China Mieville - Details.pdf - China Mieville - margozap

China Mieville - Details

Details

China Mieville

China Mieville is the author of several short stories and three

novels : King Rat, Perdido Street Station (which won the Arthur C.

Clarke and British Fantasy Awards), and The Scar. Born in 1972,

he lives and works in London .

Mieville says: " 'Details' was an attempt to write an homage to

Lovecraft that was un-Lovecraftian in style. It was serendipity that

John Pelan and Benjamin Adams were putting together an

anthology with the same idea — tribute, not imitation or parody ."

The story succeeds brilliantly in evoking Lovecraftian horror

without invoking any specifically Lovecraftian tropes. No small feat!

"Details" was originally published in The Children of Cthulhu.

—E. D.

When the boy upstairs got hold of a pellet gun and fired snips of

potato at passing cars, I took a turn. I was part of everything. I

wasn't an outsider. But I wouldn't join in when my friends went to

the yellow house to scribble on the bricks and listen at the windows.

One girl teased me about it, but everyone else told her to shut up.

They defended me, even though they didn't understand why I

file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/China%20Mieville%20-%20Details.html (1 of 22)13-8-2005 23:44:36

China Mieville - Details

wouldn't come.

I don't remember a time before I visited the yellow house for my

mother.

On Wednesday mornings at about nine o'clock I would open the

front door of the decrepit building with a key from the bunch my

mother had given me. Inside was a hall and two doors, one broken

and leading to the splintering stairs. I would unlock the other and

enter the dark flat. The corridor was unlit and smelled of old wet air.

I never walked even two steps down that hallway. Rot and shadows

merged, and it looked as if the passage disappeared a few yards

from me. The door to Mrs. Miller's room was right in front of me. I

would lean forward and knock.

Quite often there were signs that someone else had been there

recently. Scuffed dust and bits of litter. Sometimes I was not alone.

There were two other children I sometimes saw slipping in or out of

the house. There were a handful of adults who visited Mrs. Miller.

I might find one or another of them in the hallway outside the door

to her flat, or even in the flat itself, slouching in the crumbling dark

hallway. They would be slumped over or reading some cheap-

looking book or swearing loudly as they waited.

There was a young Asian woman who wore a lot of makeup and

smoked obsessively. She ignored me totally. There were two drunks

who came sometimes. One would greet me boisterously and

incomprehensibly, raising his arms as if he wanted to hug me into

his stinking, stinking jumper. I would grin and wave nervously,

walk past him. The other seemed alternately melancholic and angry.

Occasionally I'd meet him by the door to Mrs. Miller's room,

file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/China%20Mieville%20-%20Details.html (2 of 22)13-8-2005 23:44:36

China Mieville - Details

swearing in a strong cockney accent. I remember the first time I saw

him, he was standing there, his red face contorted, slurring and

moaning loudly.

"Come on, you old slag," he wailed, "you sodding old slag . Come

on, please, you cow."

His words scared me but his tone was wheedling, and I realized I

could hear her voice, Mrs. Miller's voice, from inside the room,

answering him back. She did not sound frightened or angry.

I hung back, not sure what to do, and she kept speaking, and

eventually the drunken man shambled miserably away. And then I

could continue as usual.

I asked my mother once if I could have some of Mrs. Miller's food.

She laughed very hard and shook her head. In all the Wednesdays of

bringing the food over, I never even dipped my finger in to suck it.

My mum spent an hour every Tuesday night making the stuff up.

She dissolved a bit of gelatin or cornflour with some milk, threw in

a load of sugar or flavorings, and crushed a clutch of vitamin pills

into the mess. She stirred it until it thickened and let it set in a plain

white plastic bowl. In the morning it would be a kind of strong-

smelling custard that my mother put a dishcloth over and gave me,

along with a list of any questions or requests for Mrs. Miller and

sometimes a plastic bucket full of white paint.

So I would stand in front of Mrs. Miller's door, knocking, with a

bowl at my feet. I'd hear a shifting and then her voice from close by

the door.

"Hello," she would call, and then say my name a couple of times.

file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/China%20Mieville%20-%20Details.html (3 of 22)13-8-2005 23:44:36

China Mieville - Details

"Have you my breakfast? Are you ready?"

I would creep up close to the door and hold the food ready. I would

tell her I was.

Mrs. Miller would slowly count to three. On three, the door

suddenly swung open a snatch, just a foot or two, and I thrust the

bowl into the gap. She grabbed it and slammed the door quickly in

my face.

I couldn't see very much inside the room. The door was open for

less than a second. My strongest impression was of the whiteness of

the walls. Mrs. Miller's sleeves were white, too, and made of plastic.

I never got much of a glimpse at her face, but what I saw was

unmemorable. A middle-aged woman's eager face.

If I had a bucket full of paint, we would run through the routine

again. Then I would sit cross-legged in front of her door and listen

to her eat.

"How's your mother?" she would shout. At that I'd unfold my

mother's careful queries. She's okay, I'd say, she's fine. She says she

has some questions for you.

I'd read my mother's strange questions in my careful childish

monotone, and Mrs. Miller would pause and make interested

sounds, and clear her throat and think out loud. Sometimes she took

ages to come to an answer, and sometimes it would be almost

immediate.

"Tell your mother she can't tell if a man's good or bad from that,"

she'd say. "Tell her to remember the problems she had with your

father." Or: "Yes, she can take the heart of it out. Only she has to

file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/China%20Mieville%20-%20Details.html (4 of 22)13-8-2005 23:44:36

China Mieville - Details

paint it with the special oil I told her about."

"Tell your mother seven. But only four of them concern her and

three of them used to be dead.

"I can't help her with that," she told me once, quietly. "Tell her to go

to a doctor, quickly." And my mother did, and she got well again.

"What do you not want to do when you grow up?" Mrs. Miller

asked me one day.

That morning when I had come to the house the sad cockney

vagrant had been banging on the door of her room again, the keys to

the flat flailing in his hand.

"He's begging you, you old tart, please, you owe him, he's so bloody

angry," he was shouting, "only it ain't you gets the sharp end, is it?

Please , you cow, you sodding cow, I'm on me knees…"

"My door knows you, man," Mrs. Miller declared from within. "It

knows you and so do I, you know it won't open to you. I didn't take

out my eyes and I'm not giving in now. Go home."

I waited nervously as the man gathered himself and staggered away,

and then, looking behind me, I knocked on her door and announced

myself. It was after I'd given her the food that she asked her

question.

"What do you not want to do when you grow up?"

If I had been a few years older her inversion of the cliche would

have annoyed me: It would have seemed mannered and contrived.

But I was only a young child, and I was quite delighted.

I don't want to be a lawyer, I told her carefully. I spoke out of

loyalty to my mother, who periodically received crisp letters that

file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/China%20Mieville%20-%20Details.html (5 of 22)13-8-2005 23:44:36

China Mieville - Details.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: