"Robert Rankin - Brentford 02 - The Brentford Triangle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rankin Robert)

the first of the Swan's eight polished Britannia pub tables. Two more soundless strides and Neville halted
involuntarily in his tracks. Before him stood an object so detestable, so loathsome and so mind-stunningly vile
that the postman's irritating habits paled into insignificance.
The Captain Laser Alien Attack Machine!
Its lights blinked eternally and a low and sinister hum arose from it, setting the part-time barman's ill-
treated teeth on edge. Installed by one of the brewery's cringing catspaws the thing stood, occupying valuable
drinking space, and as hated by the Swan's patrons as it was possible for any piece of microchipped circuitry
to be hated.
Neville caught sight of his face reflected in the screen and surprised even himself with the ferocity of his
expression. He addressed the machine with his regular morning curse, but the monster hummed on regardless,
indifferent to the barman's invocation of the dark forces. Neville turned away in disgust and slouched off up
the stairs to his


rooms. Here in privacy he poured milk upon his cornflakes and perused Archroy's postcard, propped against
the marmalade pot.
A rooftop view of Brentford.
It was a great pity that Archroy, in the interests of economy, as he put it, had chosen to take a bundle of
local postcards with him when he set off upon his globetrotting. Rooftop views of Brentford were all very pleasant
of course, but they did tend to become a little samey. After all, when one received a card postmarked 'The
Potala, Lhasa', or 'The East Pier, Sri Lanka', it wouldn't hurt to see a bit of pictorial representation on the
front once in a while. It did tend to take the edge off, having read the exotic details of a Singhalese temple
dance, to turn over the card and view the splendours of two gasometers and a water tower.
Neville sighed deeply as he squinted over to the row of identical postcards which now lined his
mantelpiece. Certainly, the one view was so commonplace as to be practically invisible, but each of these
little cards had been despatched from some far-flung portion of the great globe. Each had travelled through
strange lands, across foreign borders, over continents, finally to return, like little pictorial homing pigeons,
to the town of their birth. Certainly there was romance here.
Neville plucked up the card and turned it between his fingers. 'Noah's Ark, eh?' That one took a bit of
believing. Each of the postcards had boasted some fabulous deed or another, but this outdid them all.
Noah's Ark? To the pagan Neville it did seem a trifle unlikely. Even if it had existed at all, which Neville
considered a matter of grave doubt, the chances of it surviving, even partially intact, down through the long
centuries on the peak of Mount Ararat did seem pretty slight. Such things were just silly-season space-fillers
for the popular


press. The barman recalled reading about that chap up north who claimed to have discovered the bottomless
pit in his back garden. He would probably have come clean that it was all a hoax had he not stepped backwards
down it while posing for the press photographer.
Noah's Ark indeed! Neville took the card and placed it with its eight identical brothers upon the
mantelshelf. Noah's Ark indeed! It couldn't be true. Could it?
 2
That same sun, having now risen from behind the gasometers, stretched down a tentative ray towards a rarely
washed bedroom window at Number Six Abaddon Street. Passing with some difficulty through the murky pane,
it displayed itself upon an inner wall as a pale lozenge of light surrounding a noseless statuette of Our Lady.
This mantelpiece beatification of the blessed Virgin was as usual lost upon the room's tenant. John Vincent
Omally was what the textbooks are wont to describe as 'a late riser'. Usually the lozenge of light would move
noiselessly across the mantelpiece wall until it reached the cracked mirror, and then reflect itself on to the face
of the sleeper, thus awakening him from his restful slumbers. But today, as for some days past, it was to be
denied its ritual.