Читать книгу The Information Officer - Mark Mills - Страница 8

He lay stretched out on the mattress, naked, staring at the ceiling, the dancing shadows thrown by the small pepper-tin lamp.

He raised his arm and examined it in the flickering light, flexing his elbow, his wrist, his fingers, enjoying the silent articulation of the joints, the play of muscle and sinew beneath the skin.

He was proud of his hands. Men didn’t notice hands. Women did. His mother had. She had always praised him for his hands. Then again, kind words came easily to her, maybe too easily for the compliments to have any real value. She scattered them about her like a farmer spreading seed from a sack.

He saw her now as a young woman: the blue of her wide-set eyes, the arched eyebrows, dark and dense, which she refused to pluck as other women did because Father liked them just the way they were. Or so he said.

My, you’re looking handsome today.

I think that’s the best I’ve ever heard you play the piano.

The best day of my life? When I gave birth to you.

You’re the best boy in the world.

She came from parents with low intellectual horizons and she used words like ‘best’ a lot.

Maybe that’s what lay at the heart of everything. She had never felt worthy of the world in which she found herself, not worthy of the man who had taken her by the hand and led her into Eden. ‘See all this? This is my world, but now it is yours too.’

But Eden didn’t come cheap, she must have learned that early on, and she had chosen to repay cruelty with kindness. She was known for her kindness. It was what defined her in the eyes of others. No one was unworthy of her selfless ministrations.

He suspected now that some baser urge lay behind her behaviour: an instinct for survival. How could her husband possibly harm such a kind and decent person, such a good wife?

It hadn’t worked, but she had kept the faith. It was hard to respect her for it, but at least it showed a certain determination.

‘You’re the best boy in the world.’

He saw her now, ruffling his hair, smiling warmly down at him, her prominent incisors, the small white scar on her lower lip from the time Father had struck her with a shoe. And he saw what she was doing: one person looking to provide the love of two. The intentions had been good, if ultimately counter-productive. The more she had smothered him with maternal affection, the more Father had felt the need to counteract her ‘damned molly-coddling’ of him.

It was strange that she had never stopped heaping praise upon all and sundry, even after the accident, when there was no longer any need to do so. He also found it strange that she had never taken tweezers to those unruly eyebrows when she must surely have wanted to, when at last she could.

That’s what annoyed him most, he realized—that even when Father was gone, he had managed to live on in her.

He lowered his arm to the mattress and smiled at this thought, a smile of pleasant surprise. When was the last time he had cared enough about anything to be annoyed by it?

It made him feel almost human.