Ivi_Fray: переводы

→All scattered but there. Like they exist, not just in Hannah’s imagination but in real life. A little voice tells me that the Prayer Tree could easily be the inspiration for her story but I know deep down it’s more than that. Worse still, one of them is dead. I know that from the story. And I grieve like I’ve known them all my life. I copy down the song lyrics and back in my room I enter the words in a search engine. I find the bands and the songs and in one there’s a line about Brigadoon and a rain-dirty valley that reminds me of something in Hannah’s manuscript. I download them all, creating a soundtrack of the past. When I finally hear the song that the boy in the tree in my dreams plays to me, I cry for the first time since being on the train with Jonah Griggs. I wrap myself in the music, curled up in my bed, thinking of Hannah, eyes wide open, forcing myself to keep awake. Unlike Macbeth, who has sleep taken away from him, I take sleep away from myself. And Hannah’s sick pathetic cat sits in the corner, still huddled in its state of fear.

→At night the Prayer Tree becomes my shrine. I spend most of my time searching the carvings on the trunk while the rest of the world is dead silent, sinister phantoms seemingly absent from their sleeping dreams. Unlike mine. I look for anything. Links, I’d call them. There are phrases that sound like song lyrics and the biblical references are there and as I shine my torch on every single carving, I come across another piece of the puzzle. I find the names. Narnie. Jude. Fitz. Webb. Tate.

→There’s a point just outside Hannah’s house where the river makes a sand bar. I sit there often and one day I see Jonah Griggs standing on the bank on the other side, against a gum tree. I don’t know what to feel. For a moment it seems like the most natural thing in the world for him to be there, for one of us to call out a hey rather than ignore or accuse each other. The distance between us is no more than twenty metres and neither of us move for what seems like hours. There is a question in his eyes; I can see. That and something more. I can hear the ducks in the distance but no one stirs, except for the finches, which have no idea about the territory wars and boundaries. They leave my side and make their way over to his, as if to say, “Don’t involve us in this; we’re just enjoying the view.”

→I begin to develop a pattern. During the day I hide outside Hannah’s house. The peace I feel here is overwhelming. Monkey Puzzle trees and rose bushes are scattered all around and the result is a mix of scents and colour and sounds of birds flying low and nature in such perfect harmony that it seems wrong that the very person who created it is nowhere to be found.

→I avoid the House front. I notice that most of the students have started eating dinner in their rooms. Probably to avoid me. The common area is empty and silent. News has already hit the streets that I’m losing control of my House and Richard is all ready to take the reins.

→I can no longer hold on. My scream hurts my own ears. The ground comes quickly and I hit it with a sickening thud.

→He turns around. “Catch yourself, Taylor.”

→He doesn’t answer and begins to walk away. I feel myself slip. One leg first, the position so painful that I am perspiring like hell.

→“If I fall, will you catch me?” I call out to him.

→It is dark, surreally dark, and I’m hanging upside down from the tree. My legs are hooked over a branch and my arms stretched as far as they can go. From upside-down I see the silhouette of the boy, but this time he is on the ground.

→In my room I lie on my bed, sick to the stomach, and I want to cry because my mind is working too much. All I know is that there is something not right. It’s in my dreams, it’s inside my heart, and without Hannah here, it’s an all-consuming feeling of doom. Like something’s coming and it’s something bad. I try to feed the cat but he scratches me until my arms are red raw, and I let him because I want to feel something other than this emotional crap. Sometimes we sit, the dying cat and I, staring at each other like in a Mexican stand-off and more than anything I want to ask him what he has seen. What was the last thing Hannah said to him? But he stares at me; even in his sickly old age he is feral with fury, his hair matted beyond the point of no return. I try again and even though he seems as if he’s going to drop dead at any moment, he scratches until I feel tears in my eyes, my bloody hands trembling with despair.

→“You’re right,” I say, walking up the rest of the stairs. “I don’t give a shit.”

→It draws a crowd. I think Raffaela raising her voice tends to do that. It’s mostly seniors and year tens, but I know that the juniors are listening from downstairs. The past leaders of my House would be rolling in their graves if they knew about the shouting and mayhem that has taken place in this House since they left.

→She stares at me for a moment, a cold angry look on her face. A look I’ve never seen before. “You know your problem?” she asks quietly. “It’s that you’re never interested in what anyone else is feeling. What I was trying to say before you rudely, as usual, interrupted me, is that all of us are worried about you, not about this situation, and we think you should just try to get some sleep and let us take over but you don’t care because the difference between you and us is that you fly with…with…I-Don’t-Give-a-Shit Airline and we fly with a friendlier one.”

→I want to slow down the pace of my heart but I can’t. The more I hear her speak, the harder it beats.

→Raffaela comes down the stairs towards me. “You look terrible. What’s happening?”

→I don’t realise until she’s crying that my fingernails are pinching into her and Jessa is gently trying to dislodge me. She’s crying as well, as are half the year sevens. The rest of my House are looking at me like I’m some kind of demented monster. I leave them standing there and start to walk upstairs, my hands shaking, clutching the note, wanting it to have more than the words HANNAH CALLED on it. I want a number or a message. I want anything.

→“I don’t…I could hardly hear…”

→“I…I did.” Chloe P. stands there, Jessa next to her, an arm on her shoulder like some kind of angel of mercy.

→Silence. But a different kind. The year nines, tens, and elevens appear on the second and third landings, their faces shocked. The juniors come out of study, standing in the corridor watching me.