"Simon R. Green - Drinking Midnight Wine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Simon R)

usually awake enough to know where he was, but not nearly together enough to interact with
customers, so the other staff usually provided him with useful, mindless activities to occupy
him until he was fully conscious. 'Carry these boxes down into the cellar. Carry these boxes
up from the cellar. Plug in this hoover and follow it around for a while.'
Toby quite liked working in the bookshop. Stacking shelves appealed to his sense of order,
and he liked dealing with customers, even the ones who came in ten minutes before closing
time looking for a book, but couldn't remember the title or the author's name, though they
were almost sure they could describe the cover . . . But at the end of each and every day he
was still just a shop assistant; another faceless drone in the great hive of the city, doing the
same things over and over, achieving nothing, creating nothing. Every day was just like every
other day, and always would be, world without end, amen, amen.
Toby had just turned thirty-three, and he resented it deeply. He didn't feel old, far from it;
but his youth, supposedly the most promising part of his life, was now officially over. When
he was younger, he'd always thought he'd have his life sorted out by the time he was thirty,
that all the important decisions would be made by then. He'd have a chosen career, a wife and
kids and a mortgage, just like everyone else. He'd have worked out who he was, and what he
wanted out of life. But thirty came round as just another year, just another birthday, and
brought no special wisdom with it. He'd had jobs, but none of them meant anything; and
girlfriends, but none of them came to anything. He had ambition, but no focus; dreams, but no
vocation. He drifted through his days, and years, and didn't realise how much time had passed
until he looked back and wondered where it had all gone.
Most of his contemporaries were married, usually for all the wrong reasons:
companionship, regular sex, baby on the way. Peer pressure, fears of growing old, alone.
There were remarkably few great loves or passions that Toby could detect. Some had already
divorced, and were on their second or even third marriage. Sometimes Toby felt like a late
developer. But in his own quiet way he was stubbornly romantic, and was damned if he'd
marry just for the sake of getting married. It helped that women weren't exactly beating down
his door to get to him. And as for a career . . . Toby was still looking for a role to play that
interested him; something to live for, to give his life purpose and meaning. He didn't know
what he needed, only what he didn't want, and so he drifted through his life, sometimes
employed and sometimes not achieving nothing, going nowhere. Knowing that his life was
slipping away like sand through his fingers, but somehow unable to do anything about it.
Toby looked at his own reflection in the carriage window, and saw only a pale face under
dark hair, with no obvious virtues; just another face in the crowd, really. He wore a rumpled
jacket over T-shirt and jeans, the official uniform of the anonymous, and even his T-shirt had
nothing to say.
He looked through the carriage window at the passing countryside, stretched lazily out
under the dull amber glow of the lowering sun. Summer was mostly over now, and heading
into autumn, and already the countryside was unhurriedly shutting up shop for winter. But
still, it was home, and Toby found its familiar sights comforting. There were wide woods and
green fields, and the River Avon curling its long slow way towards the town. There were
swans on the river, white and perfect and utterly serene, moving gracefully, always in pairs
because swans mated for life. They studiously ignored the crowds of chattering ducks,
raucous and uncouth, darting back and forth on urgent errands of no importance to anyone
except themselves, and perhaps not even to them. Ducks just liked to keep busy. Every now
and again a rowing team would come sculling up the river, the long wooden oars swinging
back and forth like slow-motion wings, and the swans and the ducks would move
ungraciously aside to let them pass. The rowers never looked up. Heads down, arms and
lungs heaving; all effort and concentration and perspiration, too preoccupied with healthy
exercise and beating their own times to notice the calm beauty and heart's-ease of their