Читать книгу Brothers of the Head - Brian Aldiss - Страница 5

My wife and I were driving home with our children. We had been staying in a bungalow on the north coast of Norfolk. Whilst there, she and I had had one of those matrimonial rows that blow up now and again.

Suddenly, a dream I had had during the previous night returned to mind. ‘A nightmare!’ I exclaimed. Immediately, of course, my family wished to hear about it.

So I told them.

I had dreamt the story of two boys who were conjoined at the hip and could not be separated. But worse still, another head was growing from the shoulder of one of the twins: a silent alien head.

My daughter Wendy was particularly distressed – eventually I would dedicate the story to her.

The dream lingered. I believed it to be prodromic – foretelling illness – but I built on it all the same. An exploitive music company took up the conjoined twins; transforming them into a novelty number they called ‘The Bang-Bang’. They performed with moderate success.

Looking up the reality of their deformity, I found there was a medical term for it: diprosopus tetrotus; a defect in human babies causing them to be born with two heads. Very sinister.

In Brothers, this extra head eventually speaks. After its years of imprisonment with the brothers, it has nothing good to say. It demands its freedom.

Yet it is a strangely poetic story, and the story of its publication is also. Brothers of the Head was the first book to be published by Pierrot Press. The Publisher there was new. He phoned me and asked me to meet him by a park bench in Red Lion Square. Was he a secret agent? An escaped prisoner? It was dusk when I went to meet him. He wanted me to write him a strange story.

The book was published early in 1977. It was originally accompanied by surreal sketches by Ian Pollock, which perfectly enhanced the story. Possibly five thousand copies were printed, two thousand of which were exported to America. The odd square shape of the book, the amazing illustrations, and my strange story helped the book to sell rapidly – so rapidly that the publisher (Philip – second name, alas, forgotten) flew out to New York to get his two thousand copies back.

They sold immediately, but nevertheless Philip went broke – such are the hazards of publishing.

Brian Aldiss

Oxford, 2012