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

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closer to the point at which the torment of choice would cease. Once he handed over his boarding pass and walked down that gangplank, there would be no going back. Not without some very uncomfortable explaining afterwards, anyway.
Somehow, the laws of temporal physics prevailed, and the clock conceded.

At 12:12 the departure was announced.
At 12:15, he boarded the aircraft.
At 12:37, it took off.
At 12:39 and eighteen seconds, when the plane had reached exactly three thousand feet, a bomb exploded towards the rear of the passenger cabin. The charge wasn't particularly big, but neither did it have to be, placed as it was within feet of the fuel tanks. The tail section was severed completely, causing the remainder of the aircraft to arc and then spin as it plummeted towards the fjord beneath.

That was the truly transforming moment, when life, whatever it had meant before, suddenly became unconditionally precious.
The job, the daily commute, the enslaving mortgage, the faceless suburb, the crumbling relationship, the arguments, the bills, the crushed ambitions, the castrating compromises: in an instant they went from being an inescapable hell to a lost paradise.
And the rate at which they underwent that change was ten metres per second squared.

At 12:40 and nine seconds, the front section hit the water, breaking the fuselage into two more parts and killing everyone on board.

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sending a message to the man.

This was a new kind of nervous. It wasn't like the nervousness he felt before a match; that was more of an impatience, an unsteady feeling that set him off-balance until he got his first touch, sent his first pass, made his first tackle. After that, all was familiar, whatever challenge the opposition presented. And, thank God, it wasn't like the nervousness he'd felt on Thursday, waiting for her to go on her break, trying to get the timing right so that it seemed natural and she didn't know he'd been hanging around, worrying that her rota had changed and he'd already missed her; all of which being before he had to actually speak to her. He'd feared his voice would disappear, and then when it didn't, that she could read his thoughts even as he chatted and joked. When he finally asked, he'd felt his words soften and tremble in his throat, his lips seeming to numb as though he had some kind of palsy, hardly presenting the strong-jawed image that would enhance his chances.
Her name was Maria. He'd known her for years in as much as they were in some of the same classes at school, but he hadn't known her to talk to until recently. The guys just didn't talk to the girls at school, not unless they wanted to lay themselves open to all manner of teasing and ridicule. Even among themselves, nobody talked about who they fancied, unless they meant models and movie stars. It was as though it was a sign of weakness, or something the
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others could use against you. Worse still, they could tell her, and then you might as well commit suicide.
Maria had a job at one of the big department stores over the summer holidays, and he had genuinely bumped into her on her break on Monday. It had taken him by surprise that they had been able to talk so comfortably, but what surprised him more was the way he felt after she was gone. He couldn't think about anything or anyone else. From being just a girl he knew of, she became the only girl in the world he wanted to know.
He went back the next day, thinking he'd just try and catch a glimpse of her, but not let her see him (what would she think?), but it turned out to be her day off. On Wednesday he had to help his father lay chips in the garden, and the truck didn't turn up on time, so the job wasn't done until late in the afternoon. He thought about going into town and waiting to catch her coming out when her shift was over, but when he came downstairs after having a shower, Jo-Jo was in the kitchen, waiting for him to come and join a kick-around in the park. He would go tomorrow, he told himself, and he wouldn't just sneak a glimpse, he would speak to her. He would ask her out.
She didn't say yes. Instead she began nodding and smiling before he had even finished his tremulous, stumbling sentence, making it plain that she had read his thoughts, had known what was coming, and already knew her answer. It felt amazing.
They arranged to meet outside the cinema. She had surprised him by saying she wanted to see the American movie Close Action 2, which Tony hadn't considered ideal date material, and he came close to blowing their relationship before it started when he suggested she must fancy the star, Mike MacAvoy. Maria didn't regard herself as a
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'girly' girl. She listened to The Offspring and Nine Inch Nails as her classmates drooled over the latest bubble-gum teen-idols, and while they gossiped about soaps, she could tell you everything about The X-Files and The Sopranos.
She was late. Not very late, not late enough for him to start seriously worrying about being stood up - yet - just late. The sense of anticipation had been present in varying degrees of intensity for at least thirty-six hours, but what he was feeling now was something different, something unique. This was a good nervous, an exciting nervous. He was trying to remember how she smelled, to picture what she'd wear, how she walked, the way she smiled, and marvelling that so many wonderful and fascinating things could be contained in one small frame. It tingled in his stomach and it quivered in his chest. It was as though he had to remember to breathe.
And then he saw her, suddenly emerging from behind two old women dressed in widows' black. She wore a cornflower-coloured sundress that made her look like she ought to be barefoot and the pavement knee-high grass. Last month he'd scored from a direct free-kick in injury time in the last game of the schools season to clinch the point his team needed to win promotion.
This felt far better.

