The Blind Assassin

The laundry

March at last, and a few grudging intimations of spring. The trees are still bare, the buds still hard, cocooned, but in places where the sun hits there's meltdown. Dog doings unfreeze, then wane, their icy lacework sallow with wornout pee. Slabs of lawn come to light, sludgy and bestrewn. Limbo must look like this.

Today I had something different for breakfast. Some new kind of cereal flake, brought over by Myra to pep me up: she's a sucker for the writing on the backs of packages. These flakes, it says in candid lettering the colours of lollipops, of fleecy cotton jogging suits, are not made from corrupt, overly commercial corn and wheat, but from little-known grains with hard-to-pronounce names-archaic, mystical. The seeds of them have been rediscovered in pre-Columbian tombs and in Egyptian pyramids; an authenticating detail, though not, when you come to think of it, all that reassuring. Not only will these flakes whisk you out like a pot scrubber, they murmur of renewed vitality, of endless youth, of immortality. The back of the box is festooned with a limber pink intestine; on the front is an eyeless jade mosaic face, which those in charge of publicity have surely not realised is an Aztec burial mask.

In honour of this new cereal I forced myself to sit down properly at the kitchen table, with place setting and paper napkin complete. Those who live alone slide into the habit of vertical eating: why bother with the niceties when there's no one to share or censure? But laxity in one area may lead to derangement in all.

Yesterday I decided to do the laundry, to thumb my nose at God by working on a Sunday. Not that he gives two hoots what day of the week it is: in Heaven, as in the subconscious-or so we're told-there is no time. But really it was to thumb my nose at Myra. I shouldn't be making the bed, says Myra; I shouldn't be carrying heavy baskets of soiled clothing down the rickety steps to the cellar, where the ancient, frantic washing machine is located.

Who does the laundry? Myra, by default. While I'm here I might as well just pop in a load, she'll say. Then we both pretend she hasn't done it. We conspire in the fiction-or what is rapidly becoming the fiction-that I can fend for myself. But the strain of make-believe is beginning to tell on her.

Also she's getting a bad back. She wants to arrange for a woman, some nosy hired stranger, to come in and do all that. Her excuse is my heart. She has somehow found out about it, about the doctor and his nostrums and his prophecies-I suppose from his nurse, a chemical redhead with a mouth that flaps at both ends. This town is a sieve.

I told Myra that what I do with my dirty linen is my own business: I will stave off the genericwoman for as long as possible. How much of this is embarrassment, on my part? Quite a lot. I don't want anyone else poking into my insufficiencies, my stains and smells. It's all right for Myra to do it, because I know her and she knows me. I am her cross to bear: I am what makes her so good, in the eyes of others. All she has to do is say my name and roll her eyes, and indulgence is extended to her, if not by the angels, at least by the neighbours, who are a damn sight harder to please.

Don't misunderstand me. I am not scoffing at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and just as complicated. But sometimes it's hard to put up with.

Having made my decision-and having anticipated Myra's bleats of distress upon discovering the stack of washed and folded towels, and my own smug grin of triumph-I set about my laundering escapade. I delved about in the hamper, narrowly saving myself from toppling into it head first, and fished out what I thought I could carry, avoiding nostalgia for the undergarments of yesteryear. (How lovely they were! They don't make things like that any more, not with self-covered buttons, not hand-stitched. Or perhaps they do, but I never see them, and couldn't afford them anyway, and wouldn't fit into them. Such things have waists.)

Into the plastic basket went my selections, and off I set, step by step, sideways down the stairs, like Little Red Riding Hood on her way to Granny's house via the underworld. Except that I myself am Granny, and I contain my own bad wolf. Gnawing away, gnawing away.

The main floor, so far so good. Along the hall into the kitchen, then on with the cellar light and the jittery plunge into the dank. Almost at once, trepidation set in. Places in this house that I could once negotiate with ease have become treacherous: the sash windows are poised like traps, ready to fall on my hands, the stepstool threatens to collapse, the top shelves of the cupboards are booby-trapped with precarious glassware. Halfway down the cellar stairs I knew I shouldn't have tried it. The angle was too steep, the shadows too dense, the smell too sinister, like freshly poured cement concealing some deftly poisoned spouse. On the floor at the bottom there was a pool of darkness, deep and shimmering and wet as a real pool. Perhaps it was a real pool; perhaps the river was welling up through the floor, as I have seen happen on the weather channel. Any of the four elements may become displaced at any time: fire may break from the earth, earth liquefy and tumble about your ears, air beat against you like a rock, dashing the roof from over your head. Why not then a flood?

I heard a gurgling, which may or may not have been coming from inside me; I felt my heart gulping in my chest with panic. I knew the water was a quirk, of eye or ear or mind; still, better not to descend. I dropped the laundry on the cellar stairs, abandoning it. Perhaps I might go back and pick it up later, perhaps not. Someone would. Myra would, lips tightening. Now I'd done it, now I would havethe woman foisted on me for sure. I turned, half fell, grasped the bannister; then pulled myself back up, one step at a time, to the sane bland daylight of the kitchen.

Outside the window it was grey, a uniform spiritless grey, the sky as well as the porous, aging snow. I plugged in the electric kettle; soon it began its lullaby of steam. Things have gone pretty far when you've come to feel that it's your utensils that are taking care of you and not the other way around. Still, I was comforted.

I made a cup of tea, drank it, then rinsed out the cup. I can still wash my own dishes, at any rate. Then I put the cup away, on the shelf with the other cups, Grandmother Adelia's hand-painted patterns, lilies with lilies, violets with violets, like patterns matched with like. My cupboards at least have not gone haywire. But the image of the cast-away items of laundry fallen on the cellar steps was bothering me. All those tatters, those crumpled fragments, like shed white skins. Though not entirely white. A testament to something: blank pages my body's been scrawling on, leaving its cryptic evidence as it slowly but surely turns itself inside out.

Perhaps I should make a try at gathering these things up, then stowing them away in their hamper, and none the wiser. None means Myra.

I have been overcome, it seems, by a lust for tidiness.

Better late than never, says Reenie.

Oh Reenie. How I wish you were here. Come back and take care of me!

She won't, though. I will have to take care of myself. Myself and Laura, as I solemnly promised to do.

Better late than never.

Where am I? It was winter. No, I've done that.

It was spring. The spring of 1936. That was the year everything began to fall apart. Continued to fall apart, that is, in a more serious fashion than it was doing already.

