Almond Nesting

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9575032-5-0
Verlag: Iron Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

David Almond is now known around the world as the author of the novels Skellig, Kit's Wilderness and The Savage. His first two books - Sleepless Nights (1985) and A Kind of Heaven (1997) - were published by Iron Press, a selection of which appears in Nesting alongside two previously unpublished tales. The stories draw deeply from the Tyneside estate of Almond's childhood, exploring the themes that would inform his later work, and displaying all the rhythm, lyricism and drive for which he is acclaimed today. 'A master storyteller.' The Independent 'There is nobody quite like Almond writing in adults' or children's fiction today. A writer of visionary, Blakean intensity.' The Times 'David Almond's books are strange, unsettling wild things. They are, like all great literature, beyond classification.' The Guardian David Almond was born in Newcastle upon Tyne. His many awards include the Whitbread Children's Book Award (twice), the Carnegie Medal and the Hans Christian Andersen Award. My Name is Nina, the prequel to Skellig, was published in 2010. His books have been translated into over 40 languages, and adapted for both stage and screen. He now lives in Northumberland. This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Almond, David

Leseproben

Joffy


‘Nn-nn-ooo-nnnooot… Nnnoott-en-enn…’ ‘Not enough? That’s what you’re saying, Joffy?’ ‘Yyyy-yy…’ The cleaver came down again, cutting away more from the red wedge of meat between the butcher’s hands. Joffy, his head level with the marble slab, watched the pile of cubes before his eyes grow. ‘How much more, Joffy? Your mammy only wrote steak.’ Joffy held the meat between his hands, then held his head in the same way. ‘As big as your head,’ his mother had said, sending him out. ‘Get enough steak that would fill up your head.’ Faced with the meat now, though, he couldn’t tell how much that was. It could be squashed, it fell into a sunken heap, but his head had its own hard shape. He looked up at the butcher, Mr McCaufrey, the only man who came to see them now, the only person, apart from those who came to pry and ask questions. Mr McCaufrey waited patiently, as usual, smiling, his face red as the blood on his broad hands, but this was too hard for Joffy. There was nowhere to begin. His tongue squirmed uselessly between his teeth. ‘Tell you what, Joffy. You take this, and if you need more, you can come back for it. Okay?’ Walking the hill out of the village, Joffy could feel the meat sliding beneath the pressure of his fingers. He watched blood collect in the corners of the white plastic bag. He knew it didn’t matter if there was too little or too much. She was angry anyway, and all yesterday, all this morning, had been shouting at him. ‘The cow better not start nosing about again,’ she said, her mouth twisted, scornful, ‘She’s just like the rest of us underneath it all. Thinks her money gives her some right, but it doesn’t.’ The cow was Auntie Eileen. She was coming today, Saturday, to spoil it. On Saturdays he liked to be alone. His mother went out, not to return until the next morning, telling him he must stay near the house, go no further than the garden. He’d go to the quarry to sit by the pond there. It had begun to be packed with frogs now that spring was on its way. He’d play with them, until darkness came near, then run quickly home, trembling with anticipation. But today he would have to stay with them, his mother and his aunt. Auntie Eileen had been before, and he hated her, was frightened by her. She wouldn’t just leave him like most other people did, but was always wanting to touch him, fingering his skin, stroking his hair. Hardly anybody else did that. Hardly anybody else could. She always wanted to talk to him, kept asking him questions, telling him if he took his time he could say anything he wanted to. And she wore a fur hat and a fur scarf, even indoors. A fur scarf with animals’ heads on its ends that hung down over her shoulders. She would pull him tightly to her huge soft chest, and he would have to stare into the animals’ bright, empty eyes. He approached his home, the last house in the village, a tiny bungalow isolated by high hawthorn hedges. Beyond it more hawthorn that edged the quarry, and link chain fences to keep the children out, because of falling stones. And far beyond the quarry the town where his school was, to which he travelled in what even his mother called the dooley bus. He hated entering the town in it, trying not to see the grinning bestial faces outside, put on to echo or provoke those inside. Last time she was here, Auntie Eileen told his mother she should move from here, back into town, where there would be work for her, where Joffy could be close to school. ‘We like it here, don’t we, Joffy?” his mother said. ‘We can keep ourselves to ourselves. It’s fine, and there’s plenty space for him.’ ‘Is it enough, though? There’s hardly another child in the whole place. The boy needs friends, someone to be with, company.’ ‘Ha!’ Auntie Eileen turned to him, told him to say for himself that he would like friends, but he didn’t know how to answer that. When she had gone, his mother, her fists full of five pound notes, muttered angrily all evening, more to the walls than to Joffy, ‘Old bag, what does she know? Never had a cock in her whole life but tries to tell me what to do.’ Inside were the unfamiliar smells of disinfectant and polish. The living room was cleared of its piles of clothes, of its empty wine bottles. His mother was on the arm of a chair, still in her nightgown, putting on make-up before a small hand mirror. He held out the meat to her, but she waved it away in disgust, told him to leave it on the table. She smelt warm, newly bathed, and he went close to her, pressed himself to her. Sometimes she opened the gown, wrapped him inside it, but not today. With a long coloured fingernail she pushed him away from her, and as he left shouted after him, ‘And mind you keep your trap shut today. You say nothing, not about anything. Right?’ She waited, ‘Right?’ He turned, biting his lip, nodded. White, tiny-headed, half-dumb Joffy. Into the hedge he went, to his damp dark nest of hollowed earth, broken branches, bark worn smooth by his so much sitting there. Joffy, white as a hawthorn petal, coloured only by sparse traceries of pink, pink eyes and his mouth when opened wide as red as any meat. He refused to look at himself now. He had long ago taught himself the horror of himself in mirrors, how he would peer out like some blanched fish used only to deep darkness. And fish-mouthed also, gulping silence.

