Читать книгу Ashes Of The Phoenix - Jane Fade Merrick - Страница 6

Before returning to the shelter which she had chosen as her home, Fade always took two or three laps of the block to make sure that no one saw her sneak into her “secret entrance”, which she then made with astonishing speed.

The secret entrance was nothing more than a rickety door of a dilapidated abandoned building. Once inside, the girl went through a long dimly lit corridor which opened onto a foyer in which four doors appeared. The only door equipped with a big lock nestled crookedly on the handle, was the entrance of the one room apartment she used as her shelter.

Once inside, she made sure to properly close the door by moving a safety bolt. The room was lit only by the lights coming in from the street lamps, but she didn’t care much because she was used to moving around in the dark.

With a push of her skates she approached the area turned into a bedroom, with nothing but a mattress thrown on the ground covered with crumpled sheets, and collapsed exhaustedly onto the bed. For a few minutes she stared blankly in front of her, with the usual intent to think of nothing other than strictly necessary things. She decided that it was time to eat.

She pulled the cans out of her pockets, stood up and walked over to what must have been a pretty kitchenette, set them on the shelf and opened a drawer in search of a can opener. Despite the poverty of the means at her disposal, she was accustomed to respect certain basic standards of behaviour. She set a piece of cloth stolen from some store on the counter and on it she placed a dish and cutlery, then she sat on a high stool and ate. She did it slowly, even though the meal was poor and unappetizing.

Usually she got her water by filling some bottles from a fountain a few steps away from home and drank from a glass made out of an empty jar of marmalade. When she finished her meal, she put the dirty dishes in a supermarket basket, along with an empty bottle and prepared to go down to the fountain to wash them and stock up on fresh water.

She was about to leave when she heard two knocks on the door. For a moment she froze; since she lived there no one had ever found her. Holding her breath she put the dishes down quietly and instinctively put her hand behind her back, grabbing the only companion that she allowed to be part of her life. Under her shirt, in a lining attached to a shoulder strap, she hid a sharp kitchen knife, a weapon she had decided to use only for her defence.

Another couple of knocks echoed in the eerie silence of the room.

“Who is it?” She asked, trying to keep her voice as steady as she could.

“It’s me,” said a child’s voice beyond the door.

“‘Me’ is not an answer! Go away!”

“I brought you something to eat,” he insisted.

“No one asked you for it! Go away or...” Fade’s voice faded at the end of sentence.

“It’s late, it’s dark outside and I’m lost,” he whimpered.

“It’s your problem!” She replied lowering her weapon, already exhausted by that silly conversation.

For a long moment there was nothing but silence, which was interrupted by retreating footsteps.

The girl stood still, waiting, ready to pick up any noise that came from outside, and after several minutes she became convinced that the boy had left. She returned to the ritual he had interrupted and grabbed the basket with the dirty dishes, and then she slid the safety bolt, opened the door and checked that there was no one in the foyer.

She glanced around and jumped when she saw the sudden flash of two reflecting circles in a corner of the foyer. For a second she thought it was a cat, but the two circles were too large to belong to a domestic feline. She took a better look and saw the boy she bumped into at the market, sitting in a corner with his head between his knees: the reflection came from the goggles he was wearing. Beside him he had two big overflowing shopping bags.

“You’re still here!” She snapped.

The child suddenly raised his head and she recoiled when she saw that his round black eyes also reflected, like those of a cat.

The two studied each other. His face looked like he had just woken up from a deep sleep. She looked at him with a mixture of distrust and fear, and her hand was ready to pull out the knife. “Just to frighten him,” she thought.

The boy stood up, rubbing his eye. “Hello” was the only word that came out of his mouth, and then he stood waiting for an answer.

“What are you still doing here?” She asked, after a careful scrutiny.

The brat then picked up the bags at his feet. “The food, remember? I brought you something to eat!”

“I’ve already eaten, now shove off! I’ll walk you out” she answered, regretting that last sentence as soon it came out.

