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

Eric left school and found a job at a colour-separation compaнny in Lewisham, in south-east London. He lived in a mews flat over a lock-up garage only a one-and-sixpenny busride from where he worked. He was tall now, tall and long-legged, with a strange diving stride that could only have been adoptнed by a man who never walked with women; because no woman could have possibly caught up with him. He wore National Health tortoiseshell spectacles and his hair was cut so short that it always stuck up at the crown, like a cockatoo.

He sat at his drawing-board at work, painting out flaws on colour separations, his head bowed, his nose so close to the celluloid film that his face was reflected in its blackness. He hardly ever spoke to anybody. He brought a Thermos of Ovaltine, but nobody ever saw him eat lunch. Deborah Gibbs, who was new in accounts, thought he was lonely and strange and rather alluring. 'He's Byronic,' she said; and Kevin in the platemaking section wanted to know if it was catching.

Every night Eric stood on the corner outside the works and waited for the bus which would take him back home. He would sit downstairs on the 3-seats where his thigh would be pressed against the thigh of some homegoing typist or some big West Indian woman in a bright print frock, with bagfuls of Sainsbury's shopping on her lap. He liked to feel their warmth. He liked to feel their life. There were airless days in summer when his leg was pressed close to the woman next to him, and he could have ducked his head down and taken a bite out of her living flesh.

The mews was almost always deserted when he returned; the late sun hanging in the sky like a yellow badge. Occasionally Mr Bristow was tinkering with his old Standard Twelve, but usually it was Eric's echoing footsteps and Eric's jingling keys and nothing else. Only the deep ambient roar of suburban London.

He would climb the metal fire-escape stairs and let himself into the flat. A small kitchenette with a wooden drainingнboard and a tap that constantly dripped. A curled-up calendar for 1961, Views of the Lake District. He would sniff, whistle, switch on the electric kettle. Then he would walk through to the sitting-room; which at this time of day was always dark, and smelled of damp.

He would switch on the black-and-white television but he would turn down the sound. Nobody on television ever had anything to say which interested Eric in the slightest. The news was all about President Kennedy and Mr K and death; or pop music, which he didn't understand. He heard it all day, every day. They played it on transistor radios at work. But he simply didn't understand it. That endless nagging bang, bang, bang, bang. It gave him a headache. It made him feel that he had been imprisoned by some primitive tribe that didn't even realise that that night sky wasn't a lid.

The only programme that Eric liked was Hancock's Half Hour, although it never made him laugh. He liked lines like, 'I thought my mother was a bad cook, but at least her gravy moved about.'

In the bedroom, Eric's unmade bed. And all around it, pinned to the wall in their hundreds, Eric's drawings. Anatomical studies of insects, rats, dogs and horses. Anatomical studies of woodlice, anatomical studies of pigeons. Everything that Eric had eaten, meticulously drawn in pencil. Each one signed, each one dated, a catalogue of Eric's living meals. Each one bore the legend, 'You are what you eat.'

Under the bed were drawings which he kept tied up in a large grey fibreboard portfolio. These were special drawings which he didn't want the landlady to see, in case she visited his flat when he was out at work.

These were drawings of things that Eric had never eaten, but which he would like to eat. New-born babies, as they emerged from their mothers, still hot, still steaming, like offerings from some sacred oven. Afterbirths, Eric would have given anything to be able to eat an afterbirth, plunge his face into hot pungent gristle. Men's faces; children's thighs. Slices of women's breasts. Eric drew them in painstaking detail, shading and shading with his 2B pencil until the heel of his hand was silvery-black with rubbed-off graphite.

Later, when the sun had set behind the rooftops, and the mews was very dark, Eric used to go down to the garage. He would lay his hand against the green weather-blistered paint. He would say nothing; but close his eyes. Sometimes he felt as if he didn't belong on this planet at all. At other times, he felt that he owned it, and that everybody else was intruding on his privacy.

He would turn his key in the Yale lock, and push open the wooden concertina doors. They would always shudder and complain, even though Eric had greased them three or four times. Eric would step into the darkness of the garage and smell 1930s motor-oil and leather and dust; but most of all, blood; and despair.

He would close the doors behind him, and then he would switch on the light. Suspended from the garage ceiling by an elaborate system of weights and hooks and pulleys were six or seven animals - dogs, cats, rabbits, even a goat. Their jaws were bound with fishing-line so that they were unable to utter the slightest sound, even though they were suspended from hooks and wires that must have been causing them intense and endless agony. Most of them had been bitten here and there. A black Labrador dog had the flesh from its hind-legs missing, so that it pedaled the air with nothing but bones. The goat's eyes had been sucked from their sockets, and its udder bad been opened up and partially devoured; like a huge bloody pudding.

Eric took life wherever he could find it. Eric ate everything which offered him life. He felt strong and knowledgeable and many, as if every animal that he had eaten had given him some of its instincts, some of its intellect, some of its individuнality. He was sure that he could run faster, balance better, smell more keenly. He was sure that he could hear dog-whisнtles. He was convinced that if he ate many living birds, he would soon be able to fly.

Every night, Eric would lock his garage door, take off all of his clothes, and fold them on a bentwood chair which he had placed by the wall for this very purpose. Then, naked, Eric woud feed; trying to keep each of his animals alive for as long as possible. There was nothing like staring into the eyes of a living creature while you were actually chewing its flesh. And digesting it. Sometimes he would bend over naked in front of the suffering, dangling animals and excrete, so that they could witness their final fate. Dropped onto the oil-stained concrete floor, lifeless!



One hot evening in August, 1963, Deborah Gibbs came over and perched her hip on Eric's plan-chest. She was wearing a small white sleeveless top and a short green skirt and Eric, when he looked up, could see chestnut-brown stocking-tops and white plump thighs and white knickers.

Sandy Jarrett in developing had bet Deborah ten sillings that she couldn't persuade Eric to take her out for a drink. Sandy was hiding behind the reeded-glass partition and tryнing to smother giggles. Eric could see her ginger hair bobbing.

'I was wondering what you was doing tonight,' said Deborah.

Eric wiped his brush and peered at her through his paint-freckled spectacles.

'I'm not doing anything. Why?'

'I don't know. Thought you might like to come down the Blue Wanker.'

'The what?' blushed Eric.

'Oh, sorry. We all call it that. The Blue Anchor. It's the pub over at Hilly Fields.'

'Why should I want to do that?' Eric asked her. His hand lying still and white on the drawing-board, as if it were someнthing dead that didn't belong to him. Fingernails ruthlessly bitten until they bled, and formed scabs, and been bitten again, and bled again...