"The Robber Bride" - читать интересную книгу автора (Atwood Margaret)

XIX

None of the McClung Hall girls had anything to do with Zenia. And Zenia would have nothing to do with them. She wouldn’t have lived in a women’s residence if forced at gunpoint, as she said to Tony the first time she set foot in the place. This dump, she called it.

(Why had she come? To borrow something. What was it? Tony doesn’t wish to remember, but remembers anyway: it was money. Zenia was always running short. Tony found it embarrassing to be asked, but she would have found it more embarrassing still to refuse. What she finds embarrassing now is that she so naively, so tamely, so obligingly forked over.)

“Residence is for small people,” Zenia said, gazing contemptuously around her, at the institutional paintwork, the shoddy chairs in the Common Room, the comic strips cut out of the newspaper and Scotch-taped to the girls’ doors.

“Right,” said Tony, heavily.

Zenia looked down at Tony, smiling, correcting herself. “Imaginatively small. I don’t mean you.”

Tony was relieved, because Zenia’s contempt was a work of art. It was so nearly absolute; it was a great privilege to find yourself excluded from it. You felt reprieved, you felt vindicated, you felt grateful; or this is what Tony felt, pattering off to her room, locating her little chequebook, writing out her little cheque. Offering it up. Zenia took it carelessly, folded it twice, and stuck it into her sleeve. Both of them tried to act as if nothing had happened; as if nothing had changed hands, as if nothing at all was owed.

How she must have hated me for that, thinks Tony.

So Tony did not meet Zenia among the girls at McClung Hall. She met her instead through her friend West.

She was not sure, exactly, how West had become her friend. He had more or less materialized. He began by sitting beside her in class and borrowing her Modern History notes because he’d missed the lecture before that one, and then all of a sudden he was a part of her routine.

West was the only person she could talk to about her interest in war. She hadn’t done it yet, but she was working up to it gradually. Such a thing might take years, and he’d only been her friend for a month. For the first two weeks of this period she’d called him Stewart, like his other, his male friends, who would slap him on the shoulder, give him small punches on the arm, and say, Hey Stew, what’s new? But then= he’d come across a few of the cryptic comments she’d written in the margins of her notes—egabrag tahw, poop dlo gnirob—and she’d had to explain them. He was impressed with her ability to write backwards—That’s something, was what he said—and he’d wanted his own name reversed. He claimed to like his new name a lot better.

The girls in the residence began referring to West as Tony’s boyfriend, although they knew he wasn’t. They did it to tease. “How’s your boyfriend?” Roz would yell, grinning at Tony from the saggy depths of the orange sofa, which sagged even more when it was Roz who was sitting on it. “Hey Tonikins! How’s your secret life? How’s Mr: Beanpole? Poor me! The tall guys always go for shrimps!”

West was tall enough, but walking beside Tony made him look even taller. He lacked the solidity of the word giant; instead he was skinny, loosely strung. His legs and arms were only tentatively attached to the rest of him, and his hands and feet seemed larger than they were because his sleeves and pant legs were always an inch or two short. He was handsome in an angular, an attenuated way, like a medieval stone saint or an ordinarily handsome man who had been stretched like rubber.

He had shaggy blond hair then, and wore dark, tarnished clothing—a frayed turtleneck, sullied jeans. This was unusual for the time: most men at university still wore ties, or at least jackets. His clothes were a badge of the fringe, they gave him an outlaw’s lustre. When Tony and West had coffee together after their Modern History lecture, in one of the student coffee shops they frequented, the girls would stare at West. Then their eyes would move downwards and they would spot Tony, in her kiddie pageboy, her horn-rimmed glasses and kilry skirt and penny loafers. Then they would be puzzled.

Drinking coffee was about all Tony did with West. As they drank the coffee, they talked; although neither of them was wh’it you would call loquacious. Most of their talk was an easy silence. Sometimes they drank beer, in various dark beer parlours, or rather West did. Tony would sit on the edge of her chair, her toes barely touching the floor, and lick-the froth off the top of her draft, her tongue exploring it thoughtfully, like a cat’s. Then West would drink the rest of the beer and order two more. Four was his limit. To Tony’s relief he never drank any more than that. It was surprising that the beer parlours let Tony in, because she looked so under-age. She was under-age. They must have thought she would never dare to set foot in such places unless she was in reality twenty-two. But she was disguised as herself, one of the most successful disguises. If she’d tried to look older it wouldn’t have worked.

