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

`Did you hear me?' her mother called. `I said Wendy's here' - and all at once it was too late: the night had crept up on her, and she didn't want to go.

There was nothing in her room to help her. Sandwiched in its case, her tennis racket leaned against one wall. Posters froze wild birds in flight. Elvis Presley sneered above her bed, his hair shining like oil. Spines of encyclopaedias offered her fragments of words, none of which inspired an excuse.

She retrieved her coat from the wardrobe, where she'd hidden it after laying it out, in the hope that doing so might wish Wendy away. Buttoning the coat, her fingers felt hot and swollen, prickly with nerves.

From the top of the stairs she heard her mother saying `Look after her, Wendy, won't you. Don't let her get too excited.'

The Magic Flute was playing. Her father hung back in the living-room doorway, afraid to lose the opera. `What is this film, did you say? Rock Around The Clock?' He knew perfectly well, but meant to imply that it wasn't worth knowing. `I'm surprised that it interests you. Well, you must find out for yourself.'

Couldn't he tell that it was a lie? Just because the girl thought Elvis was sexy didn't mean that she wanted to watch fat Bill Haley sing three notes. Her moist hands squirmed, suffocated by her pockets. Resentment gagged her more than nervousness. How dare her mother suggest she was less mature than Wendy! Couldn't she both prove her maturity and save herself by admitting the lie? But her parents were waving, the door was closing, and she was outside in the icy night.

Beneath the streetlamps Wendy's eyes looked bruised with makeup. Scent crept from beneath her pink coat. By comparison, the younger girl was dressed childishly, which made her feel irritable and vulnerable. Already her knees were burning with the cold.

At least she wasn't going up the hill, where the watertower no longer resembled the maze of tall arches among which she'd used to play hide and seek with her friends. Now it was a looming crowd of legs, its body hovering above a scrawny glimpse of daylight as a spider stands over a wrapped fly. The night changed everything.

Even the main road was changed. Beneath the lamps the terraces glared as though trapped in the stasis before a storm. Two nurses marched like nuns towards the hospital, once a workhouse. Suppose they asked where the girls were going? But they vanished laughing into the hospital, leaving her alone with Wendy's footsteps and her own, with the repetitive brushing of Wendy's knees against her calf-length skirt, with her fears.

A young couple hurried by, their breath and their parcels of fish and chips steaming. Queues of cars passed each other on the narrow road; their scoops of light caught dust, petrol fumes, a moth. Soon they were gone, and the tarmac gleamed bleakly. `What do you think we're going to do?' she said uneasily.

`Oh, just sit around a table, I expect, like they did in that story.' Wendy sounded glad to talk. `Or maybe Richard will sit there with a pencil and see if it writes anything. I expect it'll write something stupid, if he has anything to do with it. You know what Richard's like.'

They were approaching the town. Houses and gardens were dwindling, sometimes into terraces of cottages. Glimpses of bright rooms - warm, impregnable, aloof from her - reminded the girl of home. One last secret charm reassured her a little: as long as she stayed on this pavement, on the far side of the road from the house, she might be saved.

Saved from what? She had seen death, her grandmother more soundly asleep than whispers could penetrate, her fretted lips gaping in a silent snore. Richard liked to scare people, but she was too old to be scared. Why, only last year he'd told everyone that the girl who had been dug up outside town had just been murdered, when in fact she was fifty years dead.

They passed the pale squat unlit hall, the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses. Next to it, behind the Windmill pub, hens clucked sleepily. It was a comfortable sound, but by no means encouraging, for it meant that they had reached the terrace which contained the house.

But it was only a house where someone had died, months ago. Nobody but Richard insisted that he had been crying for help; nobody but Richard said that the house had an unpleasant reputation - at least, nobody else had said so to the girls. Or were there rumours which had given Richard the idea for his latest horror fib?

Beyond the terrace, people sat morosely on a bench outside the bus station. Disraeli stood on a pedestal, ignoring the traffic lights beneath him, which were stepping down to green. There was safety: far too distant. Wendy had already crossed to the opposite pavement, had braved the short path beside the lit bay window and was ringing the bell.

Seated figures glided by in slabs of light like amber. Glowing splashes trailed over the pavement, over the shiny blunt toecaps of the girl's shoes. Then the bus was past, and Richard was frowning at her. `Well, what's she waiting for? Does she want crossing over?'

She drew a breath so fierce it bruised her chest. She wasn't a baby, she was ten years old. Wendy might be older, but she was more mature than Wendy. She strode across the deserted roadway, past the dark uncurtained bay, into the bright house.

The living-room seemed crowded with people, sitting on a plump, though somewhat faded, suite. In fact there were only five people, but all of them were staring at her as though she had no right to be there. A boy whose chin sprouted a few unequal hairs complained `She's rather young for this, isn't she?"

'Oh, she's all right. Leave her alone.' Wendy sounded both annoyed by the reflection on her judgment and a little embarrassed; perhaps, deep down, she agreed.

Richard stood between chairs in the bay, peering out through a crack in the curtains. A boy with hair like Elvis and a reasonably even moustache said `Is that everyone?"

'No, there's Ken. He has to come from near the CoMr.ades of the Great War Club.'

Glancing at the moustached boy, Wendy brightened. `I didn't know you were coming.'

`Who, me? I wouldn't have missed it for anything.' He patted the arm of his chair, as though to make a dog jump. `Besides, you might need looking after.'

The younger girl thought him pompous and conceited, and a very bad substitute for Elvis. After a token protest at the way he summoned her, Wendy sat beside him. She had withdrawn into the adolescent world, where people seemed to do things which they didn't want to do and which, when they did them, they didn't enjoy. The girl felt excluded, barely tolerated by the group. She sat on the couch, beside two girls who ignored her. She wished she hadn't come.