Testament of Jessie Lamb , livre ebook

Canongate Books - Jane Rogers

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130 pages

English

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Women are dying in their millions. Some blame scientists, some see the hand of God. As she watches her world collapsing, Jessie Lamb decides she wants to make her life count. Would you let your daughter die if it would save the human race? The Testament of Jessie Lamb is the story of one daughter's heroism and one father's love.

Informations

Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	05 juillet 2012
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9780857864192
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

THE TESTAMENT OF JESSIE LAMB
Jane Rogers has written eight novels including Her Living Image (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Mr Wroe’s Virgins (shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction prize), Promised Lands (winner of the Writers Guild Best Novel Award), and Island (long-listed for the Orange Prize). She has written drama for radio and TV, including an award-winning adaptation of Mr Wroe’s Virgins for BBC2. Her radio work includes both original drama and Classic Serial adaptations. The Testament of Jessie Lamb was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2011.
She is Professor of Writing at Sheffield Hallam University, and has taught writing at the University of Adelaide, Paris Sorbonne IV, and on a radio-writing project in eastern Uganda. She lives on the edge of the moors in Lancashire.

www.janerogers.org
Praise for The Voyage Home :
‘Jane Rogers’ new novel is extraordinarily bold . . . It is also powerfully imagined, a real web of forces. What a book. What an astonishing achievement’
Adam Piette, Scotland on Sunday
‘Beautifully constructed and controlled . . . an absorbing, nuanced drama about moral choices and personal responsibility’
Katie Owen, Sunday Telegraph
‘A voyage of self-discovery that is eloquent, lucid and entirely enthralling’
Hephzibah Anderson, Daily Mail
‘A startling and gripping exploration of love, grief, responsibility and power that moves effortlessly from the personal the pain of a woman who has recently lost her father to one of the most hotly debated and emotive issues of the moment, the plight of asylum seekers . . . A wonderfully humane and vividly written story that will keep you entranced until the last page’
Alex Clark, ‘Must Read of the Month’, Red

Praise for Island :
‘Nikki is a triumphant creation . . . There is indeed a house-style: one of economy, accuracy and controlled passion. But the authorial voice has a chameleon quality; she speaks with tongues. And the tongue here is persuasive indeed’
Penelope Lively, Independent
‘There is a lot of delicious black comedy here . . . Then, there is the magic. This book reminds us of the power of stories, of their possibilities. It is the song Jane Rogers sings, and it is triumphant’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Heart-breakingly lyrical . . . It takes you into the heart of a dark wood, where there is no hope at all, and brings you out the other side, ready, if not to live happily ever after, then at least to begin to live’
Julia Blackburn, Guardian
‘Weaves a spell that glimpses another world’
Sunday Times

Praise for Promised Lands :
‘Ambitiously conceived and brilliantly realised’
Sunday Times
‘This story of lost innocence is rich in itself and beautifully imagined from Rogers’ researches. In air that ‘waves and wrinkles with heat’ we see Dawes’ moral labours translated into physical terms sweat, stickiness, pinched flesh. White buttocked convicts rut in the mud; a debonair surgeon plays Mozart in a tent thick with insects . . . Marvellously intelligent’
Observer
‘Ambitious, brave, and beautifully crafted’
TLS

Praise for Mr Wroe’s Virgins :
‘An engaging, serious and gleefully ironic novel, one that leaps headlong into the most ambitious and risky territories: faith, love and existential meaning’
New York Times Book Review
‘There is a rich vein of comedy in this beautifully written book which deals so profoundly with the attractions of idealism and the confusion between sexual and religious feeling’
Guardian
‘A delight from the first page to the last’
Observer
By the same author

The Voyage Home
Island
Promised Lands
Mr Wroe’s Virgins
The Ice is Singing
Her Living Image
Separate Tracks

Thanks
I am grateful to Hawthornden Castle for a writing retreat, and to Arts Council England and the Banff Centre Canada, for a Fellowship Award which allowed me to work uninterrupted for 10 weeks in an amazing setting. JR.
This paperback edition published in 2012 by Canongate Books, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Copyright © Jane Rogers 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in Great Britain 2011 by Sandstone Press Ltd, One High Street, Dingwall IV15 9WJ
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 85786 418 5 eISBN 978 0 85786 419 2
Typeset in Sabon by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books
www.canongate.tv
For Wendy
‘Another kind of light and life Are to be mine . . .’
Iphigenia at Aulis , Euripides
Contents

