"M. John Harrison - Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

a greyish skin. He wasn't sure what it belonged to, or even what sex it was. As soon as it saw him it
began swallowing and wetting its mouth urgently, as if it hadn't enough saliva to speak.
'I can't begin to describe the grudgingness of my life!' it shouted suddenly. 'Ever feel that, Kearney?
Ever feel your life is threadbare? Ever feel it's like this worn-out curtain which barely hides all the rage,
the jealousy, the sense of failure, all those self-devouring ambitions and appetites that have never dared
show themselves?'
'For God's sake,' Kearney said, backing away.
The head smiled contemptuously.
'It was a cheap enough curtain in the first place. Isn't that what you feel? Just like the ones at these
windows, made of some nasty orange stuff with a fur of age on it the day after it was hung.'
Kearney tried to speak, but found that his own mouth had dried up.
Eventually he said: 'Elizabeth never hung curtains.'
The head licked its lips. 'Well let me tell you something, Kearney: it didn't hide you anyway! Behind it
that horrible thin body of yours has been writhing and posturing for forty-odd years, laughing and making
faces (oh yes, making faeces, Kearney!), shaking its huge Beardsleyesque cock about, anything to be
noticed. Anything to be acknowledged. But you won't look, will you? Because pull that curtain back
once and you'd be burned to a crisp by the sheer repressed energy of it.'
The head gazed exhaustedly around. After a moment or two it said in a quieter voice:
'Ever feel like that, Kearney?'
Kearney considered.
'No.'
Valentine Sprake's face seemed to fluoresce palely from within. 'No?' he said. 'Oh well.'
He got up and came out from behind the sofa where he hid been crouching, an energetic-looking man
perhaps fifty years o d, with stooped shoulders, sandy orange hair and a goatee beard. His colourless
eyes were wilful and absent-minded at the same time. He had on a brown fleece jacket too long for him,
tight old Levis which made his thighs look thin and bandy, Merrell trail boots. He smelled of rolling
tobacco and generic whisky. In one hand тАФ its knuckles enlarged by years of work or illness тАФ he held
a book. He looked down at it in a startled way, then offered it to Kearney.
'Look at this.'
'I don't want it.' Kearney backed away. 'I don't want it.'
'More fool you,' said Valentine Sprake. 'I got it off the shelf there.' He tore out two or three pages of
the volume тАФ which, Kearney now saw, was Elizabeth's beloved thirty-year-old Penguin Classics
edition of Madame Bovary тАФ and began stuffing them in different pockets of his coat. 'I can't be
bothered with people who don't know their own minds.'
'What do you want from me?'
Sprake shrugged. 'You phoned me,' he said. 'As I heard it.'
'No,' said Kearney. 'I got some sort of answer service, but I didn't leave a message.'
Sprake laughed.
'Oh yes you did. Alice remembered you. Alice quite fancies you.' He rubbed his hands busily. 'How
about a cup of tea?'
'I'm not even sure you're here,' Kearney said, looking anxiously at the sofa. 'Did you understand
anything you were saying over there?' Then he said: 'It's caught up with me again. In the Midlands, two
days ago. I thought you might know what to do.'
Sprake shrugged.
'You already know what to do,' he suggested.
'I'm sick of doing it, Valentine.'
'You'd better get out, then. I doubt you'll finish with a whole skin whatever you do.'
'It doesn't work any more. I don't know if it ever worked.'
Sprake gave him a small colourless smile. 'Oh, it works,' he said. 'You're just a wanker.' He held up
one hand in the pretence that Kearney might take offence. 'Only joking. Only joking.' He kept smiling for