The Robber Bride (61 page)

Somewhere out of sight the flowers have grown out of control and the house is on fire. Unless Tony can stop it, everything that once was will burn. The unseen flames make a fluttering sound, like ruffling feathers. A tall man is standing in the corner. It’s West, but why is he wearing those clothes, why is his hair black, why does he have a hat? There’s a suitcase beside him on the floor. He picks it up and opens it: it’s full of sharpened pencils.
Reverof
, he says sadly; though what he means is
Farewell
, because Zenia is there at the door, wound in a silk shawl with a long fringe. In her neck there’s a pinkish grey gash, as if her throat’s been cut; but as Tony watches, it opens, then closes moistly, and she can see that Zenia has gills.

But West is going, he’s putting his arm around Zenia, he’s turning his back. Outside, the taxi is waiting to take them to the snowy hill.

Tony needs to stop them. She holds out her hand once more and her mother puts the egg into it, but the egg is too hot now because of the fire and Tony drops it. It rolls onto a newspaper and breaks open, and time runs out of it, wet and dark red. There are gunshots, coming from the back of the house, and marching boots, and shouting in a foreign language. Where is her father? Frantically she looks around for him but he is nowhere to be seen, and the soldiers are already here to take her mother away.

Charis is lying in her white vine-covered bed, arms at her sides, palms open, eyes closed. Behind her eyes she is fully aware. She feels her astral body rise out of her, rise straight up and hang suspended above her like a mask lifted from a face. It too is wearing a white cotton nightgown.

How tenuously we inhabit our bodies, she thinks. In her body of light – clear, like gelatin – she glides out through the window and
across the harbour. Below her is the ferry; she swoops and follows in its wake. Around her she hears the rushing of wings. She looks, expecting seagulls, and is surprised to see a flock of chickens flying through the air.

She reaches the other shore and floats along over the city. Ahead of her is a large window, the window of a hotel. She fetches up against the glass and beats her arms for a moment, like a moth. Then the window melts like ice and she passes through.

Zenia is in here, sitting in a chair, wearing a white nightgown just like Charis’s, brushing her cloudy hair in front of the mirror. The hair twists like flames, like the branches of dark cypresses licking heavenwards, it crackles with static electricity; blue sparks play from the tips. Zenia sees Charis and motions to her, and Charis goes close and then closer, and she sees the two of them side by side in the mirror. Then Zenia’s edges dissolve like a watercolour in the rain and Charis merges into her. She slides her on like a glove, she slips into her like a flesh dress, she looks out through her eyes. What she sees is herself, herself in the mirror, herself with power. Her nightgown ripples in an invisible wind. Beneath her face are the bones, darker and darker through the glass, like an X-ray; now she can see into things, now she can change herself into energy and pass through solid objects. Possibly she’s dead. It’s hard to remember. Possibly this is rebirth. She spreads the fingers of her new hands, wondering what they will do.

She drifts to the window and looks out. Down below, among the fiery lights and many lives, there’s a slow smouldering; the smell of it permeates the room. Everything burns eventually, even stone can burn. In the room behind her is the depth of outer space, where the atoms are blown like ashes, borne on the restless interstellar winds, the banished souls, atoning.…

There’s a knock at the door. She goes to open, because it will be a maid with towels. But it isn’t, it’s Billy, in striped pyjamas, his body
grown older, bloated, his face raw meat. If he touches her she will fall apart like a bundle of rotted leather. It’s her new eyes doing this. She rubs and pulls at her face, trying to get out of these eyes, these dark eyes she no longer wants. But Zenia’s eyes won’t come off; they’re stuck to her own eyes like the scales of a fish. Like smoked glass, they darken everything.

Roz is walking through the forest, through the shattered trunks and spiky undergrowth, wearing a sailor dress that is too big for her. She knows this dress isn’t hers, she never had a dress like this. Her feet are bare, and cold too; pain shoots through them, because the ground is covered with snow. There’s a track ahead of her: a red footprint, a white footprint, a red footprint. To the side there’s a clump of trees. Many people have been that way; they’ve dropped the things they were carrying, a lamp, a book, a watch, a suitcase fallen open, a leg with a shoe, a shoe with a diamond buckle. Paper money blows here and there, like candy-bar wrappers tossed away. The footprints lead in among the trees but none come out. She knows not to follow them; there’s something in there, something frightening she doesn’t want to see.

