Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman

Author:Ned Beauman [Beauman, Ned]
Language: spa
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Like a small child defending an obvious lie, Mrs. Purleyswars had managed to answer only two or three questions before her story ran out. She was a stout hippyish woman in her fifties who, until she became evasive, spoke in the unctuous tone of somebody forever celebrating life’s lovely little surprises, a voice like a hug that goes on for too long. As the two of them sat there in the dim, airless cabin—Mrs. Purleyswars perched on the bottom bunk of the bunk bed, Resaint on a stool sipping from a plastic tumbler of bilberry tea she had felt no choice but to accept—Mrs. Purleyswars chuckled, hummed and sighed through her explanation of exactly what she meant by “having a natter with the gnats,” and Resaint was certain that this was the first time she’d been pressed on the subject by an outsider. Once Mrs. Purleyswars could see that Resaint could see that she was talking nonsense, she did seem sheepish. But only mildly. Whereas Resaint was scolding herself for being such an idiot.

After all, Resaint thought, what was more demeaning: For an adult woman to pretend she could talk to insects, or for an adult woman to nearly believe her? Part of her had known in advance it was silly but part of her, enough to matter, had longed for it to be true. She asked herself again how she could have got her hopes up like that—it was extremely out of character—and she knew it had to do with the sadness she felt about Kazu Horikawa: about the dismissal of her ideas, about the curtailment of her career. If Horikawa had died as a sort of exile, wasn’t it possible that amongst the exiles on this putrid Baltic shore one might find languishing another like her, a savant of little nibblers, somebody who understood these gnats like a Siberian hunter understood tigers, and that when Resaint met her it would be like the many meetings she’d had with Horikawa in her dreams?

The cabin door opened and a girl came in. She was about eighteen or nineteen, and she had that low-contrast coloring that was in fashion for white women at the moment, tawny eyebrows hardly standing out against the skin, although it was now a bit measled by kaptcha marks. Resaint recognized this girl but couldn’t place her right away. “Nathan said he left his charger here,” the girl said. “Do you know where it is?” She looked at Resaint. “Oh, hi?”

“Elsie, this is Karin,” Mrs. Purleyswars said. And so Resaint realized where she’d seen the girl before: this was ElsieVVVV, who posted all those videos about life in the camp. She had burst into the cabin with such familiarity that Resaint wondered if she might be Mrs. Purleyswars’ daughter, although there wasn’t much of a resemblance.

“Are you from Migri?” Elsie said.

“No, pet, she’s from Switzerland. She came to talk about . . .” Mrs. Purleyswars tailed off. The conversation they’d just had was like a pool of vomit in the corner of the room that neither of them wanted to acknowledge.

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