"Robert Rankin - Brentford 04 - The Sprouts Of Wrath" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rankin Robert)

aside and a boy and his bike vanished from the footpath and were lost to view.
 Beyond the iron fencing, the long-abandoned boatyard slumbered. The pointless walls of the derelict buildings
were decked with festoons of convolvulus, the windows swagged with cobwebs. Here and there the tragic
debris of the once proud trade showed as tiny islands amidst a grassy ocean. Here a crane, strung like a fractured
gibbet, there the gears and gubbins, over-ripe with rust. Capstans and winches, pulleys and blocks, blurred with
moss, weatherworn and worthless. At a quayside beyond, the dark hulk of an ancient barge wallowed in oily
water.
Once the glittering island boatyards, strung like a necklet about the borough's throat, had prospered. Here the

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barques and pleasure boats, the punts and Thames steamers had taken form from the hand-hewn timbers,
fashioned with the care of craftsmen. Now it was no more, here and there a yard survived heavily secured with
barbed wire and night-prowling dogs, knocking out plastic dinghies or casting fibre-glass hulls for Arabian
moguls. Floating gin palaces for camel jockeys. The life had gone, and that particular form of melancholia
which haunts places of bygone commerce washed over the buildings in waves of lavender blue. For blue is the
colour of tears and water, sea and sadness.
Omally left Marchant to rest upon a handlebar, the reflected glory of the early sun cupped in his headlamp.
Hitching up his trousers, he set out to wade through the waist-deep grass towards the ancient barge.
Upon reaching the edge of the wharf he again paused to assure himself that he remained unobserved. When so
assured he dropped down on to the barge and tapped out an elaborate tattoo upon the hull.
A head popped up from the inner depths and a voice, that of Jim Pooley, owner of the head, called out,
'Watch-amate John, you're bloody late!' Omally shinned through the hatchway and down into the bowels of the
wreck.
The interior presented a most surprising and unexpected appearance. Over a period of many months Pooley
and Omally had effected a conversion of a most enterprising nature. The superannuated vessel now housed a
distillery, a series of grandiose fish tanks, wherein lazed river fish of prize-winning proportions, a storehouse
for 're-routed' goods and a comfortable salon for the entertaining of special guests.
A line of portholes below waterline looked out upon a string of elaborate fish traps set above the distillery
cooling tubes. This was the headquarters of what was known to a select few as the 'P and O Line'. There was
much of Captain Nemo's 'Nautilus' to the thing, but there was a good deal more of Fagin's kitchen. Although, in
evidence for the defence, it must be stated that John and

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Jim drew the line before coining, or the manufacture of hard drugs.
Pooley and Omally took their morning coffee in the forward salon. The style was essentially eclectic. A hint
of Post-Modernism here, a touch of rococo there, several boxes of video cassettes just behind the door. A pair of
blown glass vases, signed by Count Otto Boda himself, adorned a chromium table of the high-tech persuasion. An
antique paisley swathed a gaudy sun-lounger, three china ducks flew nowhere.
Omally stuck his feet up on the Le Corbusier chaise and Pooley leant upon the Memphis-style cocktail cabinet
dunking a breakfast biscuit.
'Well,' said Jim when he finally tired of the sight of his partner's inane grin. 'Good night, was it?'
Omally's smile resembled that of the legendary Gwynplaine. 'Propriety forbids a disclosure of details,' he said as
he dandled his demi-tasse, 'but it was magic.'
'I'm so glad.'
The two drank on in silence, Omally mentally replaying selected highlights and Pooley glowering with evident
envy. When he could stand no more of that Jim said, 'We got four, they must be five-pounders easily.'
Omally raised his eyebrows and smiled his winning smile. 'Well now, Neville will take one for the Saturday
sarnies and another for his freezer, I have no doubt.'
'Wally Woods will take the other two then.'
Omally frowned - briefly, for the effort vexed him. Wally Woods, Brentford's foremost purveyor of wet fish,