It is now: I am the only survivor.

In any case, it was just as Reenie had said, about the men in movie theatres, except that what I felt was not outrage. But the rest of it was true enough: I was transfixed, I could not move, I had no recourse. My bones had turned to melting wax. He got almost all of my buttons undone before I was able to rouse myself, to pull myself away, to flee.

I did this wordlessly. As I scrambled down the attic stairs, pushing back my hair, tucking in my blouse, I had the impression that—behind my back—he was laughing at me.

I didn’t know exactly what might occur if I let such a thing happen again, but whatever it was would be dangerous, at least for me. I would be asking for it, I would get what was coming to me, I would be an accident waiting to happen. I couldn’t afford to be alone in the attic with Alex Thomas again, nor could I confide in Laura the reason why. It would be too hurtful to her: she would never be able to understand it. (There was another possibility—he might have been doing a similar kind of thing with Laura. But no, I couldn’t believe that. She never would have allowed it. Would she?)

“We have to get him out of town,” I said to Laura. “We can’t keep this up. They’re sure to notice.”

“Not yet,” said Laura. “They’re still watching the train tracks.” She was in a position to know this, as she was still doing her work with the church soup kitchen.

“Well, somewhere else in town then,” I said.

“Where? There isn’t anywhere else. And this is the best place—this is the one place they’d never think to look.”

Alex Thomas said he didn’t want to get snowed in. He said a winter in the attic would drive him buggy. He said he was going stir-crazy. He said he would walk a couple of miles down the tracks, and hop a freight—there was a high bank there that made it easier. He said that if only he could get as far as Toronto, he could hide out—he had friends there, and they had friends. Then he’d get across to the States, one way or another, where he’d be safer. From what he’d read in the papers, the authorities suspected he might be there already. They certainly weren’t still looking for him in Port Ticonderoga.

By the first week in January, we decided it was safe enough for him to leave. We filched an old coat of Father’s from the back corner of the cloak room for him, and packed him a lunch—bread and cheese, an apple—and sent him away on his travels. (Father later missed the coat and Laura said she’d given it to a tramp, which was a partial truth. As this act was entirely in character for her it wasn’t questioned, only grumbled about.)

On the night of his departure we let Alex out the back door. He said he owed a lot to us; he said he wouldn’t forget it. He gave each of us a hug, a brotherly hug of equal duration for each. It was obvious he wanted to be quit of us. Apart from the fact that it was night, it was oddly as if he were going off to school. Afterwards we cried, like mothers. It was also the relief—that he’d gone away, that he was off our hands—but that is like mothers too.

He left behind one of the cheap exercise books we’d given him. Of course we opened it immediately to see if he’d written anything in it. What were we hoping for? A farewell note, expressing undying gratitude? Kind sentiments about ourselves? Something of that sort.

This is what we found:

anchoryne = nacrod

berel = onyxor

carchineal = porphyrial

diamite = quartzephyr

ebonort = rhint

fulgor = sapphyrion

glutz = tristok

hortz = ulinth

iridis = vorver

jocynth = wotanite

kalkil = xenor

lazaris = yorula

malachont = zycron

“Precious stones?” said Laura.

“No. They don’t sound right,” I said.

“Is it a foreign language?”

I didn’t know. I thought this list looked suspiciously like a code. Perhaps Alex Thomas was (after all) what other people accused him of being: a spy of some kind.

“I think we should get rid of this,” I said.

“I will,” said Laura quickly. “I’ll burn it in my fireplace.” She folded it up, and slid it into her pocket.

A week after Alex Thomas’s departure, Laura came to my room. “I think you should have this,” she said. It was a print of the photograph of the three of us, the one Elwood Murray had taken at the picnic. But she’d cut herself out of it—only her hand remained. She couldn’t have got rid of this hand without making a wobbly margin. She hadn’t coloured this picture at all, except for her own cut-off hand. This had been tinted a very pale yellow.

“For goodness’ sake, Laura!” I said. “Where did you get this?”

“I made some prints,” she said. “When I was working at Elwood Murray’s. I’ve got the negative too.”

I didn’t know whether to be angry or alarmed. Cutting up the picture like that was a very strange thing to have done. The sight of Laura’s light-yellow hand, creeping towards Alex across the grass like an incandescent crab, gave me a chill down the back of my spine. “Why on earth did you do that?”

“Because that’s what you want to remember,” she said. This was so audacious that I gasped. She gave me a direct look, which in anyone else would have been a challenge. But this was Laura: her tone was neither sulky nor jealous. As far as she was concerned she was simply stating a fact.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I have another one, for me.”

“And I’m not in yours?”

“No,” she said. “You’re not. None of you but your hand. “This was the closest she ever came, in my hearing, to a confession of love for Alex Thomas. Except for the day before her death, that is. Not that she used the word love, even then.

I ought to have thrown this mutilated picture away, but I didn’t.

Things settled back into their accustomed, monotonous order. By unspoken consent, Laura and I did not mention Alex Thomas between us any more. There was too much that could not be said, on either side. At first I used to go up to the attic—a faint odour of smoke was still detectable there—but I stopped doing that after a while, as it served no good purpose.

We busied ourselves with daily life again, insofar as that was possible. There was a little more money now, because Father would get the insurance after all, for the burned factory building. It wasn’t enough, but we had been given—he said—a breathing space.

The Imperial Room

The season is turning on its hinges, the earth swings farther from the light; under the roadside bushes the paper trash of summer drifts like an omen of snow. The air is drying out, preparing us for the coming Sahara of centrally heated winter. Already the ends of my thumbs are fissuring, my face withering further. If I could see my skin in the mirror—if I could only get close enough, or far enough away—it would be crisscrossed by tiny lines, in between the main wrinkles, like scrimshaw.

Last night I dreamt that my legs were covered with hair. Not a little hair but a great deal of it—dark hair sprouting in tufts and tendrils as I watched, spreading up over my thighs like the pelt of an animal. The winter was coming, I dreamed, and so I would hibernate. First I would grow fur, then crawl into a cave, then go to sleep. It all seemed normal, as if I’d done it before. Then I remembered, even in the dream, that I’d never been a hairy woman in that way and was now bald as a newt, or at least my legs were; so although they appeared to be attached to my body, these hairy legs couldn’t possibly be mine. Also they had no feeling in them. They were the legs of something else, or someone. All I had to do was follow the legs, run my hand along them, to find out who or what it was.