image of him with all his clothes off was painful to me, in some way that did not bear contemplating.
Alex Thomas was featured in newspaper editorials, not only in our own paper. He was an arsonist and murderer, it was said, and of the worst kind – one who killed from cold-blooded fanaticism. He had come to Port Ticonderoga to infiltrate the working force, and to sow seeds of dissension, in which he had succeeded, as witness the general strike and the rioting. He was an example of the evils of a university education – a smart boy, too smart for his own good, whose wits had been turned through bad company and worse books. His adoptive father, a Presbyterian minister, was quoted as saying that he prayed every night for Alex’s soul, but that this was a generation of vipers. His rescue of Alex as a child from the horrors of war was not passed over: Alex was a brand snatched from the burning, he said, but it was always a risk to take a stranger into your home. The implication was that such brands were better left unsnatched.
In addition to all of that, the police had printed a Wanted poster of Alex, and had stuck it up in the post office, and in other public places as well. Luckily it wasn’t a very clear picture: Alex had his hand in front of him, which partly obscured his face. It was the photo from the newspaper, the one Elwood Murray had taken of the three of us, at the button factory picnic. (Laura and I were cut off at the sides, naturally.) Elwood Murray had let it be known that he could have printed a better picture from the negative, but when he went to look, the negative was gone. Well, that was no surprise: a number of things had been destroyed when the newspaper office was wrecked.
We brought Alex the newspaper clippings, and one of the Wanted posters too – Laura had purloined it from a telephone pole. He read about himself with rueful dismay. “They want my head on a platter,” was what he said.
After a few days, he asked if we could bring him some paper – writing paper. There was a stack of school exercise books left over from Mr. Erskine: we brought him those, and a pencil as well.
“What do you think he’s writing?” Laura asked. We couldn’t decide. A prisoner’s journal, a vindication of himself? Perhaps