“Never be too kind,” she chided herself making her way out of the hallway.

From the foyer to the front door, the girl could not help but think about that strange situation. Once they reached the main door she turned to the child and, with a nonchalant tone she asked: “How much stuff did you buy at that market?”

“The bare minimum for dinner! In this bag...” raising the heavy bag he held in his right hand, the boy explained “... there are all the foods at the base of the food pyramid, and in this other...” he made the same gesture with his left hand “...drinks and juices!”

“The bare minimum? All that stuff would last me for weeks,” she snorted indignantly.

“I also got something for you, you can keep it!” The brat continued undeterred.

After that chatter the girl blurted out: “I don’t want anything from you! May I ask why you followed me here?”

“I’m lost,” he continued, looking at her with those bemused little black eyes that Fade couldn’t stand the sight of “...and when I met you I knew right away that we were alike.” He pointed his finger to her wacky hairdo. “That’s why I followed you.” He concluded.

She gave a sigh of resignation, unsure whether to kick him out or investigate further. Watching him better, that pink bob, those red goggles on his head and that lab coat aroused the desire to learn more about him rather than to get rid of him. “Show me what you’ve got there!” she concluded, trying not to look like a quitter and, gloomily, she returned to the door of her shelter.

“... and don’t touch anything” was the last in a series of recommendations she made to the kid before opening the door to her one room apartment. The boy walked quietly into the room, taking the shopping bags with him. He looked quietly around; his look didn’t reveal any of his impressions on the miserable furniture. He simply put his bags on the ground and waited silently for instructions. The girl came up skating on her rollerblades. “So, what do you have there?”

He sat on the ground between the two bags, and with an excitement he had never shown until then, he began to bring out the products and describe them in detail, setting them all around him:

“Chinese noodles, artichokes in oil, butter, cereal, milk, chocolate snacks, soda, peanuts, potato chips, hamburger buns, pear and apricot juices, hot dogs...”

The girl had already lost the sense of all that was happening and was no longer listening to the long list of products he had bought. She got a tremendous headache, too overwhelmed by that absurd situation and still trying to find out what was wrong with that weird kid.

“And here’s the best!” Cried the boy, standing up and showing her a large bottle full of a dark liquid “Soda made with caramel and food colouring!” Having said that he proceeded to open it, but as soon as he unscrewed the cap, the bottle, evidently shaken for all that time, began to pour out the contents uncontrollably, spraying all around the room.

Fade’s thoughts came to a halt. Wet from head to toe with that sticky liquid and seeing the motionless child who was still holding the despicable bottle in his hand without doing absolutely anything about it, she screamed with a shrill voice to stir him. He winced, as if he had awakened from a spell, but by then the bottle had lost all its contents.

The red-haired girl grabbed the kid by the collar, sodden with the drink, and pushed him out of the door cursing the disaster he had caused. He sat on the ground for a while still holding the empty bottle in his arms while behind him he heard the door being shut by the girl who insulted him, the sound of furniture being moved, and things falling to the floor.

Suddenly the door flew open. Fade angrily handed him a basket of empty bottles and ordered: “Go get some water from the fountain below! Immediately!!” The child didn’t answer, he grabbed the basket and with soggy shoes he started down the dark hallway.

Meanwhile the girl roughly rinsed her hair using the water of some bottles she stored in the bathroom. She hated washing her hair, first because she had to do it with cold water - frozen, in the winter - and secondly because she had to redo her elaborate hairstyle, which was quite challenging especially when she had a headache.

A short time later she heard a shy knock at the door. With her hair wrapped in a towel she went to open it, however, first she made sure it was him. The child entered the room tiredly carrying the basket with the bottles full of water. She seized one giving him instructions: “First take that sponge and wash all the furniture that you have smeared with the damn drink, and when you’re finished take that rag and wash the floor. I’m going to the bathroom to get changed, and don’t try any tricks, if you run away I’ll catch you!”

Having said that, she closed the door behind her leaving the brat alone, who sadly set to work.