‘%’est said nobody took better history notes than Tony. That made her feel useful—even better, indispensable. Praised. West was taking Modern History—which wasn’t modern history at all, it was simply not Ancient History, which ended with the fall of Rome—because he was interested in folk songs and ballads, and in antique musical instruments. He played the lute, or so he said. Tony had never seen his lute. She’d never been to his room, if in fact he lived in a room. She didn’t know where he lived, or what he did in the evenings. She told herself she wasn’t interested: theirs was a friendship of the afternoons. As time went on, however, she began thinking about the rest of his life. She found herself wondering what he ate for dinner, and even breakfast. She assumed he lived with other men, or boys, because he’d told her about a guy he knew who could set fire to his own farts. He didn’t tell her this in a sniggering way, but regretfully somehow. “Imagine having that engraved on your tombstone,” he said. Tony recognized the fart-lighting as a variant of the more sedate tricks that went on in McClung Hall with the eggs and lipstick faces, and postulated a men’s residence. But she didn’t ask.

When West appeared, he said Hi. When he disappeared, he”said See you. Tony never knew when either of these things was going to happen.

In this fashion they reached November. Tony and West were sitting in a beer parlour called Montgomery’s Inn, after one of the skirmishes of the 1837 Rebellion in Upper Canada, which, in Tony’s opinion, should have gone the other way, but had been lost through stupidity and panic. Tony was licking the foam off the top of her draft beer as usual, when West said something surprising. He said he was having a party.

What he actually said was we. And he didn’t say party, he said bash.

Bash was an odd word, coming from West. Tony did not think of West as a violent person, and bash was harsh, a bodyblow term. He sounded as if he were quoting someone.

“A bash?” Tony said uncertainly. “I don’t know” She had heard the girls in the residence talking about bashes. They took place at men’s fraternities, and frequently ended with people being sick—men mostly, but sometimes girls too, either at the fraternity itself or later, in one of the McClung washrooms.

“I think you should come,” said West, gazing at her benevolently with his blue eyes. “I think you’re looking pale.”

“This is the colour I am,” said Tony defensively. She was , taken aback by the sudden concern for her health on West’s part. It seemed too polite; although, in contradiction to his offhand and sullen clothing, he always opened doors. She wasn’t used to such concern from him, or from anyone else. She found it alarming, as if he had touched her.

“Well,” said West, “I think you should get out more.”

“Out?” said Tony. She was confused: what did he mean by out? “You know,” said West. “Meet people:”

There was something almost sly about the way he said this, as if he were concealing a more devious purpose: It occurred to her that he might be trying to set her up with some man, out of misplaced solicitude, the way Roz might. Toinette! There’s someone I want you to meet! Roz would say, and Tony would sidestep and evade.

Now she said, “But I wouldn’t know anyone there:”

“You’d know me,” said West. “And you could meet the others:”

Tony didn’t say she did not want to meet any more people. It would have sounded too strange. Instead she let West write down the address for her, on a corner of paper torn from his Rise of the Renaissance textbook. He didn’t say he would pick her up, so at least it wasn’t a date. Tony couldn’t have handled a date with anyone, much less West. She couldn’t have handled the implications, or the hope. Hope of that kind might unbalance her. She didn’t want to get involved, with anyone, underlined, full stop.

The bash is up two flights of stairs, in a narrow asphalt-shingled building far downtown that forms part of a row of cut-price and army surplus stores, and fronts on the railway tracks. The stairs are steep; Tony climbs them one step at a time, helping herself up by the banister. The door at the top is open; smoke and noise are billowing out through the doorway. Tony wonders whether to knock, decides against it on the grounds that no one would hear her, and goes in.

