"Paul McAuley - Whole Wide World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

For Georgina, encore

I am nothing but must be everything. Karl Marx




PART ONE

The Silver Chair


1

I was running laps in the local park when my mobile rang. I managed to drop my
headphones around my neck and hook the headset over my ear without breaking stride. I
was hoping it would be Julie, but it was Detective Inspector Pete Reid, T12's duty officer.
He said, 'I need you to make a pick-up.'
'I'm not on call,' I told him, and rang off.
I could just about front up to Pete Reid, a dedicated alcoholic at the end of an
undistinguished career. At least, I could do it over the mobile, which rang again almost at

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/McAuley,%20Paul%20-%20Whole%20Wide%20World.html (2 of 287)10-12-2006 21:55:03
California Gold by John Jakes


once, with the insistent warbling of a small and very hungry bird. I let it ring and put on
my headphones (the extended reissue of Elvis Costello's Armed Forces) and kept running.
Sunday, early June. The sky hazy with heat as if bandaged in gauze, the sun burning
through it like the business end of a welder's torch. According to the watch Julie had given
me the previous Christmas, it was thirty-one degrees centigrade. It felt hotter. People in
various states of undress sprawled on browning grass like a horde of refugees from one of
the European microwars. I was aware of the brief snags and thorns of their drowsy
inattention as I ran past.
I'm not a natural runner. I run as self-consciously as an actor in some low-grade drama. I
run to stay in touch with my body; at a certain age, especially after you've been badly hurt,
you become horribly aware of its tendency to sag and sprawl and seize up, of its obdurate
otherness. I run because there's virtue to be wrung from moderate exertion. In the good old
days of cohabitation, I'd come back boiled red and trembling, and after some heroic
hawking in the sink my announcement to Julie that I'd managed six kilometres (a judicious
doubling of the actual distance) would earn me a cold beer or a glass of nicely chilled
Colombian Chardonnay.
I ran past a man rubbing sunscreen into the trembling flanks of his boxer dog. I ran past a
family eating from styrene clamshells. Sweat soaked my T-shirt, gathered at the waistband
of my shorts. My left leg hardly hurt at all. I ran past a kid resting his head between the
speakers of a sound box broadcasting heavy pulses of raga metal to the indifferent world. I
ran past a temporary security checkpoint on the other side of the park railings, where coils
of smartwire and high kerbs of hollow, water-filled plastic blocks choked the road down to
a single lane. Three peace wardens in red tunics, black trousers, and mirrorshades —
pitbulls in Star Trek leisure gear, their paws resting on belts laden with shock sticks,