Читать книгу The Orchid Nursery - Louise Katz - Страница 22

I could die of thirst or be poisoned by the witch. So I do not answer, but sit quietly, trying to summon enough calm concentration to breathe in time with the pulses of pain that move through my arm and down my side, and to subdue the growing sick feeling in my belly.

She moves to the mantelpiece and takes down a caddy and measures tea into a saucepan, adding other powders from a jar. She adds water from a big black kettle and puts the saucepan on the range, then dis­appears into the adjoining room, which by the sounds of chinking crockery and running water, is probably a scullery.

I am alone with the beast, though it is now snoring like a great black boar by the hearth, where the heavy black kettle is set on its grid of metal. The rest of the room is unstable in the flickering firelight, its stone walls caulked with sludge that sprouts many small toadstools exuding a cool, dim light of their own so that there is no need for bulb or candle. There is a sleeping nook adjacent to the chimney, with a curtain of some coarse stuff painted crudely with red leaves and blue roses; it is only partly drawn and within I can see a narrow bed with yellow linen and a fat pillow under a small deep-silled window. In this main room there is a couch as well as our two chairs, and two tables, one before the fire, the other under another window on the other side of the room. Over the sound of her preparations emanating from the scullery her voice rambles on, and oh, my gut is churning …

‘Adolescent people are brimming with inexperience, ignorance. These qualities are not interesting at all, are merely a condition of youth, like acne. But I am interested in why you are here.’ Her head pops around the side of the door and her black eye winks. ‘I daresay you’ve had a shock – something very bad indeed must have happened to bring you to me!’ She disappears again then re-emerges with a tray in her arms, cups, a plate of bread and butter, radishes, salt and slices of some kind of cured meat, pink veined with white gristle. ‘Bloody nasty, I should say!’

‘I wanted—’

‘Oh, want, need, desire!’ She puts the tray down on the nearby table. ‘I know desire. It is the force behind everything worth doing. It motivates us and will eventually destroy us.’ She butters a piece of bread and halves a big radish. She places it on top of the bread with a strip of the fatty meat and places it on the arm of my chair. The scent assaults my already nauseated stomach. I swallow back my bile.

‘Desire is the eating place of the soul,’ she informs me, as she lights up a foully stinking cigar, and when she’s finished coughing, says, ‘It is like Oroborus, the ancient snake who perpetually swallows himself alive: our beginning and our end.’ She exhales a stream of acrid smoke and goggles her eyes at me so that the blue-whites show all around the dark brown irises. ‘Then we will go back and join our history, beneath the necrophiliac conifers with a stone at our feet. And the residue of our passion will live on in death, churning the earth in restless sleep, disturbing worms. Yes, I think the little worms will wriggle up to the surface, as do the new shoots, pale and greeny yellow and succulent, that feed the creatures, and so on and so forth and thus the end feeds the beginning, again and again. Nothing special. Yet entirely miraculous.’

Or similar grand words. I remember the snake and his name, and the earth and the worms, but some of her meaning is lost on me, as the unpleasant bodily sensations that have been with me since I crossed her threshold are by now occluding my wits. What has been unease and tightness in my gut has increased ten-fold as if curdled with acid, and the dryness of throat, pounding heart, cramping stomach, rising gorge now threaten to undo me utterly. Gathering what strength remains to me I push myself to my feet and make for the door. I kneel on the ground and throw up what little there has been inside me, and more; then, still racked by intestinal spasms, my bowels involuntarily void and again I dry-retch, and again, my convulsions more violent than I have ever experienced.

The pain is dreadful, yet less intense than the humiliation I feel shitting and retching the reeking filth from my poisoned body in the presence of the Hag, who squats by me holding my shoulders and, after the last paroxysm passes, wipes my mouth and my brow with the hem of her sleeve, then carefully gathers me into her arms and supports me back into the house.

I lay there in the witch’s bed for days, I don’t know how many, then more days, for after the sickness passed I was too weak to rise. I would hear her moving about her house, and sometimes she would be by my side, looking at me thoughtfully, smelling of grease and tobacco and nutmeg and ancient, unwashed (wo)Man. Sometimes the beast was there at the side of the bed, wondering when I would be fat enough to eat. And then she would be back, sponging my face and body, retying the bandage on my arm, then later spooning broth into me, and over and over again cleaning my mess. I awoke one night to find her holding my good hand. Hers was warm and dry, and roughly corded with the old burn scars. I was too weak to pull away. I often heard her voice, soft and low, and though I understood little, in my physical and moral debilitation I found I liked to hear her speak – not the words, but the tone, for the rhythms of her voice were seductive. Later, when I was closer to recovery, I made a point of ignoring what she was actually saying so that I might be forgiven the listening, partial as it was.