"Michael Scott Rohan - Chase the Morning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rohan Michael Scott)

reflection from a boarded-up window, or that the flash of red that looked so
much like the tavern signboard was a forgotten poster flapping ragged from &
wall. When at last one such alley spat me out into the wider street I'd
glimpsed, it turned out to be Danube Street again, much further along past
Tampere Street. And there beneath a glaring orange streetlamp hung a gleaming
new brown and white tourist sign, that I'd have seen the first night if only
I'd kept on going -< < Somehow or other the sight of it only made my heart sink more. But I turned
the way it pointed, and drove on. Until, quite unexpectedly, there were no
more grim walls ahead, and Danube Street opened out onto a neat little
roundabout with bright lights and bushes growing in concrete tubs, and blue
parking signs in all directions. And beyond it, flanked by a row of buildings
whose scrubbed stone and brick and new paint positively blazed in the last
rays of the falling sun, was a dock pool, empty of ships and hung with the
same white chains you find on suburban gardens. I pulled in beside them, at a
vacant parking meter, and clambered slowly out of the car. I looked down the
pool, to where it opened out onto the sunset sea; but the waters were empty.
There was not a ship in sight, and the only warehouse I could see was marked
with a pink neon disco sign across its upper storey. The seawind was tainted
with dust from a scaffold-shrouded building behind me, and the spicy staleness
emanating from an Indian restaurant nearby. I'd found only what I'd set out to
look for, that night; and it seemed almost like a mockery, a judgement.
Ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and ye shall find. What had I found before?
Hallucination? Delusion? In my mind I couldn't be sure it had ever existed; in
my memory it was already clouded. And yet all my feelings shouted that it was

there somewhere, that I had to find my way back to it before it was too late.
I thrashed frantically against the doubts that ensnared me. But what could I
do? I was a child again, and lost. I was shut out. CHAPTER THREE
THAT PUCE
Just two days back I'd have liked it. I might even have checked out that
disco, it looked stylish and upmarket. Not that that would make the cocktails
less lurid, the moronic beat less numbing; but the clientele would be
smoother, and there'd be no need to talk. Eye to eye, body to body, direct; no
well-worn lines, no show of caring, no rite of lies. That was the way they
liked it, too, the ones who went there; a short, sweaty, sleepless night,
make-up smears and animal smells, and if it went well a shared breakfast. The
girls who hung up their clothes first - they were the ones it went best with;
I'd noticed that. Names were things we traded lightly, without obligation,
between kisses; no need to call again, and these days I seldom did. All right,
so it wasn't love; but love isn't for everybody. At least - unlike so much -
it was honest. At least nobody got hurt.
Now, though, even the idea of the place and all that went with it made me
sick. The sight of the whole petti-fied street clawed at my sanity. Its mere
existence seemed to clash horribly with what I'd stumbled on that night,
romanticized or not. I had to get out, or believe ... Or believe nothing,
trust nothing, my senses least of all. I forgot the car; I blundered blindly
across the road, lucky that it was empty. If there was anyone to see.me they
must have thought me drunk. I plunged gratefully into the sheltering blackness
of an alley mouth like an animal injured, desperate to hide. My fingers
skidded along the still fresh paintwork of a window-frame, and struck worn

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