Читать книгу The Camp Whore - Francois Smith - Страница 5

I can see. My eyes must have been open long before I realised this. At first the light falling around me was so white that I thought it was not light, not light. I don’t know what I thought it was, but whatever it was also poured from my mouth and everything, everything inside me and around me is filled with this bitter, burning nausea. I must not look; I don’t want to know what it is, I don’t want to feel like this, no, I don’t. I don’t. Everything must just go away. I must rather not think, because when I do my mind crushes me, my thoughts shoved up against the bone. It’s the thinking that makes it crack open, makes it hurt so.

It smells of sheep. Dust and dung and stone and wool. I think I’m in some kind of cave. I’m lying in the shade, but at the open end the sun is so bright I cannot look. Speckled shafts of light, and farther on, dark people seem to be bending down and looking in, or perhaps it’s rock rabbits among the wild olives. I don’t know I cannot think my ears go deaf and all around me are paintings on the rock of people and animals and I hear the hooves of thousands of sheep on trampled earth they were the ones that stampeded over me all of them with their little sharp hooves grinding my whole body into the dirt flaying the skin off my cheeks off my ribs the hard horn in my eyes I cannot think I cannot think.

Now I know what I saw. My own thoughts. A bloody trail dribbling from my head, bubbling and gushing.

It hurts so much that I have tried to scream, but I can’t, I just lie here. This is what I saw. I am lying like a slaughtered sheep with blue seeping veins bulging over the slimy white stomach, a blade grating, grating, a dried-out rusk falling to the dung floor and disintegrating where my toes should be, my mouth stuffed with sharp, hard crumbs. I can’t say anything, because it smells of smoke and wool and sewage. Someone threw a cloth into that stinking ditch and I should rather look away, away, away because there are goats here red as soil and white like clouds they jump over each other in disarray people with sticks herd them black like mud are the people and the eland jump over me, jumping higher, higher, higher. If only I could shut my eyes so tightly that everything would vanish.