Chapter 10 run with scissors (9)

The ceiling in the kitchen is so low that it feels depressing, depressing and suffocating.It seems to be the source of our unhappiness in life. "I'm tired," Natalie said. "What?" I asked.I really want to know.Did she mean the ceiling, did she feel the same way I did. "My life," she replied quite calmly.Listening to her tone, it is not like ordinary adolescent children, even if the latter hate life, even if life makes them feel depressed, so they need a different life, their way of expression is also a different feeling.But Natalie's tone was too calm, making people feel that her experience and maturity far exceeded her fifteen-year-old age.

Generally speaking, it seems that only older adults have such diction and tone, when in fact they are more likely to keep their mouths shut. I let out a puff of Marlboro smoke into the air, and a cloud of fuzzy smoke meandered across the room, and it seemed to float up to the ceiling, bumping into the moths and light bulbs above.We sat quietly in the room, seeming to be listening to something. It was dark outside the window.Due to my position and the angle of the windows, I couldn't see my own image clearly.From the window, all I could see was the rest of the kitchen, which made me feel like a vampire, no one could see me for who I was, and I was waiting to do evil in the room.

"Why are you tired of your life." I asked.In fact, I know the answer, and the answer must be the man named Terrence Maxwell. "Ah." Her voice was calm and erratic, like humming at the beginning of a song. "Terrence," she sighed, her shoulders sinking. I think, as expected, not what I expected. Last year, Natalie and Terrence blew—I'm borrowing a mainstream parlance.Only after that did I know their full story, real relationship.Terrence, I learned, was forty-one, a former semi-professional tennis player, and a patient of Dr. Finch.I also gradually learned why he chose psychiatric treatment: his alcoholic mother suffered a sudden misfortune and was burned to death on the easy chair because she was drunk, the bottle fell on the floor, and she threw down the lit cigarette .Oh, and they were still lovers—Terrence and his mother.According to Natalie, Terrance will never be able to accept the fact that despite his great tennis skills, he will never be able to reach the level of a professional athlete, and his mother is the only person who can comfort him.

When Dr. Finch found out that Terence was a millionaire, he tried to match them together: one was his disobedient daughter, and the other was a simple-minded millionaire who liked to hang out and often wore tennis shorts even in winter. . Terrence and Natalie have been lovers since the first week they met.The former is forty-one years old, and the latter is only thirteen years old.Shortly thereafter, Natalie moved into Terrance's home. Terence became Natalie's legal guardian.They are a father-daughter relationship, everyone is convinced, at least it seems, they are like father and daughter.

Except Dr. Finch himself.Only he knows that they are lovers, and he also knows that at the age of thirteen, a person is free. However, when Terrence left Natalie with blue eye circles, and when sixteen-year-old Natalie ran home crying, people began to ask all kinds of questions, so all the doubts in the past—Natalie Li's bruises, her drinking, her endless quarrels with Terence, Terence's frequent slaps and foul language towards her—finally came to light. Under pressure from her family, Natalie finally filed a lawsuit. Natalie and Terrence go to court. Terrence lost. Natalie won.But what did she win?Besides the seventy-five thousand dollars in the civil suit (and going straight to Dr. Finch's pocket), what did Natalie win?She's never been abused again, so she's won her freedom, I think.

"I miss him," she said.With her fingertips she picked pieces of veneer off the edge of the table and flicked them to the floor, patting the crumbs off the clothes with her hands. "I know it's disgusting to say that, but I really love him." "I know." "I miss him so much," she said, "sometimes very strongly. I wonder, what is he doing now?" I know she's nostalgic for a past life: Bang & Olufson hi-fi, 1965 Rothschild wine, orange Saab cars, expensive Martin guitars.But she seems to have completely forgotten that she was once Terrence's dirty little plaything.

"You're dirty," Terrence once said to her. "Dirty as hell. Look at your disgusting feet. You don't even wear socks. Can't you wash them?" However, she said she loved Terrence, and I believed her.I know why.Love someone who is not worth loving because he has everything you can dream of, because it is better to be noticed than ignored. It is for the same reason that sometimes it may be satisfying to have one's own pulse cut off and to bleed slowly to death.On a gray day, eight o'clock in the morning is no different than noon, nothing happens, and nothing can happen, and you're in the sink rinsing glasses.It breaks suddenly, cuts your skin by accident, you see the bright red color, the brightest color of the day, it is so exciting, and there is a gurgling sound - it is your blood flowing .Sometimes it's a good thing, at least you know you're alive.

This is how I think about the problem, maybe it has something to do with the foreign films I watched at the Xingfu Street Cinema.Instead of going to school, scribbling faces in my notebooks, or hunching over a marijuana in the corner of a baseball field, I like to watch French black-and-white films starring Lena Waltermuller.I remember a film in which a pair of cousins ​​fell in love madly, and then a weeping clown came on the scene, and he made the pure and noble love into a vendetta, and the protagonists stabbed each other with daggers in the stomach at the same time-this symbolized The simplicity and innocence of love is just an illusion.These emotionally weird (perhaps pretty bad) films have a very strong appeal to me.

In fact, there are weird emotions in the world, like Terrence and Natalie, like me and Neil, like my mother and Fern. Maybe that's what connects me to Natalie.We've all lived in sick homes, we've all had our crazy experiences, we've all had kinky, ugly relationships. If there is a difference—the main difference between us is that this is her home, her place of residence, and I am only here to live. I don't even know which of us has the upper hand. I ran out of cigarettes and lit another.She said, "Pass me the cigarette case." I did as she said, and pushed the cigarette case across the table, the cellophane of which still had a lot of cigarette dust stuck to it.

Our lives are so boring that with nothing to do, we all notice the crumbs on the cellophane of our cigarette packs.Natalie's nails are long, so she pinches the crumbs off, or flicks them onto the floor one by one, taking pains. I used up the last match. She holds out two fingers as a cue.I obviously know what she needs.I put the cigarette between her fingers and she lit her own cigarette with the end.Then she sucked the smoke into her lungs and looked at me as if to say, "Thank you for knowing what I need. Thank you for not making me get up and walk over to the stove Smoke on."

