"James Lovegrove - The House Of Lazarus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lovegrove James)

the bill and printed off a new one.
"How was she?" she enquired as Joey signed for the price of the
conversation.
"Same," he said. "Same as she always was."

It had been her last request.
I don't want to die.
Spoken in a small, frail, frightened voice by dry grey lips, while eyes
too big for their sockets rolled, trying to find and focus on Joey's face.

Oh, Joey, I don't want to die.
On the bus bound for home, Joey pressed his face to the window and watched
the city ease past. The black stone walls, the shopfronts behind their
protective grilles, the blowsy smears of shop-sign neon reflected on the
wet pavements, fast, gleaming cars and drab, slow-moving citizens нн all
sliding by with a steady, measured grace.
I don't want to die.
She had barely been able to talk. Each sentence had been an effort, gasped
out between blocked-drain gurgles. Moving her head had been a Herculean
labour, but she had done so, in order to fix those swollen, terrified eyes
on her son нн glassy marbles that were already losing their lustre,
pale-blue pupils swimming in sepia-tinged whites.
Her arms, so thin. The veins, strings binding slender strips of flesh to
bone. Brown parcel-paper skin.
The man next to Joey on the bus was watching a game-show on the screen set
into the headrest of the seat in front. He chuckled and gave a little
round of applause whenever a contestant answered a question correctly. He
groaned if a contestant was eliminated. He groaned harder if he knew the
answer to a question and a contestant did not. He was very drunk.
There are ways, Joey.
He remembered that her cheeks had been so sunken that she had appeared to
have no teeth, no tongue, just a sucking vacuum where her buccal cavity
used to be. Her skull had loomed beneath her face.
Outside, the city slicked by, silk-lined with artificial light.
In a hard hospital room, where there had been too much brightness, Joey
had taken his mother's hand. It was the first time he had touched her in
as long as he could recall. She had touched him often enough, held his
arm, kissed his cheek нн he had never been the one to reach out across the
space between them and make contact.
She tried to squeeze his fingers. He felt the creak of her knuckles as
they grated together.
We have money, she said. Your father left us enough.
A sales rep for the House of Lazarus had been around the hospital the
previous week. He had left brochures and leaflets in every ward. There
were leaflets by Joey's mother's bedside. They had been well read. One of
them contained an application form which she had half completed, filling
in the blanks with scrawled handwriting like an EEG readout until the
effort had become too great for her.
A girl sauntered down the gangway as the bus pulled into a stop. Earlier
on she had given Joey a long, simmering look. Had he not been so