Smith Devilskein and Dearlove

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-909208-16-2
Verlag: Arachne Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Just as Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book reworked Kipling's The Jungle Book for a modern audience with a liking for the supernatural, Devilskein & Dearlove is a darker, more edgy, contemporary reworking of Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic The Secret Garden. An orphaned teenager is taken in by a reluctant distant relative, and in her new home makes an unexpected friend and finds a secret realm. It has shades of the quirky fantastical in the style of Miyazaki's (Studio Ghibli) animated films like Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle (originally a novel by Diana Wynne Jones). Alex says 'As a child The Secret Garden was one of my first favourite novels - one of the first I relished reading by myself. Although Devilskein & Dearlove is very different, it was inspired by that novel and its themes.' 'Alex Smith's quirky imagination knows no bounds.' - André Brink

Alex Smith was brought up in South Africa and until recently lived in Cape Town with her partner, their book-eating baby boy and their two dogs. She is now resident in Ireland. She has had four novels published in South Africa (Random House/Umuzi Imprint), was shortlisted for the 2010 Caine Prize and won the 2011Nielsens Bookseller's Choice Award. She has been published before by Arachne Press, in Weird Lies

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smith, Alex

Leseproben

1

Grumpy Girl

When Erin Dearlove arrived at Van Riebeek Heights to live with her reluctant Aunt Kate, the neighbours all said she was an obnoxious brat, too thin, spoiled, wild-looking, and with a habit of speaking like she’d swallowed a dictionary. They were pretty spot on. Her face was scrawny, her sandy amber hair unbrushed, she used convoluted vocabulary with spite, and she never smiled because she had no parents. Apart from Aunt Kate, who had been sworn to secrecy, nobody quite knew what had happened to them. Erin relished shocking people by telling them her mother and father had been eaten by a crocodile. ‘Can’t undo it, can’t forget it,’ she’d say, then add, ‘I found bits of them on the shaggy white carpet of our designer home.’

Some people’s jaws dropped open in horror. Erin liked that.

But the truth of her parents’ demise was even uglier than a crocodile.

In the first few days at Van Riebeek Heights she found it impossible to avoid being cornered by overwhelmingly chatty grown-ups endowed with a blur of names like Nozizwe, Ebindenyefa, Zibima Oruh, Granny Wokoya, Aunty Talmakies, Varsha Lalla, Tekenatei, Ayodele, Boitumelo and Jaroslav Chudej, and when their unwelcome geniality forced her into conversation, Erin would boast how her dad had been an important and very corrupt banker. ‘Mr Dearlove, my father, was a splenetic, abusive man,’ she’d say. ‘He had many enemies, but even he did not deserve the horrendous fate that befell him and his wife and their irksome dog.’ After telling the story a few times, she’d added that yapping terrier, but she never once mentioned the brother she had lost on that same unspeakable morning.

Her bad reputation at Van Riebeek Heights was sealed one Tuesday in the hour before twilight. ‘Of course,’ she said to Mrs Puoane, a flabbergasted neighbour from upstairs, who was seven months pregnant with twins, ‘I was fascinated by their fabulous parties, their beautiful clothes, and famous friends who often appeared in glossy magazines and international newspapers, but the Dearloves were hard to get close to.’ About this, Erin just shrugged. ‘There was no warmth in that architecturally astonishing house. It’s almost a relief that those Dearloves are gone.’ But as she said the words, her heart constricted; it ached and so she added with venom, ‘Parents are so overrated. With the way science is advancing, they’ll soon be superfluous.’

Ping!Ping!Ping! went the Company Soulometer and Devilskein regarded the scurrilous contraption on his kitchen table with satisfaction. The Tuesday sun had sunk and night was on its way and the device alerted him to a quarry on another continent. The contraption was something like a GPS, except it dated back almost four thousand years, back to the early days of Babylon, and instead of directing a Companyman to a place, it gave the longitude and latitude of any living person who had, with true intent, thought or uttered aloud some variation of: ‘Oh, I would sell my soul for/to…’. Of course, the Company did not buy souls, nobody can buy a soul: it is priceless; it has to be pledged. In order to procure these most precious of commodities, the Company dangled all manner of carrots and smidgens of hope in the way of desperate would-be traders: ‘Your soul is not sold, it is pawned, and it is security for your debt to the Company; it is redeemable on certain terms. So if you or somebody you know can muster the wherewithal within a reasonable amount of time, there is a chance you can have it back. Until such time, it will reside in a locked room in our Indeterminate Vault. And like gold bullion for a government, its great treasury of souls made the Company a universal superpower. Exactly the nature of the said ‘wherewithal’, the specifics of the certain terms and the length of the reasonable time were all things never made obvious. Company policy was never obvious. Its magic was too shadowy and despicable for any such contractual transparency. However, betwixt the hot air and subterfuge, trading in souls did in fact have very definite rules. And every room in the vault of endlessly nested doors had a key.