She’s safe though because here is her garden, the delphiniums drooping, black with mildew, forlorn in the snow. There are white chrysanthemums too but they aren’t planted, they’re in big cylindrical silver vases and she’s never seen them before. Nevertheless this is her house. The back window is shattered, the door swings loose but she goes in anyway, she walks through the white kitchen where nothing moves, past the table with three chairs. Dust covers everything. She’ll have to clean this up, because her mother is no longer here.

She climbs up the back stairs, her thawing feet tingling with pins and needles. The upstairs hallway is empty and silent; there is no music. Where are her children? They must be grown up, they must have gone away, they must be living elsewhere. But how can that be,
how can she have grown-up children? She’s too young for that, she’s too small. There’s something wrong with time.

Then she hears the sound of the shower. Mitch must be here, which fills her with joy because he has been away so long. She wants to run inside, to greet him. Through the open bedroom door steam billows.

But she can’t go in, because a man in an overcoat is blocking her way. Orange light pours from his mouth and nostrils. He opens his coat and there is his sacred heart, orange too like a glowing jack-o’-lantern, flickering in the wind that has sprung up suddenly. He holds up his left hand to stop her.
Nun
, he says.

Despite appearances, despite everything, she knows this man is Zenia. From the ceiling it begins to rain.

I
t’s after dark. There’s a fine chilly drizzle, and the storefronts with their lit-up windows and the black streets with their red neon reflections have the slick, wet look that Tony associates with plastic raincoats and greased hair and freshly applied lipstick – a dubious, exciting look. Cars sizzle past, filled with strangers, going somewhere unknown. Tony walks.

The Toxique is different at night. The lights are dimmer, and squat candles in red glass holders flicker on the tables; the outfits of the waiters and waitresses are subtly more outrageous. There are a few men in suits, having dinner; businessmen, Tony guesses, though with their mistresses rather than their wives. She likes to think that such men might still have mistresses, though probably they don’t call them that. Lovers. Main squeezes. Special friends. The Toxique is where you would take a special friend, but maybe not a wife. Though how would Tony know? It’s not a world she moves in. There are more men in leather jackets than there are in the daytime. There’s a subdued buzz.

She checks her big-numbers wristwatch: the rock band doesn’t come on till eleven, and she hopes she’ll be out of there by then. She’s had enough noise at home; today she had to listen to a full thirty minutes of aural torture, put together by West and played to her at full volume, with considerable arm-waving and expressions of glee. “I think I’ve done it,” was West’s comment. What could she say? “That’s good,” was what she came out with. It’s an all-occasion phrase, and appeared to suffice.

Tony is the first one here. She’s never had dinner at the Toxique before, only lunch. This dinner is last-minute: Roz phoned in a state of breathlessness and said there was something she really needed to tell. At first she suggested that Tony and Charis should come over to her place, but Tony pointed out that such a thing was difficult without a car.

She’s not that keen on going to Roz’s anyway, though Roz’s twins are – in theory – favourites of hers. She used to regret not having had children, though she wasn’t sure she would have been all that good at it, considering Anthea. But being a godmother has suited her better than being a mother – for one thing it’s more intermittent – and the twins have done her proud. They have a fine glittering edge to them, and so does her other goddaughter, Augusta. None of them is what you would call self-effacing – all three would be at home on horses, riding astride, hair flying, scouring the plains, giving no quarter. Tony isn’t sure how they’ve come by their confidence, their straight-ahead level gazes, their humorous but remorseless mouths. They have none of the timidity that used to be so built in, for women. She hopes they will gallop through the world in style, more style than she herself has been able to scrape together. They have her blessing; but from a distance, because close up Augusta is faintly chilling – she’s so intent on success – and the twins have become gigantic; gigantic, and also careless. Tony is slightly afraid of them. They might step on her by mistake.

So it was Tony who suggested the Toxique, this time. Roz may have something to tell, but Tony has something to tell also and it’s fitting that it should be told here. She has requested their usual table, the one in the corner by the smoked mirror. From the young woman, or possibly man, who appears beside her, dressed in a black cat-suit with a wide leather stud-covered belt and five silver earrings in each ear, she orders a bottle of white wine and a bottle of Evian.

