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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

,

“I don’t believe you,” says Charis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t think I can,” says Charis.

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

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

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

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

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