"Gwyneth Jones - Bold As Love (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Gwyneth)

Bold as Love
a short story by Gwyneth Jones

Note

"Bold As Love" was written for Paul McAuley and Kim Newman's anthology
In
Dreams (Gollancz 1992; see also Greg Egan's Worthless from the same
anthology). This story is heavily based on a factual account of a night
in
Brighton's clubland in the eighties that appeared in Fuck The Tories
(September 1989, edited by Judith Hanna and Joseph Nicholas) and is
also
republished in the nonfiction area of infinity plus.

Bold as Love

At midnight there was someone in a coma, vomiting into the toilet floor.
I
watched her for a while, but her boyfriend seemed a capable type for a
deathshead. He said his Dad was a psychiatric nurse, and he'd got her
into
the unconscious position all right. A boy in a black basque, tattered
fishnets and stilletoed ankle boots came in, staggered to the basins
and
clung there, white arms braced and oversized hands gripping the
porcelain.
He stared at himself in the mirror. Through the spots and a starburst
of
diamond lines around an impact crater, his face was beautiful: carven
chalk white cheekbones, enormous purple pits under his eyes, a soft,
full
bruise-coloured mouth. On his bone flat breast his nipples, lifting out
of
the torn lace and boning, were like brownish coins. He was shaking from
head to foot. "I'm experiencing this," he repeated, madly earnest. "I'm
experiencing this I'm experiencing this." I saw a split in the satin,
across his ribs on the left. It was crusted with something like dark
brown
mud (in this light); there was more of the stuff moving thickly out of
the
slit. It was blood. Blood had been pouring out of him, until it slowed
of
its own accord.
I'd been about to leave, but I didn't know what to do now. Maybe I
should
make him lie down? The sensible young deathshead looked up and said:
"It's
okay Fio, he's just done a bit of stig."
More people know Jill fool than Jill fool knows. "Oh yes. Of course.