Modern Gods. Nick Laird

Чтение книги онлайн.

       CHAPTER 3

      The problem with zopiclone was it launched you into the ocean of sleep handily enough, but subsequently it tossed you up on the beach of 3:11 a.m., wide awake, spectacularly marooned. You came to with a jolt, alert, your mind already mid-churn.

      So here we are again, the Voice said to Judith. Just you and me. Us two. Us twosome. Us all alonesome. Us gruesome duo. How do you do, so?

      The vast hulk of Kenneth beside her whistled serenely, steadily steaming across his own deep.

      The Voice said, You know, you never should have bought a memory foam mattress. It makes you so hot. Like lying in a slice of white bread. And you can never admit this now, of course, since it was your idea to buy it. Not just your idea. Your insistence. Nothing else would do. Oh no.

      The blinds were still black but would start edging closer soon to gray, then a kind of gray-green, then forest green, deciduous green, the green of well-fed grass, of grass that grows on graves.

      It was impossible not to imagine the worst at 3:11 a.m.

      What did Theresa say?

      Allow the feeling in, experience it, and let it go again. Let it move on. Let it float past.

      The Voice said, Do you think little Michael will remember you? Sure, how could he? What age will he be when you go? You’ll be a kind of misty presence in his memory, at best, and maybe video or pictures will remind him, maybe. But you won’t be reading books to him, you won’t be watching him at football matches, you won’t be seeing him put on gang shows with the scouts …

      The Voice would not shut up. It would not be outwitted or shouted down. You could not threaten it or bargain with it. The Voice just talked and talked, recounting the things that must be done, the things that never would be, mixing the probable and the possible, the hopeless and the endless and the pointless … The mind leapt from rock to rock. The only way to escape it was to get up and go into the kitchen and make the mind do what the body told it. Read a book or make some wheaten bread or pay the bills. Clean the grouting in the upstairs bathroom. Which is what she had intended to start on this afternoon and might as well tackle now. Why not.

      She put her feet on the cold floor and the Voice said, Slippers, Judith, you’ll catch your death. Ha.

      The Voice had a sense of humor, of course, and yet it was not funny. You could not call it funny. Kenneth was doing his best. She was doing her best. Everyone was trying hard to do their best but so what? To what end? You went through the day doing your utmost and smiling and telling everyone you were fine really you were coping and then the night came and you lay down and in the darkness were gripped by the million hands of terror. So, said the Voice, I said how are we doing?

      Not great, Judith replied. I’ve been better.

      You have, said the Voice. Oh, you surely have.

      She crept up the stairs. This had been the “kids’ toilet” until her son Spencer moved out it must be almost eight years now. Overnight Judith began calling it “the guest bathroom,” which Kenneth found “a bit affected.” But as usual he misunderstood. It had taken a conscious effort to rechristen it, and it was a deliberate overwriting, part of her efforts to keep abreast of time, not fall behind it. Time snuck up on you and she’d seen some of her friends—Carol Thomson, Betty Moore—keep their children’s rooms like little shrines when they went off to their universities or jobs. She was not going to be one to wallow. As the clock moved on, so did she. It felt important—morally important—not to be caught in past attitudes. Not to be hung up on it, on what happened, on the museum of the family. There was an obligation to live your life forward. She told anyone who’d listen that she wasn’t going to be one of those grandmothers obsessed with their grandkids, looking after them every week and talking of nothing else. But then of course Isobel was born and this was exactly what happened.

      Now that Isobel, Alison’s daughter, stayed with them all the time, in the little box room called “Izzy’s room,” the bathroom too had reverted to its old name, its first name.

      Judith tugged on the light and the extractor fan ticked awake, too loud. It wouldn’t rouse Kenneth unless she plucked it from the wall and dropped it on his head, but its whirring was too loud for the night. There was no place for the mechanized in this darkness pulled up like a coverlet over the fields and the woods and Ballinderry River, over the garden and the hillside beyond it, its gorse and bare rocks and tussocks, and over the house, the middle one of three on the lane, that she stood in now, breathing very lightly. She tugged the bulb off and stepped into the guest room, turned on the bedside lamp and carried it to the bathroom, setting it on the lowered lid of the toilet. The plastic Tesco’s bag full of bath toys in the sink she moved to the low shelf of the wicker unit. She ran the hot tap and used her fingernails to clean Izzy’s hardened red toothpaste off the smooth enamel.

      Things, being things, always wore out. They wore down. They got dirty and needed cleaning. They wanted bleaching. Over the years, the grouting in the shower had turned from white to this mouse gray. She needed to spray it first, really, with a peroxide-based cleaner, and then leave it for half an hour. It would need to be scrubbed fairly gently not to take the grouting off. Wire wool would be too harsh. A nailbrush. Even a toothbrush.

      She opened the cupboard under the sink. Cleaning products were always named to make it sound like cleaning took no time at all. In a jiff. In a flash. Everyone was so concerned with time. So worried about spending it the right way. And how much more pressing was it now. Life-limited. The phrase Dr. Boyers used. The limited life. But wasn’t everyone’s?

      She spritzed the grouting until all the tiles ran with little foamy rivulets, and the chemical smell nauseated her. When she opened the window the night air came in like a cold hand on her neck. There was a smell of cut grass, manure. She’d leave the liquid to soak for a while, and go and have a look at the attic. It would need to be cleared at some point.

      She found herself sitting on the bed in the guest room, staring into the deep-pile carpet, a striped affair of red and cream, and then at the curtains, a heavy red damask.

      Liz had said, after her first night in here after it was decorated, that she’d felt like she was sleeping inside someone’s womb. Now what slept in Judith’s womb was monstrous. Awful.

      Hello, the Voice said. Are you referring to me?

      Of course it could be beaten. It was unlikely, very unlikely, but who knows what could happen? Who knows what miracles science might yet come up with?

      People would say to her sometimes there are good things about getting a diagnosis, and she would smile and say, “Oh yes,” and think, How dare you. But it was true that the fact of the thing had freed her, for a bit. She’d moved into the center of their lives, СКАЧАТЬ