29

That summer dads didn’t take me to the country for some reason. Or, maybe, they did, but I can’t for the life of me remember that. But I can remember quite distinctly my father living at the villa with us, and mother coming only on weekends. Evidently, father was on holiday while mum was working.

It was exactly that unfortunate summer when I fell down from an apple-tree and couldn’t walk for two months after that. Two bloody months I had spent in bed and during those two months I saw still the same four walls, and the same fly-stained tacky chandelier with three lightbulbs, and the same wooden ceiling over my head. I felt I was losing it; besides, almost no one would visit me those days. The girls dropped in just from time to time; and seeing my gloomy face and disheveled hair sticking out of the blanket was of no interest to them. Yet Sue, surprisingly, would hang around our villa every single day, even though I saw her very rarely and in passing. About her loitering at our place not even coming into my room I knew only from the girls visiting me sometimes.

“Are you aware that Sashka is in the arbor with your father now?” they would blurt out right from the doorway.

“Really?” I answered angrily from my bed, “So what?”

“What do you mean “so what”? Wouldn’t you even like to have a look at what they are doing in there?”

I would pull myself up to the window, but not a thing could be ever seen through the foliage of the apple-trees and plum-trees growing around the arbor. At such moments I regretted that I hadn’t got a wheelchair so I could have used it to go out there and see what was going on. I recalled one movie with a guy who couldn’t walk and hated his wheelchair nearly blaming it for his immobility, and I thought, what an idiot he was. Because a case like that is a lot, lot worse if you have NO wheelchair at all.

I didn’t see - for I just couldn’t - what Sue would be doing in the arbor with my father. But, just like anyone else in my place, I felt vaguely suspicious about it. This suspicion, unfounded still, was often enhanced by Sue herself when she visited me in passing:

“Would you like a baby brother or a baby sister?”

I would laugh at the idea as I thought she was joking. Besides, conversations like that didn’t interest me much and I would have rather spoken of something else. But Sue, since that memorable day when we both had been sobbing over One Wonderful Morning song - had shut me out completely. In the daytime she used to hang out at our villa preferring my father’s company to mine. In the evenings she would leave for the township and hang around with the locals, who condemned me. There they would bake marijuana on a fire and, having got high, they would sing dirty songs. In vain I pleaded Sue to cut loose from those guys and to stop messing with them. When I ran out of ways to convince her, she would wince at me with annoyance:

“You know what? You are so boring!”

And, turning away from me, she would approach the mirror, wiggling her a*s and singing:

“The needle piercing - my heart, my heart, my heart!
It's killing me but I feel so high, so high!..”

I couldn’t stand those bawdy songs she’d adopted from the locals and I hated her at such instants. And when Sue finished with wiggling her a*s before the mirror and left me for them - I cried with bitter frustration and impotence.

Being sick and immobile I couldn’t know what was going on around me - but I could feel in my bones that something devastating was going on, something bad that would soon ruin everybody’s lives. And I, like a turtle, hid myself into the shell of my illness not even willing to peep out of it so I couldn’t hear or see anything. I feared to even look through the shuttered window, for I was sure that I would see the reality from my old nightmare - the long pole creaking in the wind and the black flag of disaster fluttering over our home.