JillianDoe: переводы

→From where she sat in her red armchair in the middle of the room, Frieda could see the wrecking ball swinging into the buildings on the site across the road. Entire walls shivered and then crumbled to the ground; inside walls suddenly became outside walls and she could see patterned wallpaper, an old poster, a bit of a shelf or a mantelpiece; hidden lives suddenly exposed. All morning she had watched it. Her first patient, a woman whose husband had died suddenly two years ago and whose grief and shock had never abated, sat bowed over and sobbing before her, her pretty face pink and sore from weeping. Without her attention slackening, Frieda saw it from the corner of her eye. When her second patient, referred to her for his escalating obsessive-compulsive disorder, fidgeted in his chair, stood up and then sat down again, raised his voice in anger, Frieda saw the ball smashing into the block of apartments. How could something that had taken so long to build up collapse so quickly? Chimneys folded, windows shattered, floors disappeared, walkways were obliterated. By the end of the week, everything would be rubble and dust, and men in hard hats would walk across the razed ground, stepping over children’s toys and sticks of furniture. In a year’s time, new buildings would stand on the ruins of the old.

→‘It’s not like that. I can’t explain.’

→‘A cocker spaniel. Not too big but not too small and yappy either. Do you want to talk about what you’re feeling?’

→‘Didn’t fancy spending the whole night with him,’ said one.

→The fourth person was Frieda Klein and for her it was neither Sunday night nor Monday morning but something in between. As she stepped into the square, the wind hit her full on. She had to push her hair away from her face so that she could see. Over the previous week the leaves on the plane trees had turned from red to gold but now the wind and rain had shaken them free and they were rippling around her like a sea. What she really wanted was to have London to herself. This was the closest she could get to that.

→It was ten to three in the morning. There were four people walking across Fitzroy Square. A young couple, huddled together in the wind, had made their way up from Soho where they had been at a club. For them, Sunday night was coming gradually to an end. Though they hadn’t said it to each other, they were delaying the moment when they had to decide whether they were getting into separate cabs, or into the same cab. A dark-skinned woman in a brown raincoat and a transparent polythene hat tied under her chin was shuffling north along the east side of the square. For her it was Monday morning. She was going to an office on Euston Road, to empty bins and vacuum floors in the dark early morning for people she never saw.

→Rosie, Rosie. Wait for me!

→The case was never actually closed. Nobody made a decision. But there was less and less to report. Officers were reassigned. Meetings became more sporadic, then merged into other meetings, and then the case wasn’t mentioned at all.

→Deborah Teale – Vine, as was – prayed secretly, fiercely, for a son, not a daughter. But first Abbie and then Lauren arrived. She crouched over their baskets at nights to hear them breathe; she clutched at their hands. She wouldn’t let them out of her sight. They reached Joanna, they overtook her and they left her behind. In the attic, the boxes of Joanna’s clothes stood unopened.

→When Rosie went to university she called herself Rosalind Teale, taking her step-father’s name. She didn’t tell her father. She still loved him, though she was scared by his chaotic, unchanging grief. She didn’t want anyone to say: ‘Rosie Vine? Why does that ring a bell?’ Even though there was less and less chance of that. Joanna had melted into the past, was a wisp of memory now, a forgotten celebrity, a one-hit wonder. Sometimes, Rosie wondered if her sister was just a dream.

→‘Why not? Anything rather than life has to go on. But don’t worry. I’m still waiting.’

→‘You want me to destroy myself as well?’

→‘And now you’re deserting her.’

→Deborah stood up, thin legs on high heels and a round stomach pushing at her shirt. He could see her belly button. Her mouth was a thin, trembling line. ‘You bastard,’ she said.

→‘When you lost her.’

→‘Joanna was five when we lost her.’

→‘Life has to go on. Are you going to tell me that this is what Joanna would have wanted?’

→‘That’s not fair. It’s been eight years. Life has to go on, for all of us.’

→‘And forget all about her.’

→‘Richard.’