Charis arrives at the same time as the bottles, looking strangely pale. Well, thinks Tony, she always looks strangely pale, but tonight she’s even more so. “Something weird happened to me today,” she tells Tony, shedding her damp woollen sweater-coat and her fuzzy knitted hat. But this is not an unusual thing for Charis to say, so Tony merely nods and pours her a glass of Evian. Sooner or later they will get the story of the dream about shiny people sitting in trees, or the odd coincidence involving street numbers or cats that look just like other cats that used to belong to someone Charis once knew and doesn’t any more, but Tony would rather have it wait till Roz gets here. Roz is more tolerant of such intellectual wispiness, and better at changing the subject.

Roz comes in, waving and yoo-hooing and wearing a flame-red trench coat and matching sou’wester, and shaking herself. “Judas Priest!” she says, pulling off her purple gloves. “Wait till you hear! You won’t
believe!”
Her tone is dismayed rather than jubilant.

“You saw Zenia today,” says Charis.

Roz’s mouth opens. “How did you know?” she says.

“Because, so did I,” says Charis.

“And so did I,” says Tony.

Roz sits heavily down, and stares at each one of them in turn. “All right,” she says. “Tell.”

Tony waits in the lobby of the Arnold Garden Hotel, which would not have been her own hotel of choice. It’s a graceless fifties
construction, cement slabs on the outside and a lot of plate glass. From her vantage point she can see out through the double doors at the back, into a patio dotted with chunky planters and with a large circular fountain off in one corner, non-functional at this time of year and overlooked by tiers of balconies with orange-painted sheet-metal railings. The post-modern awning and brass at the front is just an add-on: the essence of the Arnold Garden is those balconies. Though efforts are being made: above Tony looms a prehensile arrangement of purplish dried flowers and wires and strange pods, daring the aesthetically uninitiated to call it ugly.

The patio and the fountain must be the garden part of the Arnold Garden, Tony decides; but she wonders about the Arnold. Is it Arnold as in Matthew, he of the ignorant armies clashing by night? Or Arnold as in Benedict, traitor or hero depending on point of view? Or perhaps it’s a first name, denoting some bygone city councillor, some worthy backroom fixer whose friends called him Arnie. The lobby, with its framed prints of rotund pink-coated foxhunting Englishmen, gives no clue.

The chair Tony sits in is leathery and slippery and built for colossi. Her feet don’t touch the ground even if she moves well forward, and if she slides herself all the way back, then her knees can’t bend over the front edge and her legs stick out stiffly like the legs of a china doll. So she has adopted a compromise – a sort of hunched curvature – but she is far from comfortable.

Also, despite her demure navy blue coat and her sensible walking shoes and her wimpy Peter Pan collar, she feels conspicuous. Her bad intentions must be sticking out all over her. She has the sensation that she’s growing hair, little prickles of it pushing out through the skin of her legs like the quills of a porcupine, hanks of it shoving through in tufts around her ears. It’s Zenia doing this, the effort of tracking Zenia: it’s fusing her neurons, rearranging the molecules in her brain. A hairy white devil is what she’s becoming, a fanged
monster. It’s a necessary transformation perhaps, because fire must be fought with fire. But every weapon is two-edged, so there will be a price to pay: Tony won’t get out of this unaltered.

In her outsized tote bag is her father’s Luger, unearthed from the box of Christmas decorations where it’s usually stored, and freshly oiled and loaded according to the instructions in the manual of forties weaponry she photocopied in the library. She took care to wear gloves while photocopying, so as not to leave fingerprints, just in case. In case they try to pin anything on her, afterwards. The gun itself is unregistered, she believes. It is after all a sort of souvenir.

Beside it is another implement. Tony has taken advantage of one of the many tool circulars littering her front lawn to purchase a cordless drill, with screwdriver attachment, at a third off. She has never used one of these before. Also, she’s never used a gun before. But there’s a first time for everything. Her initial idea was that she could use the drill to break into Zenia’s room, if necessary. Unscrew the door hinges, or something. But it occurs to her, sitting here in the lobby, that the drill too is potentially lethal, and might be put to use. If she could murder Zenia with a cordless drill, what policeman would be smart enough to figure it out?