Right away she wishes she hadn’t, because the room is thick with people, and they are the kind of people who, taken en rnasse, are most likely to frighten her, or at least make her very uneasy. Most of the women have straight hair, worn long in a ballerina ponytail or wound into austere buns. They have black stockings and black skirts and black tops, and no lipstick; their eyes are heavily outlined. Some of the men have beards. They wear the same kind of clothes that West does—work shirts, turtlenecks, jean jackets—but they lack his candour, his sweetness, his air of hairlessness. Instead they are compacted, matted, v” dense with supercharged matter. They hulk, they loom, they bristle with static energy.

The men are talking mostly to one another. The women aren’t talking at all. They’re leaning against the wall, or standing with their arms folded under their breasts, a cigarette carelessly in one hand, dropping ashes on the floor, looking as if they’re bored and about to leave for some other, better party; or they’re gazing expressionlessly at the men, or staring past their shoulders as if searching intently for someone else, some other man, a more important one.

A couple of the women glance over at Tony as she comes in, then shift their eyes quickly away. Tony is wearing the sort of clothes she usually wears, a dark green corduroy jumper with a white blouse under it, a green velvet hairband, and knee socks and brown loafers. She has kept a lot of her clothes from high school, because they still fit. She knows at this moment that she will have to acquire other clothes. But she is not sure how.

She stands on tiptoe and peers through the intertwined hedge of arms and shoulders and heads, of black wool rib-knit breasts and denim chests and torsos. But West is nowhere in sight.

Maybe it’s because the room is so dark; maybe that’s why she can’t see him. Then she realizes that the room is not only dark, it’s black. The walls, the ceiling, even the floor are a glossy, hard enamel black. Even the windows have been painted over; even the light fixtures. Instead of electric lights there are candles, stuck in Chianti bottles. And all over the room there are big silvery juice tins, peeled of their labels and filled with bunches of white chrysanthemums that waver and shine in the light from the candles.

Tony wants to leave, but she wouldn’t like to do that without seeing West. He might think she’d refused his invitation, had failed to come; he might think she was being snobby. Also she wants to be soothed and reassured: with him there she will not be so out of place. She goes in search of him, down a hallway that leads off to the left. This terminates in a bathroom. A door opens, there’s a flushing sound, and a large, hair-covered man comes out. He gives Tony an unfocused look. “Shit, the Girl Guides,” he says.

Tony feels about two inches tall. She flees into the bathroom, which will at least be a refuge. It too has been painted black, even the bathtub, even the sink, even the mirror. She locks the door and sits down on the black toilet, touching it first to make sure the paint is dry.

She’s not sure she’s in the right place. Perhaps West doesn’t live here at all. Perhaps she has the wrong address; perhaps this is some other bash. But she checked the scrap of paper before coming up the stairs. Perhaps, then, it’s the time that’s wrong—perhaps she’s too early for West, or too late. There’s no way of knowing, since his comings and goings have always been so unpredictable.

She could go out of the bathroom and ask someone—one of the enormous, furry men, one of the tall supercilious women—where he might be, but she dreads doing this. What if nobody knows who he is? It would be safer to stay in here, replaying the Battle of Culloden to herself, calculating the odds. She arranges the terrain—the hill that slopes downwards, the fine of the stone wall with the tidy British soldiers and their tidy guns in a row behind it. The raggedy clans charging, plunging down the hill yelling, with nothing but their heavy outdated swords and their round bucklers. Falling in picturesque, noble heaps. An abattoir. Courage is of use only when technologies are evenly matched. Bonnie Prince Charlie was an idiot.

Unwinnable, she thinks, as a battle. The only hope would have been to avoid a battle altogether. To reject the terms of the argument, refuse the conventions. Strike at night, then melt away into the hills. Disguise yourself as a peasant. Not a fair fight, but then, what is a fair fight? Nothing she’s learned abouC’ yet.

Someone’s knocking at the door. Tony gets up, flushes the black toilet, rinses her hands at the black sink. There’s no towel so she wipes her hands on her corduroy jumper. She unlocks the door: it’s one of the ballerina women.

“Sorry,” Tony says to her. The woman stares coldly.

Tony goes back into the main room, intending to leave. Without West, there’s no point. But there, in the centre of the room, is Zenia.

