The Robber Bride Read online

  Maybe Zenia has forgotten all about West by now. He's small game, pleads Tony silently. A tiny fish. Why bother? But Zenia likes hunting. She likes hunting anything. She relishes it.

  Imagine your enemy, say the experts. Put yourself in his place. Pretend you are him. Learn to predict him. Unfortunately, Zenia is a bugger to predict. It's all in the old children's game - scissors, paper, stone. Scissors cut paper, but break on stone. The trick is to know what your opponent is concealing, what fist or nasty surprise or secret weapon he's hiding behind his back. Or hers.

  The sun declines and Tony walks along her own quiet street, scuffing through the fallen leaves of the maple and chestnut trees, back to her own house. Her stronghold. In the waning light the house is no longer thick, solid, incontrovertible. Instead it looks provisional, as if it's about to be sold, or to set sail. It flickers a little, sways on its moorings. Before unlocking the door Tony runs her hand over the brickwork, reassuring herself that it exists.

  West hears her come in, and calls down to her. Tony checks her face in the hall mirror, settling it into what she hopes is her normal expression.

  "Listen to this," says West, when she's climbed the third-floor stairs.

  Tony listens: it's another noise, much the same - as far as she can tell - as yesterday's. Courting male penguins bring rocks, held between their rubber-boot feet; West brings noises. "That's wonderful," she says. It's one of her more minor lies.

  West smiles, which means he knows she can't hear what he hears but likes her for not saying so. She smiles back, scanning his face anxiously. She checks each wrinkle, each lift and inflection. All is as usual, from what she can tell.

  Neither of them feels like cooking, so West goes around the corner for Japanese take-out - barbecued eel, yellowtail, and salmon sushi - and they eat it sitting on cushions, in front of the television set in West's third-floor study, with their shoes off, licking their fingers.

  West has the TV in there so he can play videos on it in which sounds are rendered as colours and wavy lines, but they also use it for watching old movies and junky late-night crime series. West usually prefers the movies, but tonight it's Tony's turn to choose, and they settle on a rerun of a cop show, high on the offensive-and-tacky scale and punctuated with bursts of gratuitous violence.

  Tony's students would smile if they caught her doing this; they're under the illusion that their elders and teachers can't possibly be as frivolous and lazy-minded as they are themselves. Tony watches as a woman brushes her freshly washed hair, and as another extols a new sanitary napkin, curved to catch the drips. She continues to watch as, for the hundredth, for the thousandth time, one man prepares to kill another.

  Such men always have something appropriate to say before throwing the knife or breaking the neck or pulling the trigger. This may be just a screen phenomenon, a fantasy of scriptwriters; or maybe men really do say such things, under such circumstances. How would Tony know? Is there an urge to warn, to gloat, to intimidate the foe, to boost oneself into action? Dieu et mon droit. Nemo me impune lacessit. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Don't mess with me. Challenges, battle cries, epitaphs. Bumper stickers.

  This man says, "You're history."

  Tony has compiled a mental list of these televised synonyms for death. You're toast, you're fried, you're wasted, you're steak, you're dead meat. It's odd how many of them have to do with food, as if being reduced to nutrients is the final indignity. But you're history has long been one of her favourites. It makes such an exact equation between the past - any of the past, all of the past - and a deserved and shoddy oblivion. That's history, the young announce, with self-righteous scorn. This is now.

  There's a close-up of the bug-eyed fear on the face of the man who will soon be history if things go the way they're going, and then the scene shifts to a view of nasal passages, with smile-button medicated orange bubbles percolating through them.

  "This is awful," says West. Tony doesn't know whether he means the cop show or the cross-sectioned nose. She mutes the sound, and takes up his large hand, holding two of his soy-sauced fingers. "West," she says. What is it she would like to convey? You're so large? No. I don't own you? No. Please stay?

  Mutt and Jeff, he sometimes calls them. Ttum and Ffej, Tony replies. Cut that out, says West. When they go walking together, they always look as if one of them is on a leash; but which one? A bear and its handler? A poodle and its trainer?

