The Book Eaters(97)
Gender, sexuality, beliefs, and relationships branched out into endless layers of complexity, stunning her in their variety compared to the narrow sliver she’d experienced growing up. In books, in life, in the world around.
Soon after, she went back to the charity shop and bought new clothes. Jeans, dark slogan T-shirts, lace-up shoes made from dead cow. No idea yet what she liked, but she was going to find out. The linen skirts and long dresses she threw away. No one should have to wear them.
The same day, she bought scissors and, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, cut her braids off. The reflection staring back at her was no princess, but it was her. That gave her savage satisfaction. As if she’d shed a false skin.
Another week of that musing, meandering life and her phone rang. Devon’s heart jumped, but it was only Ramsey. Filled with chagrin, she pressed to answer.
“You fucking idiot!” Somehow, he managed to snarl across electronic distance. “What are you doing? This isn’t a goddamn bloody holiday!”
“I—”
“Human women do not wander around a city at two A.M. with their small children. You look conspicuous, you look odd, no Ravenscar would come within a mile of you, and I have had reports from a book eater who sighted you in the city. Do you know how difficult that’s made my life?”
“How should I know what to do, I’m not one of them!” she bit back, finally getting a word in. “I’m learning, all right?”
“Well, learn faster! No more night walks, and clear out of Reading ASAP,” he snapped. “You’re supposed to be a fugitive. Start acting like it!”
He hung up.
Devon put her mobile down and looked at Cai, who was watching a black-and-white silent film on the television. He hadn’t noticed her call, and anyway he still didn’t know English.
“We need to leave,” she said, speaking to him in dictionary-stilted Polish. “For a new city.” There were plenty of places on her list.
Later that evening, Devon caught a bus in the pouring rain with a damp and grumpy Cai at her side. They sat near the front, because for reasons she couldn’t fathom other humans seemed to prefer sitting in the back. Devon liked the wider view.
Reading slid away, its redbrick buildings and throngs of university students left behind in the growing gloom. Devon watched it through grotty windows with the mobile phone nestled in her lap.
“G?odny,” Cai said, palm pressed to belly. “G?odny, Devon.”
She winced. “I know, love. I’ll get you something to eat. Very soon.” She’d been dreading his hunger, unsure how to go about capturing someone for him. The idea gave her pangs of anxiety. Ramsey had suggested children; the idea made her sick. She resolved not to do that unless truly, truly desperate.
How, then, did one choose? Perhaps she could feed Cai the so-called “undesirable” humans: the killers, thieves, and rapists. Pretend she was a kind of vigilante people-cleaner, like the brooding heroes in Jarrow’s graphic novels.
But eating each person had been hugely affecting for Cai, and Ramsey’s offhand indication that this is normal had frightened her badly. She feared giving her son someone twisted or unkind to consume, and the mental corruption that would cause him. For Cai’s sanity and mental well-being, she’d have to choose good people.
That in itself was a dilemma. Who was good, or even just good enough? What did goodness mean? How did she assess it? And what did that say about her, choosing the kindest and sweetest strangers she could find, all for her son’s sake? If he became a “good” person from eating good people, would he not struggle with the morality of it all?
It would be the first of many such choices. She hated how hard it was; she dreaded that it would get easier.
Maybe “normal” strangers would do, ordinary people with ordinary lives. She tried to conjure up an idea of what an ordinary human was like, and could only think of peasants in fairy tales, or the servant staff in old English classics. And, more unnervingly, of the four drug dealers she’d killed.
The narrowness of her experience appalled her, this skewed intersection of sheltered privilege and lifelong abuse. Even after all the books she’d read and the new experiences she held, Family biases limited her parameters.
Like Nycteris, she thought, and cringed.
There was an old fairy tale called The History of Photogen and Nycteris that she still carried a copy of. The main character in it was a young woman who had been raised by a cruel witch, inside a cave beneath a castle. The girl had grown up knowing only darkness, which at the time hadn’t seemed much of an issue to child-Devon.
But the general idea was that Nycteris’s world was narrow: she thought the lamp in her cave was a sun, and that the universe was just a tiny series of rooms. She knew nothing of society and had very few books. A relatable situation, for a book eater woman.
One day, Nycteris escaped her cave by following a stray firefly. She ended up in the castle garden. But her reactions in the story were strange and unexpected. Upon espying the moon for the first time, Nycteris decided that it must be a giant lamp, akin to the one in her cave. She saw the sky, and likewise decided it must be another kind of roof. And when she looked at the horizon, she saw not a limitless world, but merely another room, albeit with distant walls.
The concept of outside didn’t exist for one such as Nycteris, nor could it ever. Her upbringing had given her such a fixed perspective that, even when encountering something new, she could only process it along the lines already drawn for her.