Читать книгу The Orchid Nursery - Louise Katz - Страница 13

Heh. Comic. How things turn out. It was just last week, after much wishing and loving and planning, that I’d sorted out what to do. I knew what I would do. I was certain. Good joke, that, and quite large. Cosmic.

One idiot girlie’s certainty in the face of absolute crushing fact of the world as it is. Oh, you’re sure of this are you? says the world that is shaped like a wall of water as big as anything ever was, as big as all space and time. Well, take this! And down crashes the wall. And what’s left of the small person with the loving and the hoping and the certain plan? Nothing. Not a splinter of bone, not a shred of flesh. Not the whisper of a notion of shredness. All washed away and nothing left but a lovely clean beach.

Only last week the guileless, hopeful Pearl, incubating her silly certainty and her careful plan, lay by the side of her lover. See her as she pushes back a damp lock from his eye with its pupil so large and black you can hardly see the blue. We’ve finished fucking and lie a muddled bundle of humanity corded together like mangrove roots under the thin skin of swampy water that is our sour-sweet sweat. I say, ‘Look at this map I found – no, never mind where just now, tell you later – we’ll follow the way that leads to the edge of the treeline, on the edge of the world, edge of Civilisation. A crossroad, a forest, all the way to Hagovel where Big River embraces the swamplands, rich in faeries, feys, and lil’im sprites. And from there I know it is not so far to the ocean, the clean, wide sea that goes on forever …’

A little stray slip of moon gets in to where we lie and I see his eyes are alive with the hope and the terror, as must mine be also. I say, ‘Anyone who is hated as much as the Hag has got to be our friend. Why else is everyone so frightened even by the thought of her? Got to be more to it. We’ll find out what it is.’

By the look on Asa’s face, which is now quite white, my audacity can blanch a Man’s soul. I wonder what it feels like to have one of those, a soul, blanchable or otherwise? Like this? Like I feel? Oh, haraamasur …

My infidelity has opened a chasm at my feet between what I always knew and what I have yet to discover. Between what was and what may be. I am terrified at my insolence and what it has done. Anything can happen now I have broken with the Lore, broken it in half and crushed it beneath my feet, and now I creep in my mind to the edge of the abyss and I peer over the lip at the end of the world, at the end of belief, and I see the bright and dark things within, flashes of possibility …

And then what happens?

On the night of the Day of Attainment – or not – MaOblat came to me. I was working alone in the garden where I’d been sent – a mild and pleasant punishment for some pettiness, my slapping of a dullard for some irritating inanity, as is usual – to work late under the arc of light from the watchtower. I was here a lot, I liked my ‘Solitary’. Alone amongst the rows of lettuce, turnip, silverbeet, their broad, dark leaves so thick and fleshy, lurid in the watch-light, I plucked the weeds that grew there, sly little stranglers. Then I saw her two feet in their brown felt slippers, all bulgy with aug-sockets for her useful appliances, her gizmos for dusting and brushing, for grabbing and grasping.

‘Pearl,’ she said in her crimple-crumpled little voice, her face bright and shiny as a septic carbuncle. At first I thought she’d reprimand me for having my dressless rucked up around my waist and my knees all muddy, but no … Instead, she smiled like one of those antediluvian fishes with bodies of leather and three rows of teeth. ‘Pearl,’ she said, her weak-tea eyes all wet in their dusty pouches, ‘You have been Chosen for Perfection. You have been graced.’

I did not ask for this!