Читать книгу Providence Island - Gregor Robinson - Страница 4

When I was a boy, I played with imaginary people and feared haunted places. The people were a father and mother and children — always lots of children — whose parts were played by the stuffed animals in my room: dogs and lions and wolves.

Outside my bedroom window, my real parents would talk quietly below, snatches of conversation and the clink of the ice in their drinks wafting up from the stone terrace. I thought of my father as remote, even austere. My mother was nervous (highly strung, people said).

I was an only child. I imagined noisy gatherings, parades, and games in a rambling house with lawns and gardens: a green paradise, far from the woods and ravines and lonesome swamps that haunted my dreams. Especially the swamps, the wide, ragged marshes, the stinking muskeg where there was nowhere to hide, and the abandoned railway line, and that awful swamp: And when she could no longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child in; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.