Читать книгу Galilee - Clive Barker, Clive Barker - Страница 9

I should tell you, just briefly, about what happened the day I told Marietta I’d begun this book, because you’ll understand better what it’s like to live in this house. I had been sitting on my balcony with the birds (there are eleven individuals—cardinals, buntings, soldier-wing blackbirds—who come to feed from my hand and then stay to make music for me), and while I was feeding them I heard her down below having a furious argument with my other half-sister, Zabrina. As far as I could gather Marietta was being her usual imperious self, and Zabrina—who keeps out of everybody’s way most of the time, and when she does encounter one of the family doesn’t say much—was for once standing up for her own opinions. The gist of the exchange was this: Marietta had apparently brought one of her lovers into the house the previous night, and the visitor had proved to be quite the detective. Apparently she’d got up while Marietta was asleep, had gone wandering around the house and seen something she should not have seen.

Now she was apparently in a state of panic, and Marietta was quite out of patience with her, so she was trying to cajole Zabrina into cooking up some spiked candy that would wipe the woman’s memory clean. Then Marietta could take her back home, and the whole untidy business could be forgotten.

“I told you last time I don’t approve—” Zabrina’s voice is normally reedy and thin; now it was positively shrill.

“Oh Lord,” said Marietta wearily. “Don’t be so highhanded.”

“You know you should keep ordinary folks away from the house,” Zabrina went on. “It’s asking for trouble, bringing somebody here.”

“This one’s special,” Marietta said.

“So why do you want me to wipe her memory?”

“Because I’m afraid she’s going to lose her mind if you don’t.”

“What did she see?”

There was a pause. “I don’t know,” Marietta finally admitted. “She’s too incoherent to tell me.”

“Well where did you find her?”

“On the stairs.”

“She didn’t see Mama?”

“No, Zabrina. She didn’t see Mama. If she’d seen Mama—”

“She’d be dead.”

“—she’d be dead.”

There was a pause. Finally Zabrina said: “If I do this—”

“Yes?”

“Quid pro quo.”

“That’s not very sisterly,” Marietta groused. “But all right. Quid pro quo. What do you want?”

“I don’t know yet,” Zabrina said. “But I’ll think of something, don’t worry. And you won’t like it. I’ll make sure of that.”

“How very petty of you,” Marietta observed.

“Look. Do you want me to do it or don’t you?”

Again there was a pause. “She’s in my bedroom,” Marietta said. “I had to tie her to the bed.”

Zabrina giggled.

“It’s not funny.”

“They’re all funny,” Zabrina replied. “Weak heads, weak hearts. You’re never going to find anyone who can really be with you. You know that don’t you? It’s impossible. We’re on our own, to the very end.”

About an hour later Marietta appeared in my room. She looked ashen; her gray eyes full of sadness.

“You heard the conversation,” she said. I didn’t bother to reply. “Sometimes that bitch makes me want to hit her. Hard. Not that she’d feel it. Fat cow.”

“You just can’t bear to be in anybody’s debt.”

“I wouldn’t mind with you,” she said.

“I don’t count.”

“No, I guess you don’t,” she replied. Then, seeing the expression on my face. “Now what have I said? I’m just agreeing with you, for God’s sake! Why is everybody so damn sensitive around here?” She went to my desk and examined the contents of the gin bottle. There was barely a shot remaining. “Got any more?”

“There’s half a case in the closet in the bedroom.”

“Mind if I—?”

“Help yourself.”

“You know we should talk more often, Eddie,” she called back to me while she dug for the gin. “Get to know one another. I don’t have anything in common with Dwight and Zabrina’s been in the foulest mood for the last couple of months. She’s so obese these days, Eddie. Have you seen her? I mean, she’s grossly fat.”

Though both Zabrina and Marietta insist that they’re completely unlike—and in many regards this is true—they have some essential qualities in common. At their cores they’re both willful, stubborn, obsessive women. But whereas Marietta, who’s eleven years Zabrina’s junior, has always prided herself on her athleticism, and is as lean as a woman can get and still have a lushness about her body, Zabrina gave into her cravings for praline brittle and pecan pie years ago. Occasionally I’ll see her from my window, wandering rotundly across the lawn. At the last sighting she was probably three hundred and fifty pounds. (We are, you’ve doubtless begun to grasp, a profoundly wounded group of people. But trust me, when you better know the circumstances of our lives, you’ll be astonished we’re as functional as we are.)

Marietta had emerged with a fresh bottle of gin, and, unscrewing the top, poured herself an ample measure.

“Why do you keep all those clothes in the closet?” she said, knocking back a mouthful. “You’re never going to wear most of them.”

“I presume that means you have your eye on something.”

“The smoking jacket.”

“Take it.”

She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “I’ve underrated you all these years,” she said, and went back into the bedroom to fetch the jacket in case I changed my mind.

“I’ve decided to write the book,” I told her when she emerged.

She tossed the jacket at Nicodemus’s chair and fairly danced with excitement. “That’s so wonderful,” she said. “Oh my God, Eddie, we’re going to have such fun.”

“We?”

“Yes, we. I mean, you’ll be writing it most of the time, but I’ll be helping. There’s a lot you don’t know. Dirt about Cesaria that she told me when I was little.”

“Maybe you should keep your voice down.”

“She can’t hear me. She’s always in her chambers these days.”

“We don’t know what she can hear,” I said. There was a story that she’d had Jefferson design the house so that it funneled sounds to her chambers (which I’ve never entered, by the way; nor has Marietta). The story may be apocryphal, but I wonder. Though it’s many, many months since I caught sight of the woman I don’t have difficulty believing she sits there in her boudoir listening to her children, and her husband’s children, conniving and weeping and slowly losing their minds. She probably enjoys it.

“Well if she can hear me, so what? She should be happy we’re going to all this trouble. I mean, it’s going to be a history of the Barbarossas. It’ll make her immortal.”

“If she isn’t already.”

“Oh no…she’s getting old. Zabrina sees her all the time and she says the old bitch is failing.”

“I find that hard to imagine.”

“It was her saying that which started me thinking about our book.”

“It’s not our book,” I insisted. “If I’m going to do it, it’s going to be done my way. Which means it’s not going to simply be a history of the Barbarossas.”

She emptied her glass. “I see,” she said, with a little chill in her voice. “So what’s it going to be?”

“Oh, it’ll be about the family. But it’ll be about the Gearys too.”

Now she fell silent and stared out of the window at the place where I sit with the birds. It took her fully a minute to bring herself to speak again. “If you write about the Gearys, then I’m having nothing to do with the fucking thing.”

“How can I write—”

“Or indeed you.”

“Let me finish, will you? How can I write about this family—particularly the recent history of this family—and not write about the Gearys?”

“They’re scum, Eddie. Human scum. And vicious. Every one of them.”

“That’s not true, Marietta. And even if it were, I say again: what kind of bowdlerized account would this damn book be if I didn’t include them?”

“All right. So just mention them in passing.”

“They’re part of our lives.”

“They’re not part of mine,” she said fiercely. Her gaze came back in my direction and I saw that she wasn’t so much enraged as sorrowful. I was revealing myself as a traitor with my desire to tell the story this way. She measured her next words with great care, like a lawyer making a pivotal argument.

“You realize, don’t you, that this may be the only way people out there get to know about our family?” she snapped, showing me a glimpse of her temper.

“All the more—”

“Now you let me finish. When I came in here suggesting you write this fucking book, it was because I had this feeling—I have this feeling—that we haven’t got very long. And my instincts are rarely wrong.”

“I realize that,” I said quietly. Marietta has prophetic talents, no question. She gets them from her mother.

“Maybe that’s why she’s looking so haggard these days,” Marietta said.

“She’s feeling what you’re feeling?”

She nodded. “Poor bitch,” she said softly. “And that’s another thing to consider. Cesaria. She hates the Gearys even more than I do. They took her beloved Galilee.”

I snorted at this nonsense. “That’s one sentimental myth I intend to lay to rest, for a start,” I said.

“So you don’t believe he was taken?”

“Absolutely not. I know what happened the night he left better than anyone living. And I intend to tell what I know.”

“Of course, nobody may give a damn,” Marietta observed.

“At least I’ll have set the record straight. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“I don’t know what the hell I was thinking,” Marietta replied, her distaste at what I had proposed now resurfacing. “I’m beginning to wish I’d never suggested a fucking book.”

“Well, it’s too late now. It’s begun.”

“You began already?”

This was not entirely true. I hadn’t yet laid pen to paper. But I knew where I was going to begin: with the house, and Cesaria and Thomas Jefferson. The work was as good as started.

“Well don’t let me delay you,” Marietta said, going to the door. “But I’m not guaranteeing you my help.”

“That’s fine. I’m not asking for it.”

“Not now you’re not. But you will. You’ll have to. There’s a lot of pieces of information I’ve got that you’ll need. Then we’ll see what your integrity’s worth.”

So saying, she left me to my gin. I didn’t doubt the significance of this last remark: she intended to make some kind of bargain. A section of my book she didn’t approve of excised in return for a piece of information I needed. I was absolutely determined she wasn’t going to get a single word removed however. What I’d told her was true. There was no way to tell the story of the Barbarossas without telling that of the Gearys, and thus also the story of Rachel Pallenberg, the one name I do not ever expect to hear crossing Marietta’s lips. I had deliberately not mentioned the Pallenberg woman myself, because I was certain as soon as I did so Marietta would be screaming inventive obscenities at me. Needless to say, I intend to devote a substantial portion of this story to the vices and virtues of Rachel Pallenberg.

That said, this narrative will be somewhat impoverished if I don’t get Marietta’s help; so I intend to be selective in the way I talk about what I’m doing. She’ll come round; if only because she’s an egotist, and the idea of not having her ideas in the book is going to be far more painful to her than my talking about the Gearys. Besides, she knows very well there are so many matters that I’m going to trust to my instinct on, matters that cannot be strictly verified. Matters of the spirit, matters of the bedroom, matters of the grave. These are the truly important elements. The rest is just geography and dates.