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

Gabriel shifted for the first time and took the chance to look into the back. His sister’s gaze was fixed on his seat, as if she expected smoke to coil any moment from the point of her stare. The others too were unnaturally still: a grazed knuckle on the armrest of the door, a disco girl’s polka-dot-painted fingernail digging into the fake suede of the upholstery.

“Your dad is mad.” White-faced, Susan mouthed the words and whirled her index finger at her temple.

There was nothing Gabriel could say.

They drove on. And the silence in the car seemed a worse agony than the shouting and the striking that had gone before, seemed to hold them all rigid as surely as if they were each pinned with a hundred tacks through pinches of the skin. And Gabriel felt instinctively, without the restrictive formality of articulation, that it was neither fear nor resentment that kept them all from meeting any other’s eye; it was the shame. The livid, writhing embarrassment of every moment now being lived through: the shame of the blows—witnessed blows—henceforth indelible in their individual histories; the shame of what lay ahead, of what he and Isabella must both face at school, of what would be known about them; and, worst of all, lurking beneath all these like some poisoned underground lake, the shame of the discovery that their father—champion, guarantor, backer—had turned out not to be the idol of their public boast but a public betrayer instead. This the most painful shame. And a shame he felt without the adult luxury of the long view, of independent resource—though immortal all the same for that.

But it was not the ride to Acton that Gabriel remembered most of all when he shut his eyes. It was the rest of the night.

Nothing had been eased and nothing spoken ninety minutes later, when the vast Victorian house reared up in the headlights. His father turned off the engine and stepped out of the car, his distance the shortest to the front door. But Gabriel sat very still, watching his sister walk around the hood while Nicholas fumbled for his key. Without looking back and expecting him to follow, they both disappeared inside, leaving the door ajar and a narrow triangle of light on the frayed gray mat.

But Gabriel did not move. Something held him there.

It was not exactly his conscious intention. But a minute passed and he simply remained motionless.

Then another minute came and went.

And still he did not shift to unbuckle his seat belt. But found himself staring dead ahead: the porch light, at this exact position of parking, somehow revealed the otherwise invisible smears on the windscreen left behind by long-vanished rain.

Three minutes passed in this observation and his attitude did not change—upright, legs together, as if ready for a new journey, selfconsciously breathing through his nose. And though yet without plot or purpose, the more he sat, the harder it was to move. And with each additional second, his resolve seemed to be hardening; yes, the more he sat, the more he knew that he had to go on sitting. And the more he sat, the harder it was to move. And that was all there was to it. Somehow he had become a fugitive from his own decisions—a boy in an adventure story, locked in the basement, stock-still, ear to the door, listening to the baddies decide what they were going to do with him.

The porch bulb was extinguished like a dare. The driveway darkened. He refocused on the opaque semicircular patterns left by the wipers. To his left, the rhododendrons shuffled outside the passenger window. To his right, he could sense his father ducking down a little to get a look inside the car from the steps. And even though he could not see directly for fear of turning his head, even though the narrow angle of dead ahead was all he permitted himself, still Gabriel knew at once that this was the moment, that this was the test—that he must not move at all, not even the shiver of an eyelash; he must remain as still as the headstones in Highgate Cemetery.

His breathing stopped. And he summoned all the will he had in his eight-year-old soul. He would not breathe again until. He would not breathe again. He would not breathe.

His father was gone!

The front door shut.

He had done it.

He was alone.

For the next five minutes triumph surged through him. But just as quickly as it had arrived, his jubilation began to seep and shrink away, his veins to hollow. Pins and needles attacked his foot. The trees shifted again, disturbing the shadows. And all of a sudden he felt uncertain and scared. He tried to rally. He bent everything he had to the single purpose of containment. He sealed off his mind. He shut his eyes. His foot was killing him. Needle pin, pin needle. But the pain was something he could concentrate on, at least. The spasm must pass. If only he could survive the next minute. Survive the next minute. Count up to sixty.

He was totally convinced an hour must have elapsed, maybe longer. He was okay, though. He had come through it in some sort of waking sleep or trance or something. And the cramp had disappeared. And he reckoned he was good for the full adventure, whatever that might be. He allowed himself to relax slightly. Yeah, it was like he was in the book he was reading about three boys who ran a detective agency somewhere in faraway San Francis—

Shit!

His sister’s light was on, directly above. And now off. And now on. And now off. Signals… No, Is, no. Don’t wreck it. Please don’t wreck it. Off. On. Off. On. Off. Off. Staying off… Of course, she would be able to see him better with no light. She must be looking out right now. All he had to do was signal in return. He could sense her face, just above and beyond the ceiling of his self-permitted vision. But once again he knew that the movement of a single nerve would mean mutiny and total collapse, and he would be up and out, and she would sneak down and open the front door, and he would run straight to his room, and she would come running after him, asking him all kinds of Isabella questions. So don’t look up. How long would she be there? What was she doing? Was she waving? Don’t look up. Don’t look up.

The engine had cooled completely when the first serious shiver passed through him and the night began in earnest. The house now loomed like a phantom liner. He was sure of less and less. He could not tell the murmuring of the trees from the murmurs inside his own mind. Voices he had not sanctioned muttered rival commentaries in his head. Familiar faces came and went behind shadowy windows he could not see. And there was only his own stillness left to be relied upon.

His last conscious thought came as dead midnight fell. His chin dropping to his chest and the shivering properly upon him, he became dimly aware that Highgate church bells were chiming—twelve? Was it twelve? His feet and legs had long gone but it was still quite warm beneath him. Nestle into this warmth and let it spread up through him like a hot fountain. Count the church bells.

He was a stranger to the world after that. The fog rose as forecast from London below, creeping and stealing up Highgate Hill, whispering forth blind comrade the frost, until the windscreen rimed and the red hood turned all to pearl. But Gabriel was no longer looking through conscious eyes, because a feverish waking sleep had overtaken him and he was a pilgrim now, wandering through a bone-strewn valley in the story of a dark and evil land. Several times he thought perhaps he could make out the shape of Isabella’s face again—his mysterious twin watching at her window, by his side, or over his shoulder—but he could not be certain. And anyway he did not want to lose count on his journey.

He was still sitting there at four, when Maria Glover’s headlights swept the driveway. At first she dismissed the evidence of her own copy-sore eyes; then she thought it must be a thief. But when the shape still did not move (a bowed head silhouetted through silvered glass), she killed her engine and stepped out of the car, leaving the lights on. The three seconds that it took to cross the gravel were filled with a mother’s horror—she could not guess what or how or why, and surely it could not be Gabriel? But it was. Even then, she put her hand to the door handle expecting to meet resistance—he must be locked in. And yet, save for the adhesion of the frost, there was none.