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Joe Treasure: The Book of Air

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Joe Treasure: The Book of Air» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию). В некоторых случаях присутствует краткое содержание. Город: London, год выпуска: 2016, ISBN: 978-1-911525-09-7, издательство: Clink Street Publishing, категория: sf_postapocalyptic / Современная проза / на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале. Библиотека «Либ Кат» — LibCat.ru создана для любителей полистать хорошую книжку и предлагает широкий выбор жанров:

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Joe Treasure The Book of Air

The Book of Air: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Retreating from an airborne virus with a uniquely unsettling symptom, property developer Jason escapes London for his country estate, where he is forced to negotiate a new way of living with an assortment of fellow survivors. Far in the future, an isolated community of descendants continue to farm this same estate. Among their most treasured possessions are a few books, including a copy of , from which they have constructed their hierarchies, rituals and beliefs. When 15-year-old Agnes begins to record the events of her life, she has no idea what consequences will follow. Locked away for her transgressions, she escapes to the urban ruins and a kind of freedom, but must decide where her future lies. These two stories interweave, illuminating each other in unexpected ways and offering long vistas of loss, regeneration and wonder. The Book of Air

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And all the time I’m thinking, they’ll recognise Simon’s face. They’ll work out who he is. For a couple of days his picture was on the front pages, the TV, all over the internet – not everyone’s forgotten. They’ll ask for ID and see my name and make the connection and shoot us. Or I’ll say I haven’t got any ID and they’ll shoot us anyway.

A woman appeared in a doorway – she was wearing a pale blue sari, some silvery detail along the edge of the fabric, and she was so elegant you’d think nothing could touch her. But the moment she let go of the door and stepped into the street you could see she had the staggers. Her bag hit the pavement and vegetables spilled out – a tight white cabbage, peppers the colour of sunlight, five onions shedding translucent skin, all rolling towards the gutter. See, I was paying attention. We all were. Jesus, Caro, there must have been acres of vegetables rotting all over Kent, all over the south of England, and we were craving the stuff. I wondered if she was buying or selling, but I wasn’t getting out of the car to ask. I was heading west, ready to take my chance on the road. I figured there’d be food enough if we didn’t get knifed picking it. Fresh meat too, walking around on four legs, hens starving in their sheds with no one to let them out.

The van driver wasn’t waiting though. I watched him in the mirror, a big man manoeuvring his belly from behind the steering wheel and out on to the road. He must have been mad or desperate – anyone could see those jokers were itching to use their guns.

Remember what cities used to sound like – sirens and diggers, music blaring from car windows, jet engines. All gone. There was nothing to cushion us from the sudden burst of gunfire and screaming.

It woke Simon. One minute he’s curled up like a cat, next he’s all attention, peering out through the window. He’d seen enough death, God knows, but here was a new twist – the woman on her knees, the loose end of her sari held to the van driver’s neck before he’d even stopped twitching. It took me a moment to register that she wasn’t trying to save his life – it was too late for that. For her too, it was too late. She was dying of what she’d been dying of already. Remarkable the steadiness of her hand, though, as she printed crimson petals on the wall of the pub. Her legs could hardly hold her. I stopped to watch her stoop and rise five or six times, the delicate touches of silk transforming arterial blood into images of poppies and begonias and drooping pomegranates, and a hint of a red pot as she finally sank towards the pavement. The gunmen were dumbstruck, motionless behind their gas masks. It catches you like that, the blessing, every time.

So I watched. But you can’t predict when the urge to live will kick in. Before I’d had time to think, I’d swung the car into a U-turn, skidded up an empty side street, gunfire jabbering behind us, and I was finding a new route to the motorway.

We’d passed the exit for Slough before I realised I was soaked in sweat. The road was abandoned, we had most of a tank of petrol, the Mercedes would take us wherever we wanted. But my heart was racing, panic rising in my chest. A normal reaction, maybe – to the guns, to the murdered driver. But you know when it’s hit you. Once you’ve got the sweats, the rest follows – the staggers, the blessing, the burn, the pit.

