Читать книгу Miss Lamp - Christopher Ewart - Страница 13

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Hangnail for a Wink.

Between the creases of her pillow, Miss Lamp picks the sleep from her eyes. An itch on her cheek brings her left hand out from under her side. Congealed blood, skin and toilet paper drag along the polyester bedspread. She sucks in her cheeks like a lemon. Pins and needles tickle her immaculately shaved underarm, sewing themselves into the lapel of her collarbone. Her eyes blink wet.

‘That was smart,’ she says. ‘I need a band-aid.’

Leaning over the side of the bed, she reaches into her carry-on, beams at her manicure kit and zips slowly around its corners. It’s full of shiny picks, files, clippers, tweezers and scissors. ‘Security is blind,’ she says, pondering the possibility of hijacking an airplane with a pair of well-sharpened nail scissors. Just a glimpse of an emery board and her finger throbs like an eardrum at 10,000 metres.

She roasts germs from the tweezers’ steel limbs with her cigarette lighter. When the handles get hot she stops the flame with a lift of thumb. Hygienic. Wiping away the soot, she picks off five minutes’ worth of paper, skin and nail. Almost to the moon. Running her finger under the tap eases out a wince. ‘Water take me home,’ she sings, almost in key, dancing her blue toenails beneath the bathroom sink. Two of four Hollywood-style globes snap and hum.

Turning the cold tap left, she lathers up the one hotel soap cake not already in her travel bag and puts her finger in the bubbles. The sting brings a squint. The squint brings wrinkles. She holds the squint for certainty. She holds the squint to tally a census.

Fourteen. Six under the right eye and eight under the left.

The winking eye has one more wrinkle than the last time she checked. In a hotel room similar to this one, with a north-facing balcony, waiting for Campbell’s Tomato Soup, she counted thirteen wrinkles. Now it’s fourteen. It makes her twenty-three look twenty-three. Her winking eye deserves rest. With eyes barely visible in the bathroom mirror, she decides to not wink at Room Service Boys or pilots or dentists or judges or children anymore. Children can’t wink properly anyway. Miss Lamp weathers the damage of the wink. Cut down a tree and count the rings around its drying heart. Miss Lamp lets her face drop. It’s her mother’s fault.