Читать книгу The Drowning Child - Alex Barclay - Страница 16

Jimmy Lyle was driving, happily, freely, down the west coast. Home, in whatever altered state he had left it, was far enough behind him to bring comfort. He was taking quiet roads, darker ones, roads less traveled. He didn’t want to be pulled over, he didn’t want the trunk of his car to be searched.

The day he had the shit beaten out of him by the pond was coming up on Valentine’s Day: after the operations, as he looked around the hospital with his unbandaged eye, he caught sight of heart-shaped balloons, bunches of flowers, cards, an air of buoyancy. Jimmy hadn’t a face for Valentine’s Day, hadn’t a heart for love. He had seen it go wrong too soon. His wild and beautiful mother married his sensible teacher father. She walked out on them when Jimmy was eight years old, his father’s heart spiked on her stiletto as she made her glamorous exit. She had loved Jimmy deeply, and suddenly she was gone, and his father looked at him across the table of their first dinner alone like he was a dog who he now needed to find a home for. He kept him, though. Jimmy made sure to be indispensable. He cooked his father breakfast the very next morning and Outside Jimmy and Inside Jimmy were born; one the white, tranquil, opaque shell, the other the dark, crimson, screaming, angry, bleeding, weeping soul it covered.

The day Jimmy had left the hospital, he went via the cancer ward. He stole some things, some ‘personal effects’. He found an empty room and changed. He could barely look at himself in the mirror.

Afterward, as Jimmy stood, eyes on the floor, waiting for the elevator, he had heard a gasp beside him. It was to his right – it was always to his right. He turned to see a little girl standing there, wide-eyed.

She cried out. ‘Mommy, Mommy!’

Jimmy froze. The little girl’s mother scooped her up in her arms.

‘What happened to that lady’s face?’ said the little girl, pointing to Jimmy.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said the woman. ‘I don’t know what to say. I’m trying to teach her … she’s only three years old. She …’

Jimmy smiled. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘She’s just a little kid. They say what they think, don’t they? We could all learn from that.’

The mother’s shoulders relaxed. The little girl slowly turned to Jimmy, her head bowed. She looked up at him through teary eyes.

‘I had an accident when I was a little girl,’ he said.

The mother looked at him nervously, not sure what he was going to say next, not knowing whether or not he would say something that would scar her child.

‘So,’ said Jimmy, ‘you need to listen to your mama when she tells you to stay away from boiling water.’

The little girl was transfixed, horrified. The mother nodded, took a few steps backward. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You have a good day.’

‘You too,’ said Jimmy.

Jimmy walked through those hospital doors, holding a bunch of red roses close to his face on one side, holding a still-buoyant balloon on the other.

I HEART YOU, it said.

I FUCK YOU UP, thought Jimmy. I ABANDON YOU.

He remembered picking flowers from the back garden for a woman once, and, even while he was handing them to her, thinking exactly those words. And later, doing exactly those things.

There were good people who had scars, people who had to fight every day to bring others past the outside to the beauty underneath. Jimmy Lyle’s face and body, with their layer upon layer of damage, were the perfect complement to his soul.