Читать книгу Clear: A Transparent Novel - Nicola Barker - Страница 14

Many Outsiders come to eat. It stops them from being bored, it gives them something to toss (or to think about tossing), it keeps their hands busy, and it’s an explicit slight to the High and Hungry One. To come here and eat is the number one indicator of real hostility (they say the smell of fried onions from the vans has been driving the Illusionist almost wild with frustration).

It’s a curious fact, but I often see packs of women in late middle age standing around and devouring fast food with a far greater sense of malicious gusto than almost anybody else from any other sex/age group (apart from the schoolboys – but then these testosterone-fuelled imps are a law unto themselves).

These aren’t old slags – uh-uh – but polite-seeming women (Matrons. Mothers. Grandmothers). The sorts of people who would normally not even dream of consuming a hot dog (let alone in public, and from some shonky old van), but who come down here and queue and pay and and scoff with a real sense of vindictive glee. Stand and eat and smirk. (‘Oh my God, Jemima! You’ve got an awful slick of chilli sauce on your pashmina. Lucky I’ve got a handy pack of Wet-Ones in my bag…’)

‘We are London’s mothers,’ their smug, munching faces seem to announce, ‘and while our fundamental instincts are to provide and to nurture, in your particular case we simply don’t care. You’re a stranger. A nothing. We despise what you’re doing, what you’re attempting to do, what you represent. We despise your Art, your Magic, your deceit, your pretension. We despise what you are.’

I read (in some random newspaper article a while back) about how Blaine lost his own mother when he was 21. And I might be going out on a limb, here, but I can’t help wondering whether this wholesale matronly rejection might not really sting that lonely magician a little (somewhere).

Well get me, coming over all empathetic, eh?!