Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-04-22T23:33:17+00:00

Chapter 27

Today when I woke up there was a beautiful pink sunrise, with the mist lying over the fields like a white soft cloud of muslin, and the sun shining through the layers of it all blurred and rosy like a peach gently on fire.

In fact I have no idea of what kind of a sunrise there was. In prison they make the windows high up, so you cannot climb out of them I suppose, but also so you cannot see out of them either, or at least not onto the outside world. They do not want you looking out, they do not want you thinking the word out, they do not want you looking at the horizon and thinking you might someday drop below it yourself, like the sail of a ship departing or a horse and rider vanishing down a far hillside. And so this morning I saw only the usual form of light, a light without shape, coming in through the high-up and dirty grey windows, as if cast by no sun and no moon and no lamp or candle. Just a swathe of daylight the same all the way through, like lard.

I took off my prison nightdress, which was coarse-woven and of a yellowed colour; I should not say it was mine, because we own nothing here and share all in common, like the early Christians, and the nightdress you wear one week, next to your skin while you sleep, may two weeks previous have been lying close to the heart of your worst enemy, and washed and mended by others who do not wish you well.

As I dressed myself and tidied back my hair there was a tune going through my head, a little song that Jamie Walsh used to play sometimes upon his flute:

Tom, Tom, the piper’s son,

Stole a pig and away he run,

And all the tune that he could play

Was over the hills and far away.

I knew I’d remembered it wrong, and the real song said the pig was eat and Tom was beat, and then went howling down the street; but I didn’t see why I shouldn’t make it come out in a better way; and as long as I told no one of what was in my mind, there was no one to hold me to account, or correct me, just as there was no one to say that the real sunrise was nothing like the one I’d invented for myself, but was instead only a soiled yellowish white, like a dead fish floating in the harbour.

At least in the Lunatic Asylum you could see out better. When you were not muffled up in a darkened room.

Before breakfast there was a whipping, out in the courtyard; they do it before breakfast, as if those being whipped have eaten first, they are likely to spew up their food, and that makes a mess, as well as being a waste of good nourishment; and the keepers and guards say they like the exercise at that time of day, as it gives them an appetite.

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