Читать книгу The Ice is Singing - Jane Rogers - Страница 11

Fri. 7

Snow. More snow every day. Many roads are blocked. I thread my way along those that have been cleared; even in frost they remain wet because of the salt. The verges, heaped high with snow-plough packed snow, are ruined and blackened like a building after fire. On the other side of hedge or wall the white begins, snow clear to the next blobbed wall. There are no colours in this landscape, it is black and white, and even the black is faded – grey black, faint black: whiteness of snow overpowers all, bleaching the eye, leeching colour.

My eyes are suffering; they ache, and at times white masses seem to shift before them, even when I’m not driving. The world seems slippery to them, they can’t get a grip on it. Perhaps I should buy some sunglasses. My neck and shoulders ache as well. I need to take a rest from driving.

You talk rubbish. A tube of chemicals fizzing, changing colour by the minute. Lions pace. Pigs chew. Marion drives. It’s Nature’s way, my dear – survival. Do you think you’ve made a choice? Bid for freedom, escape? Can you escape your own nature, your own substance, the sloppy porridge of cells which are your construction, flesh and bones? All they’re programmed for is to keep you alive – they don’t care how.

1. Lion. In a cage, paces. Hormones thereby released dull its anxiety, keep it sane.

2. Pig. (More satisfyingly, more symbolically) in a factory farm, secured in its stall with chains, chews them. Day and night, obsessively. Survives, pain of captivity blunted, high on the heroin substitute its body manufactures in response to chain-chewing. Remove its chains, it cracks up: beats it brains out against the walls.

3. Marion. The case is less extreme. Drives. Brain pleasantly numbed from consideration of more serious matters.

Chemicals. Programmed to survive. All you are.

That’s enough.

Sat. 8

At times I can go down in an eddy – down, down, below the static-noise surface, into the quiet spaces (underwater?) where vision is peculiarly clear. One thought one image leading to the next like slippery underwater rope I’m on a trail, can’t let go in the dark clear depths for fear of total loss, but if it’s possible to pursue the thought to its end (cave diver in the liquid hollows of the earth) then I will win –

What? No more than a journey of that length. Always at the end, finally, a rock wall, a crevice too narrow for my shoulders.

Strange changes in my body as I travel through no-time. I seem to swell and bloat like a drowned woman. My hands and feet have puffed up so that the skin is tight. Reasonably, I argue that it’s due to hours of driving, sitting still, blood not circulating. My body remembers it as a sign of pregnancy. My aching eyes never recover from assaults of snow glare. And now my lips are dried and cracking like sun-baked mud. They too seem to have swollen; they are bursting through the old skin, which shrivels back, to be peeled absentmindedly by me as I drive. Today I peeled a section raw.

Reasonably, reasonably. The air outside is sharp and cold. Inside my car is hot and dry, the heater like a breath from the desert. My lips are simply dry. A sensible application of Vaseline or Lypsyl three times a day would sort them out. In the mirror I see a woman I’ve never met, with tiny squinting eyes and swollen bleeding lips.

My lips must be constantly touched. I find myself stroking the silken new skin; pressing them together and moistening the dry corners; brushing the back of my hand against them, peeling with my teeth the onion layers of old skin. I have picked foolishly at the scabs until they’ve bled again.

I am continuously aware of my lips. I feel them move and crack. I lick them to taste the blood. I can’t rest, I can’t leave them alone to heal. Last night I lay on my back with my hands clenched beneath me, to stop them stealing up to touch and peel my gigantic lips. I imagined I might unpick myself. Picking and picking, peeling back the skin, touching and brushing the moist new flesh, laying the backs of my fingernails against it, fretting at the edges of what is (already, for God’s sake) a hole; I might unpick enough to find an end to pull – that would make the whole lot unravel.

They’re a neat edge around a hole, lips. Like a button hole. We girls learnt button-hole stitch at junior school. Blanket stitch, the stitch for binding raw edges. Over and over goes the thread, passing the needle through each previous stitch’s loop, linking them together to make an edge.

I circle it. Over and over (sewing or unpicking?) I painstakingly circle the hole. The world resolves itself into images and theories of lips.