The Crane Wife. Patrick NessЧитать онлайн книгу.
this particular day, a spring one, the sun held court in the sky, with a few supplicant clouds criss-crossed by the vapour trails of jets from the nearby Air Force Base. Just the kind of lovely day when God liked to test you, Miss Kelly often said.
‘So then you find out the whole ship is a gun, right?’ George was saying, excitedly. ‘The whole ship! And it shoots this huge blast of light out the end and BOOM! They destroy the Gamilon home world!’
Roy’s family didn’t have a television because TV was where the Devil did his best recruiting (George had decided not to mention this problem to his own parents, though in retrospect it seemed unlikely they would have agreed, given the porn), so George would often fill their walk home with what Roy was missing.
‘Except it’s not a whole planet?’ Roy asked.
‘No!’ George shouted with amazement. ‘That’s the most incredible thing ever! It’s half a planet and it’s floating in space and there are cities on the top half and it’s all rocky and round on the bottom. Except it isn’t any more, because the Starblazers blew it up.’
‘Sweet,’ Roy said, with due respect.
‘No kidding, it’s sweet,’ George agreed seriously.
They reached 53rd, the busiest street between O Come O Come and their respective homes. They walked past the supermarket on the corner, its parking lot filled with slightly sluttier versions of their own mothers, along with kids smaller than Roy or George who tended to stare at their uniforms. Across the street was a gas station, filled with much the same.
Roy and George waited at the crosswalk for the light to change.
‘Except I think some Gamilons escaped or something,’ George said, ‘because no one seemed very happy. And there was also a lot of shouting and stuff I didn’t understand.’ He smiled again. ‘But the whole ship was a gun all along!’
The light turned green, and the ‘Walk’ signal came on. They entered the crossing, Roy pushing his bike along, George caught up in the unfathomable mysteries of Japanese animation.
‘I’m going to turn this bike into a gun,’ Roy said. ‘I’ll take it to Vietnam when I turn sixteen.’
George said, ‘That’d be.’
And the car hit them both.
When George told this part of the story, he invariably found himself saying ‘This actually happened’ and ‘I’m not making this up’ because it seemed too cruel that the car that had run the red light and knocked into Roy and the bike and him should have been driven by an eighty-three-year-old lady who could barely see over the steering wheel.
Sadly, it was the truth. If George had ever learned her name, he’d long forgotten it, but he’d remembered that she was eighty-three, that she was barely taller than him or Roy, and that the words she kept repeating afterwards were, ‘Please don’t sue me. Please don’t sue me.’ For the dignity of old ladies everywhere, George often wished this part of the story hadn’t happened, but there you were, sometimes life didn’t oblige with appropriate variation.
She wasn’t going especially fast, but the impact was so shockingly irresistible, so bluntly unstoppable, that both George and Roy cried out simultaneous, surprised ‘Ohs!’ as she drove into them.
And didn’t stop.
There were theories about this afterwards, most of them unsurprising: that the impact had taken a short while to filter through her diminished-by-age capabilities; that it had shocked her so much that she had simply frozen, her foot remaining on the accelerator rather than moving to the brake; or that the disbelief at what was occurring in front of her was so strong that, for a few terrible moments, she simply expected someone else to act. Whatever the reason, she hit them, and on she drove.
Roy had seen her coming at the very last second and had taken a step back, though not nearly far enough. The car hit his knees, spinning him around and throwing him to the pavement, out of the way, as she ploughed on through George and the bike.
George saw the impact, of course, but he couldn’t remember feeling it. Roy had been thrown out of his line of vision, and suddenly here was this massive, unstoppable block of metal filling it, knocking the wind out of him as he flattened his stomach across the bike seat and onto the hood of the car.
It didn’t stop. It kept coming. There was nowhere for George to put his feet, nowhere he could stand that made sense as the ground was dragged away from underneath him, and he fell, still so surprised it was happening it seemed as if only his eyes were working, that each of his other senses – ears to hear it with, feeling to register pain – had been shut off.
He fell with the bike, its handlebars catching the front bumper, and as the old lady still drove on, ten, twenty, thirty feet past the crosswalk, George slipped all the way to the ground, the body of the bike pushing him along the road in front of the car. He remembered the sensation vividly, more vividly than any other detail of the accident. It felt like sliding on his back across snow, any feeling of pain from the scraping still just a future possibility. He was helpless to stop it anyway, his arms refusing to grasp anything, his legs refusing to push him out of the way, his head refusing to even look around for help.
What he remembered most was that it was, paradoxically, a moment of tremendous calm. All he saw was the sky above, its serene and soothing vastness, looking impassively down on him as he bumped and scraped along the pavement, pushed by a massive car and a fallen bicycle. It was a moment like when he found the crane, or the crane found him, a moment of stopped time, a moment to live in forever. He stared back up at the sky with a kind of ecstatic disbelief and was only able to ever remember a single coherent thought, ‘This is really happening.’
‘This really happened,’ George would say as he told the story. ‘It sounds like I’m making it up, but I’m really, really not.’
The handlebars dislodged from the bumper of the car, and the bike fell, but somehow – luckily? miraculously? improbably? impossibly? – did so in a way that the old lady’s car pushed it to one side and George along with it. Instead of being crushed flat by the tires, George had a close-up view of them as they drove past, inches from his face as the car trundled down the road.
And then there was only silence. Utter silence. George, still on his back, glanced up the street and saw Roy. Such a little amount of time had passed that Roy was still lying on the road, too, struggling to get up. George did the same, and he and Roy discovered at the same moment that neither of them could walk. Both lurched forward and fell in exactly the same way.
Which made them laugh.
Nearly forty years later, George could still remember the feeling of that laugh, the sincerity of it, the truthfulness of it. In their mutual, eight- and nine-year-old shock, before the inevitable pain that hovered seconds away came rushing in, before the acceptance or even knowledge that they had just survived a possibly fatal calamity dawned, they had, for an instant, laughed.
But the world would no longer wait. What was probably not more than a dozen adults but what felt like thousands came running in a flood from the forecourt of the gas station and out the glass doors of the supermarket, unthinkable terror written so clearly on their faces that all at once the pain showed up, too, and George began, suddenly, to cry.
They put their hands on him and Roy, lifted them from the pavement and out of the road, while some of them also went racing angrily after the car of the old lady, who was only just now coming to a stop a good hundred feet past the point where she’d hit them. These people called the ambulances that came, and a fire truck, too, that even in his bewildered pain, George thought was a bit much. He didn’t remember giving anyone his phone number, but he must have because one woman said to another behind him – he remembered this part so clearly he could still hear the precise words to this day – ‘Well, I called the mothers. One of them’s fine, the other’s hysterical.’
George’s shoulders slumped, like a deflating ball.
Sure enough, his