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

along the pavement like pieces from some new board game. A ripe smell, the
feeling warm and close, intimate as your underclothes. The gunning
motorcycle and the breathlessly laughing older kids had gone. Just a few
young ones who should by rights have been in bed were rattling skateboards
on a makeshift ramp between the cars, shouting fuck this and screw that
and then crossing themselves just in case and glancing back over their
shoulders at the spire of Saint Anthony's souring crookedly beyond the
rusted railings.
The church rose over tombstones and trees. Blackened stone that was old
enough to have been here when there was nothing but sweet green haze as
far as the horizon, in days of saint and knight and dragon. The story was
that the spire had been straight until Gideon Kenna -- who was Lord of the
Manor when there was still a Manor to be Lord of -- took to the pulpit at
Matins one bright Christmastime and blasphemed. Said there was no God.
Well, I mean. The church spire twisted at that very moment as a sign for
all to see and has stayed twisted ever since.
But things were more easy going now. There hadn't been a burning since
that one in my youth. People used to take a stricter view. They believed
that only flames could purify a soul so tormented as to reject God. And
the pendulum was swinging back that way. Articles in the tabloids. Sermons
from the priests. Prophets shouting in their rags about the decadence of
our ways. These things come and go as God wishes, soft or strict, the
other cheek or the plagues of Egypt, and if it sometimes seems that He
changes his mind, then we must remember that His ways are to us as our own
ways are to an ant. Terrible. Inexplicable. Undeniable.
I lit a cigarette and let the smoke lie on my tongue to take away the
taste of the evening. Past the newsagents and then down the alleyway
around the back of the houses, the pages of an old girlie mag were
crumpled and splayed beside a bike-rutted puddle. Something the kids had
got hold of, someone's daughter spread out there on the page, fading in
the rain and the sun.
Why does He allow us to sin in these ways? I can still remember the
terrors of my own youth, those sweet floods of sweat and pleasure followed
nights of sleepless agony when my eyes literally wouldn't close. But his
punishments are never quite strong enough. They join at the edges of our
lusts and fears until sometimes, poor sinners that we all undoubtedly are,
the pleasure and the pain becomes indistinguishable.
But May was out in the town. Out almost every evening, pecking at her
dinner, her eyes deep and absorbed, glancing up occasionally with an odd
kind of certainty that was enough to make you shiver, hair looking like it
needed a wash even when she'd just done it. Oh yes she was up to
something. School didn't seem to count, her bedroom was a tip and she went
out straight after dinner and Evensong saying she she'd done her homework
in break and Really Daddy everything is absolutely alright honestly. It's
a free country isn't it. Surely Daddy you don't mind. With that smile that
would melt butter and her eyes glinting as though the whole world was some
secret that we shared. Just you and I Daddy. And I couldn't help thinking
of her standing there in the bathroom and the wet sheen on her skin, that
sweet kid. And that we were blessed and she'd never complained about being
let's face it a bastard. And I had to look away and pretend that