"Nicola Griffith - The Blue Place" - читать интересную книгу автора (Griffith Nicola)

Chapter One
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An April night in Atlanta between thunderstorms: dark and warm and
wet, sidewalks shiny with rain and slick with torn leaves and fallen azalea
blossoms. Nearly midnight. I had been walking for over an hour, covering
four or five miles. I wasn’t tired. I wasn’t sleepy.
You would think that my bad dreams would be of the first man I had
killed, thirteen years ago. Or if not him, then maybe the teenager who had
burned to death in front of me because I was too slow to get the man with
the match. But no, when I turn out the lights at ten o’clock and can’t keep
still, can’t even bear to sit down in my Lake Claire house, it’s because I see
again the first body I hadn’t killed.
I was twenty-one, a rookie in a uniform so new it still smelled of harsh
chemical dyes. My hat was too big. My partner and I had been called to a
duplex on Lavista. It was me who opened the bathroom door.
As soon as I saw that bathwater, I knew. Water just doesn’t get that still
if the person sitting in it is alive: the pulse of blood through veins, the
constant peristaltic squeeze of alimentary tract, the soft suck of breath
move the liquid gently, but definitely. Not this water. It was only after I
had stared, fascinated, at the dry scum on the bar of soap, only after my
partner had moved me gently aside, that I noticed her mouth was open,
her eyeballs a gluey blue-grey where they should have been white.
I wake up at night seeing those eyes.
The sidewalks around Inman Park are made from uneven hexagons,
mossy and slippery even without the debris of the recent storm. I walked
in the road. A pine tree among the oaks smelled of warm resin, and the
steam already rising from the pavement brought with it the scents of oil
and rubber and warm asphalt. I smiled. Southern cities. People often say
to me, Aud, how can you stand the heat? but I love it. I love to feel the sun
rub up against my pale northern skin, love its fingers reaching down into
muscle and bone. I grew up with subzero fjord winds edged with spicules
of ice; to breathe deep and feel damp summer heat curling into delicate
bronchioles is a luxury I will never tire of. Even during the teenage years I
spent in England, when my mother decided the embassy could get along
without her for a week or two and we all went up to Yorkshire to stay with
Lord Horley, there was that endless biting moan over the moors, the
ceaseless waving of heather and gorse. The American South suits me just
fine.
Atlanta is lush. The gates and lawns and hedges I walked past were
heady with the scents of trumpet honeysuckle and jasmine, the last of the
pink and white dogwood blossom. By June, of course, all the small blooms
would wilt in the heat, and the city’s true colours, jungle colours, would
become apparent: black-striped tiger lilies, orchids, waxy magnolia
blossom. By the end of August, even those would give up the ghost and the
city would turn green: glossy beryl banana trees with canoe-sized leaves,
jade swamp oak, and acre upon emerald acre of bermuda grass. And as
the summer heat faded into the end of October, the beginning of
November, the green would fade with it. In winter Atlanta became a pale
black and white photograph of a city with concrete sidewalks,