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

That night in bed he stared at the ceiling and he was sure that he could feel the woodlice's lives weaving in and out of his body and his mind. He felt stronger, more alive. If you eat life, you stay alive.



On his eighth birthday his mother gave him a bicycle. It wasn't new, but she had cleaned it and painted it blue and Mr Tedder at the second-hand van showroom had fitted new brake-blocks and a blue hooter with a rubber bulb.

He cycled up and down Churchill Road, which was as far as his mother would let him go. Churchill Eoad was a cresнcent, safe and quiet, away from the main road.

One grey afternoon he came across a pigeon, limping and fluttering in the gutter. He stopped his bicycle close beside it and watched it. It stared helplessly up at him with a beady orange eye. Every now and then it dragged itself a few inches further away, but Eric followed it, the wheels of his bicycle tick-ticking with every step.

It was alive. It had a much larger life than woodlice (which he had been eating by the handful whenever he found them; and ants, too; and spiders; and moths). If he ate it, maybe he could experience just the briefest flicker of what it was like to fly.

He looked around. The crescent was deserted. Three parked cars, one of them propped up on bricks, but that was all. Nobody looking. Only the distant sound of buses.

He left his bicycle propped against a garden fence and took the wounded pigeon into the alleyway between two terraced houses. It struggled and fluttered and he could feel its heart racing against his thumbs. He pressed its hard pungent breast against his mouth, and bit into feathers and meat and sinew. The pigeon struggled wildly, and uttered a throaty scream that excited Eric so much that he bit it again, and then again, until the pigeon was thrashing bloodily against his face and he was biting into bone and sinew and things that were bitter and slimy.

For one ecstatic instant, he felt its heart beating on the tip of his tongue. Then he forced its breast even deeper into his mouth, and killed it.

An elderly woman was watching him from an upstairs winнdow. She had suffered a stroke not long ago, and she was unable to speak. All she could do was stare at him in horror as he wiped the ragged bloody remains of the bird around his face; and skipped while he did; a pigeon dance; a death dance.

When he got home, Eric had to sneak in by the back door, and wash his face and hands in cold water in the scullery. Blood streaked the white ceramic sink. He felt elated, as if he had learned how to fly. He heard his mother calling, 'Eric?'



When he was eleven, he crouched in the fusty-smelling, coalнshed, waiting for the neighbours' cat. When it came in, he caught it, and tied its mouth tight with fishing-line, knotted tight. The cat struggled furiously, hurling itself from side to side, and scratching at his face and hands. But Eric was ready for that. He chopped off its paws, one by one, with a pair of gardening shears. Then, when it was still struggling and writhing with pain, he hung it up from a cup-hook that he had screwed into the low wooden ceiling. He was covered in blood. The cat sprayed blood everywhere. But Eric liked the blood. It was warm and it tasted salty, like life.

He buried his face in the hot tangled fur of the cat's belly and bit into it. It crunched and burst, and the cat almost exploded with pain. Eric licked its lungs while they were still breathing. There was air inside them; life. Eric licked its heart while it was still pumping. There was blood inside it; life. Eric took the cat's life in his mouth and ate it, and the cat became Eric. You are what you eat. Eric was an insect, a bird, a cat, and scores of spiders.

Eric knew that he could live for ever.



Not long after his sixteenth birthday, Eric went to stay with his grandparents in Earl's Colne, in rural Essex. Hot summer days, glazed like syrup. Hallucinatory hay-fields, dotted with bright-red poppies.

Eric found a brown-and-white calf, down by the river. The calf had become entangled in barbed-wire, and was crying in pain. Eric knelt down beside it for a long time and watched it struggle. Butterflies blew by; the afternoon was so hot that it almost seemed to swell.

Eric took off his jeans and his T-shirt and his underpants and hung them up on the bushes. Naked, he approached the calf, and touched it. It licked his hand, and twisted pitifully against the barbed-wire.

Eric picked up a large stone in his right hand and broke the calf's legs, all four of them, one after the other. The calf dropped to the ground, bellowing with pain. Eric forced the stone between its jaws so that it couldn't cry out any more. He was panting and sweaty and his penis was rigid, with the foreskin drawn tautly back.

He mounted the calf and raped it. Black flesh, pink flesh. While he raped it, he bit into its smooth-haired chest, and tore lumps of bloody meat away. It kicked and fought, but Eric was too strong. Eric had too much life in him. Cats' lives; dogs' lives. Eric was life itself. He ran the tip of his tongue over the calfs living eye and the eye slickly quivered; so Eric bit into it, so that a clear gelatinous gobbet of optic fluid slithered down his throat like a prize oyster; and at the same time he ejacuнlated into the dying animal's bowels.

He spent almost an hour eating and retching and smotherнing himself in blood. By the time he had finished, he was surrounded by swarms of flies. The calf quivered, just once. He kissed its bloodied anus, from which his own semen glutiнnously dripped. He said a prayer to all that was terrible, all that was wonderful. The power of one life over another.

In the far distance, the sky was very black; granite black; and thunder rumbled. A rush of warm wind crossed the hayнfield, like a premonition of early death.