King Edward abdicated in that year; he chose love over ambition. No. He chose the Duchess of Windsor's ambition over his own. That's the event people remember. And the Civil War began, in Spain. But those things didn't happen until months later. What was March known for? Something. Richard rattling his paper at the breakfast table, and saying, Sohe's done it.

There were just the two of us at breakfast, that day. Laura did not eat breakfast with us, except on weekends, and then she avoided it as much as possible by pretending to sleep in. On weekdays she ate by herself in the kitchen, because she had to go to school. Or not by herself: Mrs. Murgatroyd would have been present. Mr. Murgatroyd then drove her to school and picked her up, because Richard didn't like the idea of her walking. What he really didn't like was the idea that she might go astray.

She had lunch at the school, and took flute lessons there on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because a musical instrument was mandatory. The piano had been tried, but had come to nothing. Likewise the cello. Laura was averse to practising, we were told, although in the evenings we were sometimes treated to the sorrowful, off-key wailing of her flute. The false notes sounded deliberate.

"I'll speak to her," said Richard.

"We can scarcely complain," I said. "She's only doing what you require."

Laura was no longer overtly rude to Richard. But if he entered a room, she would leave it.

Back to the morning paper. Since Richard was holding it up between us, I could read the headline. He was Hitler, who had marched into the Rhineland. He'd broken the rules, he'd crossed the line, he'd done the forbidden thing. Well, said Richard, you could see it coming a mile away, but the rest of them got caught with their pants down. He's thumbing his nose at them. He's a smart fellow. Sees a weak point in the fence. Sees a chance and he takes it. You've got to hand it to him.

I agreed, but did not listen. Not listening was the only way I had, during those months, of keeping my balance. I had to blot out the ambient noise: like a tightrope walker crossing Niagara Falls, I could not afford to look around me, for fear of slipping. What else can you do when what you are thinking about every waking moment is so far removed from the life you're supposedly living? From what's right there on the table, which that morning was a bud vase with a paper-white narcissus in it, picked from the bowl of forced bulbs sent over by Winifred. So lovely to have at this time of year, she'd said. So fragrant. Like a breath of hope.

Winifred thought I was innocuous. Put another way, she thought I was a fool. Later-ten years into the future-she was to say, over the phone because we no longer met in person, "I used to think you were stupid, but really you're evil. You've always hated us because your father went bankrupt and burned down his own factory, and you held it against us."

"He didn't burn it down," I would say. "Richard did. Or he fixed it."

"That is a malicious lie. Your father was stony flat broke, and if it wasn't for the insurance on that building you wouldn't have had a bean! We pulled the two of you out of the swamp, you and your dopey sister! If it wasn't for us, you would've been out walking the streets instead of sitting around on your bottoms like the silver-plated spoiled brats you were. You always had everything handed to you, you never had to make an effort, you never showed one moment of gratitude to Richard. You didn't lift one finger to help him out, not once, ever."

"I did what you wanted. I kept my mouth shut. I smiled. I was the window-dressing. But Laura was going too far. He should have left Laura out of it."

"All of that was just spite, spite, spite! You owed us everything, and you couldn't stand it. You had to get back at him! You killed him dead between the two of you, just as if you'd put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger."

"Who killed Laura, then?"

"Laura killed herself, as you know perfectly well."

"I could say the same of Richard."

"That is a slanderous lie. Anyway, Laura was crazy as a coot. I don't know how you could ever have believed a word she said, about Richard or anything else. Nobody in their right mind would have!"

I couldn't say another word, and so I hung up on her. But I was powerless against her, because by then she had a hostage. She had Aimee.

In 1936, however, she was still affable enough, and I was still her protegee. She continued to haul me around from function to function-Junior League meetings, political bun-fests, committees for this and that-and to park me on chairs and in corners, while she did the necessary socialising. I could see now that she was for the most part not liked, but merely tolerated, because of her money, and her boundless energy: most of the women in those circles were content to let Winifred do the lion's share of whatever work might be involved.

Every now and then, one of them would sidle up to me and remark that she had known my grandmother -or, if younger, that she wished she'd known her, back in those golden days before the Great War, when true elegance had still been possible. This was a password: it meant that Winifred was anarriviste -new money, brash and vulgar-and that I should be standing up for some other set of values. I would smile vaguely, and say that my grandmother had died long before I was born. In other words, they couldn't expect any kind of opposition to Winifred from me.

And how is your clever husband? they would say. When may we expect the big announcement? The big announcement had to do with Richard's political career, not yet formally begun but considered imminent. Oh, I would smile, I expect I'll be the first to know. I did not believe this: I expected to be the last.

Our life-Richard's and mine-had settled into what I then supposed would be its pattern forever. Or rather there were two lives, a daytime one and a nighttime one: they were distinct, and also invariable. Placidity and order and everything in its place, with a decorous and sanctioned violence going on underneath everything, like a heavy, brutal shoe tapping out the rhythm on a carpeted floor. Every morning I would take a shower, to get rid of the night; to wash off the stuff Richard wore on his hair-some kind of expensive perfumed grease. It rubbed off all over my skin.

Did it bother him that I was indifferent to his nighttime activities, even repelled by them? Not at all. He preferred conquest to cooperation, in every area of life.

Sometimes-increasingly, as time went by-there were bruises, purple, then blue, then yellow. It was remarkable how easily I bruised, said Richard, smiling. A mere touch would do it. He had never known a woman to bruise so easily. It came from being so young and delicate.

He favoured thighs, where it wouldn't show. Anything overt might get in the way of his ambitions.

I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it?

I was sand, I was snow-written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

The ashtray

I've been to see the doctor again. Myra drove me there: in view of the black ice caused by a thaw followed by a freeze, it was too slippery for me to walk, she said.

The doctor tapped my ribs and eavesdropped on my heart, and frowned and then cancelled his frown, and then-having already made up his mind about it-asked me how I was feeling. I believe he has done something to his hair; surely he used to be thinner on top. Has he been indulging in the glueing on of strands across his scalp? Or worse, transplantation? Aha, I thought. Despite your jogging and the hairiness of your legs, the shoe of aging is beginning to pinch. Soon you'll regret all that sun-tanning. Your face will look like a testicle.

Nonetheless he was offensively jocular. At least he doesn't say, How are we today? He never calls mewe, the way some of them do: he does understand the importance of the first person singular.

"I can't sleep," I told him. "I dream too much."

"Then if you're dreaming, you must be sleeping," he said, intending a witticism.

"You know what I mean," I said sharply. "It's not the same. The dreams wake me up."

"You've been drinking coffee?"

"No," I lied.