Sitting on a rickety cabinet, the girl slowly passed a wet sponge over her fair skin. The contact with the water made her shiver; it had been a long time since the day in which, for the last time, she had had the pleasure to wash with hot water, but she cheered herself up: at least now she knew and appreciated the value of things that she had taken for granted before she had lost them.

For the umpteenth time she went over in her mind the principles on which her existence was based: “I shall steal only the essential to survive, I’ll never despise or waste anything; I’ll reuse things as long as possible...”

Repeating those rules distracted her, allowing her to suffer less from the cold. She now passed the sponge over a long scar on her left leg. As if it was a kind of eerie path, Fade slowed her motions as she followed it; the girl followed the long trail passing over the cross marks of the stitches which had now healed, and in doing so she counted silently: “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven...”. Seven stitches were needed to heal the gash she had been inflicted. “Don’t harm other people’s lives” was the last point of her list, while the cold rivulets dripped from her legs to die in the shower tray.

Once she put the dirty clothes to soak in a bucket, Fade left the bathroom wearing tattered pyjamas and the rollerblades at her feet, to find that everything was clean. That unexpected order made her reflect on the fact that she hadn’t even allowed the child to dry up; she took a better look and noticed that his clothes didn’t look wet, or dirty.

“But how...?”

“It’s a synthetic cloth: it doesn’t get wet nor does it stain” he anticipated her.

She was puzzled, but realizing that it had been quite a while since she had stopped following fashion, she had no arguments to rebut.

“Where are your parents?” She asked finally.

“In a distant country” said the boy vaguely. After a moment of silence, he resumed: “I need to go somewhere, can you help me do it?”

“As long as you get out of here,” she replied disdainfully.

“Alright, now let’s eat something.”

She didn’t like that tone at all, for she found it quite bossy and demanding, but she merely grabbed a couple of packages of food and sat on the bed, which, fortunately, was spared from the earlier flooding.

The child sat on the ground and opened a packet of paprika flavoured crisps.

“He has weird tastes” she thought.

After having eaten a couple of chips, he asked, “What’s your name?”

She hesitated a moment: she was no longer used to confiding in someone, more so with such an unsettling person.

“I no longer have a name in this city. People simply call me Fade.” She answered.

“Then you can call me Jag” said the child, in no way intrigued by the phrase he had just heard.

Another endless silence stretched between the two.

Following the hearty - and high in carbohydrates - meal, Fade stood up and walked to the door; she pulled back the bolt and, with an elegant and sarcastic wave of the hand, she invited him to leave. “You don’t mind sleeping in the lobby, do you? Surely there is no place for you in here!”

“I don’t mind” said the boy standing up and approaching her. “But first,” he paused for a moment, “May I use the bathroom to wash my hands?”

“I don’t mind” she said with a toneless voice “But don't use more than half a bottle of water!” she recommended.

A few minutes later Jag came back, and, without saying a word, he walked through the door and closed it behind him; the girl simply slid the lock in place and listened to the boy’s movements in the hall, and as soon as everything was silent, she went to lie down on the bed.

After a night of restless sleep, Fade got up at sunrise, quickly put her rollerblades on and went to check if the child was still there or if he had gone away. While she slid the security bolt open, she couldn’t fully understand which of the two possibilities she would have preferred.

She opened the door very carefully, looked around and saw the boy in a corner, curled up like a cat because it had been cold the previous night. She felt no pity at the sight: too many times she had slept in those conditions, and she had seen hundreds of people acting in the same manner. “Come on, get ready!” She ordered, waking him up.

The day didn’t start well for the girl: in her haste to escort Jag to wherever he wanted to go - and finally get rid of him - she didn’t have the time to style her hair in her usual hairdo, so she went around wearing a hat which was big enough to cover all her hair and a pair of sunglasses to avoid being recognized; a pretty futile attempt, for she continued to wear her threadbare purple and black rollerblades.

