"Hutchinson, Dave - Tir-na-nOg" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hutchinson Dave)

Tir-na-nOg
by Dave Hutchinson


The birds have been singing all day. They come and sit on the telephone wires outside our window like notes on a stave, a score for some bizarre musical. I don't know how much longer I can stand it.

It's the end of the season. There has been a frost already, and most of the things that were once green have surrendered themselves to the shades at the lower end of the spectrum in a wave of pinks and reds, russets and browns. You can imagine that the colors go all the way off into invisibility, becoming pure radiant heat, soft and gentle and cozy like the glow of a log fire on a winter's evening.

Nothing much seems to have changed here. The lawns still slope to the shingle; the hills, dark and stormy with heather, still shoulder out of the other side of the loch. The jetty is still here, just a jutting tongue of wood succumbing to entropy, pilings rotting and slick with weed and algae, wear and tear from plimsolled feet and careless canoeists accounting for the odd plank here and there that nobody bothers replacing. I think they're just tired of it, letting it scatter softly of its own accord.

Disorder, Hey once told me, is the natural state of things. We measure the passage of time by the amount of change we see around us: a tree is taller, a rock is a little more weathered, a person is a little more wrinkled …

Perhaps that's why the past seems closer here, sitting on the jetty watching the loch lap unhurriedly at the beach like an old man sucking a mint imperial. You can ignore the various abrasions of entropy, concentrate instead on the Big Picture, the picture in which only the colors change, in strict procession, to the long slow beat of the seasons. It could be any autumn, any year.…

"I've been meaning to ask. Why do they call you Monkey?"

Shit, the bitch has crept up on me again. How the hell does she do that? "I don't remember," I answer without looking at her. "It was a joke, I think."

A polite snort, behind me. "A joke."

"One of Hey's jokes. Some people have an odd sense of humor." I look over my shoulder. "How's yours?"

Standing there, in her tweedy jacket and hiking trousers, hair pulled back in a painful-looking chignon, she tips her head to one side and regards me as if I'm a museum exhibit. Which from her point of view I may well be. At least twenty-five years separate us, and as usual I am on the wrong side of the equation.

"He killed a man," she reminds me again.

"Fine. I'll come to the trial." Which is actually quite amusing, because we both know that there will be no trial. Benedict's masters—and, temporarily, mine—have no intention of seeing Hey in court. Apart from the fact that it would be a dreadful breach of security and they would sooner kill Hey than have him walk into a British court, they're only interested in the things he took with him on the day he walked out of their corporate safe house in Oxfordshire, the things he carries in his head, the truly wonderful and arcane talents he has been developing for them.

She has taken every opportunity, in the weeks we've been chasing Hey, to remind me of the murder. She wheels it out every couple of days, typically when I show signs of flagging. On one memorably miserable drizzly day in Lincolnshire, she mentioned it seven times in one morning. She is trying to estrange me from him. Your old friend killed a man, Monkey. With his bare hands, Monkey. Does that sound like your old friend, Monkey?

It's a little sad that she relies on this litany. She's trying to tell me that Hey has changed beyond recognition, that I owe him no loyalty. She doesn't seem to have realized that I already know all this. I haven't seen Hey for the past seven years; how do I know what he's like now? Only the hills and the loch stay the same.

It must have irked Benedict's masters no end that Hey refused to work in America—from what she's told me about him, that much never changed. They would have liked to have flown him to their secure facility two kilometers beneath the Arizona desert, where escape is theoretically impossible, but he told them he couldn't work properly in the States. A sense of place was very important to him, he said; he wasn't averse to visiting America, touring other research facilities, pressing the flesh, putting his twopence worth into various projects. He just wouldn't work there.

So, because people have a phenomenal tolerance towards the kind of genius which is absolutely guaranteed to make them immense amounts of money, they bought Grantbridge House just for Hey. They equipped it to his specifications, made it as secure as modern paranoia can make a large building, and for years Hey worked there quite contentedly, within sight of the White Horse at Uffington. He used to send me Christmas cards signed "The Prisoner of Zenda" and "Rudolph Hess."

Until, one day, he just walked out.

Oh yes, Benedict, and he killed a man. I haven't forgotten.

"You came here as children," she says, walking along the jetty until she's standing just behind me. Her feet make almost no sound at all on the creaky boards; it's like the trick the David Carradine character used to do in Kung Fu, walking along a sheet of rice paper without leaving a mark. Except Benedict can do it in walking boots. She does it to annoy me; she knows I can't stand being crept up on.

To hide my irritation, I turn back to the loch, remember canoeing across it one day, a mile to the other side and a mile back, a hot heavy band of fatigue across my shoulders from paddling, while Hey trod foolishly about in the shallows like some awkward wading bird, examining the chunky quartz pebbles at the water's edge. When they were wet they were milkily translucent. Later, when he explained to me how a quartz crystal could be induced to vibrate as the heart of a clock, they had dried out and become almost opaque.

"Is that why he came here?" Benedict presses gently. When she wants to be, she is a creature of almost surreal gentleness; her Carolingian accent softens and broadens. She doesn't fool me, though. "Is it because you came here when you were young? All those outward-bound holidays your school arranged?"

Instead of reminding her that we only have the slimmest evidence that Hey was here at all, I say, "Tigers always return to a place of remembered beauty," recalling—probably with no great accuracy—a line from an old Jack Lemmon movie. "It's how they catch them."

"Is that how you think of Hey? As a tiger?"