De Ierse schrijver Roddy Doyle werd geboren in Dublin op 8 mei 1958. Zie ook alle tags voor Roddy Doyle op dit blog.
Uit:Brilliant
“Gloria Kelly lay in bed. She was wide awake. She knew her brother, Raymond, was too. She could tell by the way he was breathing. It was awake breath. He was lying there, thinking and listening. Sleep breath was different. It was longer and lighter, less in and out.
‘Rayzer?’ she whispered,
Raymond didn’t answer. But she didn’t care.
She liked sharing the bedroom. Although she knew Raymond didn’t. She didn’t care about that either. She could like it in secret. She didn’t have to tell him.
She’d been moved into Raymond’s room when their Uncle Ben had come to live with them. For a while. That was what her mam and dad had said. Uncle Ben would be staying ‘for a while’. At first her mother had called it ‘a little while’. But the ‘little’ had disappeared when Uncle Ben kept staying, and Gloria began to think that her bedroom wasn’t hers any more. And Raymond, she supposed, began to think the same thing. His room had become their room.
She looked into her room sometimes, when her Uncle Ben wasn’t in there. He hadn’t done anything to it. He hadn’t touched her pictures or her other stuff. It was still pink, nearly everything in it. The only really new thing in the room was her Uncle Ben’s smell. It was kind of an adult smell. A mixture of soap and sweatiness. There were none of his clothes lying around, and just one book that wasn’t hers. She’d looked at the cover but it had looked boring, about a war or something. Except for the fact that she didn’t sleep or play in there any more, it was still Gloria’s room. So maybe her Uncle Ben really was only staying for a while – but the while was a bit longer than they’d expected.
Maybe.
‘Rayzer?’
He still wouldn’t answer.
She didn’t like her bed. It wasn’t a real bed. It was just a mattress on the floor. She’d liked it at first. It had been fun, nearly like camping. But not now. Her face was sometimes right against the wall, low down, at the skirting board, nearly where it joined the floor. It was cold there. Always – even when the rest of the room was warm. And she could hear things sometimes – she thought she could. Behind the skirting board.”
Roddy Doyle (Dublin, 8 mei 1958)