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

I went to play in the graveyard instead.

The graveyard was really big back then. Before the council divided it up and sold all the best bits. All the
best bits were the Victorian bits, with their wonderful tombs and memorials. All those weather-worn
angels shrouded by ivy and all those vaults that, if you were little enough and possessed of sufficient
bravery, you could crawl into.

Iwas little enough and had plenty of bravery. I could worm my way in under the rusted grilles and view
the coffins of the Victorian dead at my pleasure.

You might consider me to have been a morbid little soul. But that was not how I considered myself. I
considered myself to be an explorer. An adventurer. An archaeologist. If it was acceptable for adults to
excavate the long-buried corpses of the Pharaohs, then why shouldn't it have been all right for me to
have a little peep at the bodies of my own forefathers?

On this particular Thursday, I didn't worm my way under any of the iron grilles. I just lay in the sunshine
upon my favourite tomb. It was a truly monumental affair. A great fat opulent Victorian fusspot of a tomb,
wrought into the semblance of a gigantic four-poster bed, mounted upon a complicated network of
remarkable cogs. The whole fashioned from the finestCarraramarble.

It was the tomb of one David Aloysius Doveston, purveyor of steam conveyances to the gentry. `Born
27thJuly 1802, died27thJuly 1902.' A good innings for a Victorian; a grand century, in fact.

I'd taken the trouble to look up Mr Doveston in the Memorial Library. I'd wondered why it was that a
purveyor of steam con-veyances had chosen to have his tomb constructed in the manner of a fantastic
bed.

In amongst the parish records, housed in the restricted section, I located a big fat file on Mr Doveston,
who, it appeared, had been something of an inventor. I uncovered a pamphlet advertis-ing what
appeared to be his most marvellous creation: `the Doveston patent steam-driven homeopathic
wonder-bed'. This incredible boon to mankind had been displayed at the Great Exhibition and was
presented as being `the universal panacea and most excellent restorer to health, efficacious in the cures of
many ills, pestilences and dreadful agues that do torment mankind to mortification'. These included
`milliner's sniffle, ploughman's hunch, blains which pain the privy member, rat pox, cacky ear, trouser
mite, the curly worms that worry from within' and sundry other terrible afflictions.

I must suppose that the homeopathic wonder-bed proved equal to the claims of its inventor, for not only
had he lived to be one hundred years of age but also, as far as I knew, ploughman's hunch and the curly
worms that worried from within no longer plagued the general public.

In fact, as I could find no trace of any of these ghastly maladies listed in any medical dictionary, I remain
of the firm conviction that Mr Doveston's invaluable invention effected their complete eradication.

I was surprised, therefore, that he hadn't, at the very least, had a local street named after him.

I lay upon the marble replica of Mr Doveston's beneficial bed, all curly-wormless and thinking a lot
about the death of P. P. Penrose and all my uncle's rancour.

Although I hadn't let on to my father, or to Uncle Jon, I felt very bad about the passing of the Penrose.
Very bad indeed. I loved that man's books. I was a member of the now official P. P. Penrose fan club.