"Brookmyre, Christopher - Boiling A Frog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brookmyre Christopher)

in perpetual fear of being chibbed and humped by rabid
schemies.

'Take him down.'


Okay, so those weren't the sheriff's precise words, but

the import was much the same, and Parlabane wasn't

arguing. No grand conspiracy had ensnared him, just his
own stubbornness and complacency, in combination with
a nihilistic recklessness that was unmistakably borne of wilful self-
destruction. He was in the huff with the whole wide
world, and indulged the negligent abandon of a wounded
fool, heedless of danger because he's convinced nothing can
hurt him anymore than he's been hurt already.

The slamming of the cell door shook him out of it and

loudly begged to differ.


The sheriff's pronouncement of sentence had failed to
deliver such a jolt, Parlabane meekly absorbing it with
a masochistic resignation. Go on, do your worst. See if
I care. You think I'm scared of, pain and misery? Let
me tell you about pain and misery, pal. Let me tell you
what jail is really like. Loneliness? Isolation? Humiliation?
Ostracisation? Tick, tick, tick, tick.

The van, the guards, the handcuffs, the prison building, none of them
penetrated the cocoon of symbiotic

self-pity and self-loathing. They were all part of a journey, and on
journeys it's always easy, if you wish, to
blot out all thoughts of what awaits at your destination.
Parlabane remembered the supreme acts of will it once took
to get him to leave even a diesel-reeking railway carriage
at Glasgow Central when only lectures and tutorials lay
ahead. Elaborate sexual imaginings and scything ripostes
to Old-Firm-biased football pundits were hardly the stuff
of profound immersion, but nonetheless most mornings he
was willing the train to slow. whether it be by van, train,
car or womb, coping with reality could be suspended until
you reached your destination - but only until then.

In truth, it wasn't really the slamming and locking of

the reception cell that woke Parlabane from his weeks of