"Must be a bad conscience." He was writing out a prescription, no doubt for sugar pills. He chuckled to himself: he thought he'd been quite funny. After a certain point, the ravages of experience reverse themselves; we put on innocence with advancing age, at least in the minds of others. What the doctor sees when he looks at me is an ineffectual and therefore blameless old biddy.

Myra sat reading out-of-date magazines in the waiting room while I was in the inner sanctum. She tore out an article on coping with stress, and another one on the beneficial effects of raw cabbage. These were for me, she said, pleased with her helpfultrouvailles. She is always diagnosing me. My corporeal health is of almost as much interest to her as my spiritual health: she is especially proprietary about my bowels.

I told her I could hardly be said to suffer from stress, as there was no stress in a vacuum. As for raw cabbage, it bloated me up like a dead cow, so I would skip the beneficial effects. I said I had no wish to go through life, or what remained of it, stinking like a barrel of sauerkraut and sounding like a truck horn.

Crude references to bodily functions usually put a stop to Myra. She drove the rest of the way home in silence, with a smile hardening on her face like plaster of Paris.

Sometimes I am ashamed of myself.

To the task at hand. At hand is appropriate: sometimes it seems to me that it's only my hand writing, not the rest of me; that my hand has taken on a life of its own, and will keep on going even if severed from the rest of me, like some embalmed, enchanted Egyptian fetish or the dried rabbit claws men used to suspend from their car mirrors for luck. Despite the arthritis in my fingers, this hand of mine has been displaying an unusual amount of friskiness lately, as if tossing restraint to the dogs. Certainly it's been writing down a number of things it wouldn't be allowed to if subject to my better judgment.

Turn the pages, turn the pages. Where was I? April 1936.

In April we got a call from the headmistress of St. Cecilia's, where Laura was attending school. It concerned Laura's behaviour, she said. It was not a matter that could best be discussed over the telephone.

Richard was tied up with business affairs. He proposed Winifred as my escort, but I said I was sure it was nothing; I myself would handle things, and would let him know if there was anything of importance. I made an appointment to see the headmistress, whose name I have forgotten. I dressed in a manner I hoped would intimidate her, or at least remind her of Richard's standing and influence: I believe I wore a cashmere coat trimmed with wolverine-warm for the season, but impressive-and a hat with a dead pheasant on it, or parts of one. The wings, the tail, and the head, which was fitted with beady little red glass eyes.

The headmistress was a greying female shaped like a wooden clothes rack-brittle bones with damp-looking textiles draped on them. She was sitting in her office, barricaded behind her oak desk, her shoulders up to her ears with terror. A year earlier I would have been as frightened of her as she was of me, or rather of what I represented: a big wad of money. Now however I had gained assurance. I had watched Winifred in action, I had practised. Now I could raise one eyebrow at a time.

She smiled nervously, displaying plump yellow teeth like the kernels on a half-eaten cob of corn. I wondered what Laura had been doing: it must have been something, to have worked her up to the point of confrontation with absent Richard and his unseen power. "I'm afraid we can't really continue with Laura," she said. "We have done our best, and we are aware that there are mitigating circumstances, but considering everything we do have to think of our other pupils, and I am afraid Laura is simply too disruptive an influence."

I had learned, by then, the value of making other people explain themselves. "I'm sorry, but I don't know what you are talking about," I said, barely moving my lips. "What mitigating circumstances? What disruptive influence?" I kept my hands still in my lap, my head high and slightly tilted, the best angle for the pheasant hat. I hoped she would feel stared at by four eyes and not just by two. Though I had the benefit of wealth, hers was her age and position. It was hot in the office. I'd slung my coat over the back of the chair, but even so I was sweating like a stevedore.

"She is calling God into question," she said, "in the Religious Knowledge class, which I have to say is the only subject in which she appears to take any interest whatsoever. She went so far as to produce an essay entitled, ‘Does God Lie?' It was very unsettling to the entire class."

"And what answer did she arrive at?" I asked. "About God?" I was surprised, though I didn't show it: I'd thought Laura had been slackening off on the God question, but apparently not.

"An affirmative one." She looked down at her desk, where Laura's essay was spread out in front of her. "She cites-it's right here-First Kings, chapter twenty-two-the passage in which God deceives King Ahab. ‘Now therefore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets.' Laura goes on to say that if God did this once, how do we know he didn't do it more than once, and how can we tell the false prophecies apart from the true ones?"

"Well, that's a logical conclusion, at any rate," I said. "Laura knows her Bible."

"I dare say," said the headmistress, exasperated. "The Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose. She does proceed to remark that although God lies, he doesn't cheat-he always sends a true prophet as well, but people don't listen. In her opinion God is like a radio broadcaster and we are faulty radios, a comparison I find disrespectful, to say the least."

"Laura doesn't mean to be disrespectful," I said. "Not about God, at any rate."

The headmistress ignored this. "It's not so much the specious arguments she makes, as the fact that she saw fit to pose the question in the first place."

"Laura likes to have answers," I said. "She likes to have answers on important matters. I am sure you'll agree that God is an important matter. I don't see why that should be considered disruptive."

"The other students find it so. They believe she's-well, showing off. Challenging established authority."

"As Christ did," I said, "or so some people thought at the time."

She did not make the obvious point that such things may have been all very well for Christ but they were not appropriate in a sixteen-year-old girl. "You don't quite understand," she said. She actually wrung her hands, an operation I studied with interest, having never seen it before. "The others think she's-they think she's beingfunny. Or Some of them do. Others think she's a Bolshevik. The rest just consider her odd. In any case, she attracts the wrong kind of attention."

I began to see her point. "I don't expect Laura intends to be funny," I said.

"But it's so hard to tell!" We looked across her desk at each other for a moment of silence. "She has quite a following, you know," said the headmistress, with a touch of envy. She waited for me to absorb this, then went on. "It's also a question of her absences. I understand there are health problems, but…"

"What health problems?" I said. "There's nothing wrong with Laura's health."

"Well, I assumed, considering all of the doctor's appointments…"

"What doctor's appointments?"

"You didn't authorise them?" She produced a sheaf of letters. I recognised the notepaper, which was mine. I looked through them: I hadn't written them, but they were signed with my name.

"I see," I said, gathering up my wolverine coat and my handbag. "I will have to speak to Laura. Thank you for your time." I shook the ends of her fingers. It went without saying, now, that Laura would have to be withdrawn from the school.

"We did try our best," said the poor woman. She was practically weeping. Another Miss Violence, this one. A hired drudge, well-meaning but ineffectual. No match for Laura.

