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

found out, had both Nick and Stuart. It was only now that we concluded
that Denton was somehow doing this to us, and we decided there and then
that no matter how bad the urge to return became, there was no way we'd go
back to Seven Arches - we'd see each other through this.
But Denton, being the vicious bastard that he was, had other ideas. The
day before the first reunion, each one of us had someone in their family
die. For me, it was my grandad's brother who committed suicide by hanging
himself because, so everyone said, he was terrified of retiring; for Nick
it was his cousin's nine month old daughter who died of Cot Death
Syndrome; for Con it was some old aunty or somebody who fell downstairs,
and for Stuart it was his mother's cousin, who got killed in a motorway
pile-up.
Ridiculous as this sounds, we might even have put these four totally
unconnected deaths down to coincidence if it hadn't been for the fact that
that night, the night before the first anniversary, we each of us had an
intensely vivid dream where we were at the funeral of someone we really
loved, not just some distant relative whose death was a quickly-forgotten
shock. I was at my Mum's funeral. I was looking down into her open coffin.
She was dressed in this blue sort of surplice with a ruffled collar and
she had her hands crossed over her chest. She looked sunken by the disease
which had ravaged her. And yet despite knowing about the disease, I had
this awful unshakeable feeling that I'd done this to her by not going
back, that she'd been punished for my mistake.
I woke up crying and sweating and thrashing about, and instantly I knew
that if I didn't want my dream to come true, if I didn't want people to
suffer because of me, I had to go back.
And so it has been every year. No doubt this is one of the reasons why
none of us have ever managed to forge lasting relationships (except
Stuart, of course, and look at what the strain of that did to him). To put
it bluntly, the ever-looming shadow of the reunion has ensured that our
lives are barely worth living. We just about cope, I suppose, by outwardly
denying from each other that the reunion - the real reunion, the one that
starts with the fire - exists until it happens. We endure our lives by
bottling it all up, keeping it inside ourselves, where it buzzes and
flutters like a trapped wasp.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here, becoming bogged down in
explanations. The thing is, it always starts with the fire, and with
Conrad saying, "We've got to put it out."
We all hauled ourselves to our feet and ran over to the burning grass and
started stamping on it. It wasn't a big fire, but it was a stubborn
bastard, and as soon as we stamped on one bit and reduced it to a
frazzled, smoking patch of what used to be grass, new flames would pop up
elsewhere, like fucking moles sticking their heads out of the ground. To
this day, I don't know for certain who started the fire, though obviously
I have my suspicions. We just happened along, mooched around a bit,
climbed up the embankment and there it was.
Anyway, we were all stamping, and just about getting on top of the thing,
when there was this blue-white flash of light that virtually blinded me,
and no doubt the others too, and I heard someone shout, "Gotcha!"
My very first thought, which only lasted about a second, was that one of