Читать книгу In A Dark Wood - Marcel Moring, Shaun Whiteside - Страница 17

(Yes, he really hears that.)

It splashes in the newsreader’s face, between her eyes, and drips like a sagging blob of paint down her nose, her mouth, down along her throat.

It’s an epiphanic moment.

It’s the end of the news.

It’s what the creator must have felt when he said let there be light and there was too.

And while the liberating emptiness of the orgasm shoots through him,

outofhisbellybackthroughhisspinalcolumn

betweenhishoulderbladesthroughthebackofhishead

tohisbrain,

the frightening post-orgasmic chill fills him up and he sees in a single glance the smeared screen, himself (man, black suit, trousers round his ankles, a putty penis), the carpet with the worn patches where other men have stood, sat, God knows perhaps knelt like him, and the desolation of what he is and what his life has become.

He sits there like that for a few seconds and then pulls himself up, with one hand on the TV, his other hand holding his trousers up. In the depths of his chest a tulip of desperation sprouts, bursts and fades, all in the blink of an eye, as if it’s a time-lapse sequence from a film by David Attenborough. His head sags, his chin on his chest. He suppresses the raw scream that rises up in him and staggers to the bathroom.

And then there’s the steam, the water clattering down, his hair turning liquid, his skin, himself. Water, clear, clean. This is the moment when he’s empty and without thoughts. For a moment even without memories, without worries and fretting, and without the brilliant ideas for which he is famous and which make him so terribly tired. Just the water streaming over him and he a thing, yes, that’s what it feels like, as if he’s an object, a wall, a roof, a street, a clinker path beneath heavy trees as the first drips fall tapping on the roof of leaves and the downpour that then explodes spills through the foliage and turns the stones dark and gleaming, and while the water slithers down the gutters and washes over the pavement, over the thresholds of houses, into cellars, up stairs, among chairs and tables, armchairs come running and rolling, bobbing from the houses, the whole world is water, the treetops are little islands of dripping green above the surface, so he, Marcus, is flooded and vanished, something that is nothing and something that no longer matters.

He is, face raised into the needles of water from the shower, pure. Empty and pure. His fingers unwrap the greaseproof paper of a piece of hotel soap that imagines it smells of roses. He lets his big hands run with the tiny bar of soap along the slopes of his armpits, over the ridges of his pelvis, through the thicket of his crotch, the long journey down his legs to his feet and then back up again, his ribcage, back, arms, till finally, as if he hasn’t been standing long enough with his head thrown back in the falling water, his face.

Pure and clean as a whistle.

And at that moment, when the shower stream washes away the foam and rains down on his closed eyes, he sees very clearly, as if it was yesterday, as if they’ve only just met each other, and he hasn’t yet closed his heart and his face and his eyes, at that moment he sees Chaja disappearing into the packed Saturday morning shop, her black curly hair among the Saturday heads of the provincial shoppers. He stands in the Saturday sun, looks at the bare house-fronts and the Saturday air up there, clear and blue, as if it’s going to be a fine day in spite of everything.