That evening, when Richard asked how my interview had gone, I told him about Laura's disruptive effect on her classmates. Instead of being angry he seemed amused, and close to admiring. He said Laura had backbone. He said a certain amount of rebelliousness showed getup-and-go. He himself had disliked school and had made life difficult for the teachers, he said. I didn't think this had been Laura's motive, but I didn't say so.

I didn't mention the false doctor notes to him: that would have set the cat among the pigeons. Bothering teachers was one thing, playing hookey would have been quite another. It smacked of delinquency.

"You shouldn't have forged my handwriting," I said to Laura privately.

"I couldn't forge Richard's. It's too different from ours. Yours was a lot easier."

"Handwriting is a personal thing. It's like stealing."

She did look chagrined, for a moment. "I'm sorry. I was only borrowing. I didn't think you'd mind."

"I suppose there's no point in wondering why you did it?"

"I never asked to be sent to that school," said Laura. "They didn't like me any more than I liked them. They didn't take me seriously. They aren't serious people. If I'd had to be there all the time, I really would have got sick."

"What were you doing," I said, "when you weren't at school? Where did you go?" I was worried that she might have been meeting someone-meeting a man. She was getting to be the age for it.

"Oh, here and there," said Laura. "I went downtown, or I sat in parks and things. Or I just walked around. I saw you, a couple of times, but you didn't see me. I guess you were going shopping." I felt a surge of blood to the heart, then a constriction: panic, like a hand squeezing me shut. I must have gone pale.

"What's wrong?" said Laura. "Don't you feel well?"

That May we crossed to England on the Berengeria, then returned to New York on the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary. The Queen was the largest and most luxurious ocean liner ever built, or that's what was written in all the brochures. It was an epoch-making event, said Richard.

Winifred came with us. Also Laura. Such a voyage would do her a lot of good, said Richard: she'd been looking pinched and weedy, she'd been at loose ends ever since her abrupt departure from school. The trip would be an education for her, of the kind a girl like her could really use. Anyway, we could scarcely leave her behind.

The public couldn't get enough of the Queen Mary. It was described and photographed within an inch of its life, and decorated that way too, with strip lighting and plastic laminates and fluted columns and maple burr-costly veneers everywhere. But it wallowed like a pig, and the second-class deck overlooked the first-class one, so you couldn't walk about there without a railing-full of impecunious gawkers checking you over.

I was seasick the first day out, but after that I was fine. There was a lot of dancing. I knew how to dance by then; well enough, but not too well. (Never do anything too well, said Winifred, it shows you're trying.) I danced with men other than Richard-men he knew through his business, men he'd introduce me to. Take care of Iris for me, he would say to these men, smiling, patting them on the arm. Sometimes he would dance with other women, the wives of the men he knew. Sometimes he would go out to have a cigarette or take a turn around the deck, or that's what he'd say he was doing. I thought instead that he was sulking, or brooding. I'd lose track of him for an hour at a time. Then he'd be back, sitting at our table, watching me dance well enough, and I'd wonder how long he'd been there.

He was disgruntled, I decided, because this trip wasn't working out for him the way he'd planned. He couldn't get dinner reservations he wanted at the Verandah Grill, he wasn't meeting the people he'd wanted to meet. He was a big potato on his own stomping ground, but on the Queen Mary he was a very small potato indeed. Winifred was a small potato too: her sprightliness was wasted. More than once I saw her cut dead, by women she'd sidled up to. Then she'd slink back to what she called "our crowd," hoping no one had noticed.

Laura did not dance. She didn't know how, she had no interest in it; anyway she was too young. After dinner she'd shut herself up in her cabin; she said she was reading. On the third day of the voyage, at breakfast, her eyes were swollen and red.

At mid-morning I went looking for her. I found her in a deck chair with a plaid rug pulled up to her neck, listlessly watching a game of quoits. I sat down next to her. A brawny young woman strode by with seven dogs, each on its own leash; she was wearing shorts despite the chilliness of the weather, and had tanned brown legs.

"I could get a job like that," said Laura.

"A job like what?"

"Walking dogs," she said. "Other people's dogs. I like dogs."

"You wouldn't like the owners."

"I wouldn't be walking the owners." She had her sunglasses on, but was shivering.

"Is anything the matter?" I said.

"No."

"You look cold. I think you're coming down with something."

"There's nothing wrong with me. Don't fuss."

"Naturally I'm concerned."

"You don't have to be. I'm sixteen. I can tell if I'm ill."

"I promised Father I'd take care of you," I said stiffly. "And Mother too."

"Stupid of you."

"No doubt. But I was young, I didn't know any better. That's what young is."

Laura took off her sunglasses, but she didn't look at me. "Other people's promises aren't my fault," she said. "Father fobbed me off on you. He never did know what to do with me-with us. But he's dead now, they're both dead, so it's all right. I absolve you. You're off the hook."

"Laura, whatis it?"

"Nothing," she said. "But every time I just want to think-to sort things out-you decide I'm sick and start nagging at me. It drives me nuts."

"That's hardly fair," I said. "I've tried and tried, I've always given you the benefit of the doubt, I've given you the utmost…"

"Let's leave it alone," she said. "Look, what a silly game! I wonder why they call them quoits?"

I put all this down to old grief-to mourning, for Avilion and all that had happened there. Or could she still be mooning over Alex Thomas? I should have asked her more, I should have insisted, but I doubt that even then she would have told me what was really bothering her.

The thing I recall most clearly from the voyage, apart from Laura, was the looting that went on, all over the ship, on the day we sailed into port. Everything with the Queen Mary name or monogram on it went into a handbag or a suitcase-writing paper, silverware, towels, soap dishes, the works-anything not chained to the floor. Some people even unscrewed the faucet handles, and the smaller mirrors, and doorknobs. The first-class passengers were worse than the others; but then, the rich have always been kleptomaniacs.

What was the rationale for all this pillaging? Souvenirs. These people needed something to remember themselves by. An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomesthen even while it is still now. You don't really believe you're there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.

I myself made off with an ashtray.

The man with his head on fire

Last night I took one of the pills the doctor prescribed for me. It put me to sleep all right, but then I dreamed, and this dream was no improvement on the kind I'd been having without benefit of medication.

I was standing on the dock at Avilion, with the broken, greenish ice of the river tinkling all around like bells, but I wasn't wearing a winter coat-only a cotton print dress covered with butterflies. Also a hat made of plastic flowers in lurid colours-tomato red, a hideous lilac-that was lit up from inside by tiny light bulbs.

Where's mine? said Laura, in her five-year-old's voice. I looked down at her, but then we were not children any longer. Laura had grown old, like me; her eyes were little dried raisins. This was horrifying to me, and I woke up.