Tony doesn’t know Zenia’s name yet, but Zenia doesn’t seem to need a name: She isn’t wearing black like most of the others. Instead she’s in white, a sort of shepherd’s smock that comes down to mid-thigh on the long legs of her tight jeans. The smock isn’t thin but it suggests lingerie, perhaps because the front buttons are open to a point level with her nipples. In the V of cloth, a small firm half-breast curves away to either side, like back-to-back parentheses.

All the others, in their black, sink into the black background of the walls. Zenia stands out: her face and hands and torso swim against the darkness, among the white chrysanthemums, as if disembodied and legless. She must have thought it all out beforehand, Tony realizes—how she would glow in the dark like an all-night gas station, or—to be honest—like the moon.

‘Tony feels herself being sucked back, pushed back into the black enamel of the wall. Very beautiful people have that effect, she thinks: they obliterate you. In the presence of Zenia she feels more than small and absurd: she feels non-existent.

She ducks into the kitchen. It’s black too, even the stove, even the refrigerator. The paint glistens moistly in the candlelight.

West is leaning against the refrigerator. He is quite drunk. Tony can see it at once, she’s had enough practice. Something turns over inside her, turns over and sinks.

“Hi, Tony,” he says. “How’s my little pal?”

West has never called Tony his little pal before. He’s never called her little. It seems a violation.

“Actually I have to go,” she says.

“Night’s young,” he says. “Have a beer.” He opens the black refrigerator, which is still white inside, and digs out two Molson’s Ex. “Where’d I put the fucker?” he asks, patting parts of his body.

Tony doesn’t know what he’s talking about or what he’s doing, or even who he is, exactly. Not who she thought he was, that’s for sure. He doesn’t usually swear. She starts backing away.

“It’s in your pocket,” says a voice behind her. Tony looks: it’s the girl in the white smock. She smiles at West, points her index finger at him. “Hands up.”

Grinning, West puts his hands in the air. The girl kneels and fumbles in his pockets, leaning her head against his thighs, and after a very long moment—during which Tony feels as if she’s being forced to peep through a keyhole at a scene far too intimate to be borne—brings out a bottle-opener. She opens both beers with it, flipping the tops off expertly, hands one to Tony, tilts the other one back and drinks from it. Tony watches her throat undulate as she swallows. She has a long neck.

“What about me?” says West, and the girl hands him the bottle.

“So, how do you like our flowers?” she says to Tony. “We stole them from the Mount Hope Cemetery. Some big cheese croaked. They’re sort of wilted, though: we had to wait until everyone had buggered off” Tony notes the words—stole, croaked, buggered—and feels timid and lacking in style.

“This is Zenia,” says West. There’s a proprietary reverence in his voice, and a huskiness, that Tony doesn’t like at all. Mine, is what he means. Handfuls of mine.

Tony can see now that she was wrong about we. We hadnothing to do with male roommates. We meant Zenia. Zenia is now leaning back against West as if he’s a lamppost. He has his arms around her waist, under her smock; his face is half hidden in her smoky hair.

“They’re great,” Tony says. She tries to sound enthusiastic. She takes an awkward swallow from the bottle Zenia has given her, and concentrates to avoid spluttering. Her eyes are stinging, her face reddening, her nose is full of prickles.

“And this is Tony,” says West’s voice. His mouth is behind Zenia’s hair, so it looks like the hair talking. Tony thinks about running: out the kitchen door, between the denim-covered legs in the main room, down the stairs. A stampeding mouse. “Oh, this is Tony,” says Zenia. She sounds amused. “Hi there, Tony. Do you like our black walls? Please get your cold hands off my stomach,” she adds, to West.

“Cold hands, warm heart,” West mutters.

“Heart,” says Zenia. “Who cares about your heart? It’s not your most useful body part:” She lifts up the bottom of her smock, finds his two big hands, extracts them, and holds them in hers, caressing them, all the time smiling at Tony. “It’s revenge,” she says. Her eyes aren’t black, as Tony thought at first: they’re navy blue: “This is a revenge parry. The landlord’s kicking us out, so we thought we’d give the old fucker something to remember us by. It’ll take him more than two coats to cover this up. The lease said we had the right to paint, but it didn’t say what colour. Did you see the toilet?”

