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

Harold didn't expect anyone to believe his stories,
but he told them anyway, and out of politeness or
admiration or a weird kind of gratitude no one turned
round to him and said, "Shut your mouth, Harold, I
can't breathe for the stink." Once you'd been seduced
by a tale of his -- and Harold was always careful to
hook a new listener with one of his more plausible
lines -- you couldn't help but admire the eloquence
and the unselfconscious audacity with which he
wove his webs of untruth, and marvel at the lengths
he would go to in order to keep you, and himself,
amused. Nothing in Harold's imaginary world could
be proved. Nothing, equally, could be disproved, so
it was foolish to try to reason or argue with him. Any
objection would only be met with a bigger lie, and if
you persisted in protesting, claiming that what he
was telling you contradicted another story he had
told you earlier or else was blatantly impossible, his
tales would just grow taller and taller and taller until
he had built a wall of mendacity so high it could not
be scaled, and you gave up exhausted. Resistance
was futile. It was easier simply to accept what
Harold said at face value and, if you were in the
mood, perhaps let drop a well-chosen question that
would encourage him to yet more outrageous flights
of fancy. And maybe, just maybe, if you got lucky,
this lifelong liar might trip himself up and
accidentally find himself telling the truth. You never
know.

I've always thought that Harold would have made a
fine novelist or playwright. He had the vocabulary
for it, the skill with language. He spoke the way most
people write, in well-formed, thought-through
sentences, which made it all the more logical for me
to suggest, as I did once, that he set the story of his
life down on paper (by which I meant compose a
work of fiction). Harold's reply was
uncharacteristically straightforward and
self-effacing: "What would be the point, Mark? If I
wrote it down, who would believe it?"

And now he was gone, or so it seemed. As the days
shortened and the trees shed and the sky turned hazy
like a cataracted eye, and still Harold did not show,
the hope that I had been nurturing like the last ember
in a grate gradually dwindled and cooled. Every
evening, having left the office and arrived at the
shelter in time to help with the dinner shift, I would
walk slowly along the rows of tables, checking each