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

or Mark Seventeen Blockbuster about this boy, but very much of the antique bedstead of Victoria and
Albert proportions.
John rubbed his hands together and chuckled. What was it his old Da had once said? A dead bird
never falls out of the nest, that was it. Carefully covering his find with a clump or two of grass,
Omally continued upon his way. The birdies had
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flown and the spiders had it away on their eight ones, but before Omally reached his secret exit in the
planked fencing he was whistling once more, and Marchant was doing his level best to keep up with the
increasingly more sprightly tune.
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3

Jim Pooley sat upon his favourite bench before the Memorial Library, racing paper spread out across
his knees, liberated Woodbine aglow between his lips, and Biro perched atop his right ear. Few were
the passers-by who even troubled to notice the sitter upon the bench. Fewer still observed the chalk-
drawn pentagram encircling that bench, the sprig of hemlock attached to the sitter's lapel, or the
bulge of the tarot pack in his waistcoat pocket. Such subtleties were lost to the casual observer, but to
the trained eye they would be instantly significant. Jim Pooley was now having a crack at occultism
in his never-ending quest to pull off the six-horse Super-Yankee.
Jim had tried them all and found each uniformly lacking. The I-Ching he had studied until his eyes
crossed. The prophecies of Nostradamus, the dice, the long sticks, the flight paths of birds, and the
changes of barometric pressure registered upon the charts of the library entrance hall - each had
received his attention as a possible catalyst for the pulling off of the ever-elusive Big One. He had
considered , selling his soul to the devil but it was on the cards that the Prince of Darkness probably
had his name down for conscription anyway.
Thrusting his hands into his trouser pockets, Jim
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peered down at his paper. Somewhere, he knew, upon this page were those six horses. Tomorrow, he
knew, he would kick himself for not having seen the obvious cosmic connection. Jim concentrated every
ounce of his psychic energies upon the page. Presently he was asleep. Blissful were his Morphean
slumbers upon this warm spring morning and blissful they would no doubt have remained, at least until
opening time at the Swan, had not a deft blow from a size-nine boot struck him upon the sole of the left foot
and blasted him into consciousness. The man who could dream winners awoke with a painful start.
'Morning Jim,' said the grinning Omally. 'Having forty winks were we?'
Pooley squinted up at his rude awakener with a bloodshot eye. 'Yoga,' said he. 'Lamaic meditation. I
was almost on the brink of a breakthrough and you've spoilt it.'
Omally rested his bicycle upon the library fence and his bum upon the bench. 'Sorry,' said he. 'Please
pardon my intrusion upon the contemplation of your navel. You looked to all the world the very picture of a
sleeper.'
'Nothing of the sort,' Pooley replied in a wounded tone. 'Do you think that I, like yourself, can afford to
fritter away my time in dalliance and idleness? My life is spent in the never-ending search for higher
truths.'
'Those which come in six or more figures?'
'None but the very same.'
'And how goes this search?'
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'Fraught as ever with pitfalls for the unwary traveller.'
'As does our each,' said the Irish philosopher.
The two men sat awhile upon the library bench. Each would dearly have liked a smoke but out of
politeness each waited upon his fellow to make that first selfless gesture of the day. 'I'm dying for a