Читать книгу The Ice is Singing - Jane Rogers - Страница 8

Monday February 3

I drove on up the motorway. There is snow lying, it makes the light strange. I’m driving through fluorescent tubes. The motorway was full of cars and slow. In places, like a conveyor belt. At a garage I filled the tank.

Driving is more like skating now. At times I can pull out and swoop past someone, skimming gracefully back into position in front of them. The car seems more responsive, it likes to swoop and glide quickly. It is engaging my concentration, I do not think about anything else. I feel well; I feel quite clear. I do everything right. Eat, go to bed, eat. When I slept I dreamed I was still driving.

My head is full of emptiness, a white eggshell. I drive in silence to keep it so. The radio is trouble. Snow light is filling up my eyes, they are scoured white. I drive blind, but the road is a clear black line and not hard to follow. Keeping moving seems the best thing to do. I move to keep blank (it works); driving all day with a ball of thoughts and feelings rolling along behind me, ready to crush, a carelessly chucked giant’s marble.

Tonight I am staying in a small cluttered room, with a china dog, amongst other things, on the mantelpiece. There is no phone.

Tuesday Feb. 4

Today I drove around smaller roads. They are clear, wet black ribbons twisting over a white landscape. On these country roads I notice that the snow does not cover the land so much as reveal it. As if it was stripped naked. You see its curves; the way a field rim turns up in a pout to a hedge; the slow undulation between two hilltops; the sliding curve of flank in a huge white expanse of field. The snow strips it of distractions and colour, flattens weeds and tall grass, and absorbs back into the shape of the surface the harsh outlines of rocks, ruined ploughs, piles of fencing and rotting bales. All detail is concealed, to reveal the sensuous shape of the whole. Trees and stone walls are all that show up, the trees bare, black and scratchy-spindly, shocking tufts of coarse black pubic hair in the folds and valleys of the body. Stone walls make black lines fractured by white, outlining shapes, emphasizing the creases between limbs. The body that lies around me is huge. I crawl across it like an ant on a Henry Moore figure, lost between voluptuous swellings.

A story.