Читать книгу Strangers - Rob Taylor - Страница 12

We snap out our chopsticks and talk about the weather. After a lull I start in about the Lake Vostok project in Antarctica and how it took them over twenty years to drill down to the surface of the lake, four thousand metres under the ice. That’s interesting, she says. Then the waiter arrives with our food. She mangles her California roll and I burn the roof of my mouth on my deep-fried tofu. Eventually she lays her chopsticks down across her bento box and tells me that her friend’s doing better, though the cancer is still killing her. She’s so skinny now but she bought herself a new wardrobe and can drive her car, so it’s not all that bad yet. That’s good to hear, I say. The lake is almost as large as Lake Ontario, I add, and it’s been trapped under ice for fifteen million years. Then we both say one or two things and somehow we end up talking about her parents, how her mom’s folks hated her father so much that he packed up the family and moved north to the mining town just to get away from that mess. The waiter comes around again with the green tea. Neither of us wants more, but we smile politely as he pours. Your dad would have liked the Lake Vostok project, I say. They set a record by drilling the world’s deepest ice core. That’s something, she says. The waiter brings the bill and she takes it before I get the chance. When he returns with the change it’s an awkward amount so I chip in a dollar for the tip. They fill the borehole with Freon and kerosene so it doesn’t freeze between drillings, almost sixty tons of the stuff so far. That doesn’t sound good, she says. No, I say, but they don’t think it will contaminate the lake because as soon as they break the surface, water will rush up the borehole and freeze, sealing out the chemicals. Well I hope so, she says, pulling on her jacket. On our way out we pass a table with a mother and three kids. All the kids have sticky rice in their hair or on their face but none of the four seems to mind. You should write a poem about that, she says. She’s never said anything like it before. About what, I ask. But she can’t hear me over the street noise and has already moved on to something else.