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

The people at work began to share our table and play dominoes at lunchtime
in the canteen, to kneel close to us along the lines of stacking plastic
chairs in the works chapel. Mrs Hewison next door in our terrace even
knitted May a matinee suit from pink and lime green acrylic she'd had left
over from a cardigan. Once people saw May in her pram and realised that
she wasn't obviously damaged or deformed, I think they all expected the
kid to be special, to start reciting the scriptures around the side of her
dummy or piss holy water like the ones you read about in the papers. But
it seemed that God had answered our prayers. He had given us fornicators
an ordinary child. An ordinary life. He had reached down from the heavens
and touched our brows with the sweat of ordinariness.
The days at Matsi Plastics dragged by. The years happened quickly. They
flew, and all Annie and I could do was watch. And draw slowly apart. We
loved May, but that became a thin thread as she grew older and went out
with her friends and we began to share the house together alone with our
age and our disappointments, the unbroken weight of our adulterous sin.
Maybe if we could have got married, if the stigmata and the lightning
hadn't returned every now and then to remind us. Maybe this, maybe that.
Sitting with the TV on and the evening paper spread on my lap, ashamed of
the loose and heavy flesh it covered with Annie slouched half asleep
across the room and hating her for the silence and the ways she had let go
of herself and the loose grey hair that fell from her bun, I could see the
spire of Saint Anthony's through the little bay window, crooked and
beckoning like a finger. And I could hear a young girl's laughter down the
street that was breathless and could have been May. Then some kid too
young for any sense gunning a motorcycle. Where in name of Lord Jesus did
May go these evenings? Only the week before I'd walked into the bathroom
and found her standing there dripping and without a towel, looking like
Aphrodite. I thought of the lads that sometimes came to the door nowadays,
rawfaced with knuckled hands I couldn't bear to watch yet couldn't look
away as they moved them restlessly. Said fine Sir if May's not in I'll
just call tomorrow God willing. All those polite words to make me think
they were good lads when I could see their hands and I know what lads were
like Oh yes.
I tried to close my mind and watch the TV. The news was full of new
miracles, the word of God spreading out from Europe and America, across
the whole world. The sunset full of angels and cherubim above Cairo, the
pillar of fire that had burned for three days and three nights in the
Forbidden City. The newsreader was grinning. Oh, how foolish those
foreigners must feel as they try to disguise their anguish and turn their
creaky foreign minds towards the Faith!
I stood up and growled something about a walk, throwing the paper down
deliberately loud and hard on my chair. Annie's eyes didn't flicker. They
were closed, showing just thin glitter of white like a dog's when it's
sleeping. I pulled on my old anorak and took the cigarettes that Annie
wouldn't let me smoke at home from the pocket of my office jacket. I
slammed the front door and it bounced back the way it always did. I pushed
it gently shut.
Out in the street, the air was tainted with the scent of factories, smoke
of chimneys, faded aftermath of the evening's cooking and dog turds placed