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

What never occurred to him was that, if they existed, the secret agent, the maverick detective, the assassin and
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the terrorist would actually be driving some nondescript SuburbanSadCuntmobile, because they needed to blend in. Sure, maybe they drove something flashier on their days off, but you could bet it wasn't a fucking Mazda. And you could bet they weren't fantasising about being a family- man wage-serf while they burned rubber.
The SSC's fantasies are uniform and predictable because he has no imagination. He needs advertising to do his imagining for him. That's why, bereft of independent opinion or any informed sense of judgement, he thinks Denise Richards is sexy, that Sony make good hi-fi equipment and that drinking Becks makes him cooler than the bloke standing next to him with a pint of heavy. That's why he thinks he looks like a different guy driving the family six- seater than at the controls of his overpriced (and paradoxically worth every penny) ego-chariot. He thinks assassins and terrorists tool around in sports cars, and if you asked him what kind of motor Death would drive, (after you'd told him a hearse was too literal) he'd probably describe the vehicle of his ultimate fantasies, styled, of course, in black. A Lamborghini Countach or Ferrari Testarossa, or maybe some minor variation on the Batmobile; a sleek, powerful, dark and incomparably macho machine.
And he'd be wrong. Miles out.
Death would drive an Espace.
He'd drive an SSC family slave-wagon just to underline that the life He was taking wasn't worth living anyway; with plenty of seats in the back for the next generation when their turn came.

He was on the dual carriageway now, five minutes away from the airport at any other time of the week, but ten
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today, it being Monday morning. What better day for a new beginning than the start of the working week, the day that would for everyone else usher in yet another 104hour vigil as they prayed for the deliverance of Friday night.
However, every new beginning was also an end, every rebirth first required a death. It would be respectful, even decorous (not to mention fun) to contemplate this life he was about to leave behind, this life that had so few hours left to run. With that thought, he reached to the stereo and popped out the cassette, then stabbed at the pre-set channels until he found the local commercial station. Might as well have the appropriately dismal soundtrack. A grim smile crept across his face as he recognised the song currently playing, the new chart-topping single by EGF. It was the standard homogenous Euro-dance number, another near-identical slice off this endless turd that was being shat out of the Low Countries via the Mediterranean teen-copulation colonies.
EGF. It stood for Eindhoven Groove Factory. Seriously. There had been a time, not so long ago, when if you had any ambitions for a career in the music biz, being from continental Europe was something you had to keep quiet, unless you were Einsttirzende Neubaten and quite clearly too mental to care. It was commercial and credibility suicide. You just couldn't be from Europe and expect to sell records in the UK or US, the two biggest music markets.
The Scandinavians were inexplicably tolerated, benefitting perhaps from a cultural exemption that owed a little to geography and a lot to a natural preponderance of strapping blondes. From Abba to The Cardigans, via Roxette and Ace of Bass, it had never hurt the album sales to have a frontwoman who was blonde with legs all the way up to her head. At least you had to give the Scans credit for
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having sussed that this was the only recipe viable for export. All points south, however, they continued to labour under the misapprehension that their sub-Eurovision drivel would be interpreted in Blighty as something other than an act of international aggression. Hence, very little made it through quarantine at Dover. The occasional specimen was imported for zoological curiosity value, or more accurately to fuel our innate sense of musical superiority, such as Rock Me Amadeus or The Final Countdown.
There were those who believed the third Antichrist of Nostradamus's prophecies was, in fact, the European Union, and certainly something Satanic had been loosed around the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in the early Nineties. How else could you explain the fact that the British public subsequently started buying records from the same forsaken region as had been found irrefutibly guilty of Live is Life and the ongoing catalogue of atrocities that was The Scorpions? What other explanation could be given for the traditional hard-working, hard-drinking four-piece being usurped as the pre-eminent group blueprint by two or three Evian-drinking spotty tossers playing synths in their mum's garage somewhere in the Benelux?
The latest (culminatory, as far as he was concerned) infestation was EGF, and their inescapably ubiquitous (it's really big in the clubs!) 'song', Ibiza Devil Groove.
There was never much to differentiate the work of any particular bunch of these mindless fuckers from that of their peers, but EGF had nonetheless managed the unlikely feat of truly distinguishing themselves in his eyes and ears. They had done this through their choice of which obligatory past standard to sample from (in lieu of spending two minutes coming up with a hook, or even a lyric). Not for them an old Andy Summers riff or Topper Headon beat;
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Eindhoven's finest had built the summer's biggest smash around the chorus of Cliff Richard's Devil Woman.
Rock and fucking roll.
He turned up the volume for maximum effect. It felt like the last day of school before the summer holidays in those odd classes where the teacher didn't let things slide: you could perversely luxuriate in the tedium of a double Maths lesson, immersing yourself in what you wouldn't have to put up with tomorrow.
He couldn't kid himself, mind you, that where he was going there'd be any escape from Ibiza Devil Groove. Christ, even if he topped himself he probably wouldn't escape it; the old Sparks track It's Number One All Over Heaven sprang to mind, and there was no doubt EGF was number one all over Hell. However, what he would be escaping was . . .
'. . . Silver City FM, bringing you a wee kick in the Balearics there, ha ha ha, with the magnificent EGF. It's just coming up to eight forty-nine on May the twenty-sixth, here in Europe's Oil Capital, where the temperature is eleven-point-five degrees . . .'
Europe's Oil Capital. Honestly. The first time he heard the expression, he'd assumed it was a bit of self-deprecatory humour. That was before he learned that there was no such thing as self-deprecatory humour in Aberdeen, particularly when it came to the town's utterly unfounded conceit of itself. It was a provincial fishing port that had struck it astronomically lucky with the discovery of North Sea oil, and the result was comparable to a country bumpkin who had won the lottery, minus the dopey grin and colossal sense of incredulous gratitude. The prevalent local delusion wasn't that the town had merely been in the right place at the right time, but that it had somehow done something to deserve this massive good fortune, and not
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before time, either. Nor did the billions ploughed into the area's economy stop them whining about every penny of Scottish public money that got spent anywhere south of the Stracathro motorway service station.
He didn't imagine the locals had first asked anyone else in the European oil industry whether they concurred before conferring this status upon their home town, but working in marketing he at least understood the necessity of such misleading promotion in face of the less glamorous truth. 'Scotland's Fourth City' wasn't exactly a winning slogan, especially considering that there was a dizzyingly steep drop-off after the first two, and it still put them behind the ungodly shit-hole that was Dundee.
The also self-conferred nickname 'Silver City' was another over-reaching feat of turd-polishing euphemism. It was grey. Everything was grey. There was just no getting away from it. The buildings were all - all - made of granite and the sky was covered in a thick layer of permacloud. It. Was. Grey. If Aberdeen was silver, then shite wasn't brown, it was coppertone. It was grey, as in dull, as in dreary, as in chromatically challenged. It was grey, grey, grey. And the only thing greyer than the city itself was the fucking natives. A couple of quotes to illustrate.
'An Aberdonian would pick a shilling from a dunghill with his teeth.' Paul Theroux.
'There's nae folk sae fine as them that bide by Don and Dee.' Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
Apposite as the former might be, it was actually the latter that offered a deeper insight, though not quite in the way the author intended. To understand, you first had to take a wild stab at what part of the globe you thought Grassic Gibbon might hail from. Then having miraculously plucked that one out of the ether, you might begin to
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develop a picture of a people who either didn't get around much, or wilfully failed to absorb anything if and when they did. How else could they remain ignorant of the existence of even the most basic foreign customs, such as smiling?
Living in Aberdeen had taught him the difference between the parochial and the truly insular. The parochial was defined by a naive, even innocent ignorance of the world beyond its borders. The truly insular knew fine there was a world outside, they just didnae fuckin' like it, and had nae fuckin' need for it!
Living in Aberdeen had also taught him that as you only got one shot at life, it was way too precious to waste living in Aberdeen. The inescapable nature of this truth had only fully dawned on him when he realised that his life here had become just that: inescapable. It was the kind of place you only went to in the first instance because you assumed you wouldn't be there for long; you'd bide your time, serve your sentence and get back to civilisation at the first opportunity. But what you hadn't foreseen was that that opportunity might never come, and in the meantime circumstances could wrap themselves around you like the coils of a snake.
So if you only got one shot, what were you meant to do when you found yourself doomed to spend it here? Surrender and join the SSCs? Aye, right. Find some form of compensatory vice, like fucking your way around the neighbourhood's housequines on your flexi-time midweek days off? He'd tried. It grew tired very quickly, mainly due to the brain-deadening quality of their post-coital conversation. Five minutes after they came, some Pavlovian trigger mechanism invariably caused them to start wittering on about their progeny. That was if they weren't
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already kicking you out of bed because they had to go and collect the little bastards from nursery or wherever. You could kid yourself on that it was making you feel good, but to be honest you might as well take up golf. It was just your choice of recreation in the prison's exercise yard.
What did that leave? How about buying a fucking lottery ticket, and joining the acolytes of Britain's saddest new religion? It was also Britain's biggest, and no wonder, because unlike all the others, it was the only one that offered you a second shot in this life rather than the next. And yes, you could get a second shot, theoretically. Only one rule of life was truly hard and fast: the same one that demanded you make the most of it, and mocked you for your efforts from the wheel of its Espace.
But those precious second shots came to a paltry few, fewer even than the fourteen-million-to-one lottery winners, most of whom were far too dull to do anything remotely interesting with their new resources. Once they'd returned from the mandatory Caribbean cruise and bought the Ferrari, the motor launch and the new pad in a part of town where the neighbours will treat them like shite off their shoes, what next? Consumerist nirvana? Come on, there was only so much gear you could buy at Argos. Twenty mill could buy you a whole new life, but only if you knew where to shop. Otherwise you were just buying a bigger cell. Truly reaping the potential reward was a little more complicated than picking up a giant greenback from a B-list celeb and a tart in a bikini.
To get a second shot, he now knew - even if you were shackled here in the mock-Tudor gulag - you didn't need to win the lottery. What it took was the will to walk away. Quit whining, quit bitching, just quit.
Walk away. As simple, and as difficult, as that.
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Leave everything behind.
Making the realisation was the hard part; taking the decision. Then from the other side of the resolution, it all looked laughably easy.
Leave your partner. No problem. Already done, in fact. The people they'd each once been had blown town years ago. Scratch that; the person he'd once been had been lost in transit during the move to the Sliver City. How did the song go? If you love somebody, set them free. He didn't love Alison, but he owed her that much at least. It wasn't just himself he'd be granting a second shot.
Leave your job. Are you kidding? What incentive was there - or had there ever been - to stick with that? Oh yeah, of course: security. As in maximum.
These chains only held you as long as you clung to them.