Читать книгу Feebleminded - Ariana Harwicz - Страница 9

Whisky with my mother as the electric blue fades into the small hours and now, a long way from home, my hands are covered in excrement. I didn’t know my own smell, the layer of smell that forms on the body as the hours without water go by. My tongue gets distracted eating grass. Sucking on an animal’s hard udders, sucking on the fur, teeth galvanised, or imagining the death of your parents. It’s all the same. From the moment he entered my head, this saltwater hell. Zealous hammering on my veins. The trouble with my brain is I can’t hold it back, it rolls on and on through the spiky undergrowth like a bulldozer. Where am I. I don’t recognise these big houses. I’ve never rounded this bend in the road. Degenerate desire. Damaging desire. Demented desire. I don’t know how to get back. My mother will be blind drunk, sprawled on the sloping grass, her poor feet carved up by the blades. The clouds are tree trunks at this time of night, my hangover’s going nowhere and I throw myself down any old how to masturbate, my hair on end, my skin hot, my eyelids rigid. My hand works away then falls still as an insect, so that nothing is enough. Me and him in a convertible. Me and him on a muddy road. Bodies shouldn’t have breasts after a certain age; when my breasts turn to thick heavy flesh I’ll have them removed. The sex should stop opening, too. I look for a word to replace the word. I look for a word that shows my devotion. The word that marks the spot, the distance, the very centre of my delirium. We should be like tiny snakes till the end, and be buried that way, in long holes. I get up feeling anxious, my head thick with blood. I walk round the house and open the windows. The wind sweeps over the insect corpses trapped in the mosquito net. He keeps jars back there full of rusty water and all kinds of fossils. He looks like he’s never slept, always needing a wash, a new haircut, a pair of trousers with no piss stains. And after all, what is that scant pleasure we get from our fingers when we’re young. What is that scant golden liquid dripping, diluting, if afterwards, later on, when at last I find her holding the thick-bottomed glass, swirling the ice cube around and asking the waiter for the same again, my mum and I are sitting at the garden table with a pot of thin broth and two spoons. What is that leftover desire, that sunken desire, while we eat our soup and the steam hits us in the face and nothing, but nothing is left.