Getting it in the Head. Mike McCormackЧитать онлайн книгу.
from a profitless sleep and when she faced her breakfast her whole being baulked in revulsion. At work, the nausea continued all through the morning and at midday on the bench she gagged on the first mouthful of her sandwich. When evening came she pushed away her plate in disgust and decided to go to bed. A twenty-four-hour bug; come the morning it would be gone.
That night her dreams were more complex. Some of the fragmented images from the night before had coalesced into a decipherable narrative. She was attending some religious ceremony in a church which had the polished sheen of obsidian. A priest of some persuasion was berating his congregation from a pulpit, exhorting them to recognize the sacred in all about them and in the least among them. He harangued his congregation on this theme for a while and when the Eucharist came he raised the flesh of Christ into the air not as unleavened bread but as a scarlet disc of stained glass. He put it in his mouth and brought his teeth down hard to fragment it. He raised his head to the roof while swallowing. He then distributed similar discs to the faithful who came to the rails to receive the flesh of our Lord. All of them returned from the rails with blood seeping between their lips or trickling down their chins. When it came to her turn to receive, the priest bent over her and told her in blood-flecked words that it was not for him to give her anything. She would receive in another way and when she did it would be not just for herself but for the whole world.
Next morning, after refusing her breakfast again she made her way along by the canal to work. So early in the morning it seemed as if the colours and textures of her dream had carried over into the morning light. The sky was streaked with vermilion and the gold of the early sun was giving way to an all-pervasive blue. Passing by the cathedral she was struck by how queerly it was lit at this time of day. It seemed lit from within by some numinous presence and the light fell from its windows in great shafts which seemed to converge upon her. She wondered how the windows of the western nave seemed to be suspended there in the morning light, standing out from the stone structure, vibrant like elongated stars. She could see the Christ Child, the Virgin and Joseph. The Child seemed to luminesce there in the silence with a life of its own. It seemed to reach out to her with some command, some imperative that would brook no avoidance. With an effort she wrenched herself from the spot but for the rest of the day she was haunted by that image of the infant saviour. It seemed to have scorched itself so deeply on the front of her mind that she could not get a focus on any of her work. Her indexing went badly. Nothing she touched fell into alignment and her mind wandered so much it was a relief when the day ended. But before leaving, on a dark intuition, she went to the reference section and took down a book, The History and Origins of Glass. She flicked through it and read how stained glass was manufactured and installed. She read for an hour and on her way home bought a hammer, a pliers, a mortar and pestle.
That evening, for the second day, her body refused food. Looking in her cabinets at the boxes of food a nausea rose within her and she had barely enough time to make it to the sink. Her stomach was so empty she suffered acute agony in retching. She sank to the floor in a foetal position, lathered in sweat. It was at this moment that an awareness formed that she was suffering from some sort of inverse inspiration. She could feel a hollow running the length of her whole being, waiting to be filled. Two days without food and she could already feel her strength ebbing from her, a tide that would leave her stranded like a dried fish if it continued. She would have to do something fast or she would be soon totally lost to this hunger.
She rose from the floor like one who had been felled, and gathered up her coat and tools and made her way into the night. She reeled through the streets like a drunkard until she came to the cathedral. In the grey streetlight coming off the nearby bridge she saw Joseph in the stained glass window offering out the Child to her with both hands.
She would have to be quick. Cars whizzed by on the bridge and it would be disastrous to draw their attention. How could she explain this excruciating hunger that had her refusing food and craving something fatal. She grabbed a down-pipe that ran in the shadow of a buttress, offered up an abortive prayer for its solidity and began to climb up hand over hand. It was easier than she had imagined and she knew instantly that this new-found agility was part of the whole neurosis. In the darkness and her heightened condition she moved confidently, hand over hand, finding toe-holds in the sheer limestone wall. She stopped for a moment on the ledge to draw breath and then moved at a crouch over to the window. She straightened up and was at last faced with the Child. It seemed now that in climbing the drainpipe, the concentration and physical effort had sapped away an essential part of her resolve. Either that or it was just shameful awe in the sight of the Child’s gaze that persuaded her to avoid Him totally and remove marginal pieces instead, doing as little damage as possible to the window. She took out her pliers and began to prise out the lead strip from the framework close to the stone. Once she had a grip on the lead it tore out easily and she quickly managed to remove four lozenge-shaped pieces. Through the hole she could see into the dark interior of the church where the red sanctuary lamp glowed and the faint aura of the tabernacle door. But she did not wait, her hunger was crying out. Feeling the eyes of the infant on her back, burning his rebuke, she moved over the ledge and with the glass and pliers pocketed, shinned down the pipe to the ground. Once hitting the ground she loped homewards like a released animal.
In her kitchen she laid out the pieces on the table. They were all one colour and shape and with a scream surfacing within her she knew they were not what she needed. She swept them from the table in a quick frenzy, dashing them against the wall, and set out again into the night. This time, in front of the Child, she did not flinch. She set the pliers into Joseph’s abdomen, gripped the lead and prised it out carefully, trying not to let any of the Child fall to the ground – she felt bad enough violating the window without committing needless vandalism. Eventually, through the sweat that had begun to sting her eyes, she saw that she had wrung the Child totally from Joseph’s grasp. All he had left now was a gaping hole in his abdomen and the lead came like dried veins curving outwards from it. For the second time that night she pocketed the glass and the pliers and crawled along the ledge to the down-pipe. At the base of the cathedral she was consumed by a shaking fit. She squatted down in the shadows with her arms wrapped about her, flicking the darkness with her eyes as she tried to get a hold of herself. She saw the bridge opposite her and the cars upon it, ploughing on into the night, and she wondered about the drivers. Did any of them ever have such a fixation as she had now? Did any of them suspect that so close by there was someone strung out on such an obsession? If one of them knew would they try to help? Would one of those drivers walk over to her in the darkness and say, it’s OK, I’m your friend and I am here to help. Come with me and you will come to no harm. She continued to speculate like this until she felt steady enough to move off.
She is at home now, in her kitchen, and she is tempted to lay the glass pieces on the table and spend a few moments rearranging them into the image of the Child. But she cannot bear to look the Child in the eye. Besides, her body senses a nearness and has begun to cry out. She knows what she has to do. She empties the pieces into the dishcloth, lays it on the floor and begins to hammer it methodically until she has a crude multicoloured rubble. She turns the little pile into her mortar and grinds the debris until it is as fine as talc. It is difficult. Despite its lowly origins and ubiquity, glass is one of our more intractable materials. By the time she finishes her arm aches and her brow is sheened with sweat. She now has a little pile of powder in the mortar that looks for all the world like one of those similarly illicit powders that can be had for a price in the underbelly of any city in the world, patented for people like herself who have been ignored, cast out, shortchanged or are just plain unable to cope. Somewhere within herself she can hear a counterpoint to this errant thought; yes, but this is the flesh of the Saviour, the divine fix, the high without comedown. She lifts a spoonful to her mouth and something within her rises greedily to it. With a jerk of her throat it is gone. She spoons back the rest of it hurriedly and washes it down with milk. She stands still, waiting for some reaction. It does not come. She walks to her room and all the exhaustion of the evening comes to rest upon her. She falls face downwards on her bed fully clothed and already she is asleep.
In the morning she wakes ravenous. In a gluttonous frenzy she hunches over a bowl of cereal and sloughs it back greedily. She thinks of animals and eats four bowls in succession with bread and an apple and a bar of chocolate. For the first time in three days she holds the food down. It is warm and weighs like ballast