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

from her so well that his suicide had come right out of the blue. Knowing
what I did, it was awful to think of her shock, her confusion, her frantic
grief. Knowing that I could alleviate just a fraction of that grief by
providing her with the answers to what must have been desperate, empty
questions was unbearable. I dreaded to think what the consequences would
be if I did tell her. I dreaded to think what might happen now that Stuart
wasn't here, now that the balance had been disrupted.
I got out of the car, flexing my hands, the palms of which felt bruised.
It was odd, but I couldn't even remember changing gear on the journey,
though I knew I must have done. It was a dull day for early August, a
granite-coloured bank of cloud dominating the sky, jettisoning the
occasional spatter of rain. I looked at Conrad's house for the first time.
Its neat suburban angles, low pan-tiled roof and clipped lawn dismayed me.
It wasn't the house itself, of course, but the situation, the fact that we
had been sucked into that dark centre once again. The house, like the
school and the fields and the viaduct, was a symbol of the reunion.
"Oi, Marky Mark, you chiselling twatter!" The greeting had me spinning
round as though startled from a doze. Standing by the open door of his car
further down the road was Nick, looking healthy and tanned and relaxed,
round-lensed sunglasses hiding his eyes.
I mustered a smile in response to his grin and wandered over. "Hi, Nick,"
I said. "How's it going?"
Nick lunged back into his car, grabbed something from the passenger seat,
and re-emerged, thrusting whatever he'd grabbed towards me. "Here," he
said, "cop hold of this." I instinctively reached out my hands and a
six-pack of Beck's landed in them like a rock.
I looked ruefully at the beer, and thought, it's going to be the same as
always, isn't it? Stuart's death's not going to change anything. "This
isn't a fucking party, you know," I said.
"Then it fucking should be," said Nick, a second six-pack tucked under his
arm. He locked the car door and pressed the button on his keyring which
primed the alarm.
"I suppose you heard about Stuart?" I said, as we pushed Conrad's gate
open and walked up the path towards the front door.
"Yeah, fucking chiseller. What'd he have to go and do a thing like that
for?" To anyone who didn't know Nick, his words would have sounded
callous, but I knew his heartiness was a bluff. Beneath it was genuine
uncertainty, and a lot of grief. Nick got up a lot of people's noses, but
he was all right really. We all knew that the reunion affected him as much
as it affected the rest of us, and he knew we knew, but he would never
have admitted such a thing.
"I guess he couldn't take any more," I said, and then I added hesitantly,
knowing that I was venturing into a taboo area, "You can understand how he
must have felt."
"Don't be a twat," said Nick, with a venom born of what I suspected was
fear that Stuart's death might lead to the dissolution of the barriers
that we built around ourselves to cope with this day. He hesitated, and
then blurted, "This only takes a few fucking hours a year. It's not worth
killing yourself over. I don't fucking let it bother me. The best thing is
to treat this day as a bit of a piss-up and a chance to see some old