The Everlasting Story of Nory

39. Reading Tintin to Her Babies

That night, after Nory’s mother read to her and her father brought her up a glass of water, Nory bundled Cooch and Samantha together in bed with her, with a plan of reading some Tintin in Tibet to them, because they were just about ready for that level of book now, as long as you explained some of the words. The difficult thing about reading to any of her dolls, as you may imagine, was that it was hard to keep both children sitting up so that they could see the book. They tended to slide down or over, and then Nory would have to tilt the book so that if Samantha was staring off toward a corner of the ceiling she could still have the chance to see the pictures, as long as Nory held the book right down over her head, and the same thing with Coochie. In the case of Tintin books you really had to be able to see the pictures — in fact if you were the one reading you had to point to each person’s head in each square as you read what they said so that the person you were reading to would know who was talking. The pictures were very important to the story, because Herge was such a good drawer, especially of mountains and people climbing mountains wearing backpacks. His dreams were very realistic. Captain Haddock dozes off while he’s walking along and dreams a number of strange things that change from one picture to the next as he’s walking. Nory had only sleptwalked a few times. One time she sleptwalked into the closet in Littleguy’s room when she was eight and was under the general impression that it was the bathroom and so she peed carefully there, pulled up her pajama-bottoms, and went straight back to her bed.

The hard thing about holding the book so that Cooch and Samantha could see was that then it was not all that easy for Nory to see, and her arms and shoulders got so tired that they started to have a case of the sparklies, and couldn’t hold the book up for one more second. Luckily Cooch and Samantha both corked off in a very short time and she could relax the book and scoot down in her bed. Nory felt sleepy, too, but not quite enough to go to sleep herself. She didn’t feel that there was any major bad dream getting itself ready to bother her — probably the last bad dream had been bad enough that she might not have any more for a month or two. So she wasn’t bothered about that. But she wasn’t completely sleepy, and she didn’t want to start another Jill Murphy book about the Worst Witch, even though it was Readathon, because her brain was stuffed to the gizzard with reading for Readathon, and yes, by all means, leukemia was a horrible disease to strike a small innocent child but she would read more Jill Murphy books at another time, since they were very, very good books. Sometimes the problem with telling someone about a book was that the description you could make of it could just as easily be a description of a boring book. There’s no proof that you can give the person that it’s a really good book, unless they read it. But how are you going to convince them that they should read it unless they have a glint of what’s so great about it by reading a little of it?

It was a challenge, but worth it because it was much better when somebody else has read a book you’ve read and you can talk about it, unless they try and be cool by saying something like, ‘Oh sure, I read that ages ago, that was really easy and kind of stupid.’ Kira had read all four of the Worst Witch books and about a hundred books besides that and she said she liked them but she didn’t seem to want to talk about them too much, as usual. She sort of read a book, bzzzzzzz, as if she was sawing through it, and then on to the next. Nory felt a little jealous of how fast she could read. It was nice to talk to Roger Sharpless about Tintin books because he had read them a lot and had them filed away in his brain, and you could play a game of describing a scene with five or six clues — say, falling out a trapdoor of an airplane into a wagon full of hay — and he would say, King Ottakar’s Scepter! because he was so fast at identifying which book had which scene. You could say just three words, ‘Acting the goat!’ and he knew that you were talking about Destination Moon.

When Nory closed her eyes she saw the little red and yellow and orange dots that spread out on the computer screen to show that you’ve crashed the plane in I.T. If you forgot that they were the sign of a massive crash, the dots were as pretty as a screensaver. She lay there for a while, thinking about little snibbets of the day, I.T., playing with the conkers with Kira, then Kira helping her clean off the bird leisure, which had been very nice of her, and her smelling her hand, also very nice. But she didn’t want to think about the day very much because in some ways it was such a dirty-clothes-heap of a day, all twisted around and garbled and wrinkled. She wanted to close her eyes peacefully and be told an unexpected story, but since she’d already been read to that wasn’t much of a possibility, so she picked up the small Chinese doll on her bedside and looked at its eyes. They were painted with different colors than they used to paint Barbie’s eyes, which are blue and purple. Then she imagined that maybe she could tell herself a story — maybe a short emotional story of the kind that Mariana, the girl who had been in the burning rain, would tell herself. So she did.