"Brookmyre, Christopher - A Big Boy Did It" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brookmyre Christopher)

THANKS: Marisa, Id Software, Greg Dulli, POTZW. They must all share the blame.


This one's true as well .


To be oneself is to kill oneself. - Henrik Ibsen

PROLOGUE.

Tonight, tonight I say goodbye
To everyone who loves me
Stick it to my enemies tonight
Then I disappear
Bathe my path in shining light
Set the dials to thrill me
Every secret has its price
This one's set to kill

Too loose, too tight, too dark, too bright
A lie, the truth, which one should I use?
If the lie succeeds
Then you'll know what I mean
When I tell you I have secrets
To attend

Do you think I'm beautiful?
Or do you think I'm evil?

-Greg Dulli, Crime Scene Part One
from Black Love, The Afghan Whigs.


things to do in stavanger when you're dead.

SSCs. Death was too good for them.
Seriously.
These fuckers deserved to live forever. The sleepwalking suburban slave classes in their Wimpey mock-Tudor penal colonies. A jail that needed no walls because the inmates had been brainwashed into believing they wanted to be there. Incarceration by aspiration, all the time mindlessly propagating and self-replicating, passing on their submissive DNA to the next generation of glazed-eyed prisoners.
And every day they'd get up and pray that emancipation never came: 'Dear Lord, protect us from uniqueness. Grant unto us eternal conformity, and deliver us from distinction. Amen.'
There was one up his arse right then, flashing the headlights on his MX3, the bloke's eyes widening and nostrils flaring in time with the admonitory illuminations. An absolute fanny. Risking his life in an attempt to overtake before the crawler lane ends, so he'll be one car - one car - up the queue when he reaches the traffic lights. And what did that tell you about the life he was risking?
Exactly.
Suburban Sad Cunts. This was the real reason for road rage. It wasn't a symptom of growing traffic congestion (though it shared the single car-usage factor), it was that this was the closest they got to defiance, the last ghostly remnant of the will to assert some identity. It was the only
time they got to express any sense of self: when they were behind that wheel, on their own, jostling for position with the rest of the faceless. Overtake the guy in the bigger, newer, shinier car, and it made you forget all the other, truer ways in which he was leaving you to eat his dust. Someone gets in your way, holds you back, and you transfer all your frustrations to him because it reminds you of just how many obstacles there are between where you are now and where you want to be. The car in front is your lack of self-confidence, bequest of your over-protective mother. The car in front is your fear of confrontation, inherited from your cowed and broken father. The car in front is the school you didn't go to, the golf club you didn't join, the Lodge you don't belong to. The car in front is your wife and kids and the risks you can't take because you've got responsibilities.
But the most tragic part is that you need the car in front, you need the obstacle, because it prevents you from confronting the fact that you don't know where you want to be. You'd be lost beyond the penal colony. It's scary out there.
You wouldn't fit in.
That was why billions were spent every year advertising near-identical vehicles as a totem of personal taste and discernment. Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Ford, Vauxhall, Rover, each with their hatchback, their coupe, their saloon, each model barely distinguishable from its competitor by anything more than the badge. The ads featured lantern-jawed beefcakes rescuing children, battling sharks, shagging like heroes, anything to keep your attention off the actual car. "The new Vauxhall. Its headlights are shaped slightly different from the Nissan. Because you're slightly different.' Maybe not, eh?
But then that was where the four-by-fours and sports models came in. Guys driving off-roaders to the fucking video shop; the only time the thing was actually off the road was when it was in the driveway outside their Gyproc and plywood 'dream home', or when it was in the workshop after you took a bend at more than forty and rediscovered your respect for aerodynamics over sheer bulk. Sometimes there was a Dependants Carrier for the wife, or maybe just a four-door saloon, salary dictating. So you saved and strived and kissed ass to pay for that MRII or CRX or GTi, to hold on to some pitiful fantasy of your enduring virility. You might have the wife, the mortgage, the weans, and the in-laws round for dinner every Sunday, but part of you would never be tamed. Another slice of Viennetta, anyone?
This was the reason that no matter how steep the petrol price hikes, however many park-and-ride schemes were subsidised, urban traffic congestion was never going to diminish. In that journey to and from work, that half an hour you were at the controls of your thunderous road-beast (going the same speed as the 2CV in front), you were able to live a pitiful little dream of yourself.
We would never car-pool. The SSC would rather sit in tailbacks every day, waiting for that brief moment when he can put the foot down and pretend he's going somewhere important, somewhere he wants to go, and fast. That power surge borrowed from the engine, the feel of the steering wheel in his hands, and Bryan Adams on the stereo. In that moment, he's cool as fuck: he's a secret agent, a maverick detective, an assassin, a terrorist. As opposed to an insurance adjuster.