If she was lighting a cigarette on the stove, her hair might catch fire, and it had happened before.Once, while trying to light a cigarette, her bangs were caught in the fire, and at least half of them were gone.At that time, her head was lowered, close to the blue flame.She put the cigarette forward, inhaled hard, stretched her cheeks, and a puff of smoke rose into the air.Then, the hair on her forehead burned!She took several steps back and laughed loudly.She slapped her forehead with her hand and dropped the cigarette on the floor. "Oh, on the damn hair, my God!" But she was still laughing, and it was hysterical.There was a watershed in the day: before her hair was on fire, after her hair was on fire, and the latter seemed better because it had content, it had color.However, the former is also indispensable, because there is a beginning and there is a result. "I'm tired of my life," she repeated. "I hate ceilings," I said. The ceiling is too low, especially for the whole kitchen; the low ceiling height is a downer for this old Victorian house.And it's bumpy, like the thighs and buttocks of an older fat woman, full of cellulite. "The ceiling is so old," Natalie said, as if to imply that I should forgive its flaws. "It's really depressing." The yellow light is set against the yellow wall, the yellow wall is set against the old wooden floor, and the wooden floor itself is a mixture of yellow and gray. The overall tone of the kitchen is hard to inspire, but suffocating.A big yellow net covers head and face, making people inescapable... "Well, let's take it down, then," Natalie said to me suddenly, looking around. "Remove what?" "We took the ceiling down." I couldn't help but chuckle at this idea: "It's so easy to say, so what should we put in the original place?" At this moment, it seemed as if a breath of fresh air had blown into Natalie's head, for she suddenly glowed: "Let's knock the ceiling down, right up to the roof, so the kitchen has a cathedral ceiling. " I snuff out the cigarette on a plate. "Do you think this will work?" I asked.Obviously, from the outside, the roof is very high and pointed, so there must be something inside.So, what is there between the low ceiling and the high roof? In this way, an hour later, we started work.It was after midnight, and Natalie and I banged rocks on the ceiling.The rocks we picked up from the backyard were piled up with the flower pots and kitchen utensils that Agnes had thrown away.We stood below the ceiling, holding the stone high above our heads.We smashed it hard, and big chunks fell from the ceiling.All fluffy chunks. "It's made of mortar mixed with horse hair," said Natalie. "That material is no longer used." For the next few hours, without speaking a word, we busied ourselves tearing down the low ceiling.We swung the boulders high and lime rained down on us so we couldn't stop blinking.We didn't need a ladder because the ceiling was so low it was easy to reach.To clear the caulk between the higher rafters we hurled various iron pans and small stones up.It was a joy to breathe the dust; we coughed and spat on the floor.We looked down at our hands, they were covered with white flowers.Compared with ordinary life, this is really an unusual experience. One minute we're sitting at our squat kitchen table lamenting the colorlessness of our lives, and the next minute we're using all sorts of heavy projectiles to "liberate" in the shortest possible time. "A style of architecture.This is rare, pure freedom.Despite the choking smell in the kitchen, this little annoyance was insignificant. It didn't take long to remove the entire ceiling.As long as you smash it with a stone, with a bang, the ceiling will succumb. It will not fall in small pieces, but in a large area and quickly.Those insulations and insulation either collapsed of their own accord or were ripped off by our dusty hands.Those materials are like stuffed with hair.In fact, the entire ceiling appears to be constructed of organic materials: horse's mane, human hair, bone fragments.The ceiling is a shriveled and mutated creature like some kind of mummy. By the wee hours of the morning we were knee deep in the garbage.The kitchen table, the top of the refrigerator, the stove, the sink—everything, was covered in rubble. The rest of the family must be amazed!It is conceivable that when they wake up in the morning and walk into the kitchen sleepily, wanting to drink a glass of water or orange juice, how surprised their expressions will be! "Hope is going to die!" said Natalie, "and Dad, he's going to go crazy watching this. Then he'll be forced to give us money and ask us to clean up the rubbish. " "That's awesome!" I excitedly thought that we could use the cash to build drywall (a type of wall that is not plastered but covered with siding) to go to McDonald's, go drink beer, and see the horrified look on everyone's face The look, how can it not make people feel happy? Anyway, that's what we think. In the morning, as usual, Dr. Finch came downstairs in his underwear; as usual, he went to the kitchen, went to the refrigerator, and wanted a glass of orange juice.But, unlike usual, he had to jump over piles of trash to get to the fridge.Even more unusual—at seven o'clock in the morning, Natalie and I were not only awake, but quite busy.However, the doctor didn't seem surprised. "Good morning." His voice was very deep, and it was only in the morning. "Okay, Dad," Natalie said. "Hello." I said. "You two are carrying out a big project." The doctor said in a relaxed tone. It seemed that Natalie and I were ambitiously working on a dress with fringed lace, and we were just in the middle of it. We were lucky enough to get his approval. That's all. "What do you think?" Natalie asked.She was swinging the broken support of Agnes's ironing board, knocking off a block of lime above the junction of the kitchen and the warehouse. "I think it's the worst mess in here," said Dr. Finch.He went to the cupboard with the bottle of orange juice and put a glass on it.Before pouring the orange juice into the glass, he took a good look to see if there was anything alive in the glass. "Is that all?" Natalie was obviously a little disappointed. She was already prepared to have a verbal contest with her father, not only to defend the justice of demolishing the ceiling, but also to get the repair funds as she wished. "Well, what's more," said Dr. Finch, "I don't care how much you mess around, or how far you want to mess around, you should clean up the kitchen like grown-ups." "We need some money to get things done," Natalie said. "We're going to have a brand new cathedral ceiling in the kitchen, so we need money." Dr. Finch wanted to know how much, financial situation was a little tight at the time because two patients had interrupted treatment. "A few hundred dollars." "Hundreds of dollars!" he roared.Now he puts the empty glasses on top of the hill of plates, basins, and empty milk cartons that have sat in the sink for a week. Natalie showed her "good