"Campbell, Ramsey - The Parasite 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell Ramsey)

pened at the seance?' she demanded at last.

`Nothing at all. Why, what on earth did you expect?'

He sounded surprised by the intensity of her question. She clung to his waist, trying to think of acceptable terms for what she wanted to say. But he was snoring.

Had she had what Diana would call a psychic glimpse? She never wanted such a glimpse again. Bill's warmth was like a fire, holding back the darkness. She breathed in his warmth, his smell, to soothe her, help her float away on bourbon into sleep. Still her thoughts were restless. If what she had sensed had somehow been real, how could it be safer for her to be less aware?

Eight

Emerging from the bathroom, where the cover of the jade-green toilet seat said Apres Moi Le Deluge, Rose passed her parents' room. On the chest of drawers her childhood self was beaming. She'd had to sit in the shop in the Southport arcade while the glaring lights made her eyes smart and her armpits prickle. She'd kept still, since the photograph had been for Uncle Wilfred and Auntie Vi. In the frame she looked unreal, glowing in her best dress, like a ghost of the childhood she had already been leaving behind.

They had died within weeks of each other, just as she reached puberty. Everything had changed: her body seemed no longer hers, and Southport had become a tomb - no more evening promenades along Lord Street, where music drifted from the bandstand beneath trees budded with lights; no more swoops of the Big Dipper while her aunt stood gnawing nervously on a toffee apple. She hadn't been able to speak to anyone for days.

She had forgotten that until today. The memory was almost uncomfortably vivid, the sense of being trapped in her unfamiliar body. She hurried down to the front garden, where Bill and her parents were waiting.

The four of them walked down arm in arm to the Wigan Road. A lorry-load of glass went by, carrying a reflection of the linked quartet descending the hill, like a shot from a musical film. Two girls rode ponies along the opposite pavement.

On the Wigan Road the pavement made the party walk in twos. Shoppers of all ages were pedaling back from the market. `Oh, I know what I meant to say to

you,' her father said to Bill. `We were wondering if you'd like our old tandem.'

`Well, ah, hmm. What do you think, Rose?'

She remembered breezes sweeping through her hair, hedgerows merging into a green flood, fields sailing leisurely, her feet pumping in time with her father's. `We could give it a try while we're here.'

`It just needs a little first aid,' her father said. `The, ah - what do you call it, the - oh, good God, what the devil is the thing the lever operates, Margaret?'

'The gear-changer.'

`Yes, of course. I just couldn't think of it for a second.'

`I'm not very good mechanically,' Bill said, like a bionic man admitting a fault.

`I'll show you what to do.'

The concrete tip of the hospital chimney was stained like a cigarette. Houses drew in their gardens, pressed closer to the road. Some houses had turned into shops: through doorways behind counters, Rose glimpsed sofas warming themselves before hearths. Hens clucked in back gardens.

`Now let me tell you all the news,' her mother was saying. `Pat next door finally went into show jumping and won herself a sprained wrist and a broken ankle. Old Mrs. Lewis died and left nothing but debts. You should have seen the relatives after the funeral - they looked as if they could have killed her. Oh, I read a story to the writers' circle, which everybody liked, except the fat poet. Did I tell you how he embarrassed us all when he read out his poems? Every couple of verses he burst into tears. Are you all right, Rose?'

'I'm fine.' Only the abruptness of the question had startled her.

`You don't look fine. She doesn't look well, does she, George?'

He stooped to Rose as though examining a stamp collection for his shop. `A bit fashionably thin, perhaps. We'll feed you up, Rose.'

`I'm perfectly all right.' The night of the seance was safely past. In the morning she had been unable to recapture any sense of the presence she'd glimpsed; it had returned to the dark in which it had awakened - the depths of her own mind, of course. Why, she had never needed to be afraid. If the seance had attracted anything, it would have gone to the Hays' house.

She felt even better for coming to Ormskirk. Some part of her would always regard it as home. There was the bus station, its bench loaded with bored children. There was Disraeli, green as cabbage, ignoring the upstart traffic lights. There was Abblett's shop, behind which she could never find traces of the theatre where Shakespeare had appeared. And there was the market.