Джейн Роджерс «The Testament of Jessie Lamb»

Читать онлайн «The Testament of Jessie Lamb»

Автор Джейн Роджерс

Jane Rogers has written eight novels including Her Living Image (Somerset Maugham Award), Mr Wroe’s Virgins (Guardian Fiction prize shortlisted), Promised Lands (Writers Guild Best Novel Award), and Island (Orange long-listed). She has written drama for radio and TV, including an award-winning adaptation of Mr Wroe’s Virgins for BBC2. Her radio work includes both original drama and Classic Serial adaptations.

She is Professor of Writing at Sheffield Hallam University, and has taught writing at the University of Adelaide, Paris Sorbonne IV, and on a radio-writing project in eastern Uganda. She lives on the edge of the moors in Lancashire.

By the same author

The Voyage Home

Island

Promised Lands

Mr Wroe’s Virgins

The Ice is Singing

Her Living Image

Separate Tracks

THE TESTAMENT OF JESSIE LAMB

Jane Rogers

SANDSTONE PRESS | HIGHLAND | SCOTLAND

First published in Great Britain 2011

Sandstone Press Ltd

PO Box 5725

One High Street

Dingwall

Ross-shire

IV15 9WJ

No part of this production may be reproduced,

stored or transmitted in any form without the express

written permission of the publisher.

Commissioning Editor: Robert Davidson

The right of Jane Rogers to be identified as

the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The publisher acknowledges subsidy from

Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

ISBN(e): 978-1-905207-77-0

Cover design by Zebedee Design, Edinburgh

Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore.

For Wendy

‘Another kind of light and life

Are to be mine …’

Iphigenia at Aulis, Euripides

Sunday morning

The house is very quiet now he’s gone. I get up carefully without falling over and shuffle to the window. The light is partly blocked by gigantic leylandii in next door’s garden. No one lives in this row anymore. I lean my forehead against the window and peer down into the overgrown garden. The cold pane mists up straightaway with my breath, but I know it’s too far to jump. Anyway, there are window locks and no key.

I shuffle around the room, keeping my left hand on the wall for balance, until I reach the door. I try it again, just in case.

He’s left me cheese sandwiches and a plastic bottle of orange juice in the corner. He must be planning to be out all day. Well at least I don’t have to listen to him saying the same things over and over, or see him crying, or hear him pacing around the house in a restless fit. At least there’s space for my own thoughts now, and I have nothing to worry about but myself.

I test the bike locks again. They are the clear blue plastic coated type, inside the plastic you can see silvery wire. He’s wound one three times around each ankle and locked it, like bangles. And threaded the third through the other two then looped it round and locked it. The circlets round each leg are too tight to slide over my ankles. I can only move my feet six inches apart. It makes me shuffle like a prisoner in a chain gang. I have to keep adjusting the circlets otherwise the one the joining-lock is fixed to pulls wider and the others get tighter and bite into me.