Carnivore: The most controversial debut literary thriller of 2017. Jonathan Lyon

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ why are you crying?’

      ‘Your wounds make me sad,’ she said – with something closer to remorse than she’d managed in the car earlier. ‘They’re a failing, if I’m your mother.’

      ‘Then don’t be my mother,’ I said, though I was pleased by her veiled confession –that she’d known in advance I’d be whipped by her client.

      ‘You asked me to be your mother!’ she shouted.

      ‘I asked because you needed me to ask.’

      ‘So you can have feelings! But they’re not enough – you never asked me why I needed it.’

      ‘It was obvious – you needed a substitute son, I needed a substitute mother.’

      ‘You don’t know it all,’ she sobbed. ‘I was too young. I was fifteen. Did you know that? Yeah – I ain’t even that old! I had him five years but then I… I weren’t up to it, was I? I failed. My mum hated me, just because she spent all her time thinking what life would be like without kids. And I didn’t want that for me. I tried it but I didn’t want it. I couldn’t take the tasks that never end. She said she felt destroyed – destroyed as a woman. And I felt like that till I got myself back. I couldn’t touch nobody for years. My mum said I made her feel like a nobody. And it was the same with me when I had my kid. My body weren’t for me and I hated it. So I ended it, didn’t I? I tried to put him in a fucking orphanage – but his dad got custody and they only let me see him twice a year. And I couldn’t bear it, so I saw him less. And now he hates me. Do you know what I mean? My son fucking hates me! That’s why I need you. I need a son that doesn’t hate me.’

      She lurched forwards tearfully to stroke my face. I pulled away. A reddish flash – perhaps a silent ambulance passing through the street below – got caught in my eye, and I saw a huge fish leaping through the air between us, like a salmon up a waterfall – until it reached the window, and leapt out into the red of the night. Dawn sat back into the table with an expression of opiated wonder – perhaps having had the same vision as me.

      ‘It’s your turn,’ she said. ‘You’re supposed to balance me out. What happened to your mother? Why’d you need me?’

      ‘I’ve told you. When I was eleven my dad shot my mum then shot himself. I found the bodies. I had an older sister, but she died when I was six.’

      ‘Maybe. Maybe I believe you. But you lie about who you want to be, don’t you? You lie so people show themselves to you. I know you think I’m stupid – and I am stupid compared to you, and even stupider now that you got me this bump on my head – but it’s fine, just because I don’t have an education to wear on my sleeve.’ She lifted her hands to stop me interrupting. ‘Even if you gave that education to yourself, sweetheart, but still, for all you want to twist me around – I understand you more than you think I do. And that’s why you like me. You like me because you can’t manipulate me.’

      ‘I can manipulate you.’

      She laughed. ‘Yeah but you can’t control me completely. You can’t predict everything. That’s what you need me for.’

      ‘And why was now the time for this little soliloquy?’

      ‘Because life’s about to happen to us! I want you to know what I know. Maybe I like you because you like lies more than people.’

      ‘I like lies that get people to tell me their secrets,’ I said. ‘But also, my lies are confessions, in a way. Lies are fantasies – and fantasies reveal you much more nakedly than facts.’

      ‘Go on then.’

      ‘Stories that aren’t biographically true can still be true – if they reveal something about the teller’s psychology. They are psychologically true. They show what I want you to believe about me. Lies are not as simple as inaccuracies. A lie, as an evasion or a complication, is still a revelation of character – it’s a slanted truth. If I told you I was trampled by a horse when I was fifteen, and the trauma of that incident is the reason why I am now inert and deceitful and constantly in pain – you would learn something true about me. It may not have literally happened, but it gives you an image by which to understand me. Rather than listing diagnoses – like fibromyalgia or immune dysfunction or dysautonomia or insomnia or Lyme disease or myalgic encephalomyelitis or even just poverty – that all only speak to the surface of what I am, I give you instead a metaphor, of a trampling horse. And by that metaphor you comprehend me beyond facts. It wasn’t literally true – it was psychologically true. Lies are insights into the liar, if you read them right.’

      ‘So when you tell people about me, I’m going to be a horse?’

      ‘No, you’ll be a blue-ringed octopus. A many-limbed entanglement, overbearing, toxic, and drowning.’

      ‘You’re a charmer.’

      ‘I have to go,’ I said.

      Worry resurfaced in her face. ‘Let me drive you there.’

      ‘You can’t drive like this. And I want to be cold for a while.’

      ‘Please don’t walk there.’

      ‘Fuck off.’

      ‘It’s dangerous,’ she said.

      ‘I’ll see you at the Rockway, ok? Do I get a key?’

      ‘Yeah, course you do sweetheart.’

      She removed a key ring from her pocket and put it into mine. She hugged me, trembling as though suppressing an apology or a warning – and waved me away with defeat in her eyes.

      I left, disorientated, but impressed – as though she’d managed some master manipulation that I could barely understand.

6.

      I strode through unfamiliar streets, my mind widening into the night’s intimacy. The space between the terraced houses had a presence I called ‘indisclosure’: the active sense of a city withholding its meanings. And as I said the word to myself, its sound gained the taste of cotton candy – a too-sweet taste, though I kept repeating it anyway – indisclosure, indisclosure, indisclosure.

      The houses had put their wheelie-bins out in the street – for tomorrow’s collection – and they reminded me of a dream I used to have, of waking up inside a black plastic bag, in a dustbin – and feeling content there, waiting for the truck to come and take me away – from the pain I felt then, and still felt now.

      Tonight that pain came as a nest of tarantulas – dressed in the smeared aprons of butchers, washing their cleavers in my blood, and promenading along my muscles like avenues in an orchard.

      I walked down a bike path to a canal. The wind quickened in its confinement here, so I walked faster, fingering the key in my pocket.

      I imagined the wind coming from the old Deptford dockyard, and carrying with it the sighs of sailors who’d left from there and died at sea, younger than me, as long as half a millennium ago – when the docks had been the cradle of a navy that plundered the whole world. And in this wind, in its ghosts, was a reminder that London was still growing from the profits of that plunder.

      But СКАЧАТЬ