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

His mother had returned to the sitting-room, and sat and stared at him; almost as if she were resentful that he wasn't really sick.

'The doctor says you're all right.'

Long pause. 'Oh.'

She knelt on the floor next to him, and took his hand. Her eyes were so colourless. Her face was so colourless. 'You have to eat, Eric. You have to build yourself up. You have to eat or you'll die. You are what you eat, Eric.

'That's what I'm afraid of,' he whispered.

'What?'

'That's what I'm afraid of. If I eat too many pies.'

'What?'

'If I eat too many pies, I'll be Eric the Pie.'

His mother had laughed. Her laugh like fragments of broнken mirror in the summer bedroom. Bright, sharp, slice your nose off.

'No, you won't. Food gives you life, that's all. If you eat life, you'll have life. It's like an equation. Life in, life out.'

'Oh.'

Eric understood. Suddenly the pieman was nothing but a story. Pieces fell off him. Crust, base, lumps of kidney. Suddenly the pieman was nothing but pie. Eric had grown up. Now, at last, he understood the mystery of human existence. It was like an equation. Life in, life out. That was all. Nothing to do with minced-beef pies; nothing to do with fishcakes; or greenage jam tarts. It was simple. If you ate life, you stayed alive.

Next morning was sunny and suffocatingly hot. Eric, bored, and tired by the heat, sat on top of the coal-shed swingнing his legs, a pale elf-faced boy with huge brown eyes and protruding ears. He had no friends to play with. Everybody at school called him 'Mekon' and bullied him. He was no good at football and when he tried to play cricket he was always out for a duck.

In the yard at the back of Eric's terraced suburban house there was a strong smell of elderflowers and cat's pee, because next door's used to slink into the coal to relieve itself. Eric's mother had just hung out her laundry and it dripped interнmittently onto the concrete path. Above Eric's head the sky was as blue as washable writing-ink, and thinly streaked with cirrus clouds. High up, to the west, a Bristol Brittania airliner caught the sunlight. The Whispering Giant, the newspapers called it. Eric thought the idea of a whispering giant was rather sad and rather sinister.

He watched a woodlouse crawl across the hot tarpaper roof of the coal-shed. It reached his cotton shorts, and then began a long and painful diversion along his thigh.

Eric picked it up between finger and thumb. Immediately, it curled itself up into a grey armoured ball. Eric threw it up a little way, and then caught it. He did this two or three times. He wondered what it was thinking about, as he tossed it up. Was it frightened? Or didn't it have enough brains to be frightened?

It was alive. Alive enough to crawl across the coal-shed roof. So it must think something. He wondered what it would think if he ate it. The woodlouse's life would become part of his life. His big life and the woodlouse's tiny life would be irreнversibly combined. Perhaps then he would know what the woodlouse was thinking. You are what you eat, after all.

He popped the pill-like woodlouse into his mouth. It rested on his tongue. It must have thought it had discovered some damp, warm friendly niche in the coal-shed somewhere, because it unrolled itself in the cleft of his tongue, and began to crawl down his throat.

For a moment, Eric was seized by the urge to gag. But he calmed himself, restrained himself. The woodlouse was joinнing his life by its own volition, and he liked the idea of that.

It crawled to the back of his throat and then he swallowed it.

He closed his eyes. He wondered how long it would take before the woodlouse's consciousness became part of his own.

Perhaps it was too small. Perhaps he needed to eat lots more woodlice. He jumped down from the top of the coal-shed and searched around the yard, picking up bricks and stones and poking in the dampest corners of the wall. Each woodlouse he found, he popped into his mouth, and swallowed. In less than a quarter of an hour, he found thirty-one.

His mother came out with another basket of washing and began to peg her slips and stockings onto the line. 'What are you doing, Eric?' she asked him, one eye closed against the sunlight.

'Nothing,' said Eric. While she pegged up her clothes, he quickly ate four more woodlice. They crunched between his teeth.