"a_taste_of_heaven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lovegrove James)

A Taste of Heaven
a short story by James
Lovegrove

Think'st thou that I that saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?
-- Mephistophilis
(Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor
Faustus)




Harold hadn't been down to the homeless shelter for
several weeks. I asked about him, asked anyone that I
knew to be a friend of his if they'd seen him, and got
only shaken heads and frowns in reply. "Think he
might've gone up north," was one suggestion, but I
knew Harold: with winter approaching, the last
direction he would be heading in was northwards.
London, for all its faults, at least had the advantage
of being a few degrees warmer than Manchester or
Newcastle, and once winter set in Harold stayed
here usually until the first buds appeared on the trees.
More to the point, he never left the city for long. A
week or two, three at the most, and then, his
wanderlust satisfied, his footsteps would turn
towards the capital again, London a Saturn whose
heavy gravitational pull he could not escape.

No, there was definitely something wrong, and once I
had begun to fear the worst, every little symptom of
poor health that Harold had exhibited the last time I'd
seen him took on a new and sinister significance.
That cough of his -- it had been getting worse, hadn't
it? Had been turning bronchial, definitely. And the
sore on his forehead -- just a lesion? Or a sarcoma?
God, I'd lost count of the number of times I'd heard
about one of the shelter regulars turning his or her
toes up overnight, for no reason other than that the
unending hardships of the vagrant lifestyle had
finally taken their toll. Harold had been in no worse
shape than most of them, but that didn't mean he
couldn't still be lying undiscovered beneath a
shambles of newsprint in an alley somewhere,
clenched in a foetal knot of death.