"Campbell, Ramsey - The Parasite 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell Ramsey)

It spilled into the roadways, turned the pavements into narrow crowded aisles, hid the shops, deafened the streets. As far as the clock tower at the crossroads, and turning the corner to the left, the pavements were a mass of stalls. Vegetables lined up next to trinkets, a dog examined a dangling corner of fabric, a pair of breasts lay in the road. Clothes, naked without a wardrobe, shivered on wire hangers. Rose glimpsed herself trapped dimly in a mirror among crowds of empty coats. In the aisles, shoppers moved like a slow-motion dream.

The smells of meat were memories brought to life. The paperbacks on the bookstall seemed to have been there since her childhood. As she glanced at wartime covers -'forties clothes, bland idealistic faces - someone touched her arm. `Isn't this a coincidence! I was asking your mum about you just the other day. Are you Bill? Lovely to meet you at last.'

It took Rose a few moments to recognize Wendy. She'd grown hearty, eager to talk to anyone, now that she was a nurse. She joined them for lunch in the bar of the Snig's Foot Hotel, which had always sounded to Rose like a Lewis Carroll monster. Soon Rose felt mellow, drinking deceptively bland ale and listening to Wendy, who was arguing with Bill.

`The only thing I don't like about my job is people dying. I like coming home feeling I've worked hard. This country is making it too easy for people to live off other people.' Each time she made a point she turned a beermat over, like an attempt at a card trick. `I've no patience with strikers. But as long as we give social security to every nigger who comes here and can't find a job, we can't withhold it from our own.'

`You're content to be paid far less than me for a job which must be at least as taxing as mine?'

'I've heard that sort of thing before, from people I don't like.' The beermat snapped like an ace in the hole, displaying an advertising slogan. `You see, Bill,' she said more gently, `I chose to stay here and look after my mother. Nobody forced me to take up nursing, so what right have I to complain? But I'll get married one day, Rose. There's a young doctor who sometimes takes me out to lunch.'

Perhaps Rose looked dubious, for Wendy said `It isn't such a bad life. I still go to parties when I can. That reminds me, someone at a party was asking after you.'

`Who was that?'

'I don't think I caught his name. I was chatting about things we used to do when we were children. He knew you, or he'd heard of you.'

`You were revealing my childhood indiscretions, were you?'

Why had her father's tankard stopped halfway to his mouth? Her mother had closed her eyes tight in her nervous way. Wendy said `Oh, just things in general. Childhood things.'

`But what were you saying about me?'

'Oh, just how you - how you always wanted to write and then grew up and did it. Is that the time? I must be going.' Though she wasn't in uniform she said, `I'm not supposed to take so long for lunch.'

Rose's parents relaxed visibly. They'd taken a dislike to Wendy just about the time Rose had entered grammar school, aged eleven. Had they thought her not intelligent enough for Rose, or too flighty? It was rather presumptuous of them to be protective still.

When she'd downed another pint of ale and Bill had won on the fruit machine beneath the stairs, only to bang his head on the ceiling, they ambled home past denuded market stalls. Rose felt pleased with everything: the parish church with its tower and separate steeple; the double image of hands and shadow on the clock tower at

the crossroads, as though the clock was dreaming of being a sundial; the little allotments like gardens in front of the cottages above the railway.

`Do you enjoy interviewing?' her father was saying to Bill.

`No, not especially.' He shrugged apologetically when Rose glanced surprised at him. `I went off it when I had to interview a director in New York. Rose was promised elsewhere that night,' he said, remembering not to upset her mother with the truth. `I got what I wanted, but it was like pulling teeth. Besides, the man was a pain in the arse, as Rose can tell you.'

Beyond the bus station, the first terrace of the Wigan Road had changed. Two bay windows housed grocery shops which Rose remembered, Morris's and Smith's; but beyond them, separated from them by empty houses like teeth which needed filling, there was a new butcher's.

`Damn,' her mother said. `Mince. I knew there was something.'

`I'll buy it, Mummy.' Hurrying before her mother could argue, she stepped over the butcher's sill.

But there was no shop. There was only darkness, far larger than the room she'd glimpsed. As it sucked her in, its stenches choked her: blood, rawness, corruption, and something worse - something old and dead yet in some sense alive, which was advancing to meet her. She could almost see its eyes, if anything was left of them.

She threw herself backwards, into daylight. The shop reappeared as though a light had been switched on, but the stench remained. Rose clung to a squat brick wall at the mouth of an arched passage between the houses. Would she be sick, or collapse entirely?

`Good heavens, Rose, what's the matter?' At last her mother, who was chatting, noticed. She gazed at Rose's face, then wrinkled her nose. `Yes, it is a bit smelly in there, isn't it? You wait here.' To Rose's horror, she went into the shop.

Bill and her father came to support Rose. `Sit on the wall for a bit. Do you want to put your head between your knees?' But Rose had to stare at the shop, at her mother leaning unconcernedly on the counter, at the facade which shone innocently, at the curtained window above the bay. She was sitting outside one house of a shabby terrace, surrounded by her family, in broad daylight; yet nothing could have made her cross the sill again, even to drag her mother to safety. She could only sit clenched within herself, willing her mother to hurry up, hurry up, please - At last her mother emerged, and Rose hurried them away.