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

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library


ISBN 0575 07403 5


Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc


Visit M. John Harrison's web-site at:
www.mjohnharrison.com
To Cath, with love.
 ONE

Disillusioned by the Actual




1999:
Towards the end of things, someone asked Michael Kearney, 'How do you see yourself spending the
first minute of the new millennium?' This was their idea of an after-dinner game up in some bleak
Midlands town where he had gone to give a talk. Wintry rain dashed at the windows of the private dining
room and ran down them in the orange streetlight. Answers followed one another round the table with a
luminous predictability, some sly, some decent, all optimistic. They would drink until they fell down, have
sex, watch fireworks or the endless sunrise from a moving jet. Then someone volunteered:
'With the bloody children, I expect.'
This caused a shout of laughter, and was followed immediately by: 'With somebody young enough to
be one of my children.'
More laughter. General applause.
Of the dozen people at the table, most of them had some idea like that. Kearney didn't think much of
any of them, and he wanted them to know it; lie was angry with the woman who had brought him there,
and he wanted her to know that. So when i; came to his turn, he said:
'Driving someone else's car between two cities I don't know.'
He let the silence develop, then added deliberately, 'It would have to be a good car.'
There was a scatter of laughter.
'Oh dear,' someone said. She smiled round the table. 'How dour.'
Someone else changed the subject.
Kearney let them go. He lit a cigarette and considered the idea, which had rather surprised him. In the
moment of articulating it -of admitting it to himself- he had recognised how corrosive it was. Not because
of the loneliness, the egocentricity, of the image, here in this enclave of mild academic and political
self-satisfaction: but because of its puerility. The freedoms represented тАФ the warmth and emptiness of
the car, its smell of plastic and cigarettes, the sound of a radio playing softly in the night, the green glow of
dials, the sense of it as an instrument or a series of instrumental decisions, aimed and made use of at
every turn in the road тАФ were as puerile as they were satisfying. They were a description of his life to
that date.