"Mark Morris - The Chisellers' Reunion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morris Mark)

chunks of it had been gobbled up. Nick only had two bottles of Beck's
left, plus the one he was drinking. It didn't seem to be affecting him
much, though, except in his throwing arm. Eventually the banter tailed off
and we fell silent. Nobody was looking at their watches, but we knew the
beginning of the reunion - the real beginning - could not be too far away
now.
I closed my eyes, rubbed my hands over my face. My stomach was trembling.
And then I heard Conrad whisper, "Here we go."
I opened my eyes.
And saw the fire.
It was licking at the grass beside the railway track as it always did,
startlingly white in the dusk. At first the fire was small, but it was
already spreading, darting tongues of flame sprouting into new life in the
undergrowth.
"We've got to put it out," said Conrad, and already his voice sounded
different - younger, clearer, cocksure without him having to force it.
The change was upon us without us even realising it. We had stepped back
on to the treadmill of time, and now nothing could stop the events that
were about to unfold.
It's hard to explain how it feels. A friend of mine once went to a show
given by a hypnotist, and was dragged up on stage and made to behave like
a chicken laying an egg and all that kind of stuff. When I asked him what
it felt like, he said that he knew what he was doing but that he couldn't
stop himself. I guess that's how the reunion feels in a way, as if we're
trapped inside bodies that we know are our own but which we have no
control over. And yet it's not quite like that, not quite so clear cut
-it's also a little bit like dreaming while awake. When you dream, you can
be a child again without realising it until you wake up; you can see
people who've died, can talk to them, and impossible though it seems
later, you forget they're dead.
So it was with the reunion. Just for a little while, our minds slip back
to that corresponding day twelve years ago when we were all fourteen. We
don't actually fall asleep, and we don't wake up afterwards. When the
reunion's over, we just kind of click into gear again, remember who we
are, and worst of all, what we've done. And we don't remember it as a
fading memory, as something long past, but as a fresh wound, a new trauma.
The reunion is not only a nightmare, but a nightmare re-lived. Again and
again and again.
So why do you come here year after year? I hear you asking. If it's so
terrible, why not just stay away?
The simple answer is, if we didn't come here then people we loved would
die. It happened on the eve of the first reunion. For maybe three or four
weeks leading up to that day, I couldn't get the thought of going back
there on the anniversary of what had happened out of my mind. It was more
than an idea, it was an obsession, and at first I thought it was just me
being morbid. At night I dreamt about going back; during the day I thought
about it constantly. It was as though the place was tugging me towards it,
as though it had me on the end of a long line and was reeling me in.
Anyway, eventually it got so bad I mentioned it to Conrad, and of course
he too had been plagued by the same obsessive thoughts. And so, we quickly