"Nicola Griffith - Slow River & A Troll Story" - читать интересную книгу автора (Griffith Nicola)

~~~The first thing she thought when she woke naked on the cobbles was:Don't roll onto your back.

She lay very still and tried to concentrate on the cold stones under hip and cheek, on the strange taste in
her mouth.

Drugs, they had given her drugs to make her stop struggling, after she had...

Don't think about it.

She could not afford to remember now. She would think about it later, when she was safe. The memory
of what had happened shrank safely back into a tight bubble.

She raised her head, felt the great, open slash across her trapezoid muscles pull and stretch. Nausea
forced her to breathe shallowly for a moment, but then she lifted her head again and looked about: night,
in some strange city. And it was cold.

She was curled in a fetal position around some rubbish on a silent, cobbled street. More like an alley.
Somewhere at the edge of her peripheral vision the colors of a newstank flashed silently.

She closed her eyes again, trying to think.Lore. My name is Lore. A wind was blowing now, and
paper, a news printout, flapped in her face. She pushed it away, then changed her mind and pulled it to
her. Paper, she had read, had insulating qualities.

The odd, metallic taste in her mouth was fading, and her head cleared a little. She had to find somewhere
to hide. And she had to get warm. Rain fell on her lip and she licked it off automatically, feeling confused.
Why should she hide? Surely there were people who would love her and care for her, tend her gently and
clean her wounds, if she just let them know where she was. ButHide, said the voice from her crocodile
brain,Hide!, and her muscles jumped and sweat started on her Ranks, and the slick gray memory like a
balloon in her head swelled and threatened to burst.

She crawled toward the newstank because its lurid colors, the series of news pictures flashing over and
over in its endless cycle, imitated life. She sat on the road in the rain in the middle of the night, naked, and
bathed in the colors as if they were filtered sunlight, warm and safe.

It took her a while to realize what she was seeing: herself. Herself sitting naked on a chair, blindfolded,
begging her family to please, please pay what her kidnappers wanted.

The pictures were like a can opener, ripping open the bubble in her head, drenching her with images: the
kidnap, the humiliation, the camera filming it all. "So your family will see we're serious," he had said. Day
after day of it. An eighteenth birthday spent huddled naked in a tent in the middle of a room, with nothing
but a plastic slop bucket for company. And here it was, in color: her naked and weeping, a man ranting
at the camera, demanding more money. Her tied to a chair, begging for food. Begging...

And the whole world had seen this. The whole world had seen her naked, physically and mentally, while
they ate their breakfast or took the passenger slide to work. Or maybe drinking coffee at home they had
been caught by the cleverly put-together images and decided, What the hell, may as well pay to
download the whole story. And she remembered her kidnappers, one who had always smelled of frying
fish, half leading, half carrying her out into the barnyard because she was supposed to be dopey with the
drugs she had palmed, the other one rolling new transparent plasthene out on the floor of the open van.