"Robert Rankin - Snuff Fiction" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rankin Robert)

magic, there is mystery.
There is snuff.
And where thereтАЩs snuff, thereтАЩs snot, the saying goes, and you shall have it all.
But let me explain from the outset that this is no ordinary biography. This book contains a series of
personal recollections. I write only of the times that I spent with the Doveston.
I write of our childhood years together and of the meetings with his тАШunclesтАЩ. Meetings that would
shape our years ahead.
I write of the now legendary Puberty Party, of Brentstock, of the days at Castle Doveston and of the
Great Millennial Ball. And I write, as I alone can, of his terrible end.
I can do no more than this.

And so, with that said, and well said too, let us begin our tale. The year is 1958, the month is good
old flaming June. The sunlight falls through those high classroom windows, lighting up the head of Mr
Vaux whoтАЩs lighting up a fag. Outside, in the corridor, Blot looms above a startled child and sniffs and
then is gone. And coming now across the quad, with shuffling gait, is a ragged lad, gum-chewing, with a
whistle and a grin. His hair is tousled and nitty, and he does not wear his tie. His grubby hands are in his
grubby pockets.
Can this urchin really be the boy who later, as the man, will make so great a mark upon this world of
ours?
It can.
Our tale begins.
 2

At bull-baiting, bear-whipping and everywhere else, the English are constantly smoking the Nicotian
weed, which in America is called тАШtobacoтАЩ.
Paul Heutzner, 1598


The boy Doveston shuffled across the quadrangle. It was a definite shuffle he had, as opposed to,
say, a waddle or a totter. There was the hint of a slouch to his gait and more than a little of the plod.
There was trudge in it too, as a matter of fact, and a smidgen of amble as well.
But let it be set clear upon the record and right from the very start, there was no trace of sidle in that
walk. And had he chosen, for reasons of his own, to increase the speed of his perambulation, there
would have been no swagger, strut, or goose-step.
The boy Doveston moved with the honest and unprepossessing shuffle of the poor. Because he was
poor, as indeed were we all.
That our school should be called the Grange was not without irony. For although the title conjures up
an image of some well-bricked seat of learning, ivy-walled and gravelly drived, this was not the case. The
Grange was your bog-standard Edwardian day school, built by the burghers of Brentford to educate the
sons of the poor.
Not educate them too much, of course, but just enough. Sufficient that they could spell their names
and count their wages and learn to call their betters, sir.
And so it had for fifty years.
And done so rather well.
The boy Doveston had not been taught to shuffle. It came naturally to him. It was in his genes.
Generations of Dovestons had shuffled on before him: few to glory and all to a pauperтАЩs grave. And while
we did not suffer the wretched privations of our Irish counter-parts, who plodded barefoot to school with
a clod of turf under each arm and a potato clenched between their bottom cheeks, we were poor
enough.
We suffered all the usual maladies of the impoverished: rickets, ringworm, scrofiila and mange. As a