The Female of the Species. Lionel Shriver

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      “Oh, absolutely.”

      Charles smiled and added wryly, “Of course, it’s just shy of voodoo. I’ve been here too long.” He looked fondly down at the scene, wiping some dust off the gymnasium roof. “I always liked miniatures, even as a kid. I liked balsa airplanes and Erector sets. I had a terrific model train, with lights inside the caboose—”

      “I bet you spent whole afternoons wrecking it to pieces.”

      “How did you guess? And I liked to put little signalmen on the tracks and run them over.”

      “I suppose the nice thing about miniatures is that they make you feel so big.”

      Charles turned to Gray and looked at her hard. “Have you always been like this?”

      “Like what?”

      “Running a fellow down all the time. Why don’t you give a guy a break?”

      “It doesn’t seem to me that you need a break.”

      “Why the hell not? Who the hell doesn’t?”

      “Any man with a thousand loyal fans outside his door.”

      Charles waved his hand in dismissal. “Yeah. A thousand of my closest friends.” He tapped the arm of his chair and stared at his models. “You know, I’ll tell you,” he began. “The funny thing is—” He stopped. He closed his mouth abruptly.

      “What.”

      Charles sat.

      “What is the funny thing?”

      Charles licked his lips, and went on reluctantly. “When that feeling … the way you feel around these models. The little houses. The little people. The way you look down on them. Put them places. When—”

      “What?”

      “When you walk outside to the regular-size place? And it’s no different. That’s what funny. When you’re around life-size shit and it all still feels like—toys.” Charles couldn’t look Gray in the eye. “Animals seem stuffed. People seem like dolls. My own house looks like the station in my train set. With spikes around it. Like Popsicle sticks.” Charles cleared his throat and raised his eyebrows, looking up at Gray with an indefinite smile, as if maybe he was pulling her leg. He laughed an unsettling little laugh. “You are here, aren’t you? Say something.”

      “Something,” said Gray dully.

      “An old kid’s joke. Not very helpful. You’re supposed to say something that makes me feel normal-sized. In the big village. With the actual people.”

      “Isn’t that the trouble? That you’re not sure they’re actual people?”

      Charles stood up. “I don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.” Charles rang a homemade bell; its clacker scrabbled in the tin. A native appeared below, by the stilts of the cabin. Charles ordered dinner—with one more look at Gray to make sure she was still there—for two.

      At the end of the meal, roasted game with mangoes and banana, Charles rang his dented tin bell and the native climbed up to his doorway to take the plates away. Once the servant had climbed back down, Charles pulled the ladder up and set it against the outside wall. Charles invited Gray to his veranda, which looked out on the cliffs. He lit an oil lantern on the porch. Gray climbed into a hammock and stared up; the stars were brighter and more numerous than she’d ever seen. She felt peculiarly content. When she glanced down, Gray noticed that the sides of the porch were covered with long, sharpened wooden spikes. Charles explained, “They help me sleep nights.”

      Corgie himself leaned back in a broad cane armchair, and they both sipped honey wine. Smoke rose from the manyattas on either side, and the lantern, which burned animal fat, gave off a meaty smell, like a barbecue. The hoot of night birds echoed between the cliffs. Gray relaxed into the netting of her hammock; it creaked gently when she moved. The wine was sweet and potent. The flame flickered beside Charles Corgie and lit his profile as he stared off into the black bush. He breathed deeply and held the wine in his mouth a long time before swallowing. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

      “What’s your name?” he asked at last. “Your first name.”

      “Gray.”

      “Soft, for you.”

      “It strikes most people as dour.”

      “No, soft. Gentle.”

      “That’s surprising?”

      Charles reached over and rapped against her outstretched leg with his knuckles. “Hear that? Bong, bong, bong. That’s what it’s like when you knock against the side of a tank.” He went back to staring out into the forest. Gray stared, too. The foliage pulsed as her eyes fought to focus, to pick up any object however slight. The trees bloomed on the edges in explosions of black. There’s nothing like African darkness. It eats your eyes.

      “Are you insulting me?” asked Gray.

      “I’m not sure.”

      Gray decided to change the subject. “I can’t believe you haven’t asked me about the war. Don’t you care what happened?”

      “Kaiser—I left.”

      “It’s over.”

      “You don’t say. Who won?”

      “I don’t know if you’ll be disappointed or not. Whose side were you on?”

      Charles considered, leaning farther back in his chair and setting his boots up on the railing. “Adolf isn’t my style. I don’t like the way he moves, know what I mean? The guy’s too excitable.”

      “And maybe you didn’t like like the way his uniform was tailored.”

      “Actually,” said Charles, looking over at her with his black eyes gleaming quietly under the looming ridge of his brow, “the tie—with the shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck—I prefer a dictator with an open collar.”

      “Clearly,” said Gray. Charles’s own shirt was unbuttoned to the middle of his chest, where the hair was thick and black like his eyes, and gleamed just as defiantly in the lantern light, with drops of honey wine.

      “You did use the past tense,” Charles observed.

      “Adolf isn’t that excitable anymore.”

      “And Benito? Hirohito?” Gray shook her head. Charles shrugged. “Just as well. Me, I’m a Napoleon man.”

      “Why’s that?”

      “Those losers wouldn’t know what to do with a joint once they’d got hold of it. Bonaparte had plans. I liked his projects. But that slouch Speer built some nasty, hulking places. What a no-talent. Everything he put together looked like a goddamned morgue.”

      Charles pulled out a packet and rolled himself a cigarette in a leaf, quickly and expertly into a long, tight spleef. “Tobacco ran out first СКАЧАТЬ