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

tinged orange by the streetlights, the houses opposite
blank-windowed and cold-shouldering. It was the
dead hour of the night, when the pavements belong to
cats and foxes, when no cars disturb the stillness and
you can almost hear the burn of the neon bulbs in
their glass casings. Harold gazed out for a long time.
It was almost as if he couldn't bear, or didn't dare, to
take his eyes off the city for a second. The kettle
burped steam and I made us tea, and it was only
when I nudged Harold on the shoulder with a full
mug that he turned away from the window and, with
a nod of thanks, accepted the mug, made his way
over to the armchair and settled down. I took to the
sofa, and in the eerie small-hours quiet we sat
without talking and sipped without tasting. The pain
that had been clearly audible in Harold's last remark
kept me from asking him anything. Though I burned to
know what had happened to him, and though I was
deeply concerned about the state of both his physical
and his mental health, I realised I would have to wait
for him to speak; the only way he was going to give
up any information was by volunteering it. And while
I hated myself for even giving them head-room, the
words "cancer" and "AIDS" did flit across my mind.
What else but a terminal illness could so ravage a
man, suck so much of the juice out of him, make a
husk of him in such a short space of time?

"You want to know where I've been, don't you?"
Harold said at last, haltingly, like a man treading
barefoot over sharp stones. "Gone all this time --
must be dead, right? Sometimes, you know, I think I
am dead. I feel dead, that's for sure. If this isn't how
it feels to be dead, I don't know what does."

"I was worried. We all were, all of us at the shelter.
You'd never been away for so long before."

Harold didn't seem to care that someone cared. "I'm
going to tell you something now, Mark, and you'd
better listen, because I'm never going to tell another
living soul. I'm not even sure I should be telling you."

"If it's a matter of national security," I joked,
"perhaps I shouldn't be --"

"This is real." From beneath the brim of his Homburg
Harold fixed me with his eyes. Briefly they gained a
lustre, though it was not the pleasant twinkling light
that accompanied his forays into falsehood; this was