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

when we all went home that night I guess there were a few wives who were surprised at how tight they got hugged
and who went to sleep in their husband’s arms feeling more loved and contented than they had in a long while.
He’d loved her and she him and for a few years they were the happiest people on earth. Then a third party had got
involved. Tom didn’t say his name, and he spoke real neutrally about him but it was a gentleness like silk wrapped
around a knife. Anyway his wife, it seems, fell in love with him, or thought she had, or leastways she slept with him.
In their bed, the bed they’d come to on their wedding night. And as Tom spoke these words some of us looked up at
him, startled, like we’d been slapped across the face with pain. Rachel did what so many do and live to regret till their
dying day. She was so mixed up and getting so much pressure from the other guy that she decided to plough on with
the one mistake and make it the biggest in the world. She left Tom. He talked with her, pleaded even. It was almost
impossible to imagine Tom ever doing that, but I guess the man we knew was a different man from the one he was
remembering.
And so Tom had to carry on living in Stevensburg, walking the same tracks, seeing them around, wondering if she
was as free and easy with him, if the light in her eyes was shining on him now. And each time the man saw Tom he’d
look straight at him and crease a little twisted smile, a grin that said he knew about the pleading and he and his cronies
had had a good laugh over the wedding bed and yes I’m going home with your wife tonight and I know just how she
likes it, you want to compare notes? And then he’d turn and kiss Rachel on the mouth, his eyes on Tom, smiling. And
she let him do it.
It had kept stupid old women in stories for weeks, the way Tom kept losing weight and his temper and the will to
live. He took three months of it and then left without bothering to sell the house. Stevensburg was where he’d grown
up and courted and loved and now wherever he turned the good times had rotted and hung like fly-blown corpses in
all the cherished places. He’d never been back.
It took an hour to tell and then he stopped talking a while and lit a hundredth cigarette and Pete got us all some
more beers. We were sitting sad and thoughtful, tired like we’d lived it ourselves. And I guess most of us had, some
little bit of it. But had we ever loved anyone the way he’d loved her? I doubt it, not all of us put together. Pete set the
beers down and Ned asked Tom why he hadn’t just beaten the living shit out of the guy. Now no one else would have
actually asked that, but Ned’s a good guy, and I guess we were all with him in feeling a piece of that oldest and most
crushing hatred in the world, the hate of a man who’s lost the woman he loves to another, and we knew what Ned was
saying. I’m not saying it’s a good thing and I know you’re not supposed to feel like that these days but show me a
man who says he doesn’t and I’ll show you a liar. Love is the only feeling worth a tin shit but you’ve to know that it
comes from both sides of a man’s character and the deeper it runs the darker the pool it draws from.
My guess is he just hated the man too much to hit him. Comes a time when that isn’t enough, when nothing is
ever going to be enough, and so you can’t do anything at all. And as he talked the pain just flowed out like a river
that wasn’t ever going to be stopped, a river that had cut a channel through every corner of his soul. I learnt
something that night that you can go your whole life without realising: that there are things that can be done that can
mess someone up so badly for so long that they just cannot be allowed, that there are some kinds of pain that you
cannot suffer to be brought into the world. And then Tom was done telling and he raised a smile and said that in the
end he hadn’t done anything to the man except paint him a picture, which I didn’t understand, but Tom looked like
he’d talked all he was going to.
And so we got some more beers and shot some quiet pool before going home. But I guess we all knew what he’d
been talking about. Billy McNeill was just a child. He should have been dancing through a world like a big funfair full
of sunlight and sounds and instead he went home at night and saw his mom being beaten up by a man with shit for
brains who struck out at a good woman because he was too twisted with ignorant stupidity to deal with the world.
Most kids go to sleep thinking about bikes and climbing apple trees and skimming stones and he was lying there
hearing splitting skin and knowing a brutal face was smiling as his mom got smashed in the stomach and then hit again
as she threw up in the sink. Tom didn’t say any of that, but he did. And we knew he was right.
The summer kept up bright and hot, and we all had our businesses to attend to. Jack sold a lot of beer and I sold a
lot of ice cream (Sorry ma’am, just the three flavours, and no, Bubblegum Pistachio ain’t one of them) and Ned fixed a
whole bunch of cracked radiators. And Tom sat right out there in the square with a couple of cats by his feet and a
crowd around him, magicking up animals in the sun.
And I think that after that night Mary maybe got a few more smiles as she did her shopping, and maybe a few more