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

After a shower and a shave, I sat down in front of the
television. All that was on was an Indian film. The
hour passed slowly, with me drifting again and again
towards the threshold of sleep and just managing to
snap myself awake each time, with the result that my
impressions of the film were a bewildering,
fragmented chaos of blue gods, portly heroes in
polyester shirts and women dancing sinuously. At
last the doorbell rang. I switched off the television,
lit the gas beneath the kettle, and buzzed Harold up,
leaving the flat door ajar. The concrete staircase that
served all the flats in the building was uncarpeted
and Harold's slow shuffling footfalls echoed all the
way up. When he reached the landing outside my
door he hesitated, pondering, breathing hard, and
then, with a feeble knock, he entered.

Nothing could have prepared me for the profound
change that had come over him. It wasn't just that he
had lost weight, more weight than a man in his
circumstances can afford to lose. Nor was it the
unkempt straggliness of his hair and beard, which he
was normally at pains to keep brushed and trimmed
and tidy. It wasn't that his once-pristine greatcoat
was mud-stained and had a number of torn seams, or
that frostbite had left three of his fingertips black,
shrivelled and hard. It wasn't even the way he
walked, stooped over where once he had carried
himself with dignified erectness, bent as though
bearing an invisible boulder on his back. It was his
eyes that shocked me the most. While the rest of him
had been somehow lessened, his eyes were larger
and wider than I remembered them, and stared,
crazy-veined, with a despairing emptiness from
oyster-grey sockets. They looked without seeing, and
when they finally found me standing by the stove in
the small kitchen area of the living room, it took them
a while to focus on me and make sense of me.

Forcing on a smile, I pretended that there was
nothing different about him. "Hey, man, how're you
doing? It's good to see you. I'm glad you're alive."

His reply was dragged up from a moss-encrusted
well of misery: "I'm not."

Without saying another word he plodded over to the
living-room window and, with some effort, drew
back the curtains. The street was misty, the milky air