"China Mieville - Details" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mieville China)

bowl into the gap. She grabbed it and slammed the door quickly in
my face.
I couldn't see very much inside the room. The door was open for
less than a second. My strongest impression was of the whiteness of
the walls. Mrs. Miller's sleeves were white, too, and made of plastic.
I never got much of a glimpse at her face, but what I saw was
unmemorable. A middle-aged woman's eager face.
If I had a bucket full of paint, we would run through the routine
again. Then I would sit cross-legged in front of her door and listen
to her eat.
"How's your mother?" she would shout. At that I'd unfold my
mother's careful queries. She's okay, I'd say, she's fine. She says she
has some questions for you.
I'd read my mother's strange questions in my careful childish
monotone, and Mrs. Miller would pause and make interested
sounds, and clear her throat and think out loud. Sometimes she took
ages to come to an answer, and sometimes it would be almost
immediate.
"Tell your mother she can't tell if a man's good or bad from that,"
she'd say. "Tell her to remember the problems she had with your
father." Or: "Yes, she can take the heart of it out. Only she has to

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China Mieville - Details


paint it with the special oil I told her about."
"Tell your mother seven. But only four of them concern her and
three of them used to be dead.
"I can't help her with that," she told me once, quietly. "Tell her to go
to a doctor, quickly." And my mother did, and she got well again.
"What do you not want to do when you grow up?" Mrs. Miller
asked me one day.
That morning when I had come to the house the sad cockney
vagrant had been banging on the door of her room again, the keys to
the flat flailing in his hand.
"He's begging you, you old tart, please, you owe him, he's so bloody
angry," he was shouting, "only it ain't you gets the sharp end, is it?
Please, you cow, you sodding cow, I'm on me kneesтАж"
"My door knows you, man," Mrs. Miller declared from within. "It
knows you and so do I, you know it won't open to you. I didn't take
out my eyes and I'm not giving in now. Go home."
I waited nervously as the man gathered himself and staggered away,
and then, looking behind me, I knocked on her door and announced
myself. It was after I'd given her the food that she asked her
question.
"What do you not want to do when you grow up?"
If I had been a few years older her inversion of the cliche would
have annoyed me: It would have seemed mannered and contrived.
But I was only a young child, and I was quite delighted.