  "Want a beer?" says West.

  "Apple juice," says Tony, "please," and West unfolds himself from his cushion and pads down the stairs in his sock feet.

  Tony sits watching a new car scream around, silently, in the mountainous desert, overlooked by flat-topped buttes. Good ambush country. She has only one decision to make right now: whether or not to tell West. How could she put it? Zenia lives. And then what? What would West do? Run from the house, without his coat, without his shoes? It's possible. Tall people's heads are too far from the ground, their centre of gravity is too high. One shock and they topple. As Zenia said once, West is a pushover.

  On a hunch, she gets up and tiptoes over to West's desk, where he keeps his phone. He has nothing so coherent as a phone pad, but on the back of a discarded sheet of musical notations she finds what she's afraid of. Z. - A. Hotel. Ext. 1409.

  The Z floats on the page as if scrawled on a wall, as if scratched on a window, as if carved in an arm. Z for Zorro, the masked avenger. Z for Zero Hour. Z for Zap.

  It's as if Zenia has already been here, leaving a taunting signature; but the handwriting is West's. How sweet, she thinks; he just left it there for anyone to see, he doesn't even know enough to flush it down the toilet. What is not so sweet is that he hasn't told her. He is less transparent than she thought, less candid; more perfidious. The enemy is already within the walls.

  The personal is not political, thinks Tony: the personal is military. War is what happens when language fails.

  Zenia, she whispers, trying it out. Zenia, you're history.

  You're dead meat.

  7

  CHARIS

  Charis gets up at dawn. She makes her bed neatly, because she respects this bed. After working her way through time from one bed to another - a mattress on the floor, or several mattresses on several floors, a second-hand box bed with screw-on tapered wooden legs that kept breaking, a spine-wrecking futon, a chemical-smelling foam pad - she has finally achieved a bed that pleases her: firm, but not too firm, with a wrought-iron bedstead painted white. She bought it cheap from Shanita, at work, who was getting rid of it in one of her periodic transformations. Anything from Shanita is good luck, and this bed is good luck too. It's clear, it's fresh, like a mint candy.

  Charis has covered the bed with a beautiful print spread, dark pink leaves and vines and grapes, on white. A Victorian look. Too fussy, says her daughter Augusta, who has an eye for leather chairs as smooth as the backs of knees, for tubular-chrome-and-glass coffee tables, for nubbly-cotton designer sofas with pillows in greys and ivories and milky-tea browns: minimalist opulence like that in corporate lawyers' offices. Or so Charis imagines; she doesn't in fact know any corporate lawyers. Her daughter cuts pictures of these intimidating chairs and tables and sofas out of magazines and pastes them into her furniture scrapbook, and leaves the scrapbook lying around, open, as a reproach to Charis and her slovenly ways.

  Her daughter is a hard girl. Hard to please, or hard for Charis to please. Maybe it's because she has no father. Or not no father: an invisible father, a father like a dotted outline, which has had to be coloured in for her by Charis, who didn't have all that much to go on herself, so it's no wonder his features have remained a little indistinct. Charis wonders whether it would have been better for her daughter to have a father. She wouldn't know, because she never had one herself. Maybe Augusta would go easier on Charis if she had two parents she could find inadequate, and not just one.

  Maybe Charis deserves it. Maybe she was the matron of an orphanage in a previous life - a Victoria
n orphanage, with gruel for the orphans and a cosy fire and a warm four-poster bed with a down-filled quilt for the matron; which would account for her taste in bedspreads.

  She remembers her own mother calling her hard, before she was Charis, when she was still Karen. You're hard, you're hard, she would cry, hitting Karen's legs with a shoe or a broom handle or whatever was around. But Karen wasn't hard, she was soft, too soft. A soft touch. Her hair was soft, her smile was soft, her voice was soft. She was so soft there was no resistance. Hard things sank into her, they went right through her; and if she made a real effort, out the other side. Then she didn't have to see them or hear them, or touch them even.

