"Robert Rankin - Armageddon the Musical" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robert Rankin)

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Rex shared his living room with a weighty section of mock Rococo ceiling cornice and an enormous
gilded cherub. This grinning monstrosity had once bestowed its distant smile upon several
generations of cinema-going heads. Now it stared with equal cheer, if somewhat foreshortened
vision, into the ragged length of sacking which served Rex as carpet. But it was a small price to
pay for overground accommodation. Six floors beneath Mrs Maycroft shared her rooms with several
rows of cinema seats, and the young woman who lived in the tobacco kiosk never complained. As for
the old couple who had been allocated the gents' toilet, well that didn't bear thinking about. All
in all Rex had done quite well for himself.

On this particular morning, Rex sat in his homemade armchair, facing the flickering TV screen. His
was the classic seated posture of the Active Viewer. Relaxed yet attentive, right thumb and
forefinger about the remote controller, expression alert, eyes wide. But here all similarities
ended. Rex Mundi was fast asleep.

His old Uncle Tony had taught him the technique when he was but a leprous lad, and there was no
doubt that it did pay big dividends. It had already earned Rex sufficient rehousing credits to get
him overground and he actually possessed a surplus of food and medico rations. His generosity with
these made him quite popular and respected locally. But the greatest benefit to Rex was that it
left him plenty of time to indulge in his own personal studies. These centred upon a book his
Uncle Tony had bequeathed to him, a curious volume entitled The Suburban Book of the Dead. Uncle
Tony had pressed-the crumbling tome upon Rex with the simple statement, 'Knowledge is power'.

Shortly after this, he had spontaneously combusted

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while watching his favourite game show. The way he would have wanted to go,' Aunty Norma put it.

Rex set to work to unravel the inner mysteries of the old book. But it was no easy matter. The
language was archaic, penned somewhere during the middle years of the previous century, and much
of it left Rex completely baffled. Yet he felt that he owed it to the old boy, who had, after all,


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passed on to Rex a most efficient method for beating the system, whilst leaving little else behind
as a testament to his existence but for a pair of smoking boots and a charred remote controller.

Of Rex's rooms, there was little that could be argued in their favour. They were above ground, dry
for part of the year and sufficient to his needs. The bedroom housed a mouldy bunk, the living
room an armchair and a TV terminal. But for the gilded cherub, the only anomaly that would have
drawn the visitor's eye, should Rex have ever had a visitor, which he never did, was a mural which
occupied an entire wall of the living room. This was indeed the proverbial thing of beauty, so
real as to be virtually photographic. Beneath a sky of the deepest blue, white crested waves broke
upon a beach of golden sand, where tall palms bent under the weight of ripening coconuts; upon the
horizon a liner cruised, a single plume of white smoke rising from a funnel.