"Eric The Pie" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

Eric the Pie

by Graham Masterton



'It's a very odd thing -
As odd as can be -
That whatever Miss T. eats
Turns into Miss T.'

Walter De La Mare

Eric's mother always used to tell him that 'You are what you eat.' Eric, seven years old, used to eat up all his minced-beef pie at supper-time and then lie in bed, feeling his arms and legs, to see if he were developing a crust.

How many minced-beef pies did you have to eat before you yourself turned into a minced-beef pie?

But if you ate Marmite sandwiches, as well; and fishcakes; and sweet cigarettes; and greengage jam tarts; and licquorice hardsticks; and apples; and cornflakes - what did you turn into then?

Eric used to lean on the windowsill of his high attic bedнroom and look out over the slated rooftops of suburban south London and try to imagine what you turned into then.

A kind of terrible groaning slushy monster, with eyes like pickled onions and skin as black as haddock, with crusty excrescences of Hovis loaf and appalling soft cavities dripping with gravy and strings of lamb-fat.

One hot afternoon in August, Eric fell over in the play-ground at school when he and his friends were playing 'it'. He scraped his knee and it bled into his sock. That night he lay in bed feeling the scab form hard and crusty on his leg and thought that he was turning into minced-beef pie.

He spent hours in his room staring at his nursery-rhyme book. 'Simple Simon met a pieman.' A pieman! There was no picture of the pieman, but Eric didn't need a picture. He could imagine himself what this terrifying creature was like. A hunched, pastry-encrusted beast, dragging himself along with muffled whimpers. A man who had eaten far too many pies in his life, and had paid the ultimate penalty.

A man whose skin had gradually turned crumbling pastry. A man whose lungs and stomach had gradually turned into minced beef. A pieman!

Eric had gone to bed and had nightmares about the pie-man. He had heard the pieman's nasal begging through bubbles of gravy. Eat me, kill me. I can't bear it any longer.

For weeks, he had eaten scarcely anything at all. And he had always left his crusts on the side of his plate. His mother had talked to Dr Wilson; and once Dr Wilson had visited the house, and Eric had answered questions to his blue chalk-striped waistcoat and his gold watch-chain.

'Do you dislike your food, Eric?'

'No, sir.'

'Are vou worried about anything at school?'

'No sir.'

'Cough.'

(Eric coughed)

'Breathe in, and hold it.'

(Eric breathed in, and held it.)

Then, in the brown-wallpapered hallway, next to the barometer that was always set fair, the doctor murmuring to his mother, 'He's quite all right, you know. Boys of this age quite often eat very little. But when he starts to grow ... well, he'll have to eat to live; and he'll live to eat. You mark my words, and stock up your larder.'