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

stone beyond it. I blinked, and looked around. The alley was narrow and dark,
now the sun had gone down; but that only made it look more like the ones I'd
gone weaving through that strange night. Whatever had been done to it the
shadow hid; the faint glimmer of twilight, sheltered from the harsh street
lighting, draped its mantle of mystery around it once more. I looked back and
laughed aloud at the contrast; all that newness seemed like a facade, a thin
gaudy crust over what really lay here. Suddenly it wasn't so hard to believe
in myself again. Just as Jyp had predicted, I'd come back.
As Jyp had predicted - and what else had he said? '... you ask for Jyp
the Pilot, right?' It came back to me, clear as I'd heard it. 'Ask anyone,
they all know me ...' Well, that ought to be easy enough. But somehow I didn't
relish it round here, not in any of those dinky-looking little bistros, they
didn't seem suitable somehow. But at the far end of the alley there was a dim
yellowish gleam of windows. That ought to be something.
It turned out to be a pub, not very large and anything but restored; in
fact, it looked about as rundown as any I'd seen. It stood on the alley
corner, defined by a curved fascia of Edwardian glazed tiling in dark red and
blue, very cracked and dirty, and stained-glass windows, equally dingy and
opaque, etched with advertisements for the forty-shilling ales of forgotten
breweries. The light that escaped was glaring, the sound of voices raucous; it
looked tough, and it made me nervous. But it was somewhere to start. The
warped door squealed as I stepped through into a suffocating cloud of smoke.
I'd half expected the conversation to stop; but nobody paid me a blind bit of
attention. Which was just as well, because in this company, this
spit-and-sawdust setting, I knew I was a sharp contrast, my white designer
anorak and grey houndstooth casuals an intrusion as stark as the electronic
fruit machine flickering unheeded at the back of the bar. The fluorescent
light showed it up all too brutally: the cracked vinyl flooring in its faded
gaudiness, the smoke-yellowed walls, the crumpled walnut faces of the old men
who were most of its customers, elderly labourer types hunched and shrunken in
their grubby raincoats. And deaf, probably, since the loud voices were theirs;
the few younger men, mostly fiftyish versions of the same, sat glumly
contemplating them like a vision of destiny. By the door a handful of teenage
skinheads swilled cans of malt liquor and moaned at each other. I plucked up
my nerve, and pushed past them to the bar. The beefy landlord served me my
scotch in a glass clouded by scouring, and wrinkled his brow when I asked if a
fellow called Jyp had been in.
'Jyp?' He stared at me a moment with great incurious ox eyes, then
rounded on his regulars, leaning over the peeling varnish. 'Gentleman asking
fer Jyp - anyone know him?'
'Jyp?' The old men turned their heads, muttered the name back and forth
among themselves. Frowns deepened, one or two heads were shaken, others seemed
less sure. But nobody said anything, and the landlord was just turning back to
me with a shrug when one old fellow hunched up by the gas fire, browner and
more wrinkled than the others, suddenly piped up with 'Wouldn't be Jyp the
Pilot he means, eh?'
There was a moment's silence. Then cackling chorus of recognition arose,
and the landlord's brow suddenly lost its furrows. 'Oh, him! Haven't set eyes
on him in awhile! But -'
And, astonishingly, the whole place seemed to change, as if some subtle