Читать книгу Rough Magic - Lara Prior-Palmer - Страница 15

VII

Beneath the plane window the steppe folded in green waves. As we descended, white tents appeared at valley mouths, met by colorful tin-roofed houses flowing down the gullies towards gray high-rises. The plane let me out in Ulaanbaatar, 8,000 kilometers away from home.

Through the taxi glass I saw fragments of a city. Men in big coats curled around fires, denim-clad figures spilled into the traffic. Small-windowed blocks stood alongside nomads’ tents at the outskirts; farther in, Soviet architecture leaned into slicker glass structures. By now there was no sign of the steppe. The only hint of horses rested on the tögrög—the Mongolian currency—that I handed to the taxi driver: wild-maned ponies cantered off the banknote edges.

At four the next morning I sat sleepless in a hotel room among bloated white pillows. Delving into my suitcase, I pulled out a collection of tangled ropes and confused penknives that had spent their lives dormant in my brothers’ drawers. There was also a copy of The Tempest, which I had taken no interest in at school, but after leaving found myself diving into for comfort. Shakespeare speaks another language, yet I never needed to know the whole meaning to be moved by the sounds—Caliban’s “I cried to dream again” moves me to real tears.

My eleven-year-old self, on the other hand, did not spare the play a thought—I was pursuing real commotion. There was nothing like the sound of Mr. Thompson’s angry voice soaring. “Get out,” he’d shout, when he caught me whisper-giggling. “I said, ‘Get. Out.’” In the wasteland of the corridor I would lean against the wall while the pink in my cheeks faded, unaware that in the play I’d left on my desk were a series of rebellions I might have admired.

Now I lay on the floor of that sublimely square hotel room ripping out soliloquies and gluing them into my flimsy Winnie-the-Pooh notebook. I imagined they’d live out the race in my backpack and might lift me out of any lows. U just have to get through the pain with . . . poetry, Mum had written in an email that midnight, British time.