She absent-mindedly followed the brat who walked before her carrying a big map with both hands. The child kept on speaking to himself reading the names of the streets and raising his nose in the air, looking for a match with the plates attached to the walls of the streets.

This went on for a bit and, suddenly, Jag stopped with the open map still in his hands. So abruptly that she almost bumped into him.

“What's the matter? Are we there?” She asked.

He didn’t answer; he just stood still in the middle of the street. Then he finally admitted: “I'm lost...”

Fade, stunned at first, burst out in a fit of rage: “What do you mean you’re lost? We’ve been walking around the city for hours and you realize only now that... Give me that!” She ordered, snatching the map out of his hand to understand where they were. Following a moment of confusion, she understood: “You idiot! This is the map of another city! How will you be able to find your way around with this?!”

“How is that possible?” He asked with the blank stare of a person who doesn’t understand what is happening.

“You tell me! It’s also the map of the city of another State!”

“That's why you speak with that strange accent” he replied tersely, without giving the slightest importance to the huge mistake he had made.

At that further demonstration of total detachment from their problem, she crinkled the map with a single move of her hands and threw it on his chest. “I'm done with you! I'm leaving!” She finished, moving quickly back in the direction from which they had come.

“Wait!” He shouted before she was too far to hear him. She stopped, although she knew she was making a mistake, and stood still without looking back.

Encouraged, the child ran to catch up with her, with the crumpled map under his arm.

“You were kind to me,” he said “Let me repay you.”

He dropped the map on the ground and took out of his back pocket a ridiculous - in Fade’s opinion - portfolio with manga illustrations on it. To her great astonishment, it was full of large bills.

Jag took one and handed it to one. “Here, this is for you.”

“This is a joke, isn’t it?” Was all she managed to say without the slightest hint of wanting to take the note. “Of course not!” He continued, “I think it’s the least I can do to thank you for what you did...”

Fade stared at the bill. Of course, that would have been enough to get her by for a while without worrying and risking her neck or prison in order to grab a meagre meal, but inside her something was stopping her: decisions she had taken, mental chains blocking her actions, oaths, prohibitions and obligations that bombed her brain every day reminding her why she was in that situation.

“Goodbye,” she said, walking away from that awkward position. This time the boy didn’t stop her, he just looked at her going away, while he soundlessly lowered the hand holding the bill. He stood there, with his usual neutral expression; then he snorted and smiled sarcastically and cynically at the same time: “Hm! She’s incorruptible.”

Fade ran through the streets in a sweat, as if trying to escape the storm of thoughts that echoed in her head. She ran to escape from it, because sliding on the asphalt allowed her to return in tune with her more neutral thoughts. But it didn’t work; she reached her home with difficulty and jumped on the bed holding her head, now hostage of a flood of screams, loud noises and rushes of images that crazily overlapped in a space too narrow to contain them. Crumpled like a can she let out an agonizing cry of pain, and then collapsed on the mattress of her miserable shelter.

The next morning she awoke completely groggy. She seemed to have slept for a long time without actually realizing how long; she laid a while on the mattress, then she tiredly turned her head towards the room.

Jag was sitting in the opposite corner, with a sketchbook on his knees and earphones at his ears. As soon as he noticed her movements he took off his earphones and stared at her.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” She asked in a whisper, barely moving her parched mouth.

“I was worried about you; I followed you and saw that you were ill. What happened to you?”

“A bit of a headache” she replied.

“A bit of a headache? To me it seemed like a real headache,” he replied with a mature tone.

“It’s none of your business, now go away or else...” but she couldn’t even finish the sentence because the crisis of the previous night had been so strong she fell back to sleep.

Jag put his headphones back on and continued to scribble on his sketch pad.

At lunch time the girl woke up, roused by the loud noises the kid was making while he opened the cans on the kitchen counter next to the bed. She sat up with uncoordinated movements, but all she could do was sit with her arms resting on her knees. She stared at the roller-blades that were still on her feet. “Didn’t I tell you to leave?” She asked with her head leaning toward the floor.

