The Robber Bride (66 page)

“But you really were sick, with something,” Charis says hopefully. Auras don’t lie, and Zenia’s was diseased. Also, she doesn’t want to think that every single one of those vegetables went to waste.

“There’s a trick you ought to know about,” says Zenia. “Just cut out all the vitamin C from your diet and you get the early symptoms of scurvy. Nobody’s expecting scurvy, not in the twentieth century, so they don’t spot it.”

“But I fed you lots of vitamin C!” says Charis.

“Try sticking your finger down your throat,” says Zenia. “Works wonders.”

“But why?” says Charis helplessly. “Why did you?” She feels so defrauded – defrauded of her own goodness, her own willingness to be of service. Such a fool.

“Because of Billy, naturally,” Zenia says. “Nothing personal, you were merely the means. I wanted to get close to him.”

“Because you were in love with him?” says Charis. At least that would be understandable, at least there would be something positive
about it, because love is a positive force. She can understand being in love with Billy.

Zenia laughs. “You are such a dipstick romantic,” she says. “By your age you ought to know better. No, I was not in
love
with Billy, though the sex was fun.”

“Fun?” says Charis. In her experience, sex was never fun. It was either nothing, or it was painful; or it was overwhelming, it put you at risk; which is why she’s avoided it all these years. But
not fun
.

“Yeah, it may come as a surprise,” says Zenia, “that some people think it’s fun. Not you, I realize that. From what Billy said, you wouldn’t know fun if you fell over it. He was so hungry for a little good sex that he jumped me almost as soon as I walked into that pathetic shack of yours. What do you think we were doing when you were over on the mainland teaching that tedious yoga class? Or when you were downstairs cooking our breakfasts, or outside feeding those brain-damaged hens?”

Charis knows she must not cry. Zenia may have been
sex
, but Charis was
love
, for Billy. “Billy loved me,” she says uncertainly.

Zenia smiles. Her energy level is up now, her body’s humming like a broken toaster. “Billy didn’t love you,” she says. “Wake up! You were a free meal-ticket! He was eating off you even though he had money of his own; he was peddling hash, but I guess that one went right past you. He thought you were a cow, if you must know. He thought you were so stupid you’d give birth to an idiot. He thought you were a stunned cunt, to be exact.”

“Billy would never say a thing like that,” says Charis. She feels as if a net of hot sharp wires is being pulled tight around her, the hairline burns cutting into her skin.

“He thought having sex with you was like porking a turnip,” Zenia goes on relentlessly. “Now listen to me, Charis. This is for your own good. I know you, and I can guess how you’ve been spending
your time. Dressing up in hair shirts. Playing hermits. Mooning around after Billy. He’s just an excuse for you; he lets you avoid your life. Give him up. Forget about him.”

“I can’t forget about him,” says Charis in a tiny voice. How can she just sit here and let Zenia tear Billy to shreds? The memory of Billy. If that goes, what does she have left of all that time? Nothing. A void.

“Read my lips, he wasn’t worth it,” says Zenia. She sounds exasperated. “You know what I was really there for? To turn him around. And, believe me, he was easy to turn.”

“Turn?” says Charis. She can hardly concentrate; she feels as if she’s being slapped in the face, on one side of the face and then the other.
Turn the other cheek
. But how often?

“Turn, as in turncoat,” says Zenia, explaining as if to a child. “Billy turned informer. He went back to the States and ratted on all his incendiary-minded little friends, the ones who were still there.”

“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 acid-head 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 a jar 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?

53

R
oz 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.”

“It’s 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 often.”

Roz is in her office, pacing, pacing. On her desk is a stack of files, project files and charitable-donation files both, the Livers, the Kidneys, the Lungs, and the Hearts all clamouring for attention, not to mention the Bag Ladies and the Battered Wives, but they will all have to wait, because in order to give you have to make, it doesn’t grow on trees. She’s supposed to be thinking about the Rubicon project, as presented by Lookmakers.
Lipsticks for the Nineties
is the concept they’re proposing, which Boyce says translates as Oral Glues for Nonagenarians. But Roz can’t get her teeth into it, she’s too preoccupied. Preoccupied? Frenzied! Her body’s a hormone-fuelled swelter, the inside of her head’s like a car wash, all those brushes whirring around, suds flying, vision obscured. Zenia’s on the prowl, and God knows where! She might be climbing up the side of this building even now, with suckers attached to the bottoms of her feet like a fly.

Roz has eaten all the Mozart Balls, she’s smoked every single cigarette, and one of Boyce’s drawbacks, his only one really, is that he doesn’t smoke, so she can’t bum a fag off him, oops, pardon the pun; his lungs at any rate are pure as the driven. Maybe the new downstairs receptionist – Mitzi, Bambi? – might have a pack tucked away; she could call down, but how demeaning, Ms. Boss clawing the walls for a cig.

She doesn’t want to leave the building right now, because it’s about time for Harriet the detective to call. Roz has asked her to call every afternoon at three to fill her in on progress. “We’re narrowing it down,” was all Harriet said for the first few days. But yesterday
she said, “There’s two possibilities. One’s at the King Eddie, the other one’s at the Arnold Garden. The people we’ve been able to – the people who have kindly agreed to identify the photo – each one of them is sure it’s got to be her.”

“What makes you think you have to choose?” said Roz.

“Pardon?” said Harriet.

“Bet you anything she’s got rooms at both of those hotels,” said Roz. “It would be just like her! Two names, two rooms.”
All foxes dig back doors
. “What’re the room numbers?”

“Let us do a little more checking,” said Harriet cautiously. “I’ll let you know.” She could evidently visualize an undesirable situation: Roz barging into some stranger’s room, hurling furniture and accusations and breathing fire, and Harriet getting hit with a lawsuit for having given her the wrong room number.

So now Roz is on tenterhooks, whatever those are. Something her mother knew about, because it was her expression. She makes a mental note to ask Boyce about it, and shakes herself, and sits down at her desk, and opens up the Lipsticks for the Nineties file that Boyce has annotated for her. She likes the business plan, she likes the projections; but Boyce is right, the name itself is wrong, because they’ll want to expand the line beyond lipsticks. An eye shadow that would also shrink puffy lids would be a breakthrough, she’d buy that, and if she would buy a thing it’s a cinch that a lot of other women would, as well, if the price is right. For another thing,
the Nineties
has to go. The nineties have not been great news so far, even though there’s only been a year of them, so why underline the fact that everyone’s stuck in them?