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

punters were being fairly sedate. I saw someone mashing chocolate mousse
into a patch of carpet with his face and hands and bum; that was about
all.
Around the drawing room there was a jungle. The trees, I imagined, must be
rooted through the floor into hydroponic vats. There must be some system
of shifting flats to let daylight or gro-lamps through the ceiling; and
the rain. It must be so, because the management at the San would never
hurt a living thing and the trees were certainly alive. There were
half-tame olive green birds with orange heads fluttering in the
undergrowth. Black and gold monkeys shifted about in the branches. I stood
and tried to coax a bird from a creeper onto my wrist. At my eye level a
tiny russet creature stood on the wet open palm of a leaf. Its slender
trunk was weaving a delicate dance, following not the beat of the music
but the rhythm of heated bodies, the riff of salt sweat... I jumped a
mile. It was the WASP in me coming out again. What's disgusting about a
leech? Nothing is disgusting, to the truly cool. The chocolate mousse
bloke was sitting up and paying attention, from across the floor. He had
seen this little error of mine, and laughed нн a horribly sane and party
line laugh.
I felt annoyed with myself and put on my dark glasses. It's easy to get
carried away. But I wasn't in the mood.
The jungle bar was lined with knobby young shave-headed girls in latex and
gauze and monster boots, arm in arm and eyeing up the talent. They checked
my hair and my painted skirts pityingly. I wasn't worried by that: you
can't please everyone. I saw a dead ringer for Ralph Churchill on the TV,
talking to a skinny bloke in gilded leather. My boy from the toilet,
looking green from his taste of near-death, was talking to a group of
friends. The hit doesn't last long and (those who like it sayнн) you
always have to have more. He'd probably be back in the toilet with one eye
dangling on his cheek in an hour. I got myself another drink and heard
someone whisper "Ax is going to get stigged ".
I had my glasses on, but I hadn't tuned them. The bar's sound track had
retreated to a distant brawling noise and my head was full of echoes of
conversations from all over the San. The Insanitude is a big place, I've
rarely seen it packed out. The halls upon halls of under-the-hill fantasy
rising up around the Snake Pit are for some only the anterooms. There are
ratty stairways, if you know which door to open, leading to the booths
where blackcan things are organised. Further up still there are cold and
desolate ballrooms, where ska bands ram on with their infectious beat in
front of a handful of flailing drunks; where punters huddle in twos and
threes on dirty torn vinyl furniture in chill corners. Bad things happen
there. No one imposes any sanctions on the deals that are made, it's
tradition that makes them hide away. Certain transactions are only at home
in some kind of outer darkness.
I knew my whisper came from up there, from somewhere very far from the
heat and the beat. I pulled my glasses off: like a true WASP, I didn't
want the dirt near me. The lad next to me at the bar was blond, plump and
narrow eyed, with Rorschach butterflies of sweat spreading over his raggy
Marlon. He had a peaked black leather cap with an SS badge. His friend was
black, taller and unremarkable.