The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [106]
“For goodness’ sake, Laura!” I said. “Where did you get this?”
“I made some prints,” she said. “When I was working at Elwood Murray’s. I’ve got the negative too.”
I didn’t know whether to be angry or alarmed. Cutting up the picture like that was a very strange thing to have done. The sight of Laura’s light-yellow hand, creeping towards Alex across the grass like an incandescent crab, gave me a chill down the back of my spine. “Why on earth did you do that?”
“Because that’s what you want to remember,” she said. This was so audacious that I gasped. She gave me a direct look, which in anyone else would have been a challenge. But this was Laura: her tone was neither sulky nor jealous. As far as she was concerned she was simply stating a fact.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I have another one, for me.”
“And I’m not in yours?”
“No,” she said. “You’re not. None of you but your hand.” This was the closest she ever came, in my hearing, to a confession of love for Alex Thomas. Except for the day before her death, that is. Not that she used the word love, even then.
I ought to have thrown this mutilated picture away, but I didn’t.
Things settled back into their accustomed, monotonous order. By unspoken consent, Laura and I did not mention Alex Thomas between us any more. There was too much that could not be said, on either side. At first I used to go up to the attic – a faint odour of smoke was still detectable there – but I stopped doing that after a while, as it served no good purpose.
We busied ourselves with daily life again, insofar as that was possible. There was a little more money now, because Father would get the insurance after all, for the burned factory building. It wasn’t enough, but we had been given – he said – a breathing space.
The Imperial Room
The season is turning on its hinges, the earth swings farther from the light; under the roadside bushes the paper trash of summer drifts like an omen of snow. The air is drying out, preparing us for the coming Sahara of centrally heated winter. Already the ends of my thumbs are fissuring, my face withering further. If I could see my skin in the mirror – if I could only get close enough, or far enough away – it would be crisscrossed by tiny lines, in between the main wrinkles, like scrimshaw.
Last night I dreamt that my legs were covered with hair. Not a little hair but a great deal of it – dark hair sprouting in tufts and tendrils as I watched, spreading up over my thighs like the pelt of an animal. The winter was coming, I dreamed, and so I would hibernate. First I would grow fur, then crawl into a cave, then go to sleep. It all seemed normal, as if I’d done it before. Then I remembered, even in the dream, that I’d never been a hairy woman in that way and was now bald as a newt, or at least my legs were; so although they appeared to be attached to my body, these hairy legs couldn’t possibly be mine. Also they had no feeling in them. They were the legs of something else, or someone. All I had to do was follow the legs, run my hand along them, to find out who or what it was.
The alarm of this woke me, or so I believed. I dreamt that Richard was back. I could hear him breathing in the bed beside me. Yet there was nobody there.
I woke up then in reality. My legs were asleep: I’d been lying twisted. I fumbled for the bedside lamp, decoded my watch: it was two in the morning. My heart was hammering painfully, as if I’d been running. It’s true, what they used to say, I thought. A nightmare can kill you.
I hasten on, making my way crabwise across the paper. It’s a slow race now, between me and my heart, but I intend to get there first. Where is there? The end, or The End. One or the other. Both are destinations, of a sort.
The January and February of 1935. High winter. Snow fell, breath hardened; furnaces burned, smoke arose,