Sunday morning
One
Two
Three
Four
Five

Sunday evening
Six
Seven
Monday morning
Eight
Nine

Tuesday
Ten
Wednesday morning
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen

Wednesday night
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Thursday night
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine

Friday morning
Thirty
Today
Sunday morning
The house is very quiet now he’s gone. I get up carefully without falling over and shuffle to the window. The light is partly blocked by gigantic leylandii in next door’s garden. No one lives in this row any more. I lean my forehead against the window and peer down into the overgrown garden. The cold pane mists up straightaway with my breath, but I know it’s too far to jump. Anyway, there are window locks and no key. I shuffle around the room, keeping my left hand on the wall for balance, until I reach the door. I try it again, just in case.
He’s left me cheese sandwiches and a plastic bottle of orange juice in the corner. He must be planning to be out all day. Well at least I don’t have to listen to him saying the same things over and over, or see him crying, or hear him pacing around the house in a restless fit. At least there’s space for my own thoughts now, and I have nothing to worry about but myself.
I test the bike locks again. They are the clear blue plastic coated type, inside the plastic you can see silvery wire. He’s wound one three times around each ankle and locked it, like bangles. And threaded the third through the other two then looped it round and locked it. The circlets round each leg are too tight to slide over my ankles. I can only move my feet six inches apart. It makes me shuffle like a prisoner in a chain gang. I have to keep adjusting the circlets otherwise the one the joining-lock is fixed to pulls wider and the others get tighter and bite into me.
He’s left me a bucket with a lid and toilet roll, but it’s hard to use because I can’t get my feet wide enough apart to squat properly. He has left me a pad and pencil for entertainment. And my sleeping bag and pillow are scrumpled against the wall. The wonky heating’s come on at last and I’m not so cold any more.
My brain has finally stopped behaving like a rat in a trap. It’s stopped hurling itself in all directions and chasing its own tail. After all, he can’t keep me here forever. All I have to do is sit it out.
I have that strangely pleasant ache above the bridge of my nose from all the crying and now I don’t feel as if I shall ever cry again. I’m a bit stiff from sleeping on the floor, but all in all it’s not so bad. It could be worse. I shuffle all round the walls again, then over to the picnic table and chair he has placed in the middle of the room. I shuffle into position and sit on the chair. I write my name on the first page of the pad: Jessie Lamb.
He wants me to think about what I am doing. Not that I am doing anything, now. I am suspended; stopped in my tracks. It almost feels like I’m not here any more I’m not that Jessie Lamb who was busily rushing towards her goal. If I spotted the bike lock keys, dropped there, say, on the floorboards would I pick them up and unlock my ankles? Would I figure out a way to get free? Maybe I’d just pretend I hadn’t noticed, and stay captive. In a way it’s a relief to be prisoner and to not have to think. To be passive, instead of active.
He’s trying to give me a way out. So that I can blame him if I don’t do it, instead of facing up to being a coward.
Is that what you want?
What else could explain me so stupidly jumping in the car with him when he suggested going to check Nanna’s house?
You thought he was making a friendly gesture; you wanted to make up.
Yes. But he had already threatened to do ‘whatever it takes to stop you’. So, did you get into the car knowing you would be imprisoned? Is that secretly what you wanted?
Oh, I can’t be bothered with all this. Isn’t it bad enough to have him going on at you, without doing it yourself when he’s not here?
The logical thing is to do as he’s asked; to think about it. Indeed. Write it down. Remember it, re-imagine it, gather it together. Because it’ll be proof won’t it? proof that you really are doing what you want. Proof that I, Jessie Lamb, being of sound mind and good health, take full responsibility for my decision, and intend to pursue it to its rightful end.
I underline my name on the pad. The question is, where to begin? Where does my story begin? With my own beginning, I suppose; the day I was born.
No way am I writing sixteen years!
No, but it needs to begin at the beginning. Before that terrible feeling of pressure came into my head insisting that I must do something, I must do something, I must do something or else explode. That I must find the thing I was destined to do.
I’ll set it down exactly, everything that happened, I’ll set it down perfectly honestly, so there can be no doubt in anybody’s mind, least of all mine, about what I want to do and why.
The testament of Jessie Lamb.
One
I used to be as aimless as a feather in the wind. I thought stuff on the news and in the papers was for grownups. It was part of their stupid miserable complicated world, it didn’t touch me. I remember sitting on the fence