Читать книгу The Book of Rapture - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 21

On a clear still night your neighbour, Ulla Ween, came around. A man of the book, flinty and devout. His house was a mile away. He was the only neighbour close. It was a Monday. He often popped in on a Monday for a meal; he lived by himself. He’d supervised your building work with heavy eyelids and weirdly bobbed hair and lips always wet. On this particular Monday Ulla Ween sat at your kitchen table and ate a meal as he always did then licked his plate clean which he never did, and placed it carefully down. He said you’d soon be informed that Salt Cottage belonged to someone else. With a peculiar smile on his face. Like he was trying to hold in the delight. You snorted a laugh. Motl stood. Because in an instant your neighbour had become someone else. He told you that it was a correcting of past iniquities. ‘Pardon?’ You laughed again, unsure, your face not getting the joke. Without another word he tucked the dinner plate under his arm and walked out, that peculiar smile still on his face. You stood in shock. Threw your own plate after him with more physical fury than you’d ever shown in your life. The china smashed and gravy dribbled down. You had finally got the joke.

‘That is a man completely untroubled by compassion,’ you declared as you wiped your hands of him smartly on your hips.

And from that evening onward the future darkened around you, you could all feel it contract. History was close on that night; the world was pushing against the windows, beating the glass with its hungry palms; wanting in. And in the early hours you slipped into Mouse’s bottom-bunk bed and curled your arm over him and burrowed into his lovely warmth. You need to do that whenever the thinking flurries in your head too much, when you can’t hook on to sleep no matter how hard you try and there’s only one thing guaranteed to work: your children. Only they can distract you enough, balm you down into it.

Now now now. Strapped to the guilt of what you did once.

The small man builds cages for everyone he knows.