Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина
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This was high praise and a few months earlier it might have made me weak with pride, but now I just stared at him.
“Besides,” said Cassis in the same light tone, “if she’s in on it, she won’t be able to run blabbing to Mother.”
I had just turned nine old for my age but still childish enough to be stung by the casual contempt of the words.
“I don’t blab!”
He shrugged.
“Fine with me if you come, as long as you pay your own way,” he continued levelly. “Don’t see why either of us should pay for you. I’ll take you on my bike. That’s all. You work the rest out for yourself. All right?”
It was a test. I could see the challenge in his eyes. His smile was mocking, the not-quite-kind smile of the older brother who sometimes shared his last square of chocolate with me, and sometimes Indian-burned my arm so hard that the blood gathered in dark flecks under the skin.
“But she doesn’t get any pocket money,” said Reinette plaintively. “What’s the point of taking-”
Cassis shrugged. It was a typically final gesture, a man’s gesture. I have spoken. He waited for my reaction, arms crossed, that little smile on his lips.
“That’s fine,” I said, trying to sound calm. “That’s fine by me.”
“All right, then,” he decided. “We’ll go tomorrow.”
10
This was where the day’s chores began. Buckets of water were brought from the well into the kitchen for cooking and washing. We had no hot water-no running water, in fact, except for the hand pump by the well, a few yards from kitchen door. Electricity was slow to come to Les Laveuses, and when bottled gas became too scarce we cooked on a wood-burning stove in the kitchen. The oven was outside, a large old-fashioned charcoal oven the shape of a sugarloaf, and beside it was the well. When we needed water that was where we had to get it, one of us pumping while another held the bucket. There was a wooden lid on the well, closed and padlocked since long before my birth, to prevent accidents. When Mother was not watching we washed under the pump, dousing ourselves with cold water. When she was around we had to use basins of water warmed in copper pans on the stove, as well as gritty coal-tar soap that abraded our skin like pumice, leaving a scum of gray froth on the surface of the water.
That Sunday, we knew Mother would not make an appearance until later. We had all heard her during the night, moaning to herself, turning and rolling on the old bed she had shared with my father, sometimes standing up and walking to and fro in the room, opening the windows for air, the shutters slamming back against the sides of the house and making the floor shake. I lay awake listening for a long time as she moved, paced, sighed, argued with herself in her percussive whisper. At about midnight I fell asleep, but awoke, an hour or so later, to hear her still awake.
It sounds callous now, but all I felt was triumph. There was no guilt at what I had done, no pity for her suffering. I didn’t understand it then, had no idea of what a torment insomnia can be. That the little bag of orange peel inside her pillow could have provoked such a reaction seemed almost impossible. The more she tossed and sighed on her pillow, the stronger the scent must have become, warmed by the feverish nape of her neck. The stronger the scent, the greater her anxiety. The headache must come soon, she thought. Somehow the anticipation of pain can be even more troubling, more of a misery than the pain itself. The anxiety that was a permanent crease in her forehead nibbled at her mind like a rat in a box, killing sleep. Her nose told her there were oranges, but her mind said it was impossible – how could there be oranges, for God’s sake? – and yet the scent of orange, bitter and yellow as old age, sweated from every dark mote of that room.
She rose at three and lit a lamp to write in her album. I can’t know for sure that it was then – she never wrote dates – and yet I know.
Worse now than it’s ever been, she writes. The script is tiny, a column of ants scrawled across the page in violet ink. I lie in bed amp; wonder whether I’ll ever sleep again. Whatever happens can’t ever be worse than this. Even going insane might be a relief. And a little later, under a recipe for vanilla-potato pie, she writes, Like the clock, I am divided. At three in the morning, anything is possible.
After that she got up to take her morphine pills. She kept them in the bathroom cabinet, next to my dead father’s shaving things. I heard the door open, the tired squeak of her sweating feet against the polished boards. The bottle rattled, and I heard the clink of a cup as she poured water from the jug. I suppose that six hours’ insomnia might well have finally provoked one of her headaches. In any case she was out like a light when, some time later, I got up.
Reinette and Cassis were still asleep, and the light that bled from beneath the thick blackout curtain was greenish and pale. It might have been five o’clock. There was no timepiece in our bedroom. I sat up in bed, felt for my clothes in the dark, dressed quickly. I knew every corner of the little room. I could hear Cassis and Reine breathing – he with shallower, almost wheezing breaths – and very quietly I stepped past their beds. There was a great deal to do before I awoke them.
First I listened at the door of my mother’s room. Silence. I knew she had taken her pills, and the chance was that she would be sleeping heavily, but I could not run the risk of being caught. Very gently I turned the doorknob. A board beneath my bare foot popped with a sound like a firecracker. I stopped mid-gesture, listening for her breathing, for any change in its rhythms. There were none. I pushed the door. One shutter had been left slightly open, and the room was light. My mother was lying across the bed. She had kicked off the covers during the night, and one pillow had fallen to the floor. The other was half covered by her outflung arm, and her head was hanging uncomfortably at an angle, her hair brushing the floorboards. I noticed with no surprise that the pillow in which I had concealed the muslin bag was the one upon which she was resting. I knelt beside her. Her breathing was thick and slow. Beneath her bruise-colored eyelids the pupils moved erratically. Slowly I worked my fingers into the pillowcase beneath her.
It was easy. My fingers worked at the knot in the center of the pillow, coaxing it back toward the slit in the lining. I touched the bag, drew it closer with my fingernails, finally pulling it from its hiding place and safe into the palm of my hand. My mother never stirred. Only her eyes ticked and skittered under the darkened flesh, as if constantly following something bright and elusive. Her mouth was half open, and a thread of drool had crawled down her cheek to the mattress. On an impulse I put the sachet beneath her nostrils, crushing it to release the scent, and she whimpered in her sleep, turning her head away from the scent and frowning. I put the orange sachet into my pocket again.
Then I began in earnest. A final glance behind me at my mother, as if she might be a dangerous animal feigning sleep. Then I moved to the mantelpiece. There was a clock there, a heavy piece with a round dial under a gilt and glass dome. It looked strange above the bare little black grate, too ornate for my mother’s room, but she had inherited it from her mother, and it was one of her most prized possessions. I lifted the glass dome and carefully turned the clock’s hands back. Five hours. Six. I replaced the dome.