Сиболд Э. Милые кости (The lovely Bones)

128 Pages·2013·1.5 MB·Russian

by  Шитова А.В.

ALICE
SEBOLD
ABRIDGED BESTSELLER
THE
LOVELY
BONES
Адаптация, сокращение и словарь:
А. В. Шитова
Санкт-Петербург
ББК 81.2Англ
С34
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Сиболд Э.
С34 The Lovely Bones = Милые кости : книга для чте-
ния на английском языке / Адапт., сокр. и словарь
А. В. Шитовой. – СПб. : Антология, 2013. – 128 с. –
(Abridged Bestseller).
ISBN 978-5-94962-236-0
Действие романа происходит в одном из штатов США –
Пенсильвании – в 70-х гг. ХХ века. Четырнадцатилетняя
Сьюзи становится жертвой серийного убийцы, умело скры-
вающегося под маской добропорядочного гражданина, живу-
щего по соседству. Заключённая между мирами, Сьюзи
наблюдает за тем, как её трагическое исчезновение меняет
судьбу друзей и родных. Веря в невозможное, она отчаянно
пытается хоть на мгновение вернуться в мир живых, чтобы
помочь разоблачить убийцу и исполнить своё самое заветное
желание...
Для широкого круга изучающих английский язык.
Текст сокращён и адаптирован. Уровень Intermediate.
ББК 81.2Англ
© Шитова А. В., адаптация,
сокращение, словарь, 2013
ISBN 978-5-94962-236-0 © ООО «Антология», 2013
Inside the snow globe on my father’s desk was a
penguin in a striped scarf. When I was little, my
father would put me onto his lap and take the snow
globe. He would shake it, and the two of us would
watch the snow fall gently around the penguin. The
penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried
for him. When I told my father this, he said, “Don’t
worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He’s trapped in a
perfect world.”
4 Alice Sebold
One
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name – Susie. I
was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.
My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My
mother liked his garden flowers, and my father talked to him
once about fertilizer.
On December 6, 1973, it was snowing, and I took a shortcut
through the cornfield back from my high school. It was dark
outside because the days were shorter in winter, and I remember
how the broken cornstalks made my walk more difficult. The
snow was falling lightly. Six feet from where Mr Harvey
stood, I stopped to taste a snowflake.
“Don’t let me frighten you,” Mr Harvey said.
Of course, in a cornfield, in the dark, I was frightened.
“Mr Harvey,” I said.
“You’re the older Salmon girl, right?”
“Yes.”
“How are your parents?”
“Fine,” I said. I had never been comfortable with adults. I
was cold, but the fact that he was a neighbor and had talked
to my father about fertilizer made me stay and chat with him.
“I’ve built something back here,” he said. “Would you
like to see?”
“I’m cold, Mr Harvey,” I said, “and my mom likes me to
be home before dark.”
“It’s after dark, Susie,” he said.
I wish now that I had known this was weird. I had never
told him my name. I guess I thought my father had told him
about his children.
TheLovelyBones 5
Mr Harvey would later say these words to my mother
when he met her on the street: “I heard about the horrible,
horrible tragedy. What was your daughter’s name, again?”
Then Mr Harvey would tell her the usual: “I hope they
get the bastard. I’m sorry for your loss.”
I was in my heaven by that time and couldn’t believe his
boldness.
Mr Harvey said it would only take a minute, so I followed
him a little farther into the cornfield.
“I’ve made a little hiding place,” said Mr Harvey.
He stopped and turned to me.
“I don’t see anything,” I said. I saw that Mr Harvey was
looking at me strangely. I’d seen older men look at me that
way before. I was wearing my blue parka and yellow bell-
bottoms that day.
“You should be more attentive, Susie. Try again,” Mr Harvey
said. He sat down and knocked against the ground.
“What’s that?” I asked.
My ears were freezing. I didn’t want to wear the colorful
hat with the pompom and jingle bells that my mother had
made for me, although I had it in the pocket of my parka.
“It’s wood,” Mr Harvey said. “It’s the entrance. The rest
is all made out of earth.”
“What is it?” I asked. I was no longer cold: I was curious.
“Come and see.”
