Free Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood

being a judge, because he found his own job so satisfying and rewarding. They had a charming house, Rennie couldn’t fault the house, filled with paintings bypromising young artists; the judge decided to be photographed in front of one of them. With each question Rennie felt younger, dumber and more helpless. The judge had it all together and Rennie was beginning to see this as a personal affront.
    I can’t do it, she told the editor at
Pandora
. The editor’s name was Tippy; she was a contact of Rennie’s. She opens her mouth and out comes this ticker tape.
    She’s a control freak, Tippy said. She’s controlling the interview. You’ve got to turn it around, get an angle on her. Our readers want them to be human too, a few cracks in the armour, a little pain. Didn’t she have to suffer on her way up?
    I asked her that, said Rennie. She didn’t.
    What you have to do, said Tippy, is ask her if you can just sort of hang out with her. Follow her around all day. There’s a real story in there somewhere. How she fell in love with her husband, did you ask that? Look in the medicine cabinet, go for the small details, it matters what they roll on under their arms, Arrid or Love, it makes a difference. Stick with them long enough and sooner or later they crack. You’ve got to dig. You’re not after dirt, just the real story.
    Rennie looked across the desk, which was messy, at Tippy, who was also messy. She was ten years older than Rennie, her skin was sallow and unhealthy, there were pouches under her eyes. She chain-smoked and drank too much coffee. She was wearing green, the wrong colour for her. She was a good journalist, she’d won all sorts of awards before she became an editor, and now she was telling Rennie to peer into other people’s medicine cabinets. A woman of achievement.
    Rennie went home. She looked at what she’d already written about the judge and decided that it was, after all, the real story. She tore it up and started a new page.
    A profile used to mean a picture of somebody’s nose seen from the side
, she wrote.
Now it means the picture of somebody’s nose seen from the bottom
. Which was as far as she got.

    Rennie takes her camera, on the off chance. She’s not very good, she knows that, but she forced herself to learn because she knew it would increase her scope. If you do both the pictures and the text you can go almost anywhere, or so they say.
    She picks up a mimeographed map of Queenstown and a tourist brochure from the registration desk. “St. Antoine and Ste. Agathe,” the brochure says. “Discover Our Twin Islands In The Sun.” On the front is a tanned white woman laughing on a beach, sheathed in one-piece aqua Spandex with a modesty panel across the front. A black man in a huge straw hat is sitting on the sand beside her, handing up a coconut with a couple of straws sticking out of it. Behind him is a machete propped against a tree. He’s looking at her, she’s looking at the camera.
    “When was this printed?” Rennie asks.
    “We get them from the Department of Tourism,” says the woman behind the desk. “That’s the only kind there is.” She’s British and seems to be the manager, or perhaps the owner. Rennie is always slightly cowed by women like this, women who can wear thick-soled khaki shoes and lime-green polyester jersey skirts without being aware of their ugliness. This woman’s no doubt responsible for the lounge chairs and the scabby plant. Rennie envies people who are unaware of ugliness: it gives them an advantage, they can’t be embarrassed.
    “I understand you’re a travel writer,” the woman says severely. “We don’t usually have them here. You ought to be at the Driftwood.”
    For a moment Rennie wonders how she knows, but then remembers that it says “freelance journalist” on her disembarkation card, which is in the office safe. Not a hard deduction. What she probably means is that Rennie can’t expect special treatment because there isn’t