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

Blondie had a long pomander sachet. (The fact is, it stinks in here, no
matter what the lightshow does: old beer, old vomit, traces of piss and
red wine; the usual bouquet). It didn't look right for him as an
accessory. But they check their weapons at the door. The lads нн and the
girls нн love doing that, it's a ceremony. You see them come in and spread
open the blj, and there are flick-knives, clasp-knives, bowie-knives,
knuckledusters, ranked in little custom-made pockets like a toolkit. You
very rarely see a firearm. Guns are not... not meaty enough. However,
after he's turned in the armoury a boy often feels the need of a
substitute; a symbol of the symbol. Blondie swung his tool between his
knees, and leered at me.
I caught a glint of something bright, probably some illicit kind of
fractional gear. I pretended not to notice, much to his annoyance.
"Hallo darling, gimme mind?"
Mind?
"Trashy track," I said. "If they're going to recreate the Stones, why
can't they do good Stones. Like High Tide and Green Grass. Like Beggar's
Banquet. They never did anything but shit after. "
"You're true, you're true."
Hooking the sachet on his belt, he lurched an arm around my shoulders,
fumbled a nipple through my pearl satin blouse. Nipples never lie (mine
don't, anyhow). He pulled back, affronted.
"Fuck off, then. Frigid."
So I fucked off, with my drink, wondering what kind of sociopath riffraff
this was, that didn't even know when he was listening to the totally
sacred original Exile On Main Street.
The jungle was milling with astral bodies, strangers from far away who'd
been queuing for hours to log on. Fractionals are all right but you can't
talk to them. Essentially they're fans, religious fanatics. They're with
the bands, they're with the friends who logged on with them. Otherwise
it's doo-wop-a-lula. I saw Ax, before he saw me: solid as a rock. He was
wearing, as usual, far too many clothes, and carrying a worn plastic bag
that bulged with paper. I remembered that there was something I ought to
tell him, but forgot what it was. I stood and watched and half wished he
wouldn't look round. But I didn't walk away.
"Hi, Fiorinda."
His mouth brushing my lips was genuinely cold, though when I came in (how
long ago was that?) it had been a hot summer night outside. I wondered
where he'd been. I didn't ask. Ax has few stigmata: but an invincible urge
to obfuscate is one of the unholy relics he carries around.
We were in the middle of a fight. It was about a singer called Sam Cheng,
who had stayed at my house while passing through on tour: a skinny boy
with hair like seaweed and a mouth that tasted of the air on a mountain
top. It was one of those fights that starts with something rational and
limited like: you fucked him in our bed; Excuse me, that's my bed... and
then the little rip in the surface begins to unravel the whole fabric. All
chaos; all the anger and the grievance in the world pours through.
Ax and I tend to have fights of that kind.
He wanted to leave a coat or two. We joined the line at the cloakroom
hatch, which was already long. I considered my half-murdered, bleeding