It was awkward to get into, but then we were both inside
the hole. I was so amazed by how he had made it that
nothing awkward was on my mind.
“This is neat!” I said to Mr Harvey.
I can still see the hole like it was yesterday, and it really
was, because life is an eternal yesterday for us. The hole was the
size of a small room. I could almost stand up in it. Mr Harvey
had made a bench along the sides of it where he sat down.
“Look around,” he said.
Amazed, I stared at the shelf with different things –
matches, batteries and a lamp that was the only light in the
room. There was a mirror on the shelf and a knife. I thought
6 Alice Sebold
that was strange. Why would he need it there? But I guess I
was thinking that Mr Harvey was just a strange man, and I
liked the room, and it was warm, and I wanted to know how
he had built it.
By the time our neighbors’ dog found my elbow three days
later, Mr Harvey had destroyed the hole. I was in transit during
this. I didn’t see him take away the wood and any evidence
together with my body parts, except that elbow. My mother sat
on a chair by the front door with her mouth open. Her face was
unusually pale. My father wanted to know details and to go to
the cornfield with the cops. I still thank God for a small detective
named Len Fenerman who helped my father a lot. No one had
told my sister Lindsey, who was thirteen and old enough, or my
brother Buckley, who was four and would never understand.
Mr Harvey asked me if I would like something to drink. I
said I had to go home.
“Be polite and have a Coke,” he said. “I’m sure the other
kids would.”
“What other kids?”
“I built this for the kids in the neighborhood. I thought it
could be like a secret club for them.”
I don’t think I believed this even then. I thought he was
lying, but I thought it was a sad lie. I imagined he was a
lonely man who never married, ate his lonely meals every
night and didn’t even have any pets. I felt sorry for him.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll have a Coke.”
A little later he said, “Aren’t you warm, Susie? Why don’t
you take off your parka.”
I did.
After this he said, “You’re very pretty, Susie.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No, Mr Harvey,” I said. I finished my Coke and said, “I
have to go, Mr Harvey. This is a cool place, but I have to go.”
He stood. “I don’t know why you think you’re leaving.”
Now that he was blocking the door I understood that
Mr Harvey was not just a strange man.
TheLovelyBones 7
“Mr Harvey, I really have to get home.”
“Take off your clothes.”
“What?”
“Take your clothes off,” Mr Harvey said.
“Mr Harvey,” I said, “please let me leave.”
“You aren’t leaving, Susie. You’re mine now.”
I fought hard. I fought as hard as I could not to let
Mr Harvey hurt me, but it was not hard enough, and he
pushed me to the floor. I was so alive then. I thought it was
the worst thing in the world: to be trapped inside the earth
and no one knew where I was. I thought of my mother.
My mother would be looking at the clock by then. She
would be worried and angry because I was late.
“Where can she be, Jack?” she would question my father.
“Maybe it’s just an early spring, Abigail,” my father would
joke to calm her down.
Mr Harvey started to kiss me. He kissed my face and put his
hands under my shirt. I cried and fought so I would not feel it.
I began to leave my body; I began to live in the air and the
silence. I had been kissed once by someone I liked. His name
was Ray and he was Indian. He had an accent and was dark. My
school friend Clarissa said that he was weird but smart. He
kissed me by my locker one day. In the yearbook he wrote “My
heart belongs to Susie Salmon”. I think he had had plans for us.
“Don’t, Mr Harvey,” I kept saying. “Please. Don’t.”
Sometimes I combined them. “Please don’t” or “Don’t please.”
When he became tired of hearing me, he took the hat my
mother had made and put it into my mouth. The only sound
I made after that was the jingling of bells.
He did this thing to me and I lived. That was all. I was
still breathing. I heard his heart. I smelled his breath.
But I knew he was going to kill me.
“Why don’t you get up?” Mr Harvey said.
His voice was gentle, like a lover’s voice in the morning.
I could not move. I could not get up.
8 Alice Sebold
When I didn’t, he turned to the side and took his knife.
Then he pulled the hat from my mouth.
“Tell me you love me,” he said.
I did.
The end came anyway.
