"Lucy Sussex - Matricide" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sussex Lucy)

Matricide

by Lucy Sussex

There is an afterlife …

And it appears to be an international airport terminal. How strangely suitable, she thinks, given the time I
spent in such places. Charles de Gaulle, Heathrow, LAX she knows, but this terminal is not so
immediately familiar. It is typical, though: computer screens, garish carpet, travelers crowding the
departure lounges. Departing for where? she wonders. Some other terminal, some afterlife Paris, Athens,
Rome?

An announcement comes over the loudspeaker in a string of translated languages. She catches in each the
word Changi. Singapore, she thinks. They named it after a prison … again appropriate. No heaven, she
thinks, but hell—I've felt that often enough, stumbling jet-lagged off a plane—or even purgatory? She
stares at the fellow travelers, but they seem just like any tired passenger encountered in life. Young girls in
high fashion, older women in tracksuits, parents pushing strollers, little children running across the carpet.
Suddenly she glimpses a woman oddly familiar, seen through the glass of a departure waiting room:
middle-sized, between youth and middle age, thin, hair cut conveniently but modishly short, her clothes
chic, but comfortable for traveling. Then she realizes the woman is not seen through the glass but darkly
reflected in it.

How I used to be, she thinks, with a pang of pleased vanity. Well, better that than the wreck of what I
am now. Or the vomitbucket of a few months ago. She moves on, becoming aware that she is not so
much stepping as gliding across the concourse. Ghosts walk, she recalls, the thought summoning the
memory of a television program, chilling when seen in childhood. Involuntarily she glances down to see
her feet, clad in modish, all-purpose (from city walking to boardroom) boots, which are firmly planted on
the black plastic of a conveyer belt.

She relaxes and lets the belt transport her past the departure lounges, into the gift-shop section. At the
end of the belt she steps off, into walls of duty-free Hermès, cigars, Scotch whisky. Then she stops.
Behind one glass shop window is a woman, familiar, older, also stylishly but comfortably dressed. And,
she notices, just on the legal edge of air travel, to judge from the bulge beneath her Pregnancy Survival
Kit black frock.

As it is the afterlife, she can do now what she wouldn't in real life, satisfy an inappropriate curiosity.

"Excuse me?"

The woman looks up from a display of little Chinese dolls.

"Excuse me, but you were the judge …"

She thinks: Judge Judy I called her at the time; it was Judge Judith something.

Judge Judy gazes at her, head slightly on one side, as if sorting through a mental card file.
"I was the defendant in a case you presided over. In New York. I was sued: Tenenbaum v. Lester. I'm
Lester, Sylvie Lester."

"Oh, yes," says the judge. "The case over that ridiculous doll. The hallucination in wax. It made me feel ill