Some people think you get it from looking. You watch someone with the blessing, you can’t not watch, and the disease enters through the eyes. That’s the cunning of it. Cunning bollocks. It’s a contagion like any other – it’s carried on the air and you breathe it in.

So what is it, then, this strange opening to impulses and talents never guessed at – a consolation? Or a twist of the knife, a glimpse of what we might have been even at the point of death, to make us all mad with grief?

I saw him last night, Caro – Simon, on his way to bed. It wasn’t a dream. I think it was last night. I know it was evening because of the way the bathroom window across the landing catches the light from the hills. Abigail held him by the hand, keeping him at a safe distance, though he didn’t seem inclined to come any closer. It was nice of her to bring him to see what’s left of me – his Uncle Jason. Simon’s gaze was curious and sad. I tried to wave, but he was gone before I’d worked out how to get my arm from under the bedclothes. I tried to smile, but my face doesn’t always do what I want it to.

He put me in mind of Penny at that age. Whatever Simon got from his father and whatever the world has done to him since, it was my little sister Penny who gave him that look, like the world’s a puzzle and why won’t you tell him the answer. And my mind was invaded by thoughts of Penny until I was in a turmoil of anguish and rage. And I made myself think about you instead, which quelled the rage, though not the anguish.

Death’s become so ordinary I imagine I’m numb to it. Then it catches up with me and I can hardly breathe for the pain. Caro, Caroline, you were really something. Every day we were together I knew I was in luck. And then the luck ran out – mine, yours, everybody’s. I tell myself your death is nothing. Penny’s death, the biggest thing in Simon’s world – nothing. To weep over you, to tear our hair and rend our clothes in grief – an idolatrous obscenity.

But we do it anyway.

When I sang in the hallway, when I cried to you to come back, it was my soul crying to yours. It was reading to you must have put the idea in my head. Reading’s never been my thing, but when you got sick there wasn’t much else I could do. For some of the book you were delirious, but I reckoned you’d read it so often that it didn’t matter, though it was new to me. So I got to know about Jane Eyre, the orphan who grows up to be a governess, and Rochester who’s ready to marry her even though he’s secretly married already, and Rivers the preacher who takes her in when she runs away and nearly starves on the moor. And you were awake enough to correct me when I pronounced Rivers’ first name as if he was a saint. ‘Not Saint John,’ you said, Sinj’n.’ I thought you were raving – something about sin or sinning. But you said it again. ‘Sinj’n, Sinj’n Rivers.’ And then I got it. And I knew I wasn’t wasting my time. So I kept on to the end. I read myself hoarse, while the sun came and went. I read until the lines of text buckled in front of my eyes. Then your temperature dropped and strange things began to happen to you and we had a row – the last thing we did, the last words we spoke before the blessing hit. We both knew you were dying and we were yelling at each other about a made-up story. You could hardly stand, but you were swinging punches at me and kicking my shins with your bare feet and screaming in my face and I was screaming back. It was ugly.

And it was my fault. Entirely and utterly. What was it made me so angry? I felt robbed. It wasn’t a ghost story – I’d worked that out. Yes, all right, weird things go on in the house – ghostly appearances, eerie laughter in the night, Rochester’s bed’s set on fire – but there’s an explanation for all of it – not the drunk servant Grace Pool as Jane thinks at first, but Rochester’s mad wife Bertha locked away upstairs in Grace’s care. Not a ghost story, then, and not a fairy tale full of magical events. Not until right at the end, when Jane’s miles away across the moor with Sinj’n Rivers, and Rochester calls to her and she hears him. The way I saw it, your Charlotte Bronte had pulled a trick. She’d come up with this pathetic piece of magic to sort everything out. I was furious because I was exhausted and I was furious because there was no magic trick to bring you back.

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