Two
When I first entered heaven, I thought everyone saw what
I saw and that in everyone’s heaven there were the same
things. After a few days in heaven, I realized that the others
around me were all in their own version of heaven but had a
lot of the same things going on inside. Their heavens just fit
with mine.
I met Holly, who became my roommate, on the third
day. She was sitting on the swing near the high school. I
wasn’t surprised that a high school had swings because it was
heaven. Holly sat reading a book in a weird alphabet. Now I
know Vietnamese because Holly taught me.
“Hi,” I said. “My name is Susie.”
“I’m Holly,” she said. I looked at her black hair. It was
shiny like in magazines. Later she told me that she got her
name from a movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Because she wanted
to have no accent in her heaven, she had none.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Three days.”
“Me too.”
I sat down on the swing next to her.
“Do you like it here?” she asked.
“No.”
“Me neither.”
So it began.
We had been given, in our heavens, our simplest dreams.
There were no teachers in the school. We had to go inside
only for art class for me and jazz band for Holly. Our textbooks
were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue. And our heavens
became bigger as our relationship grew. We wanted many of
the same things.
TheLovelyBones 9
Franny, my intake counselor, became our guide. Franny
was old enough to be our mother and soon Holly and I
realized that this had been something we wanted: our mothers.
In Franny’s heaven she served and was rewarded by results
and gratitude. On Earth she had been a social worker for the
homeless. She worked at a church that gave meals to women
and children only. She was shot in the face by a man looking
for his wife.
Franny walked up to Holly and me on the fifth day. She
gave us two cups of lemonade and we drank.
“I’m here to help,” she said.
I looked into her small blue eyes and told her the truth.
“We’re bored.”
“What do you want?” Franny asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“All you have to do is wish for it, and if you really want it
and really know why – it will come.”
It seemed so simple and it was. That’s how Holly and I
got our little house and a gazebo.
Our house looked out onto a park, and in the distance,
just close enough to know we weren’t alone, but not too close,
we could see the lights of other houses.
Later I began to wish for more. What I found strange was
how much I really wanted to know what I had not known on
Earth. I wanted to grow up.
“People grow up by living,” I said to Franny. “I want to live.”
“That’s out of the question for you,” she said.
“Can we at least watch the living?” asked Holly.
“You already do,” she said.
“I think she means whole lives,” I said, “from beginning
to end, to see how they did it. To know the secrets. Then we
can pretend better.”
“You won’t feel it,” Franny explained.
“Oh, thank you,” I said, but our heavens began to grow.
There still was the high school, but now there were roads
leading out.
“Walk the roads,” Franny said, “and you’ll find what you
need.”
10 Alice Sebold
So that’s when Holly and I set out. Our heaven had an ice
cream shop; it had a newspaper where our pictures appeared a
lot and made us look important; it had real men in it and
beautiful women too, because Holly and I loved fashion
magazines. Sometimes Holly seemed distant, and other times
she was gone. That was when she went to a part of heaven we
didn’t share. I missed her then, but it was a strange type of
missing because by then I knew the meaning of forever.
I could not have what I wanted most: Mr Harvey dead and
me living. Heaven wasn’t perfect. But I believed that if I
watched carefully, and desired, I might change the lives of
those I loved on Earth.
My father was the one who took the phone call on
December ninth. It was the beginning of the end. He gave
the police my blood type and described the color of my skin.
They asked him if I had any special features. He began to
describe my face.
Then Detective Fenerman said it: “Mr Salmon, we have
found only a body part.”
My father stood in the kitchen, shocked. How could he
tell that to Abigail?
“So you can’t be certain that she’s dead?” he asked.
“Nothing is ever certain,” Len Fenerman said.
That was the line my father said to my mother: “Nothing
is ever certain.”
For three nights he hadn’t known how to touch my mother
or what to say. Before, they had never found themselves broken
together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both
needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching,
to get strength from the stronger one. And they had never
understood, as they did now, what the word horror meant.
“Nothing is ever certain,” my mother kept saying.
My mother had been the one who knew the meaning of
each charm on my bracelet – where we had got it and why I
liked it. She made a list of what I’d carried and worn. If found,
these clues might lead a policeman to link them to my death.