"Robert Rankin - Brentford 03 - East Of Ealing" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rankin Robert)

'Well, such it is with perpetual motion. A fine thing it might be in itself, and a pleasure to the
inventor thereof, but to the general public, in particular to the man of limited reason with no care
for the higher truth, it presents but one thing only.'
'Which is?'
'Absolute monotony,' said Pooley in a leaden tone. 'All-consuming, soul-destroying, absolute monot-
ony.'
With these few words he turned upon his heel and strode from the shop, leaving Norman to
ponder upon not one but two eternal problems. The first being how a man such as Pooley could have
the sheer gall to write off the greatest scientific discovery of the age with a few poorly chosen words. And
the second, how he had managed, once more, to escape from the shop without having paid for either
Woodbines or Sporting Life.
'The wheels of God grind slowly,' thought Norman to himself. 'But they do grind at twenty-six
revolutions per minute.'




12
2
Neville the part-time barman flip-flopped across the deserted saloon-bar of the Flying Swan, his
mono-grammed carpet-slippers raising small clouds of dust from the faded carpet. Rooting with a will,
he sought his newspaper which lay upon the pub's welcome mat beneath a pile of final demands,
gaudy circulars, and rolled posters advertising the forthcoming Festival of Brentford.
Shaking it free of these postal impediments, Neville unfolded the local tabloid and perused the
front page. More good good news. Earthquakes and tidal waves, wars and rumours of wars. Jolly
stuff. And on the home front? Well, there was the plague of black fly currently decimating the allotment
crops. A rival brewery had just put its beer up a penny a pint and its competition, ever happy to accept a
challenge, were hinting at rises of two pence or more.
One particular gem caught the part-time barman's good eye: the local banks, in keeping with a
countrywide trend, were investigating the possibility of dispensing with coin of the realm and
instigating a single credit card system. That would go down a storm with the locals, thought
Neville. Without further ado he consigned the wicked messenger of bad tidings to the wastepaper
basket. 'I shall cancel
13
this,' said the part-time barman to himself. 'I shall ask Norman to despatch me something of a more
cheerful nature in the future. Possibly the People's Fnend or Gardener's Gazette.'
But on further consideration, even those two periodicals were not exactly devoid of grim tidings
nowadays. The People's Friend, not content with simply going up three pence, assailed its readers with
a fine line in doom prophecy, and the Gardener's Gazette dedicated most of its pages to large anatom-
ical diagrams of black fly. Neville shrugged his dressing-gowned shoulders. Seemed like a nice day
though, but. The sun rising majestic as ever from behind the flat-blocks and tickling the Swan's upper
panes. Always some hope for the future. Although, lately, Neville had been feeling more than a little ill
at ease. It was as if some great burden was descending upon him, inch by inch and pound by pound,
down on to his bony shoulders. He was hard put to explain the feeling, and there was little point in
confiding his unease to the regulars, but he was certain that something altogether wrong was
happening and, moreover, that it was happening to him personally.
Leaving his newspaper to confide its black tidings to the fag ends in the wastepaper basket and his
mail to gather what dust it wished upon the doormat, Neville the part-time barman flip-flopped away
up the Swan's twenty-six stairs to his cornflakes and a cup of the blackest of all black coffees.