It was three in the morning. I waited until my heart had stopped protesting, then groped my way downstairs and made myself a hot milk. I should have known better than to rely on pills. You can't buy unconsciousness quite so cheaply.

But to continue.

Once off the Queen Mary, our family party spent three days in New York. Richard had some business to conclude; the rest of us could sightsee, he said.

Laura did not want to go to the Rockettes, or up to the top of the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. Nor did she want to shop. She just wanted to walk around and look at things on the street, she said, but that was too dangerous a thing for her to do by herself, said Richard, so I went with her. She was not lively company-a relief after Winifred, who was determined to be as lively as was humanly possible.

After that we spent several weeks in Toronto, while Richard caught up on his affairs. After that we went to Avilion. We would go sailing there, said Richard. His tone implied that this was the only thing the place was good for; also that he was happy to make the sacrifice of his own time in order to indulge our whims. Or, more gently put, to please us-to please me, but to please Laura too.

It seemed to me that he'd come to regard Laura as a puzzle, one that it was now his business to solve. I'd catch him looking at her at odd moments, in much the same way as he looked at the stock-market pages -searching out the grip, the twist, the handle, the wedge, the way in. According to his view of life, there was such a grip or twist for everything. Either that, or a price. He wanted to get Laura under his thumb, he wanted her neck under his foot, however lightly placed. But Laura didn't have that kind of neck. So after each of his attempts he was left standing with one leg in the air, like a bear-hunter posing in a picture from which the slain bear has vanished.

How did Laura do it? Not by opposing him, not any longer: by this time she avoided clashing with him head-on. She did it by stepping back, and turning away, and throwing him off balance. He was always lunging in her direction, always grabbing, always grabbing air.

What he wanted was her approval, her admiration even. Or simply her gratitude. Something like that. With some other young girl he might have tried presents-a pearl necklace, a cashmere sweater-things that sixteen-year-olds were supposed to long for. But he knew better than to foist anything of this sort on Laura.

Blood from a stone, I thought. He'll never figure her out. And she doesn't have a price, because there's nothing he has that she wants. In any contest of wills, with anyone at all, I was still betting on Laura. In her own way she was stubborn as a pig.

I did think she'd jump at the chance to spend some time at Avilion-she'd been so reluctant to leave it-but when the plan was mentioned, she seemed indifferent. She was unwilling to give Richard credit for anything, or this was my reading. "At least we'll see Reenie," was all she said.

"I regret to say that Reenie is no longer in our employ," said Richard. "She was asked to leave."

When was that? A while ago. A month, several months? Richard was vague. It was a question, he said, of Reenie's husband, who had been drinking too much. Therefore the repairs to the house had not been carried out in what any reasonable person would consider a timely and satisfactory manner, and Richard did not see any point in paying out good money for laziness, and for what could only be termed insubordination.

"He didn't want her here at the same time as us," said Laura. "He knew she'd take sides."

We were wandering around on the main floor of Avilion. The house itself appeared to have dwindled in size; the furniture was covered with dust cloths, or what was left of the furniture-some of the bulkier, darker pieces had been removed, on Richard's orders I suppose. I could imagine Winifred saying that nobody should be expected to live with a sideboard festooned with such chunky, unconvincing wooden grapes. The leather-bound books were still in the library, but I had a feeling that they might not be there much longer. The portraits of the prime ministers with Grandfather Benjamin had been deleted: someone -Richard, no doubt-must finally have noticed their pastel faces.

Avilion had once had an air of stability that amounted to intransigence-a large, dumpy boulder plunked down in the middle of the stream of time, refusing to be moved for anybody-but now it was dogeared, apologetic, as if it were about to collapse in on itself. It no longer had the courage of its own pretensions.

So demoralising, said Winifred, how dusty everything was, and there were mice in the kitchen, she'd seen the droppings, and silverfish as well. But the Murgatroyds were arriving later that day, by train, along with a couple of other, newer servants who'd been added to our entourage, and then everything would soon be shipshape, except of course (she said with a laugh) the ship itself, by which she meant the Water Nixie. Richard was down in the boathouse right now, looking her over. She was supposed to have been scraped down and repainted under the supervision of Reenie and Ron Hincks, but this was yet another thing that had not taken place. Winifred failed to see what Richard wanted with that old tub-if Richard really longed to sail, he should scuttle that old dinosaur of a boat and buy a new one.

"I suppose he thinks it has sentimental value," I said. "For us, I mean. Laura and me."

"And does it?" said Winifred, with that amused smile of hers.

"No," said Laura. "Why would it? Father never took us sailing in it. Only Callie Fitzsimmons." We were in the dining room; at least the long table was still there. I wondered what decision Richard, or rather Winifred, would make about Tristan and Iseult and their glassy, outmoded romance.

"Callie Fitzsimmons came to the funeral," said Laura. We were alone together; Winifred had gone upstairs for what she called her beauty rest. She put cotton pads dampened with witch hazel on her eyes for this, and covered her face with a preparation of expensive green mud.

"Oh? You didn't tell me."

"I forgot. Reenie was furious with her."

"For coming to the funeral?

"For not coming earlier. She was quite rude to her. She said, ‘You're an hour too late and a dime too short.'"

"But she hated Callie! She always hated it when she came to stay! She thought she was a slut!"

"I guess she hadn't been enough of a slut to suit Reenie. She'd been lazy at it, she'd fallen down on the job."

"Of being a slut?"

"Well, Reenie felt she ought to have followed through. At least she should have been there, when Father was in such difficulties. Taken his mind off things."

"Reenie said all that?"

"Not exactly, but you could tell what she meant."

"What did Callie do?"

"Pretended she didn't understand. After that, she did what everyone does at funerals. Cried and told lies."

"What lies?" I said.

"She said even if they didn't always see eye to eye from a political point of view, Father was a fine, fine person. Reenie saidpolitical point of view my fanny, but behind her back."

"I think he tried to be," I said. "Fine, I mean."

"Well, he didn't try hard enough," said Laura. "Don't you remember what he used to say? That we'd beenleft on his hands, as if we were some kind of a smear."

"He tried as hard as he could," I said.

