"Michael Marshall Smith - To Receive Is Better" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Michael Marshall)

TO RECEIVE IS BETTER

by

Michael Marshall Smith



I’d like to be going by car, but of course I don’t know how to drive, and it would probably scare the shit out of me. A
car would be much better, for lots of reasons. For a start, there’s too many people out here. There’s so many people.
Wherever you turn there’s more of them, looking tired, and rumpled, but whole. That’s the strange thing. Everybody
is whole.
A car would also be quicker. Sooner or later they’re going to track me down, and I’ve got somewhere to go before
they do. The public transport system sucks, incidentally. Long periods of being crowded into carriages that smell,
interspersed with long waits for another line, and I don’t have a lot of time. It’s intimidating too. People stare. They
just look and look, and they don’t know the danger they’re in. Because in a minute one of them is going to look just
one second too long, and I’m going to pull his fucking face off, which will do neither of us any good.
So instead I turn and look out the window. There’s nothing to see, because we’re in a tunnel, and I have to shut
my eye to stop myself from screaming. The carriage is like another tunnel, a tunnel with windows, and I feel like I’ve
been buried far too deep. I grew up in tunnels, ones that had no windows. The people who made them didn’t even
bother to pretend that there was something to look out on, something to look for. Because there wasn’t. Nothing’s
coming up, nothing that isn’t going to involve some fucker coming at you with a knife. So they don’t pretend. I’ll say
that for them, at least: they don’t taunt you with false hopes.
Manny did, in a way, which is why I feel complicated about him. On the one hand, he was the best thing that ever
happened to us. But look at it another way, and maybe we’d have been better off without him. I’m being
unreasonable. Without Manny, the whole thing would have been worse, thirty years of utter fucking pointlessness. I
wouldn’t have known, of course, but I do now: and I’m glad it wasn’t that way. Without Manny I wouldn’t be where I
am now. Standing in a subway carriage, running out of time.
People are giving me a wide berth, which I guess isn’t so surprising. Partly it’ll be my face, and my leg. People
don’t like that kind of thing. But probably it’s mainly me. I know the way I am, can feel the fury I radiate. It’s not a
nice way to be, I know that, but then my life has not been nice. Maybe you should try it, and see how calm you stay.
The other reason I feel weird towards Manny is I don’t know why he did it. Why he helped us. Sue 2 says it
doesn’t matter, but I think it does. If it was just an experiment, a hobby, then I think that makes a difference. I think I
would have liked him less. As it happens, I don’t think it was. I think it was probably just humanity, whatever the fuck
that is. I think if it was an experiment, then what happened an hour ago would have panned out differently. For a start,
he probably wouldn’t be dead.
If everything’s gone okay, then Sue 2 will be nearly where she’s going by now, much closer than me. That’s a
habit I’m going to have to break, for a start. It’s Sue now, just Sue. No numeral. And I’m just plain old Jack, or I will
be if I get where I am going.
The first thing I can remember, the earliest glimpse of life, is the colour blue. I know now what I was seeing, but at
the time I didn’t know anything different, and I thought that blue was the only colour there was. A soft, hazy blue, a
blue that had a soft hum in it and was always the same clammy temperature.
I have to get out of this subway very soon. I’ve taken an hour of it, and that’s about as far as I can go. It’s very
noisy in here too, not a hum but a horrendous clattering. This is not the way I want to spend what may be the only
time I have. People keep surging around me, and they’ve all got places to go. For the first time in my life, I’m
surrounded by people who’ve actually got somewhere to go.
And the tunnel is the wrong colour. Blue is the colour of tunnels. I can’t understand a tunnel unless it’s blue. I
spent the first four years of my life, as far as I can work out, in one of them. If it weren’t for Manny, I’d be in one still.
When he came to work at the Farm I could tell he was different straight away. I don’t know how: I couldn’t even think
then, let alone speak. Maybe it was just he behaved differently when he was near us to the way the previous keeper