Читать книгу The Favourite Game - Leonard Cohen - Страница 19

Many years later, telling all this, Breavman interrupted himself:

‘Shell, how many men know of those little scars in your earlobes? How many besides me, the original archaeologist of earlobes?’

‘Not as many as you think.’

‘I don’t mean the two or three or fifty that kissed them with their everyday lips. But in your fantasies, how many did something impossible with their mouths?’

‘Lawrence, please, we’re lying here together. You’re trying to spoil the night somehow.’

‘I’d say battalions.’

She did not reply and her silence removed her body from him a little distance.

‘Tell me some more about Bertha, Krantz and Lisa.’

‘Anything I tell you is an alibi for something else.’

‘Then let’s be quiet together.’

‘I saw Lisa before that time in the garage. We must have been five or six.’

Breavman stared at Shell and described Lisa’s sunny room, dense with expensive toys. Electric hobby-horse which rocked itself. Life-sized walking dolls. Nothing that didn’t squeak or light up when squeezed.

They hid in the shade of under-the-bed, their hands full of secrets and new smells, on the look-out for servants, watching the sun slide along the linoleum with the fairy tales cut in it.

The gigantic shoes of a housemaid paddled close by.

‘That’s lovely, Lawrence.’

‘But it’s a lie. It happened, but it’s a lie. Bertha’s Tree is a lie although she really fell out of it. That night after I fooled with my father’s fishing rods I sneaked into my parents’ room. They were both sleeping in their separate beds. There was a moon. They were both facing the ceiling and lying in the same position. I knew that if I shouted only one of them would wake up.’

‘Was that the night he died?’

‘It doesn’t matter how anything happens.’

He began to kiss her shoulders and face and although he was hurting her with his nails and teeth she didn’t protest.

‘Your body will never be familiar.’