"Ben Jeapes - Pages Out Of Order" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeapes Ben)

boy in the world. Well, you're also the world's leading authority on
time travel.
There, that got a smile, didn't it? Keep it up ..."
I browsed on through the book. The middle pages were blank, then I came to
writing again. He had started from the back. It was a simple listing, he
said, of everything he could remember about the six years that lay ahead
of Tom now. There were laptop computers, jacuzzis, Yuppies, all recently
impinged on my consciousness. Names and places and events I'd never heard
of -- Kylie and Jason, Challenger explodes, Warsaw Pact breaks up,
Lockerbie, Hillsborough, the Gold Blend couple, massacre in Tiananmen
Square, Berlin Wall comes down, Madonna, Oliver North, AIDS hysteria, the
condom comeback, glasnost, the Brighton bombing, Fergie and Andrew,
Mikhail and Raisa, George and Barbara, Thatcher's downfall, Chernobyl,
Herald of Free Enterprise, Terry Waite, Live Aid -- no particular order,
with no particular consistency of significance, and some (like the Warsaw
Pact and the Berlin Wall) that I just couldn't take seriously as
predictions. The complete iconography of the eighties and the two years
after, past and present and supposedly future, jumbled up at random.
When Tom had calmed down, I gave him the book back to read and retired to
my room with Jo. We sat on the bed and I told her what the Tom from the
past had said.
"I don't know if it was time travel or what," I said, "but I'm sure he did
change when he was fourteen, somehow. I mean, I know he changed, I was
there! He seemed so well balanced because he had to adjust himself to the
world, anchor himself in reality like no one else, because otherwise he
was so unsettled. Does that make sense to you?"
Jo had a habit of seeing everyone's point of view.
"And being a teenage boy who suddenly had to be an adult would make anyone
grow up fast, wouldn't it?" she said. "So what happens now?"
"According to the book, he lives until--... no, hang on ..."
It was mind boggling, but once we had sketched it out on the back of an
envelope it made sense. Tom's mind/soul/karma/whatever and his body were
going to last together for another six years, until 1991, when his mind
would be 20 and his body would be 26. Then his mind/soul/etc. would jump
back, aged 20 and with all its memories, to his nearly-14-year-old body,
where one of his first acts would be to cling to Stephen Gale, whisper the
names of his various amours in his ear and threaten him with blackmail
unless he stopped being a poisonous bully. Six years after that, when his
mind was 26 and his body was 20, Tom imagined (and hoped) that his mind
would jump forward again and he would be reunited with his body in 1991,
when both body and mind would be the same age. That was where the Tom who
had cooked tonight's meal was now.
Hopefully.
We looked at each other.
"Shit," I said. "We've got a fourteen-year-old in there, Jo."
"And we're the only people he's got," she said. She held my gaze.
"Oh, shit," I said again. I fell backwards onto the bed to think about it.
So this was what it was like when your thoughts whirled.
There was a gentle, timid knock at the door, and Tom poked his head round.
"Um ... Will?"