"Justina Robson - Silver Screen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robson Justina)

SILVER SCREEN
Justina Robson
For my mother, Ruth,
a true friend,
and my father, Alec,
present in spirit


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to all those who have supported me during the writing of this book and others,
namely my mother Ruth, partner Richard Fennell, and friends Matthew Bates, Gill Place and
Freda Warrington. Thanks for putting up with all the mouthy complaining and helping the
good times roll on! Peter Lavery, my editor, was also an outstanding success in the shaping,
tidying and general improvements department, ably assisted by the illustrious Simon
Kavanagh. Heartfelt gratitude also to the Little Brum WritersтАЩ Group who took me in from
nowhere long ago and pointed me in the right direction and also to my fellow writers at
CW96 who gave more inspiration than they know тАУ you all da man! Finally IтАЩd also like to
thank my agent, John Richard Parker, for patience and faith and last but by no means least
Those Who Also Served everything from criti-cal advice and printers to love and coffee тАУ
Boss & Linda Hogg, Judy McCrosky, Neile Graham, Anne Gay, Barbara Davis, Andy Cox at
тАШThe Third AlternativeтАЩ, Eileen Thomas and Kurt Roth.
 1
We were good friends.
No. ThatтАЩs not true. IтАЩm saying that because IтАЩm sentimental. I needed a
friend too much to actually make any. But we were in the same classes together.
Sometimes we shared a workbench. Roy made a lot of jokes with me as the butt,
and I sat aloof and lonely in his room or JaneтАЩs, watching them work and trying to
get inside their heads to see how it was that they saw things I didnтАЩt. There was
never any doubt in my mind that I was the outsider, tolerated because I supplied
chocolate and cappuccino on demand and could always remember the details they
forgot to record. I guess I could be funny too, in a dry, self-deprecating kind of
way. I spoke like a critical encyclopedia, and still do under stress, as youтАЩve
probably noticed. I was pitiable, but fortunately nobody had time to pity me.
The school at which I first met Roy and Jane Croft was called the Berwick
School, for no reason I have ever discovered. It was in Derbyshire and owned by
the Massey Foundation, an organ-ization funded by large corporates and used
specifically for the hothousing of children who were exceptionally gifted in one of
the FoundationтАЩs areas of interest. Broadly speaking, these areas were maths and
anything applicable to the fields of technology and science. Since by that time it was
possible to turn almost any kind of ability to the service of these studies, Berwick
had a very diverse population of children. They lived there in splendid isolation with
their teachers, a nurse and a small number of animals who were chosen to provide us
with some vague sense of our link to the natural world. Considering recent days, I
have to say that this last intention failed 100 per cent.
At the time of my arrival the only thing which struck me as unusual was the
range of places from which the other children had come. All races and many
subdivisions were represented in a relatively small number of pupils. In total there
were fewer than 500 of us, including the senior years and the тАШthick kidsтАЩ who had to
stay on until they were sixteen before being allowed to leave for university. A lot of