"Night Warriors - 01 - Night Warriors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

He glanced towards the hallway door, where Susan's grandmother was vacuum-cleaning in surge after surge of roaring decibels, and then he stood up and came over to the sink, and laid his hand on Susan's shoulder. He was short and tubby, like Susan's grandmother; but unlike her grandmother he was quite content to look his age, which was sixty-six. His bald head was varnished like a candy-apple from hours of sitting out in his rocking-chair and watching the bouncy golden schoolgirls go by.

'Your grandma means well,' he told her, in a low voice.

Susan nodded. 'Yes, I know.'

'She's only trying to protect you from making a mistake.'

'Yes, I know.'

Her grandfather didn't know what else to say. He fiddled with the cuff of his droopy grey cardigan. Then he shrugged, and went and sat down, and picked up his paper again, although he kept his eyes on Susan. The newspaper headlines warned of more earth tremors mainly centred on Tijuana.

Susan went across the hall to her bedroom. Her grandmother looked up from her vacuum-cleaning with a hurt, impatient expression, but Susan tried to ignore her. It wasn't her fault that she had to live here, and just as soon as she possibly could, she was going to move out. She briefly glimpsed the dead girl's face again, and somehow it became tangled up with her mother's face, crushed and lopsided after the accident. She opened her bedroom door with the flat of her hand.

Daffy was sprawled across Susan's divan-bed, her legs kicked up, engrossed in Cosmopolitan.

'Oh hi, Suze, You're early. Did you read this thing about the sponge?'

Susan went straight across to the washbasin and brushed up her hair in the mirror. Her grandfather had been right: she did look chalky.

Daffy turned over and said, 'It says here that it's only seventy per cent safe.'

Susan frowned at herself in the mirror. 'What is?'

'The sponge O deaf ears. Can you imagine that? Seventy per cent! That means for every hundred times you make love, you get pregnant thirty times. My God, I'll have ninety children before I'm eighteen.'

Susan found that she was crying. Silently, but bitterly, so that the tears ran down her cheeks and dripped down the sides of her mouth. Daffy didn't notice at first, and went on reading, but then Susan let out a high-pitched sob.

Daffy jumped off the bed. 'Suze - what's the matter? What's happened?' Outside the door, the vacuum-cleaner was still roaring, and banging at the skirting-boards. 'It's not her again, is it?'

Susan shook her head. She dragged two tissues out of the box beside her basin, and noisily blew her nose. Then she dragged out another one and wiped her eyes. 'I don't know what it is. It's probably nothing, just my period.'

'I was going to ask if you wanted to come to my house. We're having a barbecue, and some of the kids from Escondido are coming over.'

'I don't know. I feel kind of weird.'

'Weird? Why?'

'It's - I don't know, it's something that happened down on the beach. I'm trying not to think about it but it won't go away.'

She sat down on the edge of the divan-bed and Daffy sat down beside her. 'Well?' asked Daffy, with incandescent curiosity.

Susan dabbed at her eyes again. 'I'm not sure that I can tell you.'

'Was it a boy? You weren't raped, were you? You definitely look like you could have been raped.'

'It wasn't anything like that.'

'Then what, for Christ's sake?'