"Ian R. MacLeod - Living In Sin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

almost
as easily as anyone else might have done. The neighbours were friendly
enough, sympathetic even. They nodded to us each morning as we all
trooped
yawning in our slippers to church for Matins. They let me borrow tools
every winter when our pipes burst and chatted over the hedge in spring.
In
the early days, Annie's hands often used to bleed from stigmata after
we
had made love. But that diminished, in honesty probably as our own
passion
lessened. Still, even after May was born, our chimney was licked by
lightning every time there was a storm.
Annie having May changed a lot of things. Kneeling at the pews of Saint
Anthony's at Evensong whilst she was pregnant, we had prayed
frantically
that our baby would be ordinary. But still we were as surprised as
anyone
when our prayers were answered. Who had ever heard of God blessing
adulterers with an undeformed child?
The people at work began to share our table and play dominoes at
lunchtime
in the canteen, to kneel close to us along the lines of stacking
plastic
chairs in the works chapel. Mrs Hewison next door in our terrace even
knitted May a matinee suit from pink and lime green acrylic she'd had
left
over from a cardigan. Once people saw May in her pram and realised that
she wasn't obviously damaged or deformed, I think they all expected the
kid to be special, to start reciting the scriptures around the side of
her
dummy or piss holy water like the ones you read about in the papers.
But
it seemed that God had answered our prayers. He had given us
fornicators
an ordinary child. An ordinary life. He had reached down from the
heavens
and touched our brows with the sweat of ordinariness.
The days at Matsi Plastics dragged by. The years happened quickly. They
flew, and all Annie and I could do was watch. And draw slowly apart. We
loved May, but that became a thin thread as she grew older and went out
with her friends and we began to share the house together alone with
our
age and our disappointments, the unbroken weight of our adulterous sin.
Maybe if we could have got married, if the stigmata and the lightning
hadn't returned every now and then to remind us. Maybe this, maybe
that.
Sitting with the TV on and the evening paper spread on my lap, ashamed
of
the loose and heavy flesh it covered with Annie slouched half asleep