The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [124]
Although no lasting harm was done, these are by no means the first serious difficulties to have been caused by faulty postal delivery. The public deserves a service it can rely on unquestioningly. Government officials should take note.
The Blind Assassin: Street walk
She walks along the street, hoping she looks like a woman entitled to be walking along the street. Or along this street. She doesn’t, though. She’s dressed wrong, her hat is wrong, her coat is wrong. She ought to have a scarf tied over her head and under her chin, a baggy coat worn along the sleeves. She ought to look drab and frugal.
The houses here are cheek by jowl. Servants’ cottages once, row on row, but there are fewer servants now, and the rich have made other provisions. Sooty brick, two up, two down, privy out back. Some have the remains of vegetable gardens on their tiny front lawns – a blackened tomato vine, a wooden stake with string dangling from it. The gardens couldn’t have gone well – it would have been too shady, the earth too cindery. But even here the autumn trees have been lavish, the remaining leaves yellow and orange and vermilion, and a deeper red like fresh liver.
From inside the houses comes howling, barking, a rattle or slam. Female voices raised in thwarted rage, the defiant yells of children. On the cramped porches men sit on wooden chairs, hands dangling from knees, out of work but not yet out of house and home. Their eyes on her, their scowls, taking bitter stock of her with her fur trim at wrists and neck, her lizard handbag. It could be they are lodgers, crammed into cellars and odd corners to help cover the rent.
Women hurry along, heads down, shoulders hunched, carrying brown paper bundles. Married, they must be. The word braised comes to mind. They’ll have been scrounging bones from the butcher, they’ll be toting home the cheap cuts, to be served with flabby cabbage. Her shoulders are too far back, her chin too far up, she doesn’t wear that beaten-down look: when they raise their heads enough to focus on her, the glances are filthy. They must think she’s a hooker, but in shoes like that what’s she doing down here? Way below her league.
Here’s the bar, on the corner where he said it would be. The beer parlour. Men are gathered in a clump outside it. None of them says anything to her as she goes past, they just stare as if from thickets, but she can hear the muttering, hatred and lust mixed in the throat, following her like the wash from a ship. Perhaps they’ve mistaken her for a church worker or some other sniffy do-gooder. Poking scrubbed fingers into their lives, asking questions, offering table scraps of patronizing help. But she’s dressed too well for that.
She took a taxi, paid it off three blocks away, where there was more traffic. It’s best not to become an anecdote: who’d take a cab, around here? Though she’s an anecdote anyway. What she needs is a different coat, picked up at a rummage sale, crumpled into a suitcase. She could go into a hotel restaurant, leave her own coat at the check, slip into the powder room, change. Frump up her hair, smudge her lipstick. Emerge as a different woman.
No. It would never work. There’s the suitcase, just to begin with; there’s getting out of the house with it. Where are you off to in such a hurry?
And so she’s stuck doing a cloak-and-dagger number without a cloak. Relying on her face alone, its guile. She’s had enough practice by now, in smoothness, coolness, blankness. A lifting of both eyebrows, the candid, transparent stare of a double agent. A face of