"Ian R. MacLeod - Home Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

about my mother so much these days?

I take a breath. "I don't know," I say. "Things would just be different. I
probably wouldn't be here for a start."

"Yeah," he says with a sigh, and I realize that I've been tactless. He leans
forward. I like the way his young muscles move, and for a moment I wonder if I
don't detect some sexual charge--or at least a need for sharing--in this close
torpedo air. But he's just trying to shift his arse on the uncomfortable rim of
the shelf. Figgis, he's at ease with Woolley. He could almost be on his own. He
says, "Do you think Janey's asleep?"

"I doubt it."

"Well maybe I should go see her. Clear the air."

I smile. "You do that."

So Figgis works his way out of Woolley's torpedo tube and bangs the hatch shut,
leaving me with his faint mannish odor, my own stale disappointments. I dim the
lights and lie back. I play music through my earset for a while. It's Bill Evans
in concert, June 25, 1961, but even as the baseline joins the piano for "My
Foolish Heart, " I can hear Janey and Figgis next door. Making up. He's
groaning, she's groaning. It's no good. I turn the music off and wait for
silence. And it comes, it comes. With Epsilon humming and the faint gathering
storm, my fingers reach down and find the place, and touch. I realize that I'm
aroused anyway. Poor old Woolley gets off just on the sound of other people
doing it. My fingers circle and dance. The darkness moves with them. For a few
moments, the sun breaks through the rainclouds and flickers white on a lake
where laughing bodies dive and mingle, going deep to a place where there's
nothing but music, nothing but light.

My vision spins back. This torpedo tube. The sound of my heart. Eventually, I
sleep, and I dream, as so often recently, about my mother. And with her face,
with her voice, comes an echo of trolley wheels squealing along a hospital
corridor, the bright wash of fluorescent light, the itchy feel of the stool on
which I had to sit and wait for her on that day she went to collect her test
results. The dream's so familiar that part of me's just watching. As she comes
back through those swing doors and stoops toward me, somehow still managing to
keep a smile on her face- looking, in fact, almost relieved--I realize that she
must have already known that she had cancer. Mum was also a doctor, after all.
And they always tend to expect the worst when their own health's at stake. So
this would just be confirmation that she was dying.
Perhaps she brought me with her to the hospital for moral support; perhaps it
was just because it was in the school holidays and she didn't know what else to
do with me. And I sat waiting for her on that seat in the corridor whilst the
nurse behind the desk gave me sweets that had gone sticky in their wrappers.

The face of the woman I see coming out through those double doors--big jaw,
small mouth, big forehead, large, deep, close-set eyes--is much like the one