"Ian R MacLeod - Living In Sin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

Living In Sin
a short story by Ian R MacLeod

I can still remember the last burning.
I was ten or maybe less. Too young to understand, but I knew it was
something special. The priests chanting and the crowds pushing to see the
man bound to the stake above the heaped pallets, old carpets and
paraffin-soaked newspapers. Everyone straining to catch some kind of
understanding from his face, wondering how it must feel. And then the
procession of torches up from the back of the tennis courts where the park
keeper had his hut. The special darkness of the smoke lifting above the
congregation and the hamburger stalls and the football pitches and the
lines of coaches parked behind the houses. Everyone trying hard to stay
quiet and listen for the screams that never came. My mother snatched my
hand in the press of bodies, whispered that to God the smoke was like
incense, he breathed it as the purest air. Took all that was bad into his
great holy lungs and turned it into good. Pity the poor sinner, but pity
more us poor mortals who must remain in the shame of our knowledge.
I've been living in sin with Annie these past twenty years. We're almost
respectable. She's a non-destructive tester at Matsi Plastics on the
industrial estate and I started work there in sales, trying to get
shopkeepers to stock the cheap icons we produce. Then I decided that shift
supervisors had it easier, wandering around the shopfloor, telling people
what to do. The follies of youth. But that was how I met Annie, watching
her between the vats and hydraulics with her white overalls stained yellow
from the processes they use, then catching glimpses of her calves as we
all knelt for blessing in the works chapel on the "A" lunch shift. Her
hair was mostly red then, strands of it falling down from under her
protective plastic cap in a way that seemed pretty to me. I was separated
from my wife and living alone, in my late twenties and already drinking
too much and putting on weight, losing my hair. My early marriage had
failed even before it began, and Annie's story wasn't much different. We
started flirting, dating, going out for drinks. We fell in love.
Of course, we both knew that there was no chance of the Church granting
annulments to the marriages that tied us, or blessing our union. But there
was never any direct discrimination against us. We rented our two bedroom
terraced house across the road from the church of Saint Anthony's almost
as easily as anyone else might have done. The neighbours were friendly
enough, sympathetic even. They nodded to us each morning as we all trooped
yawning in our slippers to church for Matins. They let me borrow tools
every winter when our pipes burst and chatted over the hedge in spring. In
the early days, Annie's hands often used to bleed from stigmata after we
had made love. But that diminished, in honesty probably as our own passion
lessened. Still, even after May was born, our chimney was licked by
lightning every time there was a storm.
Annie having May changed a lot of things. Kneeling at the pews of Saint
Anthony's at Evensong whilst she was pregnant, we had prayed frantically
that our baby would be ordinary. But still we were as surprised as anyone
when our prayers were answered. Who had ever heard of God blessing
adulterers with an undeformed child?