“Yes,” says Tony. “It’s very slippery.” She doesn’t mean this to be funny, but Zenia laughs.

“You’re right,” she says to West. “Tony’s a scream:”

Tony hates being talked about in the third person. She’s always hated it; her mother used to do the same thing. West has been discussing her with Zenia, the two of them, analyzing her behind her back, sticking adjectives onto her as if she’s a child, as if she’s anyone at all, as if she’s a topic. It occurs to her also that the only reason West asked her to their party is that Zenia told him to. She sets the beer bottle down on the black stove, noticing that it’s half empty. She must have drunk the other half How did she do that? “I should be going,” she says, with what she hopes is dignity.

Zenia doesn’t seem to have heard her. Neither does West. He’s peering out now from the burrow of Zenia’s hair; she can see his eyes gleaming in the light from the candles.

Tony’s arms and legs are coming detached from the rest of her, and sounds are slowing down. It’s the beer, she doesn’t usually drink it, she isn’t used to it. Longing sweeps through her. She wishes she knew someone who would bury his face in her own hair like that. She wishes it could be West. But she doesn’t have enough hair for that. He would just hit scalp.

She’s lost something. She’s lost West. Tsol. Reverof. It’s a dumb thought: how can you lose somebody you never really had?

“So, Tony,” says Zenia. She says Tony as if it’s a foreign word, as if it’s in quotes. “West tells me you’re brilliant. What’s your direction?”

Tony thinks that Zenia is asking her where she’s going from here. She could pretend there’s another party, a better one, to which Zenia herself has not been invited. But it’s not likely she would be believed. “I guess I’ll take the subway back,” she says. “I have to work:”

“She’s always working,” says West.

“No,” says Zenia, with a hint of impatience. “I mean, what do you want to do with your life? What’s your obsession?” Obsession. Tony doesn’t know anyone who talks like that. Only criminals and creepy people have obsessions, and if you have one yourself you aren’t supposed to admit to it. I don’t have to answer, she tells herself. She pictures the girls in the Common Room, and what they would think of obsessions; and what they would think of Zenia, come to that. They would think she was full of it, and also a slut, with her buttons undone like that. They would disapprove of her slutry hair. Usually Tony finds their judgments on other women catty and superficial, but right now she finds them comforting.

She should smile a bored, dismissive smile. She should say, “My what?” and laugh, and act puzzled, as if it’s a stupid question. She knows how to do this, she has watched and listened.

But it isn’t a stupid question, and she knows the answer. “Raw,” she says.

“What?” says Zenia. She’s concentrating on Tony now, as if she is finally interesting. Something worth figuring out. “Did you say law?”

Tony realizes she’s made a mistake, a slip of the tongue. She’s reversed the word. It must be the alcohol.

“I mean war,” she says, pronouncing this time carefully. “That’s what I want to do with my life. I want to study war.” She shouldn’t have said it, she shouldn’t have told that much about herself, she’s put it wrong. She’s been ridiculous.

Zenia laughs, but it isn’t a mocking laugh. It’s a laugh of delight. She touches Tony’s arm, lightly, as in a game of tag played with cobwebs. “Let’s have coffee,” she says. And Tony smiles.

That was it, that was the decisive moment. Rubicon! The die was cast, but who would have known it at the time? Not Tony, although she does remember a sensation, the sensation of having lost her footing, of being swept out into a strong current. And what, exactly, had acted as the invitation proper? What had beckoned to Zenia, shown her an opening in Tony’s beetle-like little armoured carapace? Which was the magic word, raw or war? Probably it was the two of them together; the doubleness. That would have had high appeal, for Zenia.

But this may be just overcomplication, intellectual webspinning, to which Tony knows she is prone. Doubtless it was something much simpler, much more obvious: Tony’s confusion, her lack of defences under the circumstances, the circumstances being West; West, and the fact that Tony loved him. Zenia must have sensed this before Tony did, and known that Tony was no threat, and known as well that Tony had some feathers worth plucking.

But what about Tony herself What was Zenia offering her, or appearing to offer, as she stood there in the black kitchen, as she smiled with her fingers lightly on Tony’s arm, shimmering in the candlelight like a mirage?

