Читать книгу With My Body - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 31

When I go from home to home and see the sort of rule or misrule there, the countless evil influences, physical and spiritual, against which children have to struggle, I declare I often have to wonder that in the rising generation there should be any good men and women

Your bedroom is now the verandah at the back of the house with a roll-down canvas flap at night. It is not far away enough. You are no longer a part of the main house. It has not been done by pushing you out, it has been done by removal, by erasing everything that was secure and known in your past life. All the roaring absences now; the hidden photographs, the taken-down curtains, the painted-over marks of your mother’s on the kitchen door, as you stood up, grew tall, and then they stopped. Aged three years and eight months. The whole interior has become a ghost house to you; holding its breath for someone who will never come back. You still see it – searingly – as what it was. Not what it is now.

When it thunders in your back room you drop to the ground with your belly to the floorboards and hear the house talk through the rumbling in your skin. You smell the earth opening out to the rain, opening wide, drinking it up, wider and wider the ground opens out, every pore of it, and you smile and breathe it in deep.

No respite, but the bush.