Only on Saturday nights could he change. With her gone, he opened wide the door to her room, sat by her mirrors, spreading his face with her blacks, reds, greens, blues, made himself another Joffy that could glare out from the glass, run unrestrained and naked through the rooms, kicking walls, leaping from chair to chair, yelling his own invented words of savagery or hate. Then slept, in her bed, exhausted and smiling, travelling lucid jungles of colour and noise. Sunday afternoons she returned, to the silent house, her made bed, Joffy peering at her, white and frightened from his nest.

‘Joffy!’ She was calling him, standing in the doorway, in a skirt and a blouse buttoned to her throat, the remains of a cigarette dangling from her fingers. ‘Out of there!’ Slapping his face as he came to her, calling him rat, yanking at his muddied trousers, pulling him in by his tangled hair. ‘In here. Now. Look at you.’ She stripped him in the living room, cleaned him with licked tissues, dressed him in clothes bought yesterday, yellow jeans whose hems had to be turned up around his skinny ankles, shirt of pastel checks, running shoes, brushed his hair so fiercely close to his scalp he was certain the bristles came right through skin, scraped bone. ‘Sit there. And dare move!’ He sat at the laid table’s edge, gripping a knife blade so tightly his knuckles were white against his white, pressed to tears by his pain, her anger, his wildness that raced impotently beneath his skin and threw into his head pictures of animals’ eyes, splashed frogs, carcasses hanging high behind opened white doors. But all that solved so easily when she came to him a half-hour later, sat him in her lap, tolerated his hands seeking her flesh beneath her blouse, his cheek pressed against her hair, whispered to him that he must be good this afternoon, good for her, and folded her arms about him, murmured, ‘Little whiteness. My funny little whiteness.’ He was good, sat on the floor between them while they faced each other across the hearth. Auntie Eileen had seen his report from school. ‘Jonathan likes art, and is good at it,’ it said. ‘Oh, Jonathan. Good boy,’ she said, ‘You must do some pictures for me.’ Crayons gripped in his fists he made furious tangles of colour for her, pressing so hard he gouged the edges of his paper to rags, spread flakes of wax across the floor. She wanted more, though, and she said, ‘Oh, Jonathan, how lovely. You must tell me about it. I think I can see a dog there. And is this a house? Come and tell me.’ Waiting, without the animals’ heads today, but her own head like a strange bird’s, her eyes split by half-lens glasses, encouraging him, but Joffy unable to form answers for her, unable to think even of the beginnings of answers for her, his head seething with hatred for her. He simply nodded when she asked if what she saw there was there. He felt sick, the steak as big as his head, that she had cut into tiny pieces for him at lunch, resting like stones inside him, and he wanted only to be away from them, in the quarry, or lying asleep and coloured in his mother’s bed. When the women spoke with each other, it was as if they believed that because he couldn’t speak properly, he couldn’t hear properly either. At the table it had been all the old things, how they should move from here, go back to town, stop being so cut off, how being here wasn’t enough for the boy and was too much for his mother. His mother kept saying they managed, they liked it, it had been hell before they came here and was so much better now. ‘But what future is there here?’ Auntie Eileen said, ‘How can the boy improve? How can you get pulled together again? Look at you. You’re not the girl you were. Look at that poor lonely boy. You’re just eating each...