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

"Right. Well, imagine you discovered a mole -- no, a
tattoo, an old faded tattoo on your wife's right
buttock that wasn't there before, couldn't have been
there or else you'd have noticed."

My bachelor status made it difficult to empathise
with the metaphor, but dutifully I made the
imaginative leap. "OK."

"Same thing," said Harold. "What I found was a
street that I would be willing to swear on the Bible,
the Talmud and the Koran hadn't existed before that
odd moment, that 'shift', occurred. Leading off a road
I'd been down dozens of times before: a new,
perfectly ordinary-looking, perhaps somewhat seedy
little street. One that appeared to have been there for
ages, for as long as all the other streets around it, at
least a century, perhaps longer, but a new street all
the same.

"Well, what would you have done? You'd have
investigated, wouldn't you? And that's what I did. I
wasn't scared. I was curious, and part of that
curiosity was fear, but not enough of it was fear to
make me turn and walk away, as I should have done.
Things would have been so much better if I'd simply
turned and walked away. But then we don't do that
when we're confronted with a mystery, do we? And
it was also a challenge. A stretch of road I'd never
been down before, a virgin piece of the city just
begging for me to trample all over it -- how could I
resist? Me, who's known London so intimately for so
long? How could I not walk down those fresh
pavements and make my knowledge complete?

"The most peculiar thing about that street was, it felt
and smelled and sounded just like any other street.
Radios were playing, and there were cars parked
along the kerbs and net curtains in the windows of
the houses, and people had done different things to
their houses, whitewashed them, pebbledashed them,
had paved over their front gardens, made little
glades out of their front gardens, or not bothered at
all with their front gardens and let the weeds grow
up and the low front walls crumble and sag. Lives
had been lived there on that street. Children had been
born, old people had died. Dogs had filled the
gutters with their droppings. The street had a history
-- and yet less than quarter of an hour ago it hadn't
existed.