"Michael Marshall - The Straw Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marshall Michael)

minds I would never have anything more than a second-hand regard for them?
The only thing that seemed to make any kind of sense was leaving everything as it was, walking out of
the house and never coming back. This wasn't my life. It wasn't anybody's, not any more. Apart from the
single wedding picture in the hall, there weren't even any photographs. There never had been in our
family.
In the end I wound up back in the sitting room. This faced down the garden toward the road, and had
big, wide windows that transformed the cold light outside into warmth. There was a couch and armchair,
in matching genteel prints. A compact little widescreen television, on a stand fronted with smoked glass.
Also my father's chair, a battered warhorse in green fabric and dark wood, the only piece of furniture in
the room that they'd brought from the previous house. A new biography of Frank Lloyd Wright was on
the coffee table, my father's place marked with a receipt from Denford's Market. Eight days previously
one of them had bought a variety of cold cuts, a carrot cake (fancy), five large bottles of mineral water,
some low-fat milk and a bottle of vitamins. Most of these must have been amongst the fridge contents
that Mary had thrown away. The mineral water was maybe still around, along with the vitamins. Perhaps
I'd have some later.
 In the meantime I sat in my father's chair. I ran my hands along the worn grain of the armrests, then
laid them in my lap and looked down the garden.
And for a long time, in savage bursts, I cried.


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Much later, I remembered an evening from long ago. I would have been seventeen, back when we lived
in California. It was Friday night, and I was due to meet the guys at a bar out on a back road just outside
town. Lazy Ed's was one of those shoebox-with-a-parking-lot beer dens that look like they've been
designed by Mormons to make drinking seem not just un-Godly but drab and sad and dead-end
hopeless. Ed realized that he wasn't in a position to be picky, and as we were never any trouble and kept
feeding quarters into the pool table and juke box тАФ Blondie, Bowie and good old Bruce Stringbean,
back in the glory days of Molly Ringwald and Mondrian colours тАФ our juvie custom was fine by him.
My mother was out, gone to a crony of hers to do whatever it is women do when there aren't any
men around to clutter up the place and look bored and not listen with sufficient gravity to stories about
people they've never met, and who anyway sound kind of dull, if their troubles are anything to judge by.
At six o'clock Dad and I were sitting at the big table in the kitchen, eating some lasagne she'd left in the
fridge, and avoiding the salad. My mind was on other things. I have no idea what. I can no more get back
inside the head of my seventeen-year-old self than I could that of a tribesman in Borneo.
It was a while before I'd realized Dad had finished, and was watching me. I looked back at him.
'What?' I said, affably enough.
He pushed his plate back. 'Going out tonight?'
I nodded slowly, full of teenage bafflement, and got back to shovelling food into my head.
I should have understood right away what he was asking. But I didn't get it, in the same way I didn't
get why there remained a small pile of salad on his otherwise spotless plate. I didn't want that green shit,
so I didn't take any. He didn't want it either, but he took some тАФ even though Mom wasn't there to see.
I can understand now that the pile in the bowl had to get smaller, or when she got back she'd go on
about how we weren't eating right. Simply dumping some of it straight in the trash would have seemed
dishonest, whereas if it spent some time on a plate тАФ went, in effect, via his meal тАФ then it was okay.
But back then, it seemed inexplicably stupid.
I finished up, and found that Dad was still sitting there. This was unlike him. Usually, once a food
event was over, he was all business. Get the plates in the washer. Take the garbage out. Get the coffee
on. Get on to the next thing. Chop fucking chop.
'So what are you going to do? Watch the tube?' I asked, making an effort. It felt very grown up.