"Ian R. MacLeod - The Road" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

Road, and as we began to pick our way over sodden nettles our feet slipped inch by inch deeper into
sucking mud. I tripped and stumbled over broken bricks, piles of rubble, loose rusting wire that had once
been put up to keep out trespassers. Deep brown pools had formed in the depths of the foundations. I felt
my feet slide beneath me, muddy gravity drawing me down into the water. I kicked away and heaved
myself over slippery bricks. Peering back over the wasteland, I saw that my father was some way behind,
grey again as the figure I had seen walking up from the lake, stumbling in the curtains of rain. I looked
towards the houses of Blackberry Road. Grey water filled my eyes, my heart was pounding. For a moment,
they didn't seem to be there.

"You go on Jack!" My father's voice. "Hurry home."

I clambered on, back over the last of the foundations and onto the loose clayey track that the builders
had laid. I could see rooftops now, sooty chimneys intertwined with the clouds, coalsheds, sodden washing,
ivied walls. I broke into a run, taking the narrow passage between 23 and 25. Then on around the corner.
Across the shining street.

I burst in through our front door. My breath came in heaving shudders as I stood dripping in warm
darkness. The hall clock ticked. My mother was in the kitchen. I could already smell milk and nutmeg from
the pudding she was cooking.

"That you Jack?" she called. "Get those boots off. I don't want you clumping around the house..."

I struggled with the laces and left my boots on the tiles beneath the coatstand. I walked into the warm
brightness of the kitchen.

"Where have you been?"

I looked back along the hall, willing a shape to appear at the mullioned front door. But already the sun
was brightening, shining in the diamonds of coloured glass, chasing away the rain. And Marion would be
back soon, and tea was nearly ready.

I asked, "Have you heard from Father?"

My mother was rubbing my wet hair with a towel. "Your father..." The movement of her hands became
stiffer. "No. He's always been bad for writing letters." She gave an odd laugh. Her hands dropped away. I
felt loose, light-headed. "He thinks. You know he thinks, Jack..."

"I was just thinking -- "

"And you're like him." She pushed me out of the kitchen, upstairs, away. "Now go and change."

I got a card from my father a few weeks later. It just came in the post. The censor had run a black line
through the name beneath the photograph, but you could still read the print if you held it to the light.
Ypres, but I pronounced it the way the soldiers did -- Wipers; a famous enough name, although the
newspapers reported that the great victory in Flanders of 1917 was at Passchendaele, and it was some
years before I realised that my father was involved in that last great push and not some side-show. Given
the choice, I always seemed to draw the lesser verdict of him. And in his cause of death, too, which
remains vague to this day. But then there were no proper roads in Flanders in the late summer of 1917.
The rain never stopped. Many of the advancing allied soldiers simply drowned in fetid mud.