“I still haven’t repaid you” was the child's response.

“Then, as payment, I want you to get lost,” she replied dryly.

“Don’t be silly,” he chuckled, finally managing to open a can of soup “I always reward those who help me.” That said he poured the soup in a dish, put it in a microwave oven and pressed the start button.

“What the hell is that?” She asked tilting her head.

“Multi-coloured soup, it’s good! It’s the only food with vegetables that I eat, actually...”

“I didn’t mean that” she interrupted him “What is that thing doing in my house?”

“Oh, while you were sleeping I took the opportunity to bring a little comfort to your home! With this you can warm your food, I also bought an electric stove, an oven, some light bulbs and, of course, I made sure to fix the electrical system and connect it to the to a network, then...”

“Are you crazy?” She shouted jumping up as if she was suddenly reinvigorated “That way they’ll catch me immediately! And how do you think I’ll manage to pay the bill?”

“The bill? You don’t have to pay for it, I took care of it” he calmly replied. The girl was about to argue, but she was interrupted by the sound of the alarm indicating that the microwave oven had ended its cycle. Jag opened the door, took out the steaming dish and placed it on a straw place mat he had specially bought for the occasion.

“Here you go,” he said inviting her to sit on the stool next to his. Fade remained silent, lured by the idea of eating something hot, she sat down, picked up the spoon and ate the soup, while the child beside her, munched on pretzels, one after the other.

After the meal, she started talking again with a less dismissive tone than usual “Well, I guess now you repaid me, I wish you luck in your search, no matter what it is!” And she remained silent, as if she expected the story wouldn’t end there. Strangely, however, the kid slid off the stool with a little jump and started toward the door. “Then goodbye ...”

He slipped the safety bolt aside and walked out, closing the door behind him.

The great silence following his last gesture left a bitter-sweet taste in her mouth: the satisfaction of having regained her independence but also dissatisfaction, as if she lacked the answers to figure out what had really happened.

At that moment, her gaze fell on the kitchen counter, on which, next to the half-empty box of pretzels, the child had left his sketchbook. She pulled it towards her and lifted the cover to reveal a first subject.

The design was sketched and rough, but solid in structure and with a slight touch of contrast in the parts where the author had found it interesting to bring out the volumes. It represented a singer curled up during a concert. The face and hands, more refined than the rest of the body, seemed to unleash the pure energy of the music that was channelled into his body, barely outlined, and stretched out to radiate all around him.

She continued to browse through the album. In the following pages she found various studies of musicians, detailed with dark and light contrasts of hands in various positions and musical instruments, mostly modern. She stared at a drawing of a pianist: the sheet was shaded because of strong chiaroscuro, probably made with a soft pencil, which recreated the shiny black effect of the instrument. On some points, the rubber erasures simulated reflections. The man’s face was engrossed in a serene and melancholy expression, as if he were playing music of past memories.

Fade flipped through a few more pages, until the last subject, this time designed with a red pencil. It represented the profile of a naked girl kneeling on the ground. The line her body formed remembered the slow death of a swan as it collapses. Her hands were clasped, resting between her knees and the long hair hanging in front of her face showed only a glimpse of her eye, full of anger and despair as she stared toward those who were watching her. On her left leg, a long scar broke the delicacy of her features.

She felt as if someone had just scraped her soul with a rusty spoon. She stared at the drawing, reading her thoughts for the first time. A knock on the door brought her back to reality.

“Fade it’s me! Open up, I forgot something!” Said Jag from the other side.

She was caught by a flash of anger and rushed like a fury to the door, opening it wide. He didn’t have time to say anything for she grabbed him by the collar, lifted him up and slammed him against the wall of the lobby.

“You’ve seen my sketchbook, right?” he said chokingly because of the thrust on the wall.

“What the fuck are you doing, spying on me? What do you want from me? Who are you?” She asked, keeping the handle of her knife, still stuck in the lining of the belt, and clenched in her other hand.

