Animals. Keith Ridgway
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Название: Animals
Автор: Keith Ridgway
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
isbn: 9780007405756
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The pen made it look like I had staged it, that I had put the pen down there to give the whole thing some scale. I took four photographs of the dead mouse beside the pen before I reached down, gingerly picked up the smeared pen, moved it, put it somewhere else, and took another seven photographs. That is all I can say that I remember. That I put the pen somewhere else. There I am, crouching in the street with a camera, documenting the death of a mouse, with my bag and the camera cover and my coat all getting in the way, and the badly designed lens cap swinging this and that way, and I picked up the pen because it made the scene look staged, and I put it somewhere else. I put the pen somewhere else. Even now, especially now, after all that has happened since, I find it hard to believe that my mind was so deflected, so absent, that I put the pen, the pen that had poked the mouse, the pen that had touched death – the death-stained pen – into my bag. But that, it seems, is exactly what I did.
Seven or eight more photographs. I think. About that. I took them as simply as I could, framing the dead mouse against the grey of the road, against the scattered blotches of faded yellow paint that went to form a double line. They look so clear, so solid, from a distance – those yellow lines. Up close though, they’re ruined. I filled the frame with the dead mouse. Then I zoomed out to lend more context. In one of the shots you can see the tip of my left shoe. Then I zoomed in as close as I could on the face, the claws, the limbs, the tail, the head, the snout, the eyes, the feet, the mouth, the whiskers. I documented fully the mouse in death. Perhaps it was by way of a compromise between my fear of strong memory and its associations – and my knowledge that the photograph subverts and undermines such memories. I wanted, I think, the least bad thing. The possibility of appropriate placement, of getting everything in perspective, eventually. That’s probably how we live.
Look at me. I met a dead mouse in the street. I stared at it. I prodded it with my pen. I called K. I photographed the mouse. I stared at it a little more. I glanced at my watch, and my shoulders rose and fell, and I went and had lunch with Michael.
Afterwards, after lunch, I passed that way again. I looked carefully, and in several places in case I was mistaken, but the mouse was gone.
That was it. That was how it started.
Rachel had called the night before to tell us that she was going to go to Poland. Apparently she’d had some strange sort of communication from an old school friend of her brother’s, and she wanted to investigate. She was pretty vague about it all, but sounded cheerful enough; excited that it’s happening yet again. I find it difficult to tell with Rachel though. K is better at identifying her humours. I think she fakes it with me sometimes – probably because she picks up on my frustration and unease about her, and particularly about her Max project. She’s an artist, I suppose. Well, actually, I don’t suppose it – she is an artist, of course she is. She works mostly with photography, but also with film and audio, and with longer-term projects in which she usually perpetrates some kind of deception and then documents what happens. In the past these have been fairly playful and quite fun. She spent a month last year telephoning random people from the phone book, greeting them by name and telling them that she’d just called up for a chat. She recorded the conversations. Most of them ended pretty abruptly with a Who the hell are you? kind of response. But a surprising number evolved into long dialogues, or monologues, some of them quite revealing. Rachel was never sure sometimes whether people believed they knew her, or didn’t care and talked anyway.
Hi there [xxxx], it’s Rachel. Just thought I’d call for a chat. How are you?
Her best-known project is the one that no one knows she’s responsible for. Until now, I suppose. It’s the Double-Decker Slasher rumour. She started that. It took off to such an extent that I think it freaked her out a bit. I suppose paranoia is a fairly easy thing to generate, or feed off, these days, and half the city seemed to believe at various times last year that people were having their throats cut on the upstairs of double-decker buses. It was an elaborate set-up and she did it really well. But it got out of hand and she has more or less disowned it now. Originally there had been plans for a show, but I haven’t heard anything about that lately. She has lots of eerie photographs taken on the upper decks of city buses, and she was going to show them, along with the fake evening newspaper front pages that she printed and left lying about all over the place, and she was going to record people’s accounts of the rumour, as they’d heard it, as they’d embellished it, and have the audio playing on a loop. But I think she’s shelved all that.
Upstairs only, on buses that are about half full – less than half full, a quarter full; the point is that they don’t have to be empty, and you sit upstairs, towards the back; you’re aware that there are people sitting behind you but you haven’t really paid them any attention, you haven’t picked them out at all – maybe one or two, probably one man, two women, something like that, two on the left, two on the right, and you sit down and you read your book or your newspaper or listen to your iPod or you look out the window, or you do all of these things because you can and the day is good and buses are nice, you can see the city go by, and then you feel something, at your shoulder maybe, what can that be, as if someone has brushed up against you, and then a sudden cold sensation across your throat, one that ends all the sounds that you’ve been hearing, one that seems to stop the world still, a thin abrupt clarity, as if you have plunged into cold water up to your neck, and you look down, you can’t seem to help looking down, and you are wearing, how strange, a flowing apron of dark blood, and you know in a slowing-down instant, in the last of your sight, out of nowhere, on such a nice day, that you’re dead.
I was one of the team on the Double-Decker Slasher project. I don’t know how many of us there were, but I’m not sure it was that many really. I was told to drop it into conversations, casually, precisely. I wasn’t allowed to give any details. I was to ask a question rather than impart information. Did you hear something about someone on a number 38 getting their throat cut? The other day? No? Well, I don’t know, I heard something, oh, maybe I heard it wrong, never mind. No more than that. And when I was with her, when we were in a pub or having lunch, or on a bus, we would have the conversation, and she was very good at lowering her voice in such a way that it would attract attention from people within eavesdropping range.
—I heard there was another slashing last weekend.
—You’re joking.
—No. The number 7. Some middle-aged woman. A passenger climbed the stairs and found her bleeding to death, throat cut from ear to ear, two people sitting three seats in front of her hadn’t heard a thing.
—Jesus.
—And the camera not working of course. And the conductor sitting downstairs reading the paper. Of course. It’s the third.
—My СКАЧАТЬ