Read Online This Census-Taker by China Miéville - Free Book Online Page B

my house. He wanted one key to get money, one so he could travel quickly, and one for a disgusting thing, so I wouldn’t make it for him and he shouted. But I did make him the travel key. Only that one. And he went on. Ask anyone. Ask his friends. They’ll tell you he always wanted to get away, and he did. There’s no one in the mountain.”
    “You,” the hunter said slowly to him. He looked at me and said it loud, as I listened. “We’ll come back.”
    “You should come back,” my father said.
    “I fucking mean it. We’ll send someone up and you’ll show us the boy so we know you’re treating him right.”
    “Yes.” My father nodded with abrupt rage. “You
should
. Look at me. You should come back.”
    The window-cleaner was looking into the sky, at the waning light. Drobe ran to me.
    “I’ll come and get you,” he whispered. But the teacher was calling him and he had to turn.
    The window-cleaner descended with the woman beside him. They still kept glancing up at the sun. Behind them went Drobe, watched by the hunter.
    It was he, the last man, who looked back at me most, more often even than the boy.

T here is a kind of thorned bush that thrives on the hill where I was born. I’ve never seen it anywhere else. It stands about a meter tall, with compact snarled branches that grow in dense near-cylinders so its copses are like low, snagging pillars. Its all-year berries are blue-gray but in the red light of sunset their luster makes them shine like black pupils.
    I stood among the columnar bushes watched by their nasty vegetable eyes.
    My father didn’t look at me. He dropped more stones upon a random-looking cairn. The townspeople were slow to get out of our sight. He waited and watched them and didn’t look at me and kept adding to the substance of the hill with the substance of the hill.
    When Drobe looked back a last time his eyes and mouth widened in horror at my expression. He would have taken a step back toward me but the hunter put his hand on him, not cruelly but removing hope of escape. The man whispered to Drobe and Drobe made some sign for me with his hands but I didn’t know what he was saying.
    When they were gone I stayed behind my perimeter of sentry bushes in the failing light.
    “I’m not angry,” my father said.
    I was full of the injustice of it; that that was how he tried to reassure me.
    “It’ll be all right,” he said gently. He stepped closer. “I’m sorry about it all.”
    I didn’t move: I had no moving left in me. My father stood with only one line of thorns between him and me. He held out a hand.
    And I was alone with him on the cold hill and I could do nothing. I stayed still as long as I could as if something might happen but it didn’t, and when it didn’t I shuffled as slowly as I could out from the vegetation, I dragged my toes against the ground but it was as if there was nowhere to go but to him.
    He smiled as I came. He looked as if he might cry.
    “Hello again,” my father whispered.
    He kept his hand out until I took it.
    His skin was tough and warm. I felt sick to touch it.
    “Come on,” he said. “I’ll feed you. Come home.”

T hat first night alone with my father I sat in the kitchen without hope.
    He cooked, glancing at me as I waited speechless and deflated like an empty bag. I almost felt too empty to be afraid until the night came all the way on and I lay in my cubby room listening for the sound of my father coming up the stairs, imagining him at my door, between his and my mother’s empty room, looking at me as if I was something curious, looking at me and not at me at the same time. I stared at the ceiling that was the attic floor, growing dizzy. I imagined my father watching me as if I was something that he should make stop moving.
    I don’t remember sleeping. The next day I was slow and twitchy. I didn’t know what to do or what was to happen.
    My father would make keys. I?
    “Are you going to play?” he said.
    He fed me again. Put