"M John Harrison - Isobel Avens Returns To Stepney In The Spring" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring
a novelette by M John Harrison

The third of September this year I spent the evening watching TV in an
upstairs flat in North London. Some story of love and transfiguration,
cropped into all the wrong proportions for the small screen. The flat
wasn't mine. It belonged to a friend I was staying with. There were French
posters on the walls, dusty CDs stacked on the old-fashioned sideboard,
piles of newspapers subsiding day by day into yellowing fans on the
carpet. Outside, Tottenham stretched away, Greek driving schools, Turkish
social clubs. Turn the TV off and you could hear nothing. Turn it back on
and the film unrolled, passages of guilt with lost edges, photographed in
white and blue light. At about half past eleven the phone rang.
I picked it up. "Hello?"
It was Isobel Avens.
"Oh China," she said. She burst into tears.
I said: "Can you drive?"
"No," she said.
I looked at my watch. "I'll come and fetch you."
"You can't," she said. "I'm here. You can't come here."
I said: "Be outside, love. Just try and get yourself downstairs. Be
outside and I'll pick you up on the pavement there."
There was a silence.
"Can you do that?"
"Yes," she said.
Oh China. The first two days she wouldn't get much further than that.
"Don't try to talk," I advised.
London was as quiet as a nursing home corridor. I turned up the car
stereo. Tom Waits, "Downtown Train". Music stuffed with sentiments you
recognise but daren't admit to yourself. I let the BMW slip down Green
Lanes, through Camden into the centre; then west. I was pushing the odd
traffic light at orange, clipping the apex off a safe bend here and there.
I told myself I wasn't going to get killed for her. What I meant was that
if I did she would have no one left. I took the Embankment at eight
thousand revs in fifth gear, nosing down heavily on the brakes at Chelsea
Wharf to get round into Gunter Grove. No one was there to see. By half
past twelve I was on Queensborough Road, where I found her standing very
straight in the mercury light outside Alexander's building, the jacket of
a Karl Lagerfeld suit thrown across her shoulders and one piece of
expensive leather luggage at her feet. She bent into the car. Her face was
white and exhausted and her breath stank. The way Alexander had dumped her
was as cruel as everything else he did. She had flown back steerage from
the Miami clinic reeling from jet lag, expecting to fall into his arms and
be loved and comforted. He told her, "As a doctor I don't think I can do
any more for you." The ground hadn't just shifted on her: it was out from
under her feet. Suddenly she was only his patient again. In the metallic
glare of the street lamps, I noticed a stipple of ulceration across her
collar bones. I switched on the courtesy light to look closer. Tiny hectic
sores, closely spaced.
I said: "Christ Isobel."