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

The worst thing you can do at the beginning of something fragile is to say
what it is. The night I drove her back from Queensborough Road to her
little house in the gentrified East End, things were very simple. For
forty eight hours all she would do was wail and sob and throw up on me.
She refused to eat, she couldn't bear to sleep. If she dropped off for ten
minutes, she would wake silent for the instant it took her to remember
what had happened. Then this appalling dull asthmatic noise would come out
of her -- "zhhh, zhhh, zhhh", somewhere between retching and whining -- as
she tried to suppress the memory, and wake me up, and sob, all at the same
time.
I was always awake anyway.
"Hush now, it will get better. I know."
I knew because she had done the same thing to me.
"China, I'm so sorry."
"Hush. Don't be sorry. Get better."
"I'm so sorry to have made you feel like this."
I wiped her nose.
"Hush."
That part was easy. I could dress her ulcers and take care of what was
coming out of them, relieve the other effects of what they had done to her
in Miami, and watch for whatever else might happen. I could hold her in my
arms all night and tell lies and believe I was only there for her. But
soon she asked me, "Will you live here again, China?"
"You know it's all I want," I said.
She warned: "I'm not promising anything."
"I don't want you to," I said.
I said: "I just want you to need me for something."
That whole September we were as awkward as children. We didn't quite know
what to say. We didn't quite know what to do with one another. We could
see it would take time and patience. We shared the bed rather shyly, and
showed one another quite ordinary things as gifts.
"Look!"
Sunshine fell across the breakfast table, on to lilies and pink napery. (I
am not making this up).
"Look!"
A grey cat nosed out of a doorway in London E3.
"Did you have a nice weekend?"
"It was a lovely weekend. Lovely."
"Look."
Canary Wharf, shining in the oblique evening light!
In our earliest days together, while she was still working at the
aerodrome, I had watched with almost uncontainable delight as she moved
about a room. I had stayed awake while she slept, so that I could prop
myself up on one elbow and look at her and shiver with happiness. Now when
I watched, it was with fear. For her. For both of us. She had come down
off the tightrope for a while. But things were still so precariously
balanced. Her new body was all soft new colours in the bedside lamplight.
She was thin now, and shaped quite differently: but as hot as ever, hot as
a child with fever. When I fucked her she was like a bundle of hot wires.