girl" magic weapon: "Please, Dad, you will love the new kitchen, won't you? Don't you want to give your youngest daughter, your favorite daughter, and you Prettiest daughter—Natalie, two hundred bucks?" She pursed her lips and blinked mischievously. She's just too lethal, and it always works. Sure enough, the doctor promised to give us repair funds, and then went upstairs to get dressed.Natalie pulled out the chair under the table, dusted it off, and sat on it. We were dirty and tired, but not boring. "Yeah, yum, yum, yum!" Natalie said, as if we'd just had that kind of thing. "That's right. So what are we going to do now?" We need to fix the mess.The ceiling itself and other insulation and insulation piled on the floor a full three feet high.It will take us quite a while to clean them up.In fact, it takes us as much time to remove the ceilings as it does to clean them up. Natalie peeled off a scab on her knee, revealing a small, bright red wound. "We take the garbage out and throw it in the back of the warehouse." "when?" "I'll talk about it later." "So what do we do now?" "Go to sleep first." About four o'clock that afternoon, I woke up and staggered out of the room, past the living room, and into the kitchen.Agnes washed the dishes under the tap, dried them on her apron, and put them in the cupboard.Then she walked briskly through the garbage to the refrigerator.She opened the refrigerator door and leaned over to read the labels of the appetizers. "It never lasts in our house," she asked aloud. "Who ate the appetizer?" I can't recall ever seeing these delicacies in the fridge. "Perhaps Hope ate it?" "It's all that Hope," she said. "She should know better than anyone." The table was piled with dishes, her handbag on top.She had her handbag in her hand: "I'm going to the store to get a new bottle now, and if anyone needs clean dishes they can look in the cupboard and there's a clean dish in there." She went through the back kitchen door and left. I went upstairs to Natalie's door and knocked on the door hard: "Wake up, wake up, wake up." She opened the door, wearing only a thin dressing gown. "What time is it?" She yawned. "It's getting late." "How's the kitchen going?" "Agnes has done a dish," I said. Natalie yawned again: "Ah - what are you talking about, I don't understand, where is it?" "I think we should get to work," I said. "Okay." She turned around, put both hands on the nightgown on her chest, bent down, and searched for her dress among the piles of clothes on the floor.She wore the same dress every day, bright red and embroidered with gold feathers.She had sewed it on herself because the hem of the dress had been ripped from many washes.What made me curious was, I don't know what method she used - she didn't need to take off the nightgown beforehand, and she was able to put on the dress, and the black vest. It was getting late, and we spent the rest of the day transporting the garbage out of the kitchen and stacking it in the back of the warehouse.We ran back and forth a total of dozens of times.However, by eight or nine o'clock that night, all the garbage in the kitchen had been cleaned up. "Let's do the dishes," Natalie suggested. In this way, the two of us formed a production line: she washed the dishes and I dried them.The chaos in the kitchen had forced the cockroaches to panic and retreat into the deep crevices in the walls, so Natalie didn't have to scream when she couldn't see them. When we finished our work, we stood proudly in the clean and new kitchen.Natalie began to evaluate the state of the roof: "Well, it seems to be darker in the kitchen now, do you feel it? It's strange." She is right.Although we no longer have low ceilings hanging over our heads, the black roof seems more depressing. We need to install a skylight. Natalie called her father at the office to ask for financial support.Dr. Finch said he'd give us a hundred dollars.Natalie said that one hundred dollars is not enough, we need at least one hundred and fifty dollars.After struggling for a long time, the doctor finally won and gave us 125 yuan. "Well, we'll put a skylight in for a hundred bucks," Natalie said, "and we'll spend the rest on beer." Sounds like a great idea. "But are you sure we can buy a window for a hundred dollars?" I asked. "We don't need to buy windows at all," she said with a grin. "We can take the pantry windows down and use them. We'll just batten up the pantry windows and no one will notice." For several days, we worked with incredible persistence to perfect our project.Moving the windows from the pantry to the kitchen was a challenge.When it came time to install the windows in the pantry, it was amazing with precision and sturdiness.However, we used an ax and basically solved the problem.The ax was found in the warehouse, and we also found a hammer and a rock.With these things we were able to remove the window in its entirety, leaving a big hole in the wall that was surprisingly well ventilated, and would have been much better to breathe in if the battens weren't nailed down into the dusty pantry It went smoothly. Even more difficult than removing the pantry window, though, was cutting a large hole in the roof for the skylight. "Don't think it's so difficult," said Natalie, who was cutting roof shingles with a chainsaw. We sat on the roof, the sun was high in the sky, and we both drenched in sweat.I use a hair dryer to style my hair, and it's all thrown back into a cool "big dish".I convinced Natalie and started fixing her hair.I used the dough to hold her hair into shape, piled it all up to the top of the head, and secured it tightly with a piece of aluminum foil.She soon started complaining. "The top of my head is fucking hot." "It's almost there," I said, "you better not think about it. The sun can eat the color into your hair." We chose red. "This goddamn foil is driving me nuts." The foil slipped from her forehead and she pushed it back immediately. "Now you can take it off," I said. She pulled the foil off her head, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it off the roof.Her long hair fell down like a piece of cake, falling to her shoulders in one piece.With the vibration of the chainsaw, they are like a thick mat, constantly moving back and forth. In the end, we cut an ideally large hole between the rafters in the roof. "Hi, Agnes!" I put my hand through the hole and waved towards the kitchen. "My God, what is that?" She raised her head, inexplicably surprised. Natalie poked her face into the hole: "Can you go to the store and get us something to eat?" Agnes asked, "What do you want to eat?" "I don't know either, whatever." "You two better fix it," Agnes said, "We can't live in a house with a big crack." She was wrong.In fact, we could live in a house like this. Because our measurements were rough and not precise enough, the window from the pantry didn't quite fit the opening in the roof.We nailed the windows up, used some chipped wood to plug the gaps, and later put in some asbestos shingles.