"Bowes-AtDarlingtons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bowes Richard)

RICHARD BOWES

AT DARLINGTON'S

On a January Monday, I stared at the twenty-two-year-old disaster in the mirror.
A lump behind my ear was painful to the touch. It was eight-thirty in the
morning and I wasn't dressed. "Hey," said a voice only I could hear. "The choir
boy from hell."

As a kid, I called my secret double my Shadow. We had an on and off
relationship. That morning he wore the very same neo-Edwardian suit and wide tie
I'd worn on Friday night when I told him to get lost for good.

"The rent is two months overdue and you're already late for work," he said. "You
don't have the nerve for a life in advertising or crime. So, it's up to me to
save our asses." As I watched, he gulped mouthwash, ran his hands through his
hair, and wiped a trace of methadrine off his nose. We still didn't need to
shave much and at first glance he wouldn't look like someone who had slept in
his clothes.

Usually he stayed so far inside me that I wasn't even aware of him. Sometimes he
spoke like a whisper my ear. On tense occasions he would appear right beside me.
Occasionally other people had seen that and asked if we were twins. But never
before had he tried to take my place.

As I moved to block his way, he pulled on my overcoat and asked, "No word from
the draft board?" The reminder stopped me dead. My Selective Service
classification had been 1-A since I left school the year before. This worried
even my Shadow.

Years later a wise man called him my Silent Partner, said he was my addiction.
But even before that I knew who he was. We both did. "I am all your bad habits,"
my Shadow said as he walked out the door, "And you are mine. Get some rest."

He had seen to it that I got well medicated the night before. So even though
there had been a coup, I was relieved to crawl back into my dark cave of a
bedroom. To lull myself, I invoked a memory of a laughing baby held up against
the sky. It was a kind of magic charm as I rolled between sleep and waking,
catching glimpses of the world through my Shadow's eyes.

Miraculously, he got onto the subway with a New York Times in his hand. Had he
paid? I watched him scan the pages. My stuff appeared in the daily papers.

He found something I'd had a hand in writing. It wound like haiku past elongated
drawings of an ultra mod young couple:

*
FASHION KICKS AS 1966 WELCOMES '67 AT DARLINGTON'S . . . BUT YOU KNEW THAT