Nature abhors a vacuum, thinks Tony. How inconvenient. Otherwise, we vacuums might lead our lives in relative security. Not that Tony is a vacuum now. No, not at all. Now she’s replete, now she wallows in plenitude, now she’s guarding a castle full of treasure, now she’s involved. Now she must take hold.

Tony paces the basement floor, her pen and notebook neglected on the ping-pong table, thinking of West sleeping upstairs, with the air going deeply into and out of him; West, shifting and groaning, with forlorn sighs, sighs that sound like heartbreak. She listens to the screams of the dying, to the cheering of the Saracens on the barren coast, to the refrigerator humming nearby, to the dunk of the furnace as it turns itself off and on, and to Zenia’s voice.

A drawling voice, with a slight hesitation in it, a slight foreign flavour, the hint of a lisp; low, succulent, but with a hard surface. A glazed chocolate, with a soft, buttery, deceptive centre. Sweet, and bad for you.

“What would cause you to kill yourself?” says Zenia.

“Kill myself?” says Tony wonderingly, as if she’s never thought of such a thing. “I don’t know. I don’t think I would.”

“What if you had cancer?” Zenia says. “What if you knew you were going to die slowly, in unbearable pain? What if you knew where the microfilm was, and the other side knew you knew, and they were going to torture you to get it out of you and then kill you anyway? What if you had a cyanide tooth? Would you use it?”

Zenia is fond of such interrogations. Usually they are based on fairly extreme scripts: what if you’d been on the Titanic, going down? Would you have elbowed and shoved, or stood back and drowned politely? What if you were starving, in an open boat, and one of the others died? Would you eat him? If so, would you push the others overboard so you could keep him all to yourself? She seems to have her own answers fairly firmly in place, though she does not always reveal them.

Despite the weightless corpses strewn about in her head, despite her graph-paper wars and the mass bloodshed she contemplates daily, Tony finds herself taken aback by such questions. They aren’t abstract problems—they’re too personal for that—and there are no correct solutions to them. But it would be a tactical error to let her dismay show. “Well, you’d never know, would you?” she says. “Unless it happened:”

“Granted,” Zenia says. “Well then, what would cause you to kill someone else?”

Tony and Zenia are having coffee, as they have done almost every third day now for the past month, ever since they met. Or not every third day, every third evening: right now it’s eleven o’clock, Tony’s usual bedtime, and here she is, still up. She isn’t even sleepy.

They aren’t in a tame campus coffee shop, either; they’re in a real coffee shop, near Zenia’s new place. Zenia’s and West’s.—=A dive, says Zenia. This coffee shop is called Christie’s, and it stays open all night. At the moment there are three men in it, two of them in trench coats, one in a greasy tweed jacket, sobering up, says Zenia; and two women, sitting in a booth together, talking in low voices.

Zenia says these women are prostitutes; prosties, she calls them. She says she can always tell. They don’t seem like very attractive sexual produce, to Tony: they aren’t young, they’re stuccoed with makeup, and they have forties hairdos, shoulder length, stiffened with spray and with a parting of white scalp at the side. One of them has taken off a sling-backed shoe, and dangles her nyloned foot out over the aisle. The whole place, with its dirty linoleum floor and its out-of-order jukebox and its thick, chipped cups, has a discarded quality to it, a raffish and tawdry carelessness, that repels Tony and also thrills her deeply.

She’s been signing out at McClung Hall for later and later hours. She says she’s helping to paint the sets for a play: The Trojan Women. Zenia read for Helen, but instead she’s Andromache. “All that wailing,” she says. “Female whining. I hate it really.” She says she once wanted to be an actress, but not any more. ‘Fucking directors think they’re God,” she says. “You’re just dog food, as far as they’re concerned. And the way they drool and paw at you!” She’s thinking of quitting.

Drooling and pawing is a new concept, for Tony. She has never been drooled on or pawed. She would like to ask how it is done, but refrains.

Sometimes the two of them really do paint sets. Not that Tony’s any good at painting—she’s never painted anything before in her life—but the others give her a brush and the paint and show her where, and she puts on the base colours. She gets paint on her face and in her hair, and on the man’s shirt they’ve provided, which comes down to her knees. She feels baptized.

