Читать книгу The Lost Diaries - Craig Brown, Craig Brown - Страница 48

There are always new characters to meet. This evening, I was placed next to Igor Stravinsky, the well-known composer. He is neither very tall nor very short, but if he had been it wouldn’t have mattered as for most of the time we were both sitting down.

He held forth on the subject of music, to the exclusion of all else. After a good few minutes of this, I sought to change the subject.

‘Would you agree with me that this lamb is a little overdone?’ I inquired. I cannot remember his reply, so it can’t have been interesting. He had no real conversation.

CLARISSA EDEN

The Hitch and I were in a burpfarty willybumcrack dive off the Porto-bello Road and drinking like men – one half of Skol leapfrogged swiftly by another, two packs of salt and vinegar, heavy on the salt, don’t hold back on the vinegar, mush, then another half of Skol, this time with a slash of lime, followed by a Pepsi, all black, no ice – when I rasped that fuckitman, I preferred early Conrad to later James and middle Nabokov to either of them. The Hitch immediately puked into the pocket of a passing paediatrician and snorted vomitoriously that middle James could beat early James and late Nabokov hands down, ansdarn.

‘Come outside and say that.’ The words shinned out of my mouth like a nuclear siren signalling the decimation of a world boorishly encyclopaedic in its slavish variety. On the ashpuke streets wheezing with urine-drenched tramps, the Hitch and I squared up to one another, eyes unblinking, like men. I flexed my arms; the Hitch flexed his. GO! Hands working faster than the speed of travelling luminous energy, we began to trade smacks, all the while singing, ‘A sailor went to sea sea sea to see what he could see see see and all that he could see see see was the bot –’

By this time, we were biffing our way through it full pelt. But I got to the end – ‘bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea’ – before him, and the Hitch collapsed fighting for breath like a man fighting for breath, his defeat ameliorated by his knowledge that with his hands and his rhyme he had just participated in the tumescent whirligig of literary history in the late twentieth century.

MARTIN AMIS