"Michael Marshall Smith - The Man Who Drew Cats" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Michael Marshall)

I never saw it, I guess no one did. He was a private man, private like a steel door with four bars and a couple of
six-inch padlocks, and when he left the square at the end of the day he could have vanished into thin air as soon as he
turned the corner for all we knew. But he always came from that direction in the morning, with his easel on his back
and paintbox under his arm. And he always wore that black coat like it was a part of him, but he always looked cool,
and the funny thing was when you stood near him you could swear you felt cooler yourself. I remember Pete saying
over a beer that it wouldn’t surprise him none if, if it ever rained again, Tom walked round in his own column of
dryness. Just foolish talk, but Tom made you think things like that.
Jack’s Bar looks right out onto the square, the kind of square towns don’t have much anymore: big and dusty with
old roads out at each corner, tall shops and houses on all the sides and some stone paving in the middle round a
fountain that ain’t worked in living memory. Well in the summer that old square is just full of out-of-towners in pink
towelling jumpsuits and nasty jackets standing round saying “Wow” and taking pictures of our quaint old hall and our
quaint old stores and even our quaint old selves if we stand still too long. And that year Tom would sit out near the
fountain and paint and those people would stand and watch for hours.
But he didn’t paint the houses or the square or the old Picture House. He painted animals, and painted them like
you’ve never seen. Birds with huge blue speckled wings and cats with cutting green eyes and whatever he painted it
looked like it was just coiled up on the canvas ready to fly away. He didn’t do them in their normal colours, they were
all reds and purples and deep blues and greens and yet they fair sparkled with life. It was a wonder to watch: he’d put
up a fresh paper, sit looking at nothing in particular, then dip his brush into his paint and just draw a line, maybe red,
maybe blue. Stroke by stroke you could see the animal build up in front of your eyes and yet when it was finished you
couldn’t believe it hadn’t always been there. And when he’d finished he’d spray it with some stuff to fix the paints
and put a price on it and you can believe me those paintings were sold before they hit the ground. Spreading
businessmen from New Jersey or somesuch and their bored wives would come alive for maybe the first time in years
and walk away with one of those paintings and their arms around each other, looking like they’d found a bit of
something they’d forgotten they’d lost.
Come about six o’clock Tom would finish up and walk across to Jack’s, looking like a sailing ship amongst rowing
boats and saying yes, he’d be back again tomorrow and yes, he’d be happy to do a painting for them. And he’d get a
beer and sit with us and watch the game and there’d be no paint on his fingers or his clothes, not a spot. I guess he’d
got so much control over that paint it went where it was told and nowhere else.
I asked him once how he could bear to let those paintings go. I know if I’d been able to make anything that right in
my whole life I couldn’t let it go. I’d want to keep it to look at sometimes. He thought for a moment and then he said
he believed it depends how much of yourself you’ve put into it. If you’ve gone deep down into yourself and pulled
up what’s inside and put it down, then you don’t want to let it go: you want to check sometimes that it’s still safely
tied down. Comes a time when a painting’s so right and so good that it’s private, and no one’ll understand it except
the man who put it down. Only he is going to know what he’s talking about. But the everyday paintings, well they
were mainly just because he liked to paint animals and liked for people to have them. He could only put a piece of
himself into something he was going to sell, but they paid for the beers and I guess it’s like the old boys in Jack’s Bar:
if you just like talking you don’t always have to say something important.
Why animals? Well if you’d seen him with them I guess you wouldn’t have to ask. He loved them all, is all, and
they loved him right back. The cats were always his favourites. My old Pa used to say that cats weren’t nothing but
sleeping machines put on the earth to do some of the human’s sleeping for them, and whenever he did a chalk drawing
he’d always do a cat.
Once in a while, you see, Tom seemed to get tired of painting on paper, and he’d get out some chalks and sit down
on the baking flagstones and just do a drawing right there on the dusty rock. Now I’ve told you about his paintings,
but these drawings were something else again. It was like because they couldn’t be bought, but would just be washed
away, he was putting more of himself into it, doing more than just shooting the breeze. They were just chalk on dusty
stone and they were still in these weird colours but I tell you children wouldn’t walk near them because they looked so
real, and they weren’t the only ones, either. People would just stand a few feet back and stare and you could see the
wonder in their eyes and their open mouths. If they could’ve been bought there were people who would have sold
their houses. And it’s a funny thing but a couple of times when I walked over to open the store up in the mornings I
saw a dead bird or two on top of those drawings, almost like they had landed on it and been so terrified to find