It was a miserable night, rain bouncing off the tarmac, swamping every windscreen and rendering the cars in front a mere blur of red tail-lights. Miserable, that was, for everyone else. For Nicholas, there was a paradoxical pleasure to be had in the sheer hideousness of the weather. Even having to drive through it had an inversely comforting effect, for the simple reason that at the end of the trip, he knew he'd be able to close the front door on it all and sit down to dinner with his wife.
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He'd enjoyed stormy winter nights ever since he was a child, when he used to spend ages at the front window of his mother's flat, looking down at the rain-washed street or watching the water streak the glass. It enhanced the feeling of snugness and security, made the place seem all the more cosy and his mother's presence all the more warm. When he had first moved in with Janine, he had been pleased to discover that the feeling survived into adulthood. They'd always enjoyed the sense that sometimes they could shut the world out and exist only for each other, and it seemed accentuated when the wind was shaking the trees and the rain lashing the glass.
It was their second wedding anniversary, but the first one they'd be spending together, Nicholas having been abroad on business last year. It was also the last one they'd be spending alone for the foreseeable future, with Janine expecting next month. Nights like this made work worthwhile, like the wind and the rain made a small but double- glazed apartment a palace.
The traffic wasn't particularly bad despite the rain, just slowing a little in the usual bends and up-slopes. Maybe it was lighter because people had knocked off early when they saw the deluge through their office windows. Nicholas looked at the LED clock on the dashboard. He'd be home in forty minutes at this rate. Janine would greet him with a kiss and a glass of Merlot, while he would reciprocate with the new dress he'd bought her. She wouldn't be wearing it for a while, but he remembered his sister saying how just such a gift had meant a lot to her when she was advanced in her pregnancy. It helped remind her that she hadn't always been in that condition, although it often felt that way, and gave her something to aim at for getting back into shape afterwards.
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With that, his mind turned to what might be on the menu. A cassoulet perhaps, he thought, breaking into a broad smile. That's what she'd made a night last week, but when he arrived home she discovered she'd forgotten to turn on the oven, and they'd had no choice but to have a bath and make love while they waited for it to cook. They were like teenagers these days, doing it all the time. Perhaps it was hormonal on Janine's part, or perhaps it was some natural inclination to draw closer together in advance of becoming a family. Who knew? Who cared?
He hit the disc-shuffle button to cue forward to the next CD, OK Computer. Not an ostensibly romantic choice, but it had come out when he and Janine first moved in together, and hearing it always made him think of that time. The traffic began to pick up speed once he was over the hill, past the cement factory. He could revise his ETA to nearer half an hour.

Tanya was beginning to wish she had been born in a future century when teleportation had supplanted all other means of transport, though she'd settle for one in which personal hygiene had become enforceable by law and trains didn't resemble some Communist-era social experiment on wheels. The carriage was, as ever, packed beyond capacity, and in accordance with the first law of public transport, the ratio of genetic sub-species and mental inadequates to normal human beings was ten times that of the normal per-capita average. She had managed to secure a seat at the window, which meant trading off the freezing draught against only having some soap-allergic plebeian squeezed up against her on one side. In this case it was a cabbage- smelling old crone whose leather complexion and rasping voice suggested she smoked more than a laboratory beagle.
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She was, mercifully, abstaining on this trip, presumably in deference to the toddler wedged into her lap, who was not so much eating a boiled sweet as breaking it down into its molecular constituents, the better to spread it as far around his sticky little person as was physically possible. His glistening hands swayed precariously close to her good coat every few seconds, and when Tanya tried to compact herself closer into the wall, the old bag simply took up the slack and brought her syrup-coated runt back into smearing range.
Directly across from her, there was an ostentatiously snogging couple who had come up with an ingenious way of compensating for the over-crowding by attempting to occupy the same space simultaneously. If Tanya closed her eyes it would be easy to mistake the slobbering noises for the bubbling of a volcanically heated mud-pool, though the infant was still producing more drool on his own than the pair of them could collectively muster. They were like a shape-shifting entity, every so often metamorphosing to thrust forth a different limb or appendage, the effect all the more grotesque due to at least one of the male's arms being inside his partner's blouse the whole time. There were three moving indentations on one side of the girl's chest, squirming knuckles where a solitary nipple should have been. The old bag tutted every so often but it would have taken a bucket of ice-water to break them apart.
Next to them was the statutory mutterer, a bespectacled middle-aged man who looked as though he had been collecting nervous tics as a hobby since early childhood. He sat there, eyes darting furtively but randomly around the carriage, while his fingers fidgeted and his mouth poured forth an incontinent torrent of unconnected words and sounds.
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A curse on her parents for not giving her the air fare. They said they'd already given her a sum for the coming term, and it was up to her to manage it, but for goodness sake, they knew she hated the train. Did they want her to have to take a bite out of it before the Christmas break was even over? It was because of her exam results for last term. They hadn't said anything - they never did, just huffed around and waited for her to read their minds - but she knew that's what this was about. It wasn't as though it was her fault. The urchin she'd paid to do her essays had proven to be a dud, and she'd ended up with Cs all round. Typical of her luck: everyone did it but she had to be the one who backed a loser.