Читать книгу The Humans - Matt Haig - Страница 26

I ate my sandwich. Then I thought of something else.

‘Is that normal? To have just one. Child, I mean.’

‘It’s about the only thing that is, right now.’

She scratched a little bit at her hand. Just a tiny bit, but it still made me think of that woman, Zoë, at the mental hospital, with the scars on her arms and the violent boyfriends and the head full of philosophy.

There was a long silence. I was accustomed to silence, having lived alone most of my life, but somehow this silence was a different kind. It was the kind you needed to break.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘For the sandwich. I liked it. The bread, anyway.’

I didn’t honestly know why I said this, as I hadn’t enjoyed the sandwich. And yet, it was the first time in my life I had thanked anyone for anything.

She smiled. ‘Don’t get used to it, Emperor.’

And then she patted her hand on my chest, and rested it there. I noticed a shift in her eyebrows, and an extra crease arrive in her forehead.

‘That’s odd,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Your heart. It feels irregular. And like it’s hardly beating.’

She took her hand away. Stared at her husband for a moment as if he were a stranger. Which of course he was. I was. Stranger, indeed, than she could ever know. She looked worried, too, and there was a part of me that resented it, even as I knew fear – of all the emotions – was precisely what she should have been feeling at that moment in time.

‘I have to go to the supermarket,’ she told me. ‘We’ve got nothing in. Everything has gone off.’

‘Right,’ I said, wondering if I should allow this to happen. I supposed I had to. There was a special sequence to follow and the start of that sequence was at Fitzwilliam College, in Professor Andrew Martin’s office. If Isobel left the house, then I could leave the house too, without prompting any suspicion.

‘All right,’ I said.

‘But remember, you’ve got to stay in bed. Okay? Just stay in bed and watch television.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That is what I will do. I will stay in bed and watch television.’

She nodded, but her forehead remained creased. She left the room, and then she left the house. I got out of bed and stubbed my toe on the doorframe. It hurt. That wasn’t weird in itself, I suppose. The weird thing was, it stayed hurting. Not a severe pain. I had only stubbed my toe, after all – but it was a pain which wasn’t being fixed. Or not until I walked out of the room and on to the landing, then it faded and disappeared with suspicious speed. Puzzled I walked back into the bedroom. The pain increased the closer I got to the television, where a woman was talking about the weather, making predictions. I switched the television off and the ache in the toe immediately disappeared. Strange. The signals must have interfered with the gifts, the technology I had inside my left hand.

I left the room, vowing in times of crisis never to be anywhere near a television.

I went downstairs. There were lots of rooms here. In the kitchen, there was a creature sleeping in a basket. It had four legs and its body was entirely covered with brown-and-white hair. This was a dog. A male. He stayed lying there with his eyes closed but growled when I entered the room.

I was looking for a computer but there was no computer in the kitchen. I went into another room, a square room at the back of the house which I would soon learn was the ‘sitting room’, though most human rooms were sitting rooms if the truth be told. There was a computer here, and a radio. I switched the radio on first. A man was talking about the films of another man called Werner Herzog. I punched the wall and my fist hurt, but when I switched off the radio it stopped hurting. Not just televisions, then.

The computer was primitive. It had the words ‘MacBook Pro’ on it, and a keypad full of letters and numbers, and a lot of arrows pointing in every possible direction. It seemed like a metaphor for human existence.

A minute or so later and I was accessing it, searching emails and documents, finding nothing on the Riemann hypothesis. I accessed the Internet – the prime source for information here. News of what Professor Andrew Martin had proved was nowhere to be found, though details of how to get to Fitzwilliam College were easy to access.

Memorising them, I took the largest batch of keys on the chest in the hallway and then left the house.