By the others—the thin scornful straight-maned women, the black-sweatered, ironic men—she is almost accepted, which is,—naturally Zenia’s doing. For some reason that none of these people can figure out, Zenia and Tony are thick as thieves. Even the girls in the residence have noticed it. They no longer call Tony Tonikins, or offer her cookie shards, or beg her to sing “Darling Clementine” in reverse. They have backed off. Tony can’t tell if this is dislike or respect; or possibly it’s fright, because Zenia, it seems, has a certain reputation among them. Although none of them know her personally, she is one of the visible people—visible to everyone else, but unseen by Tony before now because she wasn’t looking. It’s partly her appearance: Zenia is the incarnation of how plainer, more oblong women wish to look, and therefore to be: it’s a belief of theirs that such things can be arranged from the outside in. She is thought also to be brilliant, and she gets top marks—though she doesn’t exert herself, she hardly ever attends a lecture, so how does she do it? Brilliant, and also fearsome. Wolfish, feral, beyond the pale.

Tony hears some of this from Roz, who barges into her room one morning while Tony is studying, trying to catch up on the time she’s missed the night before. Mothering Roz descends with squawks and a flutter of feathers, and attempts to enlighten small Tony, towards whom she feels protective. Tony listens in silence, her eyes hardening, her ears closing over. She will not hear a word against Zenia. Jealous bitch, she thinks. Hctib suolaej.

She has different clothes now, too, because Zenia has redesigned her. She has black corduroy jeans, and a pullover with a huge rolled collar in which her head sits like an egg in its nest, and a gigantic wraparound green scarf. It’s not as though you can’t afford it, says Zenia, propelling her through the stores. The pageboy with the velvet hairband is gone; instead, Tony’s hair is cut short and tousled on top, with artful wisps coming out of it. Some days Tony thinks she looks a little like Audrey Hepburn; other days, like an electrocuted mop: Much more sophisticated, Zenia has pronounced. She has also made Tony exchange her normal-sized horn-rimmed glasses for bigger ones, enormous ones.

“But they’re too exaggerated,” said Tony. “Unbalanced:”

“That’s what beauty is,” said Zenia. “Exaggerated. Unbalanced. Pay more attention and you’ll see:”

This is the theory behind the outsized sweaters too, the blanket-like scarves: Tony, swimming within them, is rendered even scrawnier. “I look like a stick,” she says. “I look ten!”

“Slender,” says Zenia. Juvenile. Some men like that.”

“Then they’re warped,” says Tony.

“Listen to me, Antonia,” says Zenia seriously. “All men are warped. This is something you must never forget:”

The waitress comes, dollops of fat under her chin, support hose on her legs and clumpy shoes on her feet, a grey bibbed bosom with a stain of ketchup on it bulging out in front. Indifferently she refills their cups. “She’s one too,” says Zenia, when her back is turned. “A prostie. In her spare time.”

Tony scans the stolid rump, the bored slope of the shoulders, the straggling bun of dead-squirrel-coloured hair. “No!” she says. “Who would want to?”

“Bet you anything,” says Zenia. “Go on!”

She means that Tony should continue with whatever story she’s been telling, but Tony can scarcely remember where she was. This friendship with Zenia has been very sudden. She feels as if she’s being dragged along on a rope, behind a speeding motorboat, with the waves sloshing over her and her ears full of applause; or as if she’s racketing downhill on a bicycle, with no hands and no brakes either. She’s out of control; at the same time, she’s unusually alert, as if the small hairs on her arms and on the back of her neck are standing straight up. These are perilous waters. But why? They’re only talking.

Though it’s making Tony dizzy, all this reckless verbiage. She’s never listened so much to one person; also, she herself has~never said so much, so heedlessly. She has hardly gone in for self-revelation, in her previous life. Who was there to tell? She has no idea what might come reeling out, the next time she opens her mouth.

“Go on,” says Zenia once more, leaning forward, across the speckled-brown table, the half-empty cups, the butts in the brown metal ashtray. And Tony does.