  Maybe it looked like hardness. You can't win this fight, said her uncle, putting his meaty hand on her arm. He thought she was fighting. Maybe she was. Finally she changed into Charis, and vanished, and reappeared elsewhere, and she has been elsewhere ever since. After she became Charis she was harder, hard enough to get by, but she's continued to wear soft clothes: flowing Indian muslins, long gathered skirts, flowered shawls, scarves draped around her.

  Whereas her own daughter has gone for polish. Lacquered nails, dark hair gelled into a gleaming helmet, though not a punk look: efficient. She's too young to be so shiny, she's only nineteen. She's like a butterfly hardened into an enamelled lapel pin while still half out of the chrysalis. How will she ever unfold? Her brittle suits, her tidy little soldiers' boots, her neat lists in crisp computer printout just break Charis's heart.

  August, Charis named her, because that's when she was born. Warm breezes, baby powder, languorous heat, the smell of mown hay. Such a soft name. Too soft for her daughter, who has added an a. Augusta, she is now - a very different resonance. Marble statues, Roman noses, tight-lipped commanding mouths. Augusta is in first year in the business course at Western, on scholarship, luckily, because Charis could never have afforded to pay for it; her vagueness about money is another source of complaint, for Augusta.

  But despite the lack of cash Augusta has always been well fed. Well fed, well nourished, and every time Augusta comes home for a visit Charis cooks her a nutritious meal, with leafy greens and balanced proteins. She gives Augusta small presents, sachets stuffed with rose petals, sunflower-seed cookies to take back to school with her. But they never seem to be the right things, they never seem to be enough.

  Augusta tells Charis to straighten her shoulders or she'll be a bag lady in old age. She goes through Charis's cupboards and drawers and throws out the candle ends Charis has been saving to make into other candles, sometime when she gets around to it, and the partly used soaps she's been intending to cook into other soaps, and the twists of wool destined for Christmas tree decorations that got moths in them by mistake. She asks Charis when she last cleaned the toilet, and orders her to get rid of the clutter in the kitchen, by which she means the bunches of dried herbs grown so lovingly by Charis every summer, and dangling - somewhat dusty, but still usable - from the nails of different sizes that stud the top of the window frame, and the hanging wire basket for eggs and onions where Charis tosses her gloves and scarves, and the Oxfam oven mitts made by mountain peasant women, somewhere far away, in the shape of a red owl and a navy blue pussycat.

  Augusta frowns at the owl and the pussycat. Her own kitchen will be white, she tells Charis, and very functional, with everything stored in drawers. She's already cut out a picture of it, from Architectural Digest.

  Charis loves Augusta, but decides not to think about her right now. It's too early in the morning. Instead she will enjoy the sunrise, which is a more neutral way to begin the day.

  She goes to the small bedroom window and flings aside the curtain, which is a piece of the same print that covers her bed. She hasn't got around to hemming it, but she will, later. Several of the thumbtacks holding its top end to the wall pop out and scatter on the floor. Now she will have to remember, and avoid stepping on them in her bare feet. She should get a curtain rod, or something, or two hooks with a piece of string: that wouldn't be very expensive. In any case the curtain has to be washed before Augusta comes home again. "Don't you ever wash this thing?" she said the last time she was here. "It looks like poor people's underpants." Augusta has a graphic way of putting things that makes Charis wince. It's too sharp, too bright, too jagged: shapes cut from tin.

  Never mind. The view from her bedroom window is there to soothe her. Her house is the end one in the row, and then comes the grass and then the trees, maple and willow, and through a gap in the trees the harbour, with the sun just beginning to touch the water, from which, today, a vapoury mist is rising. So pink, so white, so softly blue, with a slice of moon and the gulls circling and dipping like flights of souls; and on the mist the city floats, tower and tower and tower and spire, the glass walls of different colours, black, silver, green, copper, catching the light and throwing it back, tenderly at this hour.

