Читать книгу Pierre - Primula Bond - Страница 7

He has amazing eyelashes. Long, thick, and black. They fan out over his hollow cheeks when he’s asleep, which is most of the time. They’re like spider’s legs. And I mean that in a good way. I like spiders.

We’re forbidden to go into his room, which is precisely why I can’t resist. I mean, what’s a NO ENTRY sign and two muscle-bound bouncers barring a closed door if not a blatant invitation? That’s pure temptation. That’s an order just begging to be disobeyed. At least, it is to me.

The drugged stillness in there at first was absolute. And the whiteness. The white sheets. The pallor of his bruised, sleeping face. His arms are white, streaked with dried blood. The muscles are slack. In the first week or so his left leg was up in traction to treat the fractured femur, his bed crowded with pulleys and weights.

I wonder, when the poor guy occasionally wakes to a room with no colour in it except the redness of his own blood, if he thinks he’s dead?

I doubt he’s been aware of my little visits. He’s heavily sedated. He wouldn’t be able to flick away a fly if it landed on him. But poco a poco he’s swimming to the surface. Little by little, reluctantly or otherwise, that instinct for survival is kicking in.

After they removed the traction I sneaked in the back way as usual, through the open door from the garden to avoid his minders, and went to stand at the end of his bed. And his eyes opened. Those spidery eyelashes bristled, became a thorny protective hedge.

At first they seemed blank and unseeing, yet something was stirring beneath the surface.

They dropped shut again, but I know what I saw.

I’m not like Dr Venska, stalking the corridors in her tight pencil skirts and teetering stilettos, clutching her clipboard against her high, pointed breasts. She’s some sort of therapist. The others joke that it must be sex therapy, the amount of time she spends in his room. But the word on the ward is that Pierre Levi’s about as articulate as the Sphinx, and Dr Venska’s about as sexy as a stick of rock.

The notes she tosses into the filing tray after each unproductive session consist of just one word: unresponsive.

He may be unresponsive by day, but at night it’s a different story. I’ve heard his terrors, when you can hear his screams all the way down the corridor. They find him shouting or crying, wide-eyed, sweat drenching the bed as he recoils from something or someone who isn’t there.

So no, I’m no shrink. I’m not qualified to go around probing and analysing. But I do have a theory. I know that behind those beautiful black stubborn eyes lurks more than just pain and anger.

It’s fear.

After all, someone tried to kill him.