"Robert Rankin - THe Suburban Book of the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rankin Robert)

hands and prepared to fling it. The bedroom window shot up and the slop pail whistled past his
unreddened ear. The hero lowered his head and began to dig.

And he dug. He dug and he dug. He got all sweaty in a macho lager commercial sort of a way. But he
didn't make a lot of progress. Digging holes is a funny old kind of a business. You either have
the way of it or you don't. A friend of mine who once ran the London marathon had the way of it;
he had served an apprenticeship as a grave digger and he could dig a hole two feet wide, six feet
long and six feet deep with a precision nothing less than awesome to behold. Mind you, he did
employ the services of a mechanical digger, something which Rex didn't have immediately to hand.
And the fellow I'm talking about got a stitch and never actually completed the London marathon. I
expect there's a moral in there if you care to look for it.

Rex didn't care to look. He was thinking about lunch. He was thinking that 'well begun is best
begun and best begun is nearly finished', and he was thinking that now would probably be as good a
time as any to down tools and repair to the drinking house. He'd just level out the bottom and
then slip away. No need to mention it to Christeen.

Clunk! went Rex's spade as it made contact with a very hard something. Rex up-ended his implement
and eyed the blunted blade. 'There,' he said, 'that settles the matter.' It would be folly to
continue work with a blunt tool. You couldn't expect a craftsman such as himself to make a decent
job of the thing with a blunt tool. Unthinkable.

Rex put the useless article aside and stooped to root out the blessed blunter by hand. He probed
about with his fingers and found something smooth and cool. 'Hmm.' Rex dug his fingers about it
and strained to pull it up. It remained firm and Rex checked his spine for severe injury. His
digging days were over, he told

13

himself. Rex kicked petulantly at the object. Now he hopped about on the other foot wondering just
why he had.

Rex picked up the spade, raised it above his head and prepared to administer the killing blow.

And then he stopped. He was gazing down at some-thing rather unusual. The object was a head. A
marble head. There was no mistake about it. He could make out the hairline and a bit of a noble
brow. A marble head. How about that then?

Rex stooped and he scooped. He dug and he delved. He trenched and he tunnelled. He burrowed and
bored. He scraped and he scrabbled and scratched. And when he was done he sat down on his bum and
marvelled greatly, saying such things as 'blow me down' and 'well, I never did'.

For there at his feet lay a full-sized marble statue, which even in its mucky state was dearly a
thing of no small wonder.

It was the statue of a young man, clad in a wide-shouldered suit, legs akimbo. He was frozen in
mid strum upon a carven guitar. He had a serious quiff and killer sideburns.

'Elvis,' said Rex Mundi. 'Elvis, it's you.'