Читать книгу The Humans - Matt Haig - Страница 20

I was told to go to the dining hall to eat. This was a terrible experience. For one thing, it was the first time I had been confronted with so many of their species in an enclosed area. Second, the smell. Of boiled carrot. Of pea. Of dead cow.

A cow is an Earth-dwelling animal, a domesticated and multipurpose ungulate, which humans treat as a one-stop shop for food, liquid refreshment, fertiliser and designer footwear. The humans farm it and cut its throat and then cut it up and package it and refrigerate it and sell it and cook it. By doing this, apparently they have earned the right to change its name to beef, which is the monosyllable furthest away from cow, because the last thing a human wants to think about when eating cow is an actual cow.

I didn’t care about cows. If it had been my assignment to kill a cow then I would have happily done so. But there was a leap to be made from not caring about someone to wanting to eat them. So I ate the vegetables. Or rather, I ate a single slice of boiled carrot. Nothing, I realised, could make you feel quite so homesick as eating disgusting, unfamiliar food. One slice was enough. More than enough. It was, in fact, far too much and it took me all my strength and concentration to battle that gag reflex and not throw up.

I sat on my own, at a table in the corner, beside a tall pot plant. The plant had broad, shining, rich green flat vascular organs known as leaves which evidently served a photosynthetic function. It looked exotic to me, but not appallingly so. Indeed, the plant looked rather pretty. For the first time I was looking at something here and not being troubled. But then I looked away from the plant, towards the noise, and all the humans classified as crazy. The ones for whom the ways of this world were beyond them. If I was ever going to relate to anyone on this planet, they were surely going to be in this room. And just as I was thinking this one of them came up to me. A girl with short pink hair, and a circular piece of silver through her nose (as if that region of the face needed more attention given to it), thin orange-pink scars on her arms, and a quiet, low voice that seemed to imply that every thought in her brain was a deadly secret. She was wearing a T-shirt. On the T-shirt were the words ‘Everything was beautiful (and nothing hurt)’. Her name was Zoë. She told me that straight away.