Cat's eye полностью

“Ten stacks of plates,” says Grace. This would once have reduced me. Now I find it silly. I keep walking. I feel daring, light-headed. They are not my best friends or even my friends. Nothing binds me to them. I am free.

They follow along behind me, making comments on the way I walk, on how I look from behind. If I were to turn I would see them imitating me. “Stuck up! Stuck up!” they cry. I can hear the hatred, but also the need. They need me for this, and I no longer need them. I am indifferent to them. There’s something hard in me, crystalline, a kernel of glass. I cross the street and continue along, eating my licorice. I stop going to Sunday school. I refuse to play with Grace or Cordelia or even Carol after school. I no longer walk home over the bridge, but the long way around, past the cemetery. When they come in a group to the back door to collect me I tell them I’m busy. They try kindness, to lure me back, but I am no longer susceptible to it. I can see the greed in their eyes. It’s as if I can see right into them. Why was I unable to do this before?

I spend a lot of time reading comic books in my brother’s room when he isn’t there. I would like to climb up skyscrapers, fly with a cape, burn holes in metal with my fingertips, wear a mask, see through walls. I would like to hit people, criminals, each fist making a red or yellow light-burst. Kapow. Krac. Kaboom. I know that I have the will to do these things. I intend to do them somehow. At school I make friends with a different girl, whose name is Jill. She is interested in other kinds of games, games of paper and wood. We go to her house and play Old Maid, Snap, Pick Up Sticks. Grace and Cordelia and Carol hang around the edges of my life, enticing, jeering, growing paler and paler every day, less and less substantial. I hardly hear them any more because I hardly listen. Eight – Half a Face

Chapter 37

F or a long time, I would go into churches. I told myself I wanted to see the art; I didn’t know I was looking for something. I wouldn’t seek these churches out, even if they were in a guidebook and of historic significance, and I would never go into them during services, in fact I disliked the idea: it was what was in them, not what went on in them, that interested me. Mostly I would just see them by accident and go into them on impulse.

Once in, I paid little attention to the architecture, although I knew the terms: clerestories and naves were things I’d written papers about. I would look at the stained-glass windows, if any. I preferred Catholic churches to Protestant ones, the more ornate the better, because there was more to look at. I liked the shameless extravaganza: gold leaf and baroque excesses did not put me off. I would read the inscriptions on walls, and carved into floors, a special foible of rich Anglicans who thought they’d get more points with God by being engraved. Anglicans too went in for tattered military flags, and war memorials of other kinds.

But especially I sought out statues. Statues of saints, and of crusaders on their biers, or those pretending to be crusaders; effigies of all kinds. Statues of the Virgin Mary I would save for last. I would approach them with hope, but I was always disappointed. The statues were of no one I recognized. They were dolls dressed up, insipid in blue and white, pious and lifeless. Then I would not know why I’d been expecting to see something else.

I went to Mexico the first time with Ben. It was also our first trip together, our first time together; I thought it might be only an interlude. I wasn’t even sure I wanted a man in my life again; by that time I’d exhausted the notion that the answer to a man is another man, and I was out of breath. But it was a relief to be with someone who was so uncomplicated, and easily pleased.

We were by ourselves, on a two-week excursion that turned out to have something to do with Ben’s business. Sarah was staying with her best friend. We began in Veracruz, checking out shrimp and the hotels and cockroaches, then took a car up into the hills, looking as always for something picturesque and undervisited.

There was a small town beside a lake. The place was subdued, for Mexico, which had struck me as visceral, like a body turned inside out so the blood was on the outside. Perhaps it was the coolness, the lake.