"David Langford - The Motivation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Langford David)

returned for credit at the usual vast discount (you riffled very carefully through the
clean-limbed poses, and refused them if pages were either incomplete or stuck
together). Benson reached past him to the till.
"Lock up half five like usual," he said, passing a grayish handkerchief over a
broadly glistening sweep of baldness. His other hand methodically stripped the till of
banknotes -- so that when he looked up and added "I'm trusting you, Peter," it was
an effort not to snap back, "What the fuck with?"
"See you tomorrow," said Peter, wondering again about the manager: there
was nothing to read from him, as though he had no feelings whatever. Perhaps you
got like that after ten years in the trade. A roar of traffic and a gale of carbon
monoxide swept through the door as Benson slouched out on the weekly errand
which was not supposed to have anything to do with Thursday evening's greyhound
races.
A dozen or so literary and artistic items changed hands in the final forty
minutes of trade, but business was slack without the lure of the back room. It was a
milder breed of customer that Peter finally chased out: men whose longings didn't
burn as brightly.
He carried the old, battered till into the back, locked it in the concealed
cupboard (cunningly papered over, but outlined with a frieze of greasy fingerprints)
dedicated to Stronger Stuff. Which left him half an hour before his bus: this had
happened before, and Peter had spent the time in unedifying study of 'strong' goods.
His eyes had widened several times as he flicked through; the only after-effect had
been a slightly reduced appetite for sausage and chips that evening, and a greatly
reduced opinion of certain customers.
The misuse of this art form, he had written conscientiously in one of his
notebooks, is a species of Blatant Beast, repelling the assault of our curiosity by
revealing far more than we wish to know.


Today, curiosity took him through the back room into the dusty regions of
no-customer's-land. There was a toilet stinking of ammonia; a passageway lined with
miscellaneous old stock, growing ever more unsalable as mice chewed it into lace...
and the grimy kitchen where the mouse-smell was stronger yet, though all that was
ever made there was the tea they drank daily from mugs whose brown inner stain
exactly matched that of the toilet. A hair-dryer might have indicated some token
concession to cleanliness, but was only used for one of Peter's morning chores:
shrink-wrapping the latest literary arrivals.
Peter tugged at the sliding door of the old kitchen cupboard; a beetle ran out
as it scraped to one side. Within was the cobwebbed box Benson had mentioned as
"good for a laugh." The scrawled caption was simply "DUDS." It had seemed a neat
idea, at the time, for one of those articles which one day might found his reputation...
an article dealing with what had once been good stout porn, perhaps even Strong
Stuff, but which social inflation had rendered as worthless as copper coinage. Peter
set great store by ideas and concepts and documentation, a bony framework
requiring not too much fleshing out, not too much writing up.
A powerfully musty smell rose as he lifted the flaps of the box. It was stuffed
full with the anonymous brown envelopes Benson used for reserve photographs.
Peter found himself breathing a little faster, caught in an absurd excitement at the
prospect of material, which, as one might put it, not even Benson dared offer for
sale. However...