"Michael Marshall Smith - Maybe Next Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Michael Marshall)

тАЬThereтАЩs three of these in there.тАЭ

тАЬYou didnтАЩt buy them?тАЭ

тАЬNo.тАЭ She held the jar so he could see the label: Waitrose own-brand. He
always did the Waitrose shop, and did it alone. Supermarkets made Amanda
irritable.

тАЬThen I must have bought them.тАЭ

тАЬYou donтАЩt like olives.тАЭ

тАЬI know.тАЭ

Ten minutes later she was gone, off to work. David was still in the kitchen,
sitting now with a second cup of tea, no closer to remembering his dream. All he
could recall was an atmosphere of affectionate melancholy. It reminded him of
another dream from five or six years before. This had been of his college, of
returning there alone and walking the halls and corridors which had shaped three
years of his life, back when the future seemed deliciously malleable. In the dream
heтАЩd met none of his friends from that period, and had notably not encountered the
girl with whom heтАЩd spent most of that time. The dream hadnтАЩt been about them, but
about him. It was about absence. About some distance he had travelled, or perhaps
had failed to come, since those days: a period now backlit by its passing, at the time
merely the day-to-day. The dream he could not now remember had something of
this about it too, but it wasnтАЩt the same. It wasnтАЩt about college. It wasnтАЩt about
anything he could recall.

It was enough to nudge him into awareness, however, and at the end of the
day he sat in the living room, after Amanda had gone upstairs, and thought back
over the previous couple of months. He considered the missing (4), the drinks
without a name, remembered also standing one afternoon in Soho Square and gazing
at the shapes of the buildings that surrounded it, as if they should mean something
more to him than they did. At the time each of these non-incidences, these failures to
mean, had seemed distinct from each other, distinct from anything at all. Now they
did not. Once gathered together, they referred to a whole. There was something on
his mind, that was clear. He just didnтАЩt know what it was.

It was then that he tried connecting them with the start of the year, with the
feeling of something beginning. Though in general a level-headed man, David was
sometimes surprised to find himself prey to rather New Age notions. Perhaps this
year, this 2004, was trying to tell him something. Maybe some celestial timepiece,
some combination of shadow and planetary sphere, had reached its predetermined
mark. Perhaps 2004 was the year of...

He couldnтАЩt make the thought go anywhere, and soon zoned out into watching
the television screen. It showed a crazy-haired old gent tramping around an
undistinguished patch of country-side. He couldnтАЩt remember selecting the channel,
and with the sound off it really wasnтАЩt very interesting. Was it worth turning the