"George R. R. Martin - Portraits of His Children" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

It bounced off his cheek. His face was reddening. "You're just like your mother," he said. "She was
always breaking things too."

"You gave her good reason, didn't you?"
Cantling ignored that. "What the hell is wrong with you? What the hell do you think you're going to
accomplish with this stupid melodramatic gesture? That's all it is, you know. Bad melodrama. Who the
hell do you think you are, some character in a Tennessee Williams play? Come off it, Michelle. If I wrote
a scene like this in one of my books, they'd laugh at me."

"This isn't one of your goddamned books!" she screamed. "This is real life. My life. I'm a real person,
you son of a bitch, not a character in some damned book." She whirled, raised the knife, slashed and
slashed again.

Cantling folded his arms against his chest as he stood watching. "I hope you're enjoying this pointless
exercise."

"I'm enjoying the hell out of it," Michelle yelled back.

"Good. I'd hate to think it was for nothing. This is all very revealing, you know. That's your own face
you're working on. I didn't think you had that much self-hate in you."

"If I do, we know who put it there, don't we?" She was finished. She turned back to him, and threw
down the knife. She had begun to cry again, and her breath was coming hard. "I'm leaving. Bastard. I
hope you're ever so fucking happy here, really I do."

"I haven't done anything to deserve this," Cantling said awkwardly. It was not much of an apology, not
much of a bridge back to understanding, but it was the best he could do. Apologies had never come
easily to Richard Cantling. "You deserve a thousand times worse," Michelle had screamed back at him.
She was such a pretty girl, and she looked so ugly. All that nonsense about anger making people beautiful
was a dreadful cliche, and wrong as well; Cantling was glad he'd never used it. "You're supposed to be
my father," Michelle said. "You're supposed to love me. You're supposed to be my father, and you
raped me, you bastard."

Cantling was a light sleeper. He woke in the middle of the night, and sat up in bed shivering, with the
feeling that something was wrong.

The bedroom seemed dark and quiet. What was it? A noise? He was very sensitive to noise. Cantling
slid out from under the covers and donned his slippers. The fire he'd enjoyed before retiring for the night
had burned down to embers, and the room was chilly. He felt for his tartan robe, hanging from the foot of
the big antique four-poster, slipped into it, cinched the belt, and moved quietly to the bedroom door. The
door creaked a little at times, so he opened it very slowly, very cautiously. He listened.

Someone was downstairs. He could hear them moving around.

Fear coiled in the pit of his stomach. He had no gun up here, nothing like that. He didn't believe in that.
Besides, he was supposed to be safe. This wasn't New York. He was supposed to be safe here in quaint
old Perrot, Iowa. And now he had a prowler in his house, something he had never faced in all of his
years in Manhattan. What the hell was he supposed to do?