Erin smiled cruelly at Mrs Puoane, her pregnant neighbour. ‘I do not miss Mother and I do not miss Father, but nor do I relish the ridiculously small size of my Aunt Kate’s apartment on this filthy Long Street.’ She sighed. ‘I suppose I have to face the fact that I am well and truly poor.’

As night absorbed any remnants of that Tuesday, Erin went on to plunder her imagination and further regale Mrs Puoane with how having always been rich and given everything she ever wanted, she assumed that living with Aunt Kate was a temporary measure until the complications with the bank were sorted out and she would have her four-poster double bed and the private forest, vineyards, peacocks and rolling lawns of the estate back again.

Two doors down, a boy who had already heard most of the blah about the mansion with the glass stairs was surprised when he happened to open one of his mother’s old copies of Garden & Home to see an article about a convicted fraudster, a banker who boasted that he was out of prison before he even went in, and who happened to live in a mansion with glass stairs. His place was so big it required a staff of five gardeners and five housekeepers. But his surname was not Dearlove. ‘And look!’ muttered Kelwyn Talmakies to himself. ‘There’s a peacock in the vineyard.’ On reading the article Kelwyn learned too that the tycoon who owned it despised anything cheap, bohemian, homemade or crafty; he wore only Armani clothes, Italian bespoke shoes and Rolex watches. Kelwyn frowned, but his thoughts were interrupted.

‘Rover 1, come in, Rover 1, come in,’ crackled a voice from a walkie-talkie lying beside Kelwyn.

He rolled over and picked it up. ‘Rover 1, here. What’s up, Rover 2?’

‘We have a situation,’ said the fuzzy voice named Rover 2. ‘Need back-up on the corner of Church Street.’

‘Be right there. Over and out.’

Duty, in the form of his sidekick, Sipho, aka Rover 2, who lived on the first floor with his grandmother, had radioed in and Kelwyn, unsure what to make of the article, stashed the magazine under his bed. In doing so he was chuffed to discover one of his favourite penknives: an Opinel with a carbon steel blade and a comfortable hand-carved wooden handle; he’d saved up to buy it from ‘Serendipity’ a musty, resin-scented antiques and oddments shop in Long Street. He collected penknives and had a particular soft spot for Opinels – ‘the peasant’s knife’, his father had told him, before vanishing back to France – and Kelwyn owned three of them.

*

Rubbing his hands in anticipation of a deal, Devilskein, a Companyman with a formidable reputation, noted the co-ordinates of a middle-aged actor in an apartment in Istanbul. The fellow in peril fancied he was a theatrical genius waiting to be discovered. ‘Honestly, I would sell my soul for a good part,’ the actor said to a confidante as they sat smoking on a roof-top terrace with a view of the Bosphorus.

The first law of soul trading is that of ‘Ask and You Shall Receive’, like easy credit (but in the small print on any contract with the Company, the crippling interest rate on borrowings runs into several thousand percent).

Erin flickered her eyelashes and made a final bid to push all those terribly friendly people at Van Riebeek Heights away for good: ‘It’s no wonder I ignore the children around here,’ she said to Mrs Puoane, whose ankles were starting to swell from having to stand for so long. ‘They’re rather dirty, low-class and uncouth. And besides, most of them are boys and I have nothing in common with them or anybody else on this noisy street where my aunt lives.’

Mrs Puoane rubbed her belly and groaned: one of the twins’ small feet was kicking eagerly and its sibling was thumping its mother-to-be right under her ribs.

And so it was that after only a week at Van Riebeek Heights, her petulance earned Erin a nickname: ‘Grumpy Girl’. It was Kelwyn Talmakies, owner of the walkie-talkie and the exceptional penknife, eldest son of Leilene Talmakies (who was Aunt Kate’s friend and favourite neighbour) who started calling Erin that name first. He was a stocky teen with caramel skin, blond hair and a fighting spirit. His nails were usually full of mud, and his T-shirt often streaked with earth – despite Leilene Talmakies’ best efforts to encourage her son to bathe twice daily, he frequently smelled of pungent kelp. He always kept a penknife in his pocket. To his mother’s chagrin, Kelwyn had a tattoo of a gecko on his right calf, for shortly before abandoning his family, his zoologist father had instigated the inking of this reptile on his son’s leg. What’s more, Kelwyn seemed to relish goading Erin with his friendliness. But his greatest crime was being the same age as her dear, dear brother who was no more. For that alone she detested Kelwyn from the moment she laid eyes on him.

‘You stink,’ she’d said to his initial ‘How do you do?’

‘It’s called “Seagrow”,’ Kelwyn said, sniffing his shirt happily. ‘It’s liquid fertiliser for plants.’ Then he ventured, ‘Do you read Garden & Home?’

Her face crumpled with disdain. ‘Don’t be absurd.’

She had, until he interrupted her, been reading a book, just as she’d...