  From here on the Island, the city is mysterious, like a mirage, like the cover on a book of science fiction. A paperback. It's like this at sunset too, when the sky turns burnt orange and then the crimson of inner space, and then indigo, and the lights in the many windows change the darkness to gauze; and then at night the neon shows up against the sky and it gives off a glow, like an amusement park or something safely on fire. The only time Charis doesn't care to look at the city is noon, in the full glare of the day. It's too clear-cut, too brash and assertive. It juts, it pushes. It's just girders then, and slabs of concrete.

  Charis would rather look at the city than go there, even at dusk. Once she's in it she can no longer see it; or she sees it only in detail, and it becomes harsher, pockmarked, crisscrossed with grids, like a microscopic photograph of skin. She has to go into it every day, however; she has to work. She likes her job well enough as jobs go, but it's a job, and every job has shackles attached to it. Square brackets. So she tries to plan a small respite for each day, a small joy, something extra.

  Today she's having lunch at the Toxique, with Roz and Tony. In a way they are inappropriate friends for her to have. It's odd to think that she's known them so long, ever since McClung Hall. Well, not known. She didn't truly know anybody back then, just their appearances. But Tony and Roz are friends now, that's beyond a doubt. They're part of her pattern, for this life.

  She steps away from the window, and pauses to remove a thumbtack from her foot. It doesn't hurt as much as she would have expected. She flashes briefly on the image of a bed of nails, with herself lying on it. It would take some getting used to, but it would be good training.

  She pulls off her white cotton nightgown, drinks the glass of water she leaves beside her bed every night to remind herself about drinking enough water, and does her yoga exercises in nothing but her underpants. Her leotard is in the wash, but who cares? Nobody can see her. There are some good things about living alone. The room is cool, but cool air tones up the skin. One nice thing about her job is that it doesn't start until ten, which gives her a long morning, time to grow slowly into her day.

  She cheats a little on the exercises because she doesn't feel like lying down on the floor right now. Then she goes downstairs and has her shower. The bathroom is off the kitchen, because it was added on after the house was built. A lot of the Island houses are like that; at first they would have had outhouses, because they were just summer cottages then. Charis has painted her bathroom a cheerful shade of pink, but that's done nothing to improve the slanting floor. Possibly the bathroom is coming away from the rest of the house, which would account for the cracks, and the drafts in winter. She may have to get it propped up.

  Charis washes herself with Body Shop shower gel, the Dewberry flavour: her arms, her neck, her legs with their nearly invisible scars. She likes to be clean. There's clean outside and there's clean inside, her grandmother used to say, and clean inside is better. But Charis is not altogether clean inside: shreds of Zenia cling to her still, like dirty spangled muslin. She sees the name Zenia in her head, glowing like a scratch, like lava, and draws a
line through it with a thick black crayon. It's too early in the morning to think about Zenia.

  She scrubs her hair in the shower, then gets out and towel-dries it and parts it in the middle. Augusta is pestering her to get it cut. Coloured also. Augusta doesn't want an old washed-out mother. Washed-out is her phrase. "I like myself the way I am," Charis tells her; but she wonders if that's altogether true. However, she refuses to dye her hair, because once you begin you have to keep on doing it, and that's just one more heavy chain. Look at Roz.

  She does her breast self-examination in the bathroom mirror - she has to do it every day, or she'll forget and never do it - and doesn't find any lumps. Maybe she should start wearing a brassiere. Maybe she should always have worn one; then she wouldn't have become so floppy. Nobody tells you about aging, in advance. No, that's not right. People tell you but you don't hear them. "Mum's on another channel," August used to say to her friends, before she added the a.

  Charis takes her quartz pendulum out of its blue Chinese silk drawstring bag - silk conserves the vibrations, says Shanita - and holds it over her head, watching it in the mirror. "Will this be a good day?" she asks it. Round and round means yes, back and forth means no. The pendulum hesitates, begins to swing: a sort of ellipse. It can't make up its mind. Normal, thinks Charis. Then it gives a sort of jump, and stops. Charis is puzzled: she's never seen it do that before. She decides to ask Shanita; Shanita will know. She tucks the pendulum back into its bag.