"Gwyneth Jones - Bold As Love" - 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. Silly
of me."
My mother is a WASP. My father is of perfectly cool Afro-Irish descent,
but I take after her. I might be tempted to lie about my ethnic
background: but there's no point. I give myself away all the time; and not
just by the shape of my nose. Contrary to popular belief, however, the
hipcats are no bigots. If I really want to be here, that's enough.
The Ladies toilet at the San is a heroic monument. No one would change or
hide its raddled beauty. Outside, I walked into a duchess's drawing room:
a warehouse full of looted poshery and finery, some of it piled as if the
removers had dumped it there; some of it arranged in impromptu tableaux.
Some nights, there would be riotous behaviour in here. Spiked rings would
scour the glowing mahogany and walnut, toecaps ram through oil-crusted
canvas; snot boogers get smeared on the brocades. Blood from broken heads
and noses would pour over the slippery silk rugs. Righteous fanatics and
helpless gonzos would defecate into the massive silverware. Tonight the