"Robin Hobb - A Touch of Lavender" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hobb Robin)

A Touch of Lavender
Megan Lindholm
We grew up like mice nesting in a rotting sofa, my sister and I. Even when I was only nine and she was
an infant, I thought of us that way. At night, when she'd be asleep in the curl of my belly and I'd be
half-falling off the old sofa we used as a bed, I'd hear the mice nibbling and moving inside the upholstery
beneath us, and sometimes the tiny squeakings of the new-born ones when the mother came to nurse
them. I'd curl tighter around Lisa and pretend she was a little pink baby mouse instead of a little pink
baby girl, and that I was the father mouse, curled around her to protect her. Sometimes it made the nights
less chill.

I'd lived in the same basement apartment all my life. It was always chill, even in summer. It was an awful
place, dank and ratty, but the upstairs apartments were worse, rank with urine and rot. The building was
an old townhouse, long ago converted to four apartments upstairs and one in the basement. None of
them were great, but ours was the cheapest, because we had the furnace and the water heater right next
to us. When I was real small, three or so, a water main beside the building broke, and water came rising
up in our apartment, maybe a foot deep. I woke up to my stuff floating beside me, and the old couch
sucking up water like a sponge. I yelled for Mom. I heard the splash as she rolled out of bed in the only
bedroom and then her cussing as she waded through the water to pick me up. Her current musician took
the whole thing as a big joke, until he saw his sax case floating. Then he grabbed up his stuff and was out
of there. I don't remember seeing him after that.

My mom and I spent that day sitting on the steps down to our apartment, waiting for the city maintenance
crew to fix the pipe, waiting for the water to go down and then waiting for our landlord.

He finally came and looked the place over and nodded, and said, hell, it was probably for the best, he'd
been meaning to put down new tile and spraysulate the walls anyway. "You go ahead and tear out the old
stuff," he told my Mom. "Stack it behind the house, and I'll have it hauled away. Let me know when
you're ready, and I'll send in a crew to fix the place up. Now about your rent . . ."

"I told you, I already mailed it," my Mom said coldly, looking past his ear, and the landlord sighed and
drove off.

So my Mom and her friends peeled up the cracking linoleum and tore the sheetrock off the walls, leaving
the bare concrete floor with stripes of mastic showing and the two-by-four wall studs standing bare
against the grey block walls. That was as far as the re-modeling ever got. The landlord never hauled the
stuff away, or sent in a crew. He never spraysulated the walls, either. Even in the summer the walls were
cool and misty, and in winter it was like the inside of a refrigerator.

My Mom wasn't so regular about paying the rent that she could raise a fuss. Most of the folks in our
building were like that: pay when you can, and don't stay home when you can't, so the landlord can't nag
at you. The apartments were lousy, but complaining could get you kicked out. All the tenants knew that if
the landlord had wanted to, he could have gotten a government grant to convert the place into Skoag
units and really made a bundle. We were right on the edge of a Skoag sector and demand for Skoag
units was increasing.

That was back when the Skoags were first arriving and there wasn't much housing for them. It all had to
be agency approved, too, to prevent any "interplanetary incidents." Can't have aliens falling down the
steps and breaking a flipper, even if they are pariah aliens. These outcasts were the only link we had to
their planet and culture, and especially to their technology for space travel that the whole world was so
anxious to have. No one knew where they came from or how they got to earth. They just started wading