Margaret Atwood - The Robber Bride

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“I don’t believe you,” says Charis.

“I don’t care whether you believe me or not,” says Zenia. “It’s true, all the same. He traded his pals in to get himself off the hook and make a bit of cash. They paid him off with a new identity and a sordid little job as a third-rate spy. He wasn’t very good at it, though. Last time I ran into him, in Baltimore or somewhere, he was pretty disillusioned. A broken-down acidhead and whining drunk, and bald as well:”

“You did that to him,” Charis whispers. “You ruined him.” Golden Billy.

“Bullshit,” says Zenia. “That’s what he said, but I hardly twisted his arm! I just told him the choices. Billy’s choice was either that, or something quite a lot worse. In the real world most people choose to save their own skins. It’s something you can count on, nine times out of ten.”

“You were with the Mounties,” says Charis. This is the hardest thing to believe—it’s so incongruous. Zenia on the side of law and order.

“Not quite,” says Zenia. “I’ve always been a free agent. Billy was just a sort of opportunity I saw. Those sanctimonious liberal help-a-dodger groups were infiltrated up to their armpits, and I had connections so I got a peek at the files. I remembered you from McClung Hall—they had a file on you, too, you know, though I told them why waste the paper, not to mention the taxpayers’ hard-earned money, it was like having a file on ajar of jelly—and I was counting on it that you’d remember me. It wasn’t hard to get myself a black eye and turn up in your yoga class. Hell, you did the rest! Now, if you don’t mind, I have to get dressed, I’ve got things to do. Billy lives in Washington, by the way. If you want to stage a joyful reunion with him and his long-lost daughter, I’d be happy to give you his address:’

“I don’t think so,” says Charis. Her legs are shaking; she’s afraid, for a minute, to stand up. Billy lies shattered in her head. Wipe the tape, she tells herself, but the tape won’t wipe. She realizes that she has no weapons, no weapons that will work against Zenia. All Charis has on her side is a wish to be good, and goodness is an absence, it’s the absence of evil; whereas Zenia has the real story.

Zenia shrugs. “Up to you,” she says. “If I were you, I’d scratch him right off my list.”

“I don’t think I can,” says Charis.

“Suit yourself,” says Zenia. She stands up and walks to the closet and starts checking through her dresses.

There is one more thing Charis wants to know, and she summons all of her strength to ask it. “Why did you kill my chickens?” she says. “They weren’t hurting anyone:”

“I did not kill your fucking chickens,” says Zenia, turning around. She sounds amused. “Billy killed them. He enjoyed—doing it, too. Tiptoed out before dawn when you were still in dreamland, and slit their throats with the bread knife. Said it was doing them a favour, the way you kept them in that filthy hen slum of yours. But the truth is, he hated them. Not only that, he had a good laugh, thinking about you going into the henhouse and finding them: Sort of like a practical joke. He got a kick out of that.”

Inside Charis, something breaks. Rage takes her over. She wants to squeeze Zenia, squeeze her and squeeze her by the neck until Charis’s life, her own life that she has imagined, all of the good things about her life that Zenia has drunk, come welling out like water from a sponge. The violence of her own reaction dismays her but she’s lost control. She feels her body filled and surrounded with a white-hot light; wings of flame shoot out from her.

Then she is over behind the flowered drapes, near the door to the balcony, outside her own body, watching. The body stands there. Someone else is in charge of it now. It’s Karen. Charis can see her, a dark core, a shadow, with long raggedy hair, grown big now, grown huge. She’s been waiting all the time, all these years, for a moment like this, a moment when she could get back into Charis’s body and use it to murder. She moves Charis’s hands towards Zenia, her hands that flicker with a blue light; she is irresistibly strong, she rushes at Zenia like a silent wind, she pushes her backwards, right through the balcony door, and broken glass scatters like ice. Zenia is purple and red and flashing like jewels but she is no match for shadowy Karen. She lifts Zenia up—Zenia is light, she’s hollow, she’s riddled with disease and rotten, she’s insubstantial as paper—and throws her over the balcony railing; she watches her flutter down, down from the tower, and hit the edge of the fountain, and burst like an old squash. Hidden behind the flowered drapes, Charis calls plaintively: No! No! Not bloodshed, not the dogs eating the pieces in the courtyard, she doesn’t want that. Does she?

“Anyway, it’s all ancient history,” says Zenia conversationally. Charis is back in her own body, she’s in control of it, she’s moving it towards the door. Nothing has happened after all. Surely nothing has happened. She turns and looks at Zenia. Black lines are radiating out from her, like the filaments of a spider web. No. Black lines are converging on her, targeting her; soon she will be ensnarled. In the centre of them her soul flutters, a pale moth. She does have a soul after all.

Charis gathers up all her strength, all her inner light; she calls on it for what she has to do, because it will take a lot of effort. Whatever Zenia has done, however evil she has been, she needs help. She needs help from Charis, on the spiritual plane.

Charis’s mouth opens. “I forgive you,” is what she hears herself saying.

Zenia laughs angrily. “Who do you think you are?” she says. “Why should I give a flying fuck whether you forgive me or not? Stuff your forgiveness! Get a man! Get a life!”

Charis sees her life the way Zenia must see it: an empty cardboard box, overturned by the side of the road, with nobody in it. Nobody worth mentioning. This is somehow the most hurtful thing of all.

She invokes her amethyst geode, closes her eyes, sees crystal. “I have a life,” she says. She straightens her shoulders and turns the doorknob, holding back tears.

Not until she is walking unsteadily across the lobby towards the front door does it cross Charis’s mind that maybe Zenia was lying. Maybe she was lying about Billy, about the chickens, about everything. She has lied to Charis before, and just as convincingly. Why wouldn’t she be doing it now?

Roz leans sideways and gives Charis a one-armed hug. “Of course she was lying,” she says. “Billy wouldn’t say such a thing.” What does she know from Billy? Not a shred, she never met him, but she’s willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, because what does it cost, and anyway she wants to lighten things up. “Zenia’s just malicious. She says stuff like that just for the heck of it. She only wanted to bother you:”

“But why?” says Charis, on the verge of tears. “Why would she, why did she say that? She was so negative. It really hurt. Now I don’t know what to think.”

—V’rs okay, babe,” says Roz, giving Charis another squeeze. “The heck with her! We won’t invite her to our birthday parties; will we?”

“For heaven’s sake,” says Tony, because Roz always goes too far and Tony is finding this scene much too infantile for her taste. “This is critical!”

“Yes,” says Roz, getting a grip, “I know it is.”

“I do have a life,” says Charis, blinking wet eyes.

“You have a rich inner life,” says Tony firmly. “More than most:” She digs into her bag, finds a crumpled tissue, hands it to Charis. Charis blows her nose.

“Now, here’s me,” says Roz. “Ms. Mature Fuller Figure meets the Queen of the Night. On the enjoyment scale, it didn’t get ten out of ten.”