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

"This happens," I say. They all think they are the only ones. They start so
differently, men and women, back among the sand castles and Dinky toys and Cindy
dolls of childhood; they think there cannot be anyone else like them. But
already they are being drawn toward us, and each other. They realize that what
excites frenzies of passion in others leaves them cold and uncomprehending, and
everything falls apart: friends, lovers, jobs, careers, hopes, dreams,
everything except the search for that something that will fulfil the fantasy in
their heads. Can anyone be as tormented, as depraved, as they? I do not
disillusion them: fantasies and confessions, and the small absolutions and
justifications I can offer; these are treasures held close to the heart. Tell me
your story, then, ul-goi boy in your best suit, and I will listen, for, though
it is a story I have heard ten thousand times before, it is a story that
deserves to be heard. You have had the courage that so many lack, the courage to
reach for what you truly want.
For the homosexual, it is the image in the mirror.
For the transvestite, it is the flight from ugliness to imagined true beauty.
For the sado-masochist, it is the two-edged embrace of guilt.
For the bondage enthusiast, it is the relieved plummet from the burden of being
adult into the helplessness of childhood.
For the rubber fetishist, it is the return to the total comforting enclosure of
the womb.
For the ul-goi, it is the frustration of desiring to be what they are and what
they are not simultaneously.
Where have all the fluorescent re-spray Volkswagen Beetles started to come from?

What is he saying now? About some 0898 Sexline he used to dial called "Cycle
Club Lust"; how he sat hanging on the line running up obscene bills waiting for
the payoff that never came. How Telecom regulations compel them to use words
like "penis" and "buttocks" and "breasts." How can you get off on words like
that? he says.
And I sense it again. A scent... Almost totally masked by my own pheromone
patterns; that certain uncertainty. I know it. I know it.... Tower cranes decked
out with aircraft warning lights like Christmas decorations move through the
upper air. Towers of London. Close to home now. I show him a place to park the
car where it will be fairly safe. In this area, you do not buy car stereos, you
merely rent them from the local pub. On the street, with his coat collar turned
up against the drizzle, he looks desperately vulnerable and uncertain. The
merest waft of pheromones is enough to firm that wavering resolution. Gentle
musks carry him through the front door, past the rooms where we cater for the
particular tastes of our goi clients, up the stairs and along the landing past
Cassiopia's room, up another flight of stairs to the room at the top. The room
where the ul-goi go.



18 November
On the third day of the jhash, I went to see Mother, a forty-five-minute train
journey past red-brick palazzo-style hypermarkets under Heathrow's
sound-footprint.
When the great wave of early-Fifties slum clearance swept the old East End out