"Remember the Christmas he dressed up as Santa Claus? It was before Mother died I'd just turned five"

"Yes," I said "That's what I mean He tried"

"I hated it," said Laura "I always hated those kinds of surprises"

We'd been told to wait in the cloak room The double doors to the hall had gauzy curtains on the inside, so we couldn't see through into the square front hall, which had a fireplace, in the old manner, that was where the Christmas tree had been set up We were perched on the cloak-room settee, with the oblong mirror behind it Coats were hanging on the long rack-Father's coats, Mother's coats, and the hats too, above them-hers with large feathers, his with small ones There was a smell of rubber overshoes, and of fresh pine resin and cedar from the garlands wreathed around the front-stair bannisters, and of wax on warm floorboards, because the furnace was on the radiators hissed and clanked From under the windowsill came a cold draught, and the pitiless, uplifting scent of snow There was a single overhead light in the room, it had a yellow silk shade In the glass doors I could see us reflected our royal blue velvet dresses with the lace collars, our white faces, our pale hair parted in the middle, our pale hands folded in our laps Our white socks, our black Mary Janes. We'd been taught to sit with one foot crossed over the other-never the knees-and that is how we were sitting The mirror rose behind us like a glass bubble coming out of the tops of our heads I could hear our breathing, going in and out the breath of waiting It sounded like someone else breathing-someone large but invisible, hiding inside the muffling coats.

All at once the double doors swung open There was a man in red, a red giant towering upwards Behind him was the night darkness, and a blaze of flame His face was covered with white smoke His head was on fire He lurched forward his arms were outstretched Out of his mouth came a sound of hooting, or of shouting.

I was startled for a moment, but I was old enough to know what it was supposed to be The sound was meant to be laughter It was only Father, pretending to be Santa Claus, and he wasn't burning-it was only the tree lit up behind him, it was only the wreath of candles on his head He had his red brocade dressing gown on, backwards, and a beard made out of cotton batten.

Mother used to say he never knew his own strength he never knew how big he was in relation to everyone else He wouldn't have known how frightening he might seem. He was certainly frightening to Laura "You screamed and screamed," I said now "You didn't understand he was just pretending"

"It was worse than that," said Laura "I thought he was pretending the rest of the time"

"What do you mean?"

"That this was what he was really like," said Laura patiently "That underneath, he was burning up All the time"

The Water Nixie

This morning I slept in, exhausted after a night of dark wanderings. My feet were swollen, as if I'd been walking long distances over hard ground; my head felt porous and damp. It was Myra knocking at the door that woke me up. "Rise and shine," she trilled through the letter slot. Out of perversity, I didn't answer. Maybe she'd think I was dead-croaked in my sleep! No doubt she was already fussing over which of my floral prints she'd lay me out in, and was planning the eats for the post-funeral reception. It wouldn't be called a wake, nothing so barbaric. A wake was to wake you up, because it's just as well to make sure the dead are really dead before you shovel the mulch over them.

I smiled at that. Then I remembered Myra had a key. I thought of pulling the sheet up over my face to give her at least a minute of pleasurable horror, but decided better not. I levered myself upright and out of the bed, and pulled on my dressing gown.

"Hold your horses," I called down the stairwell.

But Myra was already inside, and with her wasthe woman: the cleaning woman. She was a hefty creature with a Portuguese look to her: no way to stave her off. She set to work at once with Myra 's vacuum cleaner-they'd thought of everything-while I followed her around like a banshee, wailing, Don't touch that! Leave that there! I can do that myself! Now I'll never find anything! At least I got to the kitchen ahead of them, and had time to shove my pile of scribbled pages into the oven. They'd be unlikely to tackle that on the first day of cleaning. In any case it's not too dirty, I never bake anything.

"There," said Myra, when the woman had finished. "All clean and tidy. Doesn't that make you feel better?"

She'd brought me a fresh do-dad from The Gingerbread House-an emerald-green crocus planter, only a little bit chipped, in the shape of a coyly smiling girl's head. The crocuses are supposed to grow out through the holes in the top and burst into ahalo of bloom, her words exactly. All I have to do is water it, says Myra, and pretty soon it'll be cute as a button.

God works in his mysterious ways his wonders to perform, as Reenie used to say. Could it be that Myra is my designated guardian angel? Or is she instead a foretaste of Purgatory? And how do you tell the difference?

On our second day at Avilion, Laura and I went off to see Reenie. It wasn't hard to find out where she was living: everyone in town knew. Or the people in Betty's Luncheonette did, because that's where she was working now, three days a week. We didn't tell Richard and Winifred where we were going, because why add to the unpleasant atmosphere around the breakfast table? We could not be absolutely prohibited, but we would be certain to attract an annoying measure of subdued scorn.

We took the teddy bear I'd bought for Reenie's baby, at Simpsons, in Toronto. It wasn't a very cuddly teddy bear-it was stern and tightly stuffed and stiff. It looked like a minor civil servant, or a civil servant of those days. I don't know what they look like now. Most likely they wear jeans.

Reenie and her husband were living in one of the small limestone row-house cottages originally built for the factory workmen-two floors, pointed roof, privy at the back of the narrow garden-not so very far from where I live now. They had no telephone, so we could not alert Reenie to the fact that we were coming. When she opened the door and saw the two of us standing there, she smiled broadly, and then began to cry. After a moment, so did Laura. I stood holding the teddy bear, feeling left out because I wasn't crying too.

"Bless you," said Reenie to both of us. "Come in and see the baby."

We went along the linoleum-floored corridor into the kitchen. Reenie had painted it white and added yellow curtains, the same shade of yellow as the curtains at Avilion. I noticed a set of canisters, white as well, with yellow stencilling: Flour, Sugar, Coffee, Tea. I didn't need to be told that Reenie had done these decorations herself. Those, and the curtains, and anything else she could lay her hands on. She was making the best of it.

The baby-that's you, Myra, you have now entered the story-was lying in a wicker laundry basket, staring at us with round, unblinking eyes that were even bluer than babies' eyes usually are. I have to say she looked like a suet pudding, but then most babies do.

Reenie insisted on making us a cup of tea. We were young ladies now, she said; we could have real tea, and not just milk with a little tea in it, the way we used to. She had gained weight; the undersides of her arms, once so firm and strong, wobbled a little, and as she walked across to the stove she almost waddled. Her hands were puffy, the knuckles dimpled.

"You eat for two and then you forget to stop," she said. "See my wedding ring? I couldn't get it off unless they cut it off. I'll have to be buried in it." She said this with a sigh of complacency. Then the baby began to fuss, and Reenie picked it up and set it on her knee, and looked across the table at us almost defiantly. The table (plain, cramped, with an oilcloth covering printed in yellow tulips) was like a great chasm-on one side of it the two of us, on the other, immensely far away now, Reenie and her baby, with no regrets.

Regrets for what? For her abandonment of us. Or that is what it felt like to me.

There was something odd in Reenie's manner, not towards the baby but towards us in relation to it-almost as if we'd found her out. I've since wondered-and you'll have to excuse me for mentioning it, Myra, but really you shouldn't be reading this, and curiosity killed the cat-I've since wondered whether this baby's father was not Ron Hincks at all, but Father himself. There was Reenie, the only servant left at Avilion, after I'd gone off on my honeymoon, and all around Father's head the towers were crashing down. Wouldn't she have applied herself to him like a poultice, in the same spirit in which she'd bring him a cup of warm soup or a hot-water bottle? Comfort, against the cold and dark.

In that case, Myra, you are my sister. Or my half-sister. Not that we'll ever know, or I myself will never know. I suppose you could have me dug up, and take a sample of my hair or bone or whatever they use, and send it off to be analysed. But I doubt that you'd go that far. The only other possible proof would be Sabrina-you could get together, compare snippets of yourselves. But in order for that to happen, Sabrina would have to come back, and God only knows whether she ever will. She could be anywhere. She could be dead. She could be at the bottom of the sea.

I wonder if Laura knew about Reenie and Father, if indeed there was anything to know. I wonder if that is among the many things she knew, but never told. Such a thing is entirely possible.

The days at Avilion did not pass quickly. It was still too hot, it was still too humid. The water levels in the two rivers were low: even the Louveteau's rapids were sluggish, and an unpleasant smell was coming off the Jogues.

I stayed inside the house most of the time, sitting in the leather-backed chair in Grandfather's library with my legs over its arm. The husks of last winter's dead flies were still encrusting the windowsills: the library was not a top priority for Mrs. Murgatroyd. Grandmother Adelia's portrait was still presiding.

I spent the afternoons with her scrapbooks, with their clippings about teas and the visiting Fabians, and the explorers with their magic lantern shows and their accounts of quaint native customs. I don't know why anyone found it strange that they decorated the skulls of their ancestors, I thought. We do that too.

Or I would leaf through old society magazines, remembering how I'd once envied the people in them; or I'd ferret through the poetry books with their tissue-thin giltedged pages. The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. Alas, burthen, thine, cometh, aweary -the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers-I could now see-faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Softedged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch.

Already my childhood seemed far away-a remote age, faded and bittersweet, like dried flowers. Did I regret its loss, did I want it back? I didn't think so.

Laura didn't stay inside. She rambled around the town, the way we used to do. She wore a yellow cotton dress of mine from the summer before, and the hat that went with it. Seeing her from behind gave me a peculiar sensation, as if I were watching myself.

Winifred made no secret of the fact that she was bored stiff. She went swimming every day, from the small private beach beside the boathouse, though she never went in over her depth: mostly she just splashed around, wearing a giant magenta coolie hat. She wanted Laura and me to join her, but we declined. Neither of us could swim very well, and also we knew what sorts of things used to be dumped into the river, and possibly still were. When she wasn't swimming or sunbathing, Winifred wandered around the house making notes and sketches, and lists of imperfections-the wallpaper in the front hall really had to be replaced, there was dry rot under the stairs-or else she took naps in her room. Avilion seemed to drain her energy. It was reassuring to know that something could.

Richard talked on the telephone a lot, long distance; or else he'd go into Toronto for the day. The rest of the time he diddled around with the Water Nixie, supervising the repairs. It was his goal to get the thing floated, he said, before we had to leave.

He had the papers delivered every morning. "Civil war in Spain," he said one day at lunch. "Well, it's been a long time coming."

"That's unpleasant," said Winifred.

"Not for us," said Richard. "As long as we keep out of it. Let the Commies and the Nazis kill each other off-they'll both jump into the fray soon enough."

Laura had skipped lunch. She was down on the dock, by herself, with only a cup of coffee. She was frequently down there: it made me nervous. She would he on the dock, trailing one arm in the water, gazing into the river as if she'd dropped something and was looking for it down at the bottom. The water was too dark though. You couldn't see much. Only the occasional clutch of silvery minnows, flitting about like a pickpocket's fingers.

"Still," said Winifred. "I wish they wouldn't. It's very disagreeable."

"We could use a good war," said Richard. "Maybe it will pep things up-put paid to the Depression. I know a few fellows who are counting on it. Some folks are going to make a lot of money." I was never told anything about Richard's financial position, but I'd come to believe lately-from various hints and indications-that he didn't have as much money as I'd once thought. Or he no longer had it. The restoration of Avilion had been halted-postponed-because Richard had been unwilling to spend any more. That was according to Reenie.

"Why will they make money?" I said. I knew the answer perfectly well, but I'd drifted into the habit of asking naive questions just to see what Richard and Winifred would say. The sliding moral scale they applied to almost every area of life had not yet ceased to hold my attention.

"Because that's the way things are," said Winifred shortly. "By the by, your pal got arrested."

"What pal?" I said, too quickly.

"That Callista woman. Your father's old light o'love. The one who thinks of herself as an artist."

I resented her tone, but didn't know how to counter it. "She was awfully good to us when we were kids," I said.

"Of course she would have been, wouldn't she?"

"I liked her," I said.

"No doubt. She got hold of me a couple of months ago-tried to get me to buy some dreadful painting or mural or something-a bunch of ugly women in overalls. Not anyone's first choice for the dining room."

"Why would they arrest her?"

"The Red Squad, some roundup or other at a pinko party. She called here-she was quite frantic. She wanted to speak to you. I didn't see why you should be involved, so Richard went all the way into town and bailed her out."

"Why would he do that?" I said. "He hardly knows her."

"Oh, just out of the goodness of his heart," said Winifred, smiling sweetly. "Though he's always said those people are more trouble in jail than out of it, haven't you, Richard? They howl their heads off, in the press. Justice this, justice that. Maybe he was doing the prime minister a favour."

"Is there any more coffee?" said Richard.

This meant Winifred should drop the subject, but she went on. "Or maybe he felt he owed it to your family. I suppose you might consider her a sort of family heirloom, like some old crock that gets passed down from hand to hand."

"I think I'll join Laura on the dock," I said. "It's such a beautiful day."

Richard had been reading the paper all through my conversation with Winifred, but now he looked up quickly. "No," he said, "stay here. You encourage her too much. Leave her alone and she'll get over it."

"Over what?" I said.

"Whatever's eating her," said Richard. He'd turned his head to look at her out the window, and I noticed for the first time that there was a thinning spot at the back of his head, a round of pink scalp showing through his brown hair. Soon he would have a tonsure.

"Next summer we'll go to Muskoka," said Winifred. "I can't say this little vacation experiment has been a raging success."

