"Robert Rankin - The Greatest Show Off Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rankin Robert)

Simon had found the article quite fascinating, but he hadn't had time to finish it,
because he'd been called into the surgery to have some new crowns fitted. And the next time
he went to the dentist the pamphlet wasn't there.
Perhaps he'd just imagined it.
But he was sure he hadn't imagined Abdullah the flying starfish.
As he scrubbed away at his teeth for the umpteenth time, he wondered just what
Raymond might be up to.
'Probably wining and dining at the palace of some Venusian monarch,' said Simon
through the toothpaste foam. 'The lucky sod.'
His ablutions completed and aftershave liberally applied to even the most intimate of
places, Simon set out to face the day ahead.
Now Simon being Simon, the evening hadn't been a complete disaster for him.
Having legged it away from The Jolly Gardeners, he had chanced to bump into the landlady
from The Bear Flag Inn, who was trying to clear her blocked sinuses with a late-evening jog.
Her husband Keith (or possibly Trevor) was away at a bar food conference in Penge. Simon
had been invited back for an after-hours Campari soda. This had led, as Simon hoped it
might, to several hours of frenzied sexual athletics, culminating in an oral contract for him to
tend the pub's hanging baskets throughout the summer.
It is interesting to note that when the landlady's sinuses finally cleared and her
husband returned from his conference, both would be equally baffled by the strong smell of
fish which led from the bar, up the staircase and into the marital bedchamber.
It was mowing all this week for Simon. Mr Hilsavise had, through many years of
hard toil, and the convenient, if strangely unaccountable, collapse of all the other gardening
firms in the village, built up a vast clientele; and Simon, being his only employee, was never
short of work.
Today Simon had to take out the big Allen Scythe and crop the meadow below Long
Bob's chicken farm.
Simon was very fond of the big Allen Scythe. It was a mighty hulking piece of 1950s
farming technology, all green and shiny. Massive solid wheels with old-fashioned racing-car
tyres, and a giant hair-clipper arrangement on the front.
It went at a fair old lick once you'd primed it up and teased it into life. Little short of
concrete posts could stand before the big Allen Scythe.
Simon reversed the Transit flat-back up to the meadow gate and switched off the
engine. He swung the gate open, dropped the Transit's tail-flap, angled down a pair of
scaffold boards and wheeled the Allen Scythe carefully to the ground.
The day smelt sweet. The sun shone vigorously, birds exchanged gossip, daffs held
their heads up high. All those bunnies who had escaped the attention of Dick and his dog the
night before, bounced around as only bunnies can.
It was all very heaven.
Simon was attending to the minutiae of carburettor tickling, prior to starter-cord
tugging, when the sound of distant drumming reached his ear.
'Hello,' said Simon, as one would. 'Whatever can this be?'
Roman Candle practised in Long Bob's barn. But this wasn't your 'Rage Against the
Machine' type drumming. This was more your military type drumming. The sort that marched
the peasant cannon fodder into the jaws of death. It didn't seem to fit on a day like this.
Simon did shifty glancings to the left and the right of him, wiped his oily fingers on
the rag which he had brought for that purpose and took to sidling once more. He did low
sidling this time, ducking from one tree to another. Slinking and creeping and moving
furtively in suspicious manner (which is really 'sidling' in the true sense of the word).
He crept up the bank that fell away from the lower boundary of Long Bob's farm and