Читать книгу Match - Helen Guri - Страница 7

High on the hunch of the rattlesnaking slide, she bet I was the kind to piss the bed. Howled it out of the blue as she humped a sun-blind wave, like birds squall portents as they fly from power poles. The brick eardrum of the August schoolyard cracked.

It was news to me, kid-iotic as I was, poking a stick into an aluminum can, imagining I was a T. Rex or a saint. Bits of nature, gulls, grasshoppers, stalled cock-eared in the wake of her yodel, the lightning rods of their listening – would she have names for them too?

I’d never spoken to Ella even once. To be called anything at all was a prickling kind of honour, a drip of golden water. What a newt must feel dipping its toes in the river.

Blunt-soft as a hot-tub jet, her coronet lungs and cardinal skirt gusts – bedwetter, she belled over the edge. A bolt of warmth pleated like weather between us.

Meanwhile my real name, Robert, the eight compass points of polite distance, every woman in my kingdom-come blew in like fresh figments from the horizon.