"Robert Rankin - The Fandom of the Operator" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robert Rankin)

knew that he knew that I did. So to speak.
`Youdon't know,' said my Uncle Jon.

I looked quite hard at my uncle. As hard as I possibly could look. I was young and I hadn't learned how
to hate properly as yet. But as best as I possibly could hate, I hated Uncle Jon.

It wasn't just his eyes that I hated. Although they were quite enough. They were horrible, those eyes.
They didn't even match. Not that it was Uncle Jon's fault. It wasn't. My daddy had explained the
situation to me. He told me all about glass eyes and how opto-something-ists (the fellows who dealt with
this sort of thing) matched up eyes. They matched up a glass replacement eye to its living counterpart.
Both of Uncle Jon's eyes had left his head when a bomb from Hitler had blown up in his back yard. My
daddy hadn't had a chance to defuse that one. He'd been down at the pub fighting with American
servicemen. These opto-something-ist fellows had bunged my uncle a couple of odd eyes, because they
knew he wouldn't notice. They looked horrible, those odd glass eyes. I hated them.

Being blind didn't bother Uncle Jon, though. He'd learned how to see with his ears. He could ride his
bike without bump-ing into people and do all the things he'd done before that needed eyes to do them.
There was a special name, at that time, for being able to see without having eyes, as my Uncle Jon was
able to do. Derma-optical perception, it was. There used to be a lot of it about, back in the days when
people believed in that sort of thing. Back then in the nineteen fifties. People don't believe in that sort of
thing nowadays, so blind people have to go without seeing.

Uncle Jon travelled a lot with the circus, where he did a knife-throwing act that involved several midgets
and a large stetson hat. The crowds loved him.

The Daddy and I didn't.

The Daddy worried at the medals on his chest with cheese-free fingers and finally stirred some words
from his mouth. `Cease the rancour, were these words. `You're frightening weeGary.'

`I'm brave enough,' said I, for I was. `But who is this Charlie of whom my uncle speaks?'

`Yes,' said my daddy, `whois this Charlie? I know not of any dead Charlies.'

`Charlie Penrose, you craven buffoon.' My uncle rolled his mis-matched peepers and rapped his white
stick -- which he carried to get himself first in bus queues -- smartly on the floor, raising little chalky
clouds from the carpet and frightening me slightly.

`Charlie Penrose isdead?' My father stiffened, as if struck between the shoulder blades by a Zulu
chieftain's spear. `Young Charlie dead and never called me mother.

`And never calledme sweetheart,' said my Uncle Jon. `And I have written to the Pope regarding the
matter.'

My daddy opened his mouth once more to speak. But he didn't ask `why?' as many would. Uncle Jon
was always writing to the Pope about one thing or another.

`I am shocked,' said my father, the Daddy. `I am deeply shocked by this revelation. I was fighting with
Charlie only the last week.'