Oola. Brittany Newell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ you’re a movie star.” I instantly regretted this.

      She smiled and shrugged. “Or somehow less guilty than the rest of the states. Little do they know. I was raised near L.A., the shittiest place.”

      “Are you Scandinavian? Oo-la?”

      She laughed, opening her mouth completely. “No. I just had illiterate parents. And you?”

      “Only technically. I’m a New England mutt.”

      “A WASP?” She smiled in a way that seemed teasing.

      “Uh.” I spread my hands. “You caught me.”

      Tay had turned back to Lilith, taunting her with his clockface. “I’m not going to tell you,” I heard him say. “You have to guess.”

      Oola didn’t move. She wore an expression of wary amusement, smiling tiredly as if her surroundings didn’t quite make sense but she was game anyway. She was six feet tall.

      “So what brings you to London?” I asked, suddenly piquantly aware of how long it had been since I’d showered.

      “Oh, you know.” She waved her hands meaninglessly. She wore black tights, sneakers, and a sleeveless T-shirt three times her size, emblazoned with the words PLEASURE IS A WEAPON. “I’m a bit of a bum.”

      “A student?”

      “I was. I would have graduated this year, but I’m taking time off. To do what, I don’t know yet.” She laughed as if she’d had to say this many times before.

      “Have you been here before?”

      “Yeah. I came with a band, we went all over the place. But I was too young, too fucked up, to really do anything.” The mental image of her puking in a bucket, wearing band merchandise, was oddly arousing. “So I thought I’d come back, as, like, a real person. I flew to Suffolk on a grant, but the money dried up and now I’m just … waiting.”

      “What did you study?”

      “Music. Like I said, I’m a bum.”

      “Is that how you know Tay?”

      “Sort of. We met at a museum. We sat down on the same bench in front of a gilded tub of Vaseline. It was called, uh, The Midas Touch. It had the artist’s fingerprints in it and the fingerprints of all the people he’d ever slept with. Tay whispered that it should be titled Greatest Hits. I said Slip ’n’ Slide. The rest is history.” She leaned in closer, eyes suddenly bright. “Tay’s the best. You know what I heard?”

      “What?”

      “His ex-girlfriend is in love with a wall.”

      I laughed out loud, too stunned to be self-conscious. “What do you mean?”

      “I think it was him. Or maybe one of his friends.” She pinned me with her eyes. “It wasn’t you, was it?”

      “God, I hope not.”

      She thought hard. “Her name was … Karma?”

      “I think I remember a Karma. The artist?”

      “Yeah!” Oola stepped closer, carried by the momentum of a story she knew to be juicy. “The performance artist. I guess she was sort of known for doing extreme shit, like breaking into tampon factories or only eating lipstick for a month or whatever. She started this new project where she visited a wall every single day. It was a random brick wall in an alley in Shoreditch, right behind a Chinese restaurant, the sketchy type with their curtains always drawn. This was way after she and Tay had split up. She brought flowers, magazines, chocolate, just like you would to someone in the hospital. She always brought a huge bottle of Fanta, I remember that. When someone asked why, she said it was the wall’s favorite. When people asked, like, What do you do there? she said they hung out. Sometimes she brought an old boom box and they danced. For slow songs, she leaned her back against the wall and shifted her weight from foot to foot. From afar, she looked like someone waiting for the bus. It’s easy to picture, isn’t it?”

      I nodded.

      “This goes on for months, almost a year, until eventually people realize this isn’t an art project. She is just literally, simply, in love with her wall. Someone told the couple who owned the Chinese place that she was building a shrine to her dead brother, so they left her alone. Besides, their restaurant was almost certainly a front. She was the only person who ever went there, and all she ever got was a pound of white rice, uncooked, which she sprinkled on the cobblestones in some sort of, I don’t know, sexual ritual. A wedding, maybe.”

      “That’s sort of sweet.”

      “I know. She was a tyrant about graffiti, scrubbing it off with an electric toothbrush. It almost ended when she assaulted a drunk dude for pissing on it. And eventually she named it. Are you ready for the name?”

      “I’m ready.”

      “Wallis.”

      “Come on.”

      She raised her open palms in oath. My stomach dropped; she didn’t shave her armpits. Two hazy autumn suns, slightly moist, pointed right at me. To be frank, I felt spotlighted. She went on, unawares. “Karma was devoted. At first her friends tried to convince her out of it, but when they realized that she was in deep, they had to accept it. At least he couldn’t hurt her. They chose not to ask about sex. In my experience, that’s not so different from the way girls handle their friends dating douchebags or, like, libertarians. Just don’t ask about the sex. A few girls went with her one time and met Wallis; they all had a tea party on top of a dumpster. It seemed like a forever deal, until, all of a sudden, she fell in love with a bridge.”

      “You’re lying.”

      “I’m not! She fell in love with the Millennium Bridge.”

      “So she and Wallis broke up?”

      “She, like, cheated on him. As I understand it, he broke up with her.”

      I shook my head in amazement. “Just Tay’s type. Petite and unstable.”

      Oola fingered the rim of her glass. “Do you think it’s that weird?”

      “I’m not sure. Do you?”

      She shrugged. “I think I understand it. It’s like kids with their teddy bears, or, like, certain women with horses. Dads with gadgets. OK, in comparison, a wall is a bit, I don’t know, stark, but at least it’s dependable. In fact, it’s the most stable thing she could have done. To fall in love with something that can’t move, ha-ha. Her only true problem, I think, was that they looked weird together. Do you know, on sunny days, she would press her cheek against the warmed-up bricks. I’ve done that before.”

      “I’ve done that too.”

      “Apparently she would walk up and down the alley for hours, trailing her fingers over every brick. Stroking Wallis’s face. She kept her nails trimmed for this reason. Her friends said that when she came home, her fingers would be bleeding.”

      “Wow.”

СКАЧАТЬ