Эдвард Докс - Pravda ['Self Help' in the UK]

The night was scratched forever on the thin varnish of his childhood; its exact disfiguring pattern likewise etched on every single pane through which he might look back. In the drafty old-fashioned kitchen in the basement of the Highgate house, the halfpast seven radio had predicted fog, predicted cold, predicted bad conditions for motorists. But father and children and the children’s two friends were all in other rooms, unconscious of flights grounded or the murky freeze fingering its way up the Thames.

It began just before eight.

First the record jumped; then the needle broke and the dancing stopped; then, slowly, the ruptured stump began to drag itself across the vinyl. The newly purchased speakers clawed, rasped, snarled, screeched, but all the same, he heard his father’s fury before Nicholas had even left his study in the room above.

Gabriel stopped dead still, his sister the same. A sidelight fizzed, then appeared to brighten, and the room seemed to stretch itself taut in terrified anticipation.

Next, too much rush and panic.

And somehow, as they scrambled over the improvised disco floor, Gabriel (in Superman socks) lost his footing on the polished parquet and—hands flailing to counter the slip—knocked the actual stereo, bounced the needle back onto the record, scratching the shiny black surface a second time and causing the speakers once more to yowl. Even as he was losing his balance, he saw his sister’s teeth sink into her lip in pursuit of a plan that might alleviate the worst of what was to come. By the time he had bounded up again—less than an instant later (denying himself even the luxury of a complete fall) and now with the same aim as Isabella—she was already moving past him toward their father’s vast vinyl collection. The needle was broken, but at least they could hide the record.

He fumbled with the deck. His father was on the creaking stairs. The needle arm wouldn’t lift for a moment, then freed itself. He swung around, looking for the sleeve. He wished with all his heart that he might magic his friends away. Instead they were frozen quivering-still, the realization that there was reason to fear out of all proportion to the damage done beginning to thumbnail itself into their faces.

Too late. As the storm broke through the door, Gabriel was only halfway to putting the ruined disk back in its sleeve and his sister halfway to setting a replacement on the turntable.

In truth, as Nicholas entered the room, he had already abandoned any adult restraint and was borne in a riptide of childish emotions. The evening’s wine had thinned his blood, flooding the labyrinths of his intelligence all the more easily. His evening hijacked, even in the midst of its resentful torpor, he had caught them at it: deceit. Deceit—on top of their standing on the furniture, on top of their dancing about the place when he had expressly told them it was forbidden for this precise reason, on top of their willful inability to play fair when he had chosen to ignore their disobedience for the past hour. On top of everything else. At moments such as these he felt too young to be their father, too close: a dangerous rival, not custodian. And he was quite unable to command himself, even in front of eight-year-old children. He stood glowering on the threshold, gripping the door handle with long fingers, scouring one face and then the next.

“What the bloody hell is going on?”

The children could find no place to look, so bowed their heads.

In three infuriated strides he crossed to his new stereo.

“What the bloody hell have you done?” This spoken under his breath but so that the room could well hear—as (with his infinite sympathy for inanimate objects) he detached the broken needle, revolved it between finger and thumb, and laid it gently down.

He turned, his voice rising in a steady climb to a furious shout: “I’ve just bought this, Gabriel.” This was true, though the money was not his and had been meant for a very different purpose. “And it is not for you to be messing about with. Do you hear? Have you any idea how much these things cost? Have you any bloody idea?”

Only now did he see the ruined record in the boy’s hand: two deep scores the color of sun-bleached bone in the shape of a jagged V.

“You little shit.”

Though Gabriel knew well what was coming, he was caught by the speed of the strike and took the first blow full across the ear. The second caught him awkwardly coming the other way, across the opposite cheek, before he could raise his arm to protect himself. The pain delayed a moment, then rushed at him. Tears surged to the corners of his eyes and he was lost to the torture of fighting them back in front of his friends, face spun toward the wall.

Fury was heaving through Nicholas, gorging and swelling on itself, raging back and forth far beyond this moment, out across his whole life, annihilating all ancillary thought save for the resounding certainty of his own outraged conviction: that this—this night after night of staying in and looking after these bloody children—this had never been part of the bargain, that he had been cheated, that he (and he alone) was the victim of gross and iniquitous injustice. He was visibly swaying. Isabella was standing still in front of him, clasping the replacement record two thirds unsleeved across her chest, her wide eyes looking up at him, unblinking. The effort required not to say what he bloody well wanted to say almost defeated him. Serve the old bastard right And yet… and yet, as always, something—something about Isabella, perhaps, or something in the expressions of the other two, or something residing in the deeper terror of what he would do or become or have to face without the money, without the house, without the daily collateral—something held him back. Instead he cuffed the girl lightly across the top of her head.

“Right, get your bags, get your things—you two, Susan, Dan, you are both going. Right now. Bloody move.”

The friends had been motionless in their terrified tableau vivant since he had come in: the one standing unnaturally upright with hands strictly by his side, a child soldier traumatized to attention in front of the old fireplace; the other on the sofa, aware that her feet had been all this while on the furniture and so awkwardly half crouching as if in the act of disguising this fact. Now, released from the spell, the two gave themselves fully to efficiency and haste, as if unconsciously glad of the emotional cover they provided.

And already Nicholas felt himself tiring. His wretched circumstances at the age of thirty-eight, the thought of his wife out at her self-righteous work all night (“My own money, Nicholas, I make my own money, to spend how I will”), the house itself—all of it pressed in on him now, corralling him back to the more subdued ire of his habitual corner. The torrent was receding. His intelligence was re-emerging, asserting itself. And he could sense the shadow of his rage smirking at the histrionics of its master. Still, he had bound himself into the entire tedious performance—furious parent disciplines disgraceful children for the duration of an entire bloody evening. So he set his face.

“What the hell are you waiting for, Isabella? Get in the bloody car.”

Gabriel sat in the front, the seat belt too high and chafing at his neck. His father was driving—the contortion of face and body far worse for being imagined rather than directly looked upon—driving with undue gesture and haste, braking too hard for the pedestrian crossing, accelerating unnecessarily as he pulled away.

Nicholas swore, then swerved hard into a petrol station. He got out to dribble another teacup’s worth into the tank; he ran the car perpetually on the brink of empty and there was never enough for there and back.