Pandora’s Box. Giselle Green
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Название: Pandora’s Box
Автор: Giselle Green
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
isbn: 9780007329007
isbn:
‘No!’ Shelley comes back vehemently. Then she recovers herself and smiles. ‘I just want some special time with you. While we still can, you understand?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘And Dad won’t mind?’
Bill, of course, will have to be consulted. He always likes to be included in whatever plans are made for Shelley, and that’s fair enough. But my ex-husband has his new wife and their young child to think about these days, doesn’t he?
‘I’ll square it with your dad,’ I tell her decisively. And Daniel will have to be managed somehow because he’ll no doubt want to be in on it too. But then Daniel has his scout camp to look forward to, so why shouldn’t Shelley have her special time?
‘Don’t you wonder when it happens?’ Shelley is still thoughtful, looking at the box. ‘When do all those precious things become…just a pile of old junk?’
It happens when we’re not looking, I think. At the same time that those crows’ feet appear, which we tell ourselves will disappear when we get a good night’s sleep. When our dress size creeps up from a ten to a twelve and then a fourteen. When we’re not looking.
‘It happens when we cease to care,’ I tell her.
‘But if you don’t care,’ she whispers, ‘why were you so upset that Granny Panny sent it all on to you?’
‘I’m not…’ I begin, but there is little point in lying to Shelley. I edge over to the kitchen sink and throw the dregs of my coffee away. ‘Maybe you have never heard the story of Pandora’s Box?’ I say to her at last. ‘In Greek myth, Pandora was a beautiful and foolish woman who, out of insatiable curiosity, opened a box that she had been warned she should never open. The minute she opened it, out flew all the spites: Old Age, Sickness, Envy, Disloyalty, Deceit…in short, everything that makes mankind miserable.’ I trail off.
‘Come on, Mum. This isn’t a magical box. It isn’t going to release a load of nasty stuff into the air just because we’ve opened it up to look inside. You don’t really believe that, do you?’
‘Of course not literally,’ I say. A shiver goes through me then. I’m not superstitious. I’m not really going to be opening up the past just because we’ve opened up that box, now, am I? I was never allowed to look inside Pandora’s private box when we were kids, that’s all. Old habits die hard, and all that.
‘I think we should put it away now,’ I say. Shelley opens her mouth to protest but I add, ‘Maybe I’m just scared that there’ll be something in there I don’t want to see.’
My daughter nods wisely. She doesn’t ask me what this thing might be. Instead, she comments, ‘I have heard the story of what was Pandora’s Box, Mum, and you’ve left one of them out.’
‘And what might that be?’ I arch my brows. A ray of sloping sunshine appears for a moment across the kitchen worktop, making long shadows of our coffee cups. Outside, the squally wind is chasing the clouds across the canvas of the sky, opening up small patches of blue.
‘Hope,’ she says simply. ‘You’ve left out Hope.’
I have decided that when dawn breaks on my fifteenth birthday, that is the last day I will ever spend on this planet.
I am not depressed and I am not angry with my parents.
I am not insane, neither am I frightened of Death.
I am frightened of dying, however, in the way that I inevitably will if I don’t take matters into my own hands. I meant what I said to my mum about hope, though. I do have hope. But it’s for the others who are going to be left behind after me, that’s all.
I have a poster-sized photograph of me and Daniel in my bedroom. It’s one of my favourites of the two of us and it was taken nearly ten years ago because in it I’m five and Daniel is just one. It’s an ‘action’ shot. We’re both in our swimsuits on this huge empty beach in Cornwall. I’m jumping off a rock with my eyes closed and my arms in the air. I love the smile on my face. Whenever I look at that photo I remember what it must have felt like to be free. We called that our ‘jumping rock’. It seemed so huge to me then, but we went back to Summer Bay three years ago and the rock was still there in the same place, same green algae and footholds all over it, jutting out of the sand at the head of the beach and, guess what…it had shrunk!
Well of course it hadn’t really shrunk. The rest of the world—including us—had just got bigger. Daniel kept jumping off it, showing off, because in my photo he’s just a baby sitting on the bottom waiting patiently for me to jump and here was his chance to take on a more active role. I wasn’t completely confined to Bessie—that’s my wheelchair—three years ago, but neither were my legs strong enough to jump. This time I was the one sitting on the sand waiting, so Mum took a photo of that and Daniel’s got it on his wall, and it kind of evens up the balance of power as far as he’s concerned.
He’s like Mum there, see. They both have this immaculate sense of fairness and justice about things. I may only be fourteen but I know damn well that life isn’t fair. Maybe it’s genetic or something, I don’t know, but some people never seem to work that one out. That’s Mum’s fatal flaw; that’s how I’ll get her to come round to my way of thinking in the end. You’ll see.
Anyhow, this photo of the last time I felt really free, it’s given me the idea of how I want it to be on my last day.
I have decided that I will go down to Summer Bay in Cornwall and I will jump off a cliff, and that way, for those last few moments of my life, I’ll be flying. I won’t die in my bed all shrivelled up and cold as my limbs finally atrophy to the completely withered stage. I’ll be flying through the sunshine. It’ll be a hot, peaceful, blue-skied day. We’ll do it in the early morning—I was born at 6 a.m.—so there’ll be no footprints in the sand. The sea will have wiped everything clean from the night before. There will be no marks there before I make my mark.
I’m not bothered about the impact. It will be so quick I just won’t feel it. I’m focusing on just that one moment when I go over the edge. I’ll be like a white bird—a seagull—twinkling in the sunshine. I’ll feel the warm air rushing up through my hair and I’ll be…well, I’ll be released.
I’ve struggled with this whole plan for a while because I was worried that I might be being a bit, well…selfish. Everybody else is going to suffer and I hate the thought of that. Then I think—hell, they are going to suffer anyway. This way we’ll just get it over and done with. A long, protracted death with every vein stuffed with needles, tubes down my throat to aid breathing when the lungs cave in and a tiny bump under the bedsheets where my shrivelled legs should go is even worse.
I haven’t forgotten Miriam. One day she was just like me—she was okay enough, with the same disease, СКАЧАТЬ