Towards the end of our stay I decided to visit the attic. I waited until Richard was occupied on the telephone and Winifred was lying in a deck chair on our little strip of sand with a damp washcloth across her eyes. Then I opened the door to the attic stairs, closing it behind me, and went up as quietly as I could.

Laura was already there, sitting on one of the cedar chests. She'd got the window open, which was a mercy: otherwise the place would have been stifling. There was a musky scent of old cloth and mouse droppings.

She turned her head, not quickly. I hadn't startled her. "Hello," she said. "There's bats living up here."

"I'm not surprised," I said. There was a large paper grocery bag beside her. "What've you got there?"

She began to take things out-various bits and pieces, bric- -brac. The silver teapot that was my grandmother's, and three china cups and saucers, hand-painted, from Dresden. A few monogrammed spoons. The nutcracker shaped like an alligator, a lone mother-of pearl cuff link, a tortoiseshell comb with missing teeth, a broken silver lighter, a cruet stand minus the vinegar.

"What're you doing with these things?" I said. "You can't take them back to Toronto!"

"I'm hiding them. They can't lay waste to everything."

"Who can't?"

"Richard and Winifred. They'd just throw these things out anyway; I've heard them talking about worthless junk. They'll make a clean sweep, sooner or later. So I'm saving a few things, for us. I'll leave them up here in one of the trunks. That way they'll be safe, and we'll know where they are."

"What if they notice?" I said.

"They won't notice. There's nothing really valuable. Look," she said, "I found our old school exercise books. They were still here, in the same place we left them. Remember when we brought them up here? For him?"

Alex Thomas never needed a name, for Laura: he was alwayshe, him, his. I'd thought for a while that she'd given him up, or given up the idea of him, but it was obvious now that she hadn't.

"It's hard to believe we did it," I said. "That we hid him up here, that we weren't found out."

"We were careful," said Laura. She thought for a moment, then smiled. "You never really believed me, about Mr. Erskine," she said. "Did you?"

I suppose I should have lied outright. Instead I compromised. "I didn't like him. He was horrible," I said.

"Reenie believed me, though. Where do you think he is?"

"Mr. Erskine?"

"You know who." She paused, turned to look out the window again. "Do you still have your picture?"

"Laura, I don't think you should dwell on him," I said. "I don't think he's going to turn up. It's not in the cards."

"Why? Do you think he's dead?"

"Why would he be dead?" I said. "I don't think he's dead. I just think he's gone somewhere else."

"Anyway they haven't caught him, or we would have heard about it. It would have been in the papers," said Laura. She gathered up the old exercise books and slid them into her paper bag.

We lingered on at Avilion longer than I'd thought we would, and certainly longer than I wanted: I felt hemmed in there, locked up, unable to move.

The day before we were due to leave, I came down to breakfast, and Richard wasn't there; only Winifred, who was eating an egg. "You missed the big launch," she said.

"What big launch?"

She gestured at our view, which was of the Louveteau on one hand, the Jogues on the other. I was surprised to see Laura on the Water Nixie, sailing away downriver. She was sitting up in the bow, like a figurehead. Her back was towards us. Richard was at the wheel. He was wearing some awful white sailor hat.

"At least they haven't sunk," said Winifred, with a hint of acid.

"Didn't you want to go?" I said.

"No, actually." There was an odd tone to her voice, which I mistook for jealousy: she did so like being in on the ground floor, in any project of Richard's.

I was relieved: maybe Laura would unbend a little now, maybe she would let up on the deep-freeze campaign. Maybe she would start treating Richard as if he were a human being instead of something that had crawled out from under a rock. That would certainly make my own life easier, I thought. It would lighten the atmosphere.

It didn't, however. If anything, the tension increased, though it had reversed itself: now it was Richard who would leave the room whenever Laura came into it. It was almost as if he was afraid of her.

"What did you say to Richard?" I asked her one evening when we were all back in Toronto.

"What do you mean?"

"That day you went sailing with him, on the Water Nixie"

"I didn't say anything to him," she said. "Why would I?"

"I don't know."

"I never say anything to him," said Laura, "because I have nothing to say."

The chestnut tree

I look back over what I've written and I know it's wrong, not because of what I've set down, but because of what I've omitted. What isn't there has a presence, like the absence of light.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labelled bones.

Last night I woke abruptly, my heart pounding. From the window there was a clinking sound: someone was throwing pebbles against the glass. I climbed out of bed and groped my way towards the window, and raised the sash higher and leaned out. I didn't have my glasses on, but I could see well enough. There was the moon, almost full, spider-veined with old scars, and below it the ambient sub-orange glow cast up into the sky by the street lights. Beneath me was the sidewalk, patchy with shadow and partially hidden by the chestnut tree in the front yard.

I was aware that there shouldn't be a chestnut tree there: that tree belonged elsewhere, a hundred miles away, outside the house where I had once lived with Richard. Yet mere it was, the tree, its branches spread out like a hard thick net, its white-moth flowers glimmering faintly.

The glassy clinking came again. There was a shape there, bending over: a man, foraging in the garbage cans, shuffling the wine bottles in the desperate hope that there might be something left in one of them. A street drunk, impelled by emptiness and thirst. His movements were stealthy, invasive, as if he was not hunting, but spying-sifting through my discarded trash for evidence against me.

Then he straightened and moved sideways into the fuller light, and looked up. I could see the dark eyebrows, the hollows of the eye sockets, the smile a white slash across the dark oval of his face. At the V below his throat there was pallor: a shirt. He lifted his hand, moved it to the side. A wave of greeting, or else departure.

Now he was walking away, and I couldn't call after him. He knew I couldn't call. Now he was gone.

I felt a choking pressure around the heart. No, no, no, no, said a voice. Tears were running down my face.

But I'd said that out loud-too loudly, because Richard was awake now. He was standing right behind me. He was about to put his hand on my neck.

This was when I woke up really. I lay with my wet face, eyes open, staring at the grey blank of the ceiling, waiting for my heart to slow down. I don't cry often any more, when awake; only a few dry tears now and then. It's a surprise to find I've been doing it.

When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too-leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.

There really was a clinking sound, glass against glass. I climbed out of bed-out of my real, single bed-and made my way over to the window. Two raccoons were pawing through the neighbours' Blue Box across the street, turning over the bottles and cans. Scavengers, at home in the junkyard. They looked up at me, alert, unalarmed, their small thieves' masks black in the moonlight.

Good luck to you, I thought. Take what you can, while you can get it. Who cares if it belongs to you? Just don't get caught.

I went back to bed and lay in the heavy darkness, listening to the sound of breathing I knew was not there.