"downtime" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Eric)

"For the past few years I've been directing a few things in the provinces," Sinclair found himself saying. "If I were honest, I'd admit that I was never a very good actor. But have you ever heard an actor admit as much? It's always that the lines were crap anyway, or the directions bad, or a hundred and one other things. So I moved into directing..."

Andy seemed interested. "What have you directed recently? Anything I might have seen?"

The last thing he'd been involved with had been a Christmas pantomime at Bognor, and that had been four years ago.

"Othello, Stratford - last summer," he heard himself saying, and hated himself for the lie.

"Anyway, enough of me. What about you?"

Andy Lincoln was a quantity surveyor from Bristol, was unbelievably beautiful whichever way you looked at him, and was, Sinclair had convinced himself by now, as bent as a nine ecu note - or I'm not a dying queen.

"Staying nearby? Andy asked now.

Sinclair pointed to the villa on the headland. "I've got that place for a month. Perhaps, if you're not doing anything... That is - I'd like to show you around."

"Great. I'd like that."

Oh, Jesus... Sinclair had forgotten how it was, that sudden inner exquisite throb of lust mixed with the ridiculously romantic notion that, this time, it just might be love.

He wanted to tell Andy the truth, but that would destroy everything.

As they left the taverna side by side, Sinclair recalled the words of his tour operative. "Enjoy!" he'd said. "Remember, Mr Sinclair, where you're going there are no risks - and that's guaranteed."

They made love on the double bed which for the past three nights had mocked Sinclair's isolation. Later, he pulled on his shorts and stepped out onto the balcony. He stared out at the bay, the fishing boats returning through the gap between the thumb and finger of the headlands. A few tourists promenaded along the quayside before the taverna.

Sinclair recalled how it had been, all those years ago; the lovers, the wild times. Then he considered the emptiness of the past five years, the isolation and the agony. He could hardly believe his luck now. He had come to New Crete in the hope that he might find someone, but that was all it had been, a vague hope: he had reconciled himself to spending the month alone and celibate, thankful that for the period of the vacation he would be spared the pain that had plagued him over the past few months.

He tried to banish the sadness he felt: he told himself that he had found sex and affection, and that he should enjoy it while it lasted; three weeks with Andy would be better than three weeks without, even if the return to the cold reality of London, alone, would be all the more difficult after experiencing what he liked to think of as love.

He was staring at the mountains that rose behind the bay when he saw the aerial explosion. Like the other effects he'd noticed, it happened spontaneously and without warning. One second the sky was a perfect cerulean blue, and the next it was rent with a silver starburst. This time, though, the effect lasted. The blinding illumination shot out filigree vectors in every direction, so that within seconds the whole of the sky was divided into parallel strips of bright blue.

Sinclair gripped the balcony rail, overcome with sudden dizziness. What if the effect was not external, he asked himself, but internal, a manifestation of the disease, some neural dysfunction?

He contemplated the tragedy of such an occurrence so soon after finding Andy.
Then, to his immediate relief, Andy yelled: "What the hell-?" He ran onto the balcony and stared into the sky overhead. "What's happening?"

"You see it too? It isn't the first. I noticed one yesterday, another this morning. I thought there was something wrong with me."

Andy smiled. "It's quite spectacular. Probably some glitch in the system." He laughed when he realised that he was standing on the balcony, in full view of whoever should look up from the street below, stark naked.

He took Sinclair's hand and pulled him back into the bedroom.

At sunset they left the villa and made their way down the hillside. The sky was innocent of its lateral vectors, once more a burnt-orange Mediterranean twilight.
They avoided the restaurant where Andy's erstwhile travelling companions - friends of just two days, Sinclair was pleased to learn - were eating, and selected a cosy bistro romantically overlooking the moored fishing boats. They ordered grilled squid, french beans cooked in spiced sauce, Greek salad and retsina.

They talked for hours, or rather Sinclair steered Andy into talking about himself. Sinclair experienced a deepening of affection, a heady rush of feeling he had no hope of controlling.

He asked himself why this was so wrong when it seemed so right.