Wonders of a Godless World. Andrew McGahan

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СКАЧАТЬ if the supposed delusion was proven real? After all, she genuinely could predict the weather. Everyone knew it.

      Ah yes, but there was a madman in one of the wards with an even rarer ability. He could read minds. If someone stood near him and thought of a colour, he could always guess which colour it was. Always. He was never wrong.

      But so what? It didn’t make him sane. The same man was incapable of feeding or dressing himself. He was a useless oddity, that was all. Perhaps the orphan herself was no better. Perhaps no one was, in the whole madhouse.

      

      The duke was a straight-backed old gentleman, and his delusion was that he owned the hospital, and that the staff were supposed to take orders from him, not the other way around. He thought he was a rich man. In fact, he claimed to own virtually the entire island, which was why the nurses had laughingly given him his nickname. In reality, though, he was only a poor man. No rich men ever came to the back wards.

      The orphan liked the duke very much, for he was always kind to her, and softly spoken. He had been permitted to live unsupervised in the crematorium for years, and she used to wonder why he was in hospital at all, for his madness seemed so benign. But then one day she heard that for the first decade of his confinement, he had been kept in a cell in the locked ward. He had then been considered the most violent and dangerous man on the premises. It was almost impossible to believe, looking at him now. He passed the bulk of his days merely wandering the grounds, or gently working in the gardens.

      The orphan too liked wandering the grounds. They were red and bare and dusty in the dry season, and red and bare and muddy in the wet, but still there was a kind of beauty in them. Occasionally she would walk with the duke, and it pleased her that he seemed to see the beauty too, if only through his dementia.

      Then there was the witch, who believed that she could cast magic spells. She was a bent old woman, and ugly, and most of her time was spent hunched over her collection of chicken bones, pronouncing curses or blessings upon the world. She wasn’t supposed to have the bones, the orphan knew, and now and then the nurses would confiscate her collection, but she always managed to forage more from the kitchen rubbish.

      But if it was only a matter of chicken bones and spells, the witch wouldn’t have been in hospital, let alone the back wards. The real problem was that long ago in the outside world, as a young woman, she had started to dig up human graves. Apparently, for her purposes, human bones were best. The authorities had committed her, and she had lived at the hospital ever since, nearly as long as the duke.

      Some of the staff believed she really did have powers, and went to her for charms. The orphan, however, knew full well there was no such thing as magic—there were only magic tricks. She’d seen magicians perform in the town square, and had always been able to detect the sleight of hand by which they achieved their marvels. So the old woman could glare and mutter and point bones and frighten people all she liked, it was only nonsense. In fact, it made the orphan laugh. And yet, sometimes, when she caught the witch’s eye, there was a sly sense of recognition between them, as if the witch knew what the orphan was thinking and laughed in return. That wasn’t so amusing.

      Next was the archangel. He was a young man, close to the orphan’s own age, and very handsome—striking even—if a little too thin. For the orphan though he was a far more alien figure than the duke or the witch. This was, partly, because his madness was so centred around the book he always carried.

      The orphan was wary of books. They embarrassed her, for the black marks on the paper conveyed nothing to her mind. Even children’s books, which she was told contained pretty things to look at, simple things, were impossible to decipher. She could never see the dogs or cats that were supposedly there, she saw only shapeless blobs—and anyway, how could a dog or a cat be flat on a page? Books were an ordeal.

      But to the archangel, his book was the most precious item in the world, even though it was worn and battered, its front cover missing, its many pages creased and greasy from where his fingers ran over the lines. The youth studied it perpetually. He prayed a lot too, on his knees. The orphan couldn’t quite grasp how prayer worked. There was a powerful being somewhere in the sky it seemed—a god—and other beings too, and prayer was how people talked to them. Even normal folk did it. Yet the orphan had searched the sky, many times, and never seen anyone up there.

      But that was an old puzzle, and unsolvable. Anyway, the young man wasn’t in hospital because of his prayer. He was there because, as a teenage boy, he had begun harming himself. He cut himself with knives. To the death almost. Suicidal, the authorities declared, and sent him to the back wards. Like the duke, he had been placed in the locked ward at first, but the suicide attempts had abated, and now, as long as he had his book, he was no threat to himself or to anyone. He was, indeed, angelic.

      He also had a very big penis, which the nurses liked to joke about. Sometimes they flirted with him, but he never noticed. The orphan didn’t fully understand the jokes, but she too rather fancied the archangel. And not just because he was so handsome. There was a hunger in him, she saw, a passion in the way he studied his book and in the way his lips moved when he prayed, that made something turn pleasantly in her stomach, imagining what those lips might be like on her own.

      But of course he never noticed the orphan any more than he noticed the nurses. Even if he ever did, what would he see? A fat, ugly girl, mopping the floor. No, she wasn’t a fool, there was no point dreaming about that.

      Lastly, there was the virgin. She was not much more than a girl, slender and slight, but the orphan found her the most intriguing crematorium inmate of all. There was an ethereal air about her. When she moved, she drifted. Languid. Indifferent to her surroundings. In fact, she barely seemed aware of her surroundings. She might have been blind, and deaf too. She never spoke, and if she was touched, she would turn away with an aloof displeasure, and shift carefully out of reach.

      And yet she wasn’t really blind or deaf, the orphan knew, because the virgin liked to watch television. There were two sets in the back wards. One was in the main dayroom, placed high on a wall, behind wire mesh, where it was yelled at (or occasionally pelted with food) by crowds of inmates. But the other was in the crematorium, in the little dayroom, where the virgin had it to herself. Whenever it was switched on, a dreamy light would come into her eyes and she would fold her long legs to sit on the floor in front of the screen. She could sit unmoving like that all day, watching.

      But if books were a riddle to the orphan, then television was an utter mystery. She knew that everyone else saw something fascinating on the screen, but all she ever saw were patterns of colour, randomly swirling. It didn’t matter how hard she tried. When she was very young, her mother had often left her alone in front of the television for hours on end. She had gazed at their little set until her head hurt, the flickering light teasing and promising her, eternally on the verge of becoming something…but invariably she’d had to look away, eyes aching, before she could see what it was.

      Nor could she understand the sounds a television set made. Or the sounds that came out of a radio. They could be hypnotic, those sounds, rising and falling like peculiar voices, or thumping with rhythms that matched the beat of her heart. But if there was meaning there, it eluded her. So it baffled the orphan greatly that the girl in the crematorium apparently saw and heard so much when watching TV, her eyes fixed, her head tilted in repose, her mouth open in a distant rapture.

      The staff called her the virgin out of mockery. There was her hatred of physical contact, for one thing. But it was also because of her only relative—an elderly grandmother who sometimes came to visit. The old woman would berate the girl endlessly for being such a disappointment and a burden. Oh, if the girl had been marriageable, the grandmother would declare to anyone nearby, it might have been different. Once, men had come СКАЧАТЬ