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

a mean light, bitter in its brightness, harsh and hard.
"This is something that actually happened to me, and
I'm telling you because I have to tell someone.
Because I'll go mad if I don't. I regret, for your sake,
that it has to be you, but of all the people I know
you're the one I trust most to remember and believe.
Everyone else will think I'm making it up. Everyone
else will think this is just another of Harold's
stories."

It was the first time I'd heard him even come close to
admitting that the tales he told about himself, the
tales he maintained in the face of all opposition were
true, were lies. While it didn't amount to an outright
confession, it was near enough to one to make me sit
up and pay attention, which was perhaps what
Harold had intended.

"You know me, Mark," he continued. "I've been
wandering London for a fair old number of years
now. I think I know this city pretty well. As well as a
husband knows the body of his wife, you might say.
There's not a street I haven't been down, not a square
inch of pavement in the Greater London area that
hasn't seen the soles of my feet. I've worn parts of
this city away with walking. It's worn parts of me
away in return. I really thought there was nothing
new in it, nothing that could surprise me. It turns out I
was mistaken.

"It happened last October. Nice, wasn't it, October?
Mild, mellow, calm. Trees putting on their autumn
firework display. Lovely weather to be out in, all the
more lovely because you know it's not going to last.
Well, I'd strayed into the suburbs, south of the river.
Down Balham way. There's a couple of churches
round there that open their crypts at night to let us
sleep in them. One of them has a health-care place
attached to it, you can get seen by a doctor almost
straight away, and I'd had a cough that had been
bothering me for weeks, you probably remember.
The doctor said it was nothing serious and gave me
some antibiotics for it, and I left the health-care
place feeling pretty good about myself, the way you
do when you're ill and you've just been to see the
doctor and he's given you something that you know is
going to make you well again. I'd got a meal inside
me, too, from one of those charity vans that do the
rounds. Soup and sandwiches: God's way of saying,
'Cheer up, old fellow, things aren't so bad.' And I'd