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

I still believe in what happened in the Arboretum on that sunny-rainy day, although Marion, who died in
the flu epidemic not long after the war, would have laughed and taunted me about it if I'd said anything to
her, and I couldn't ever think of a right way of telling my mother. The sense of the ordinariness was too
strong; of wandering into town and sitting, as I am sure I did sit, in the Mermaid Cafe with my father,
although it's been closed for many years now and I never did find that brown-eyed waitress again, or any of
the other people there who might have recognised us.

The little steamer that my father had so wanted to take me on crossed and re-crossed the Arboretum
lake again for a few years after the war, although I could never quite bring myself to take the aimless
journey. Still, I was there when it sunk one pastel winter evening in 1921. I stood amid the onlookers on
the shore, biting my lip and with my hands stuffed hard into my pockets as it tilted down into watery
caverns wreathed in smoke and steam, set alight by nameless vandals. Inside my coat that day, crumpled
as my trembling fingers gripped it in the hot darkness, was a sepia-tinted picture of the square of
once-pretty Ypres, and my name and address on the other side. I think that someone must have found that
last postcard after my father died and posted it to me as a kindly thought, because the rest was simply
blank. There was nothing but an empty space where my father, if he had survived and got back to the
shelter of his dug-out on that sunny-rainy day, might otherwise have left a message.
The Roads copyright ┬й 1997, 2007 Ian R. MacLeod
All rights reserved
First Published in AsimovтАЩs Magazine