Читать книгу Feebleminded - Ariana Harwicz - Страница 20

Here we are in the big, barren guest room. Swarms of flies and bluebottles echo inside it, birds with long beaks like horns, the noise of their songs overlapping. Mum delicately stretching her ash-blonde hair on the bed. Her nightdress is a robe. Are we still going sailing? The build-up of rough stones in a centuries-old house like this one, the damp from the cisterns, deafens us. Let’s go to the pub. It’s closed, it only opens at night. How many times do I have to tell you, alcoholics never see the light of day. Mum changes position, puts her legs back up against the wall. She seeks solace from the impossible meaning. And we laugh, we’re always getting the giggles. Two sleepy loons. Let’s go sailing. And we push each other out of the door, laden with equipment as if we’re off to Niagara Falls. We follow the coast to the river, past cabins and steep slopes. And though we carry a stick to scare them, the hunting dogs bark at us all the way. Ever since a dog bit mum on the arse when she was out on her bike she clings to me as we walk. We untie a plastic raft, climb aboard and set off down the river. Rowing through the foam, battling the turbulence. We sail under Romanesque bridges and along the banks of medieval towns, we pass churches in the thick hot rain. For hours we do nothing but let ourselves be engulfed. The river has burst its banks and mum’s afraid, the air growing murkier and murkier. Suddenly there are waves, hollows, whirlpools, we don’t know how to move in the river, how to read it, we’re rowing in opposite directions. The wind pulls us to one bank and the raft gets stuck in the tender earth. Mum has fainted. I could leave her to drown and go home, call 911 from the petrol station payphone come midnight and explain how I lost her when the water level rose. Then they’ll wrap me in a grey blanket to take my statement, my fingerprints, and I’ll cry on some criminal’s shoulder. Or I could help her climb out. We shelter on a round island, huddle on a patch of wet earth until the urge comes to undress and we run pell-mell through the woods, chased by the sound of buzzing. We cross the plains like two islands in a green sea and at one point I see her crouch down in the undergrowth, tribal.