“No, let me explain...” the boy hissed, his voice becoming more and more broken.

“You’ll pay for this...” she stared at him blankly, while she grasped the knife that she was about to unleash.

His wheeze, caused by her fist on his larynx, sobered her up. She released her grip, leaving him to fall on the ground.

She returned to her apartment and came out shortly after, holding his sketchbook. Having secured the door with the lock, she approached the kid and threw the album at his feet. “I don’t want to see you ever again” were her last words before slipping down the hall and leave the building.

She wandered for a long time through the streets of the city without knowing where she was going, she wanted to run, but she no longer felt the burning desire to escape; she felt strange, as if something inside her had been eradicated. She understood that it was time to return to a place where she hadn’t been for a long time.

She entered a semi-hidden alley of the city when the sun was setting and stopped in a small open space which was the loading and unloading area of some warehouses abandoned years earlier. The dirt around her, the gloomy silence interrupted only by the traffic of the main road and the light that gave everything an orange-pink hue, made the place look almost surreal.

Fade thoughtfully stared at a particular point of that place for a few minutes.

“What is this place?” Asked a familiar voice from behind her. The girl gasped at the unexpected question, and turned around. Jag was sitting with his legs dangling on the small protruding sill of a bricked off window.

“How the hell do you manage to follow me around?” She asked, without any more resentment against him.

“I have magic powers” he joked with an open smile.

She replaced her usual sullen expression with a half-smile, “Yeah sure...” then she returned serious.

“Here,” she continued after a moment's hesitation “Is where it happened.”

She approached the point that she was staring at. “This is a place abandoned by everyone, where even criminals have to give up their business, because at night it turns into an arena for desperate people. The concrete of this road has absorbed the blood of many and, that night, there was me and the boy who challenged me.”

“He continued to irritate me,” she went on with effort “he was a brat but he had a sharp tongue, he said things that made me lose my mind...”

“What kind of things?”

“He insulted my parents, but he didn’t go on for long: I broke his nose with a kick...”

“Ouch...” said the boy imagining the pain that can be inferred by giving a kick with rollerblades.

“But it wasn’t enough for me, I wanted him dead. I pulled my knife and I attacked while he was lying on the ground whimpering for his broken nose. He started to beg me, telling me that he didn’t want to die, that I'd won and that he wanted to go home... I don’t know what came over me but suddenly the anger was gone. I didn’t feel sorry for him, I was just disgusted. When I stopped he took the opportunity to grab a knife, stick it in my leg, push me backwards and then jump on me in turn. I instinctively raised my arms and I stabbed him in the stomach.”

She hesitated a moment, as if afraid to tell the rest of the story.

“I still remember his expression, his eyes staring at me as they slowly closed, the words dying in his throat and the blood coming out of his mouth and dripping and staining me for what I had done... He died like that, when I no longer wanted to kill him.” She confessed softly. “I had to push him off of me and try to escape despite my leg sodden with blood and the pain that almost made me faint.”

“How did you save yourself?” Asked the boy quivering.

“I have a friend, or should I say a saviour,” she murmured to herself, “whom I met the first time I came to live here. He’s a Doctor and, although it may seem absurd, he took me under his wing without asking too many questions. That night I managed to reach his house and he gave me stitches. “Then” she concluded “there was a violent storm that wiped away the traces of blood and the police found that to be an excellent deterrent to continue the investigation: these roads have long been at the mercy of poor devils and the law doesn’t visit them willingly...” she implied.

Before Jag had a chance to ask any other questions, Fade declared: “Now let's go, this place won’t be very safe in a short while.”

The child nodded, he jumped down from his spot as improvised spectator and walked toward the alley from which she had come. She followed him sadly, touched her leg with her hand before she looked back at that place for the last time. She pointed an imaginary handgun formed by the index and the thumb of her hand.

“Bang,” she said quietly mimicking a shot toward something unknown and then left, as if she had closed the chapter of a book for which, for some time, she was searching for a convincing end.