"Ian R. Macleod - The Summer Isles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

Ian R. MacLeod
THE SUMMER ISLES

World Fantasy Award 1999


One

On this as on almost every Sunday evening, I find a message from my acquaintance on the wall of the third cubicle of
the Gents beside Christ Church Meadow. It's two thumbnails dug into the sleek green paint this week, which means the
abandoned shed by the allotments past the rugby grounds in half an hour's time. A trail of other such marks run across the
cubicle wall; what amounts nowadays to my entire sexual life. Here-Oh, happy, dangerous days!-is the special
triple-mark that meant a back room in the hotel of a sympathetic but understandably wary proprietor. He's gone now, of
course, has Larry Black, like so many others. Quietly taken one night for the shocks and needles of the treatment centers
in the Isle of Man.
I pull the chain, clunk back the lock, and step out into the sweet Jeyes Fluid air. Placed above me on the wall as I
wash my hands, with what, if you didn't know this country, you would surely imagine to be ironic intent, hangs a
photograph of John Arthur. He gazes warmly across his desk, looking younger than his forty-nine years despite his grey
hair. The photograph is brass-framed, well-polished. Of course, no one has dared to deface it.
Outside along St. Giles, twilight has descended, yet the warmth of this early summer day remains. A convoy of trucks
lumbers around the cobbles, filled with bewildered-looking conscripts on their way to the sprawling camps in the
southeast of England. A few of the newer or expensively refurbished pubs already boom with patriotic songs. I pause to
relight my pipe as I pass St. John's, then lean spluttering against a wall and cough up out a surprising quantity of stringy
phlegm, watched over by a small but disapproving gargoyle. Odd, disgusting, habit-hawking and spitting. Something that,
until recently, I'd only associated with old men.
There's still some life out on the playing fields. Undergrads are wandering. There are groups. Couples. Limbs entwine.
Soft laughter flowers. The occasional cigarette flares. Glancing back at the towers of this city laid in shadows of hazy gold
against the last flush of the sun, it's all so impossibly beautiful. It looks, in fact, exactly like an Empire Alliance poster.
Greater Britain Awake! I smile at the thought, and wonder for a moment if there isn't some trace of reality still left in the
strange dream that we in this country now seem to be living. Turning, sliding my hand into my pocket to nurse the
encouraging firmness of my anticipatory erection, I cross the bridge over the Cherwell as Old Tom begins his long nightly
chime.
Despite all the back-to-nature and eat-your-own greens propaganda that Home Secretary Mosley has been peddling,
the shed at the far end of the allotments and the plots it once served remain abandoned, cupped as they are in a secret
hollow, lost by the men who went to the War and never came back again. I lever open the door and duck inside. Tools
and seeds and sweet dry manure. But no sign yet of my acquaintance as the floorboards creak beneath my feet. The
darkness, even as my eyes grow accustomed to the gloom, becomes near-absolute as night settles outside. A distant
bell ripples a muffled shipwreck clang. The late train to London rattles by in the distance, dead on time.
My acquaintance is late. In fact, he should have been here first. As I pushed back the door, his younger arms should
already have been around me. He trembles often as not when we first lock together, does my acquaintance. After all, he
has so much more to lose. For, despite the darkness and the secrecy with which we pretend to cloak our meetings, I
know exactly who my acquaintance is. I have studied the lights of his house shining through the privet that he trims so
neatly each fortnight, and I have watched the welcoming faces of his wife and two daughters as they greet him at his
door.
Checking, occasionally, the radium glow of my watch, I let a whole hour slide by as the residues of early hope and
fear sour into disappointment, and then frank anxiety. But what, after all, do I know of the demands of being a father, a
husband? Of working in some grim dead-end section of the Censor's Department of the Oxford City Post Office? At
ten, I lever the shed door open and step back out into the summer night, leaving my long-forgotten libido far behind me.
The stars shine down implacably through the rugby H's as I make my way past lovers and drunks and dog walkers into the
old alleys. I turn for a moment as I hear the whisper of footsteps. Could that be a figure, outlined against the mist of light