Читать книгу Five Sites, Five Stages: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff - Lisa McInerney - Страница 7
ОглавлениеMarket stall
‘ARE YOU SURE NOW?’ Cass’s brother asked. ‘Is that the lot, like? Is that the lot?’
‘Yes, that’s the lot,’ Heidi said down the phone. ‘To my knowledge.’ She did not want it assumed that she had control over Cass, or that she might know exactly what Cass was doing and when, given a specific time or scenario, given a mood or a string of evocative words. The street was throbbing, but she looked at her fingernails, the middle one now bald of the lemonade-coloured gel they’d chosen together – Heidi had been picking at it; they were, the pair of them, fiddlers and fidgeters – she brought her fist closer to her face as if needing to examine some new defect. ‘The second you know, let me know how she’s doing,’ she said to Cass’s brother, but he’d hung up. She wasn’t sure whether he had heard her begin to speak.
Around her there was much going on. There was a market at one end of the street, stalls selling crêpes or flat caps or posh cheese, people jammed up together, parting with their money in one way or another. There was a busker not far from her, forcing a folk version of a nightclub song. There were teenagers chirruping. It was an average day, and Heidi was chastised by it. Nothing catastrophic happened on days like this. Catastrophe would have the day bend for it, catastrophe would be insistently perceptible. The manner of catastrophe was this: it would not be trivialised by the paths walked by others or the air breathed by the oblivious. Those oblivious people would have looked to her like fiends or mutants, or at least the lines of their bodies would have shivered and warped. All objects would have seemed darker, even given that the sky was dark for July, heavy and close. Her knees would have buckled, she would have involuntarily howled.
As it was, she walked down to the market.
‘What do we have here?’ she murmured. She picked up a clunky pendant on a leather cord and was set upon by the stall-keeper.
‘It’s lovely, isn’t it?’ the stall-keeper said. ‘That one.’
‘Aren’t they all?’ she replied – dulled derision and downcast eyes.
She was not searching for a get-well gift here. Here, there was just tat and lavish tuck, neither of which Cass appreciated, having a neat mind and a modest appetite. But she appreciated derision, especially of the subtle kind – their own language of little ironies and aversions. ‘How tacky,’ Heidi would say of people holding hands. ‘I’m in love with love.’ ‘It’s morbid,’ Heidi would say of a bright print or a carousel. ‘We’re clawing away from the grave as if we think that’s achievable.’ ‘Excruciating,’ Heidi would say of sushi and pomegranate and salted caramel. ‘Well isn’t that fucking droll,’ Heidi would say of students collecting signatures for petitions. ‘I really hope you die before me,’ Heidi would say to Cass. ‘I honestly don’t think you could cope with the separation if it was the other way around.’
