"Ian McDonald - Some Strange Desire" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

"He insisted on paying. One of the lace-G-string-and-stocking brigade. Took me
back to his place. Why do they always have posters of racing cyclists on their
walls?"
Though we do not do it for money, genetic material is the price we ask for our
services, cash in hand is never refused. I had taken the twenty down to the
off-license for a bottle of Californian Chardonnay and a sweet-and-sour pork
while Cassiopia changed for the evening client, an ul-goi who liked to tie our
wrists to the ceiling hooks while he slipped rubber bands around our breasts,
more and more and more of them, tighter and tighter and tighter. Thank God once
every six weeks seemed to satisfy him. Vinyl Lionel had Word he was Something in
the Foreign Office. Whatever, he had taste in tailoring. We made sure he paid
for his game with the rubber bands.
When I returned Cassiopia had tletched. He is very beautiful as a woman. When he
tletches, it is like a flower blossoming. Yet there was a subtle change in the
atmosphere, something in his personal aroma that smelled not right.
"It hurts," he said. "Here. Here. Here. And here..." He touched breasts, loins,
neck and on the final here, pressed fingers into belly in the way that says deep
within, everywhere.
Of course, you never think it can be you. Your lover. Your partner. Your
sibling. I gave him two paracetamol and a cup of corner-store Chardonnay to wash
them down with.
He scratched all night. I could not sleep for his scratching, scratching,
scratching. In the shower he was covered in yellow crusted spots. The sting of
hot water made him wince. Even then I pretended not to know. I convinced myself
he had picked up some venereal bug from one of the goi. Despite the fact that
our immune systems make us almost invulnerable to goi infections. Such was my
self-deception, I even bought some under-the-counter antibiotics from the
Almost-All-Night Pharmacy.
You can imagine the smell of sickness. It is not hard, even for your limited
senses. Imagine, then, a whole street, a whole town, terminally sick, dying at
once. That is what I smelled when I came home after an afternoon with a
first-timer who had passed furtive notes: what are you into, I'm into, I got a
place... under the partitions of the cubicles in the gents' toilets.
I found him lying on the carpet, hands opening and closing spastically into
tight, futile fists. He had failed halfway in tletchen, caught between like
something half-melted and twisted by flame. I cleaned thin, sour, vomited-up
coffee and slimmer's soup from his clothes. Over and over and over and over and
over and over, he whispered, Oh my God oh my God oh my God oh my God. I got him
into bed and a fistful of Valium down him, then sat by his side in the room that
was filling with the perfume of poisoned earth, looking at everything and seeing
only the shadow my thoughts cast as they circled beneath my skull.
We have a word for it in our language. Jhash. There is no direct translation
into your languages. But you know it. You know it very well. It haunts your pubs
and clubs and Saturday night scores. It is the unspoken sermon behind every
mint- scented condom machine on the toilet wall. Like ours, yours is a little
word too. When I was small and ran in gray flannel shorts wild and heedless over
the bomb-sites of Hackney Marshes, my grandmother, who was keeper of the
mysteries, taught me that jhash was the price Pere Teakbois the Balancer with
his plumb-bob in his hand demanded of the tesh in return for their talents. I
think that was the point at which my long, slow slide from faith began: