Читать книгу Feebleminded - Ariana Harwicz - Страница 8

We clear the table surrounded by crickets. Lucky for me there’s no child around, one less plate, no congealed remains, no voice cutting through mine. Nothing happening when I tear off my head with a single yank. A whiteness expands, a fog swallowing us up. It comes from back there and engulfs us, sweeping us over the plains. Chuckling, my mum remembers when my little body slipped from her hands and she was left clutching the purple cord. Everything comes back to that, to tiny knives under the water, to eels. The two of us doing the dishes with cheap washing-up liquid and gloves. The two of us putting the cutlery away in the drawers with compartments, forks with the forks, we sing, spoons with the spoons, and we do a little dance like a tarantella. The two of us go outside to drink a bottle of pastis. There’s nothing. The slightest thing can bring us down: a bumblebee sting on the elbow, a glass blown over and smashed, the motionless doors and windows. One of us swings to and fro, the other sits on the bench waiting her turn. We’re both in heat from the scalp down, two abandoned sows. Two foxy little sluts with bright orange muzzles. Allergic. Secretly longing for a couple of guys in wide-brimmed hats to stride through the gate, ‘Can we come in?’ and then they rape us over the chairs, against the wooden seesaw, in the pergola, taking one of us from behind and the daughter face-to-face. Pushing her up against the bathroom sink they stick something inside mum, the blonde guy’s baseball bat. She doesn’t like it much but she pretends so I think she’s enjoying it. We look at each other and nothing matters. Possessing those dark, clashing eyes. They grab us by the armpits, spin us around and our long hair sweeps over the hay like a shadowy curtain. Is there any whisky left, daughter dear? It’s such a relief your childhood’s over, wonderful now everything’s so distant it’s almost like it never happened, the smell of wet eucalyptus from when you trapped your finger in the automatic door gone for good. The smell of hot tarpaulin, of rubber, of bicycle rental shops. The smell of sugared almonds, apples, pink candyfloss. I’ve been waiting for this moment since you were born. Did we or did we not go to the sandbanks when you turned six? Didn’t we balance on the jetty? Didn’t we lie along the shore, covered in sand like pieces of schnitzel, inches from the jellyfish? Is it true that when you heard a gunshot from our hotel room that day you thought it was me? Didn’t we spend a whole summer sleeping under the tourists’ beach canopies without them knowing, your little piles of poo like defensive walls? Those golden days, holding in my sour breath and taking you roller-skating, whole days spent helping you do headstands on the water’s edge, making you jump on the trampoline, scrubbing your knickers with my fists. Hiding on the cold sand as the sun set over the beach, vomiting up your childhood.