BUS-RIDE

Оглавление

Don Gutteridge. BUS-RIDE

PROLOGUE

I. 1

2

3

4

II. 1

2

3

4

III. 1

2

IV. 1

V. 1

2

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Отрывок из книги

On a summer’s day the Lake seems vaster than it is, blue waves rolling from west to east under the urging of the prevailing summer-time wind. Out here, only the sun is audience, spectator. The waves, a thousand thousand of them, merge one into the other with a circular, sexual violence. Pause, interplay, slight sweat of foam, touch of the wind’s magic, and new waves breeding before them — endless life-cycle of motion and urgent journeying, west to east, over and over. A journeying. But where? To what end?

If the sun knows he isn’t about to tell — watching, way up, above it all. Feeling his heat reborn in each contraction of wave mounting wave. Content to let his other face lie in the vast mirror below, moving with it, going wherever it must go. Audience and actor, as it were, caught up in the simultaneous movement of the play, in league with the plot, each in his own way believing in playwrights, denouements, endings.

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The waves on this day are gentle but big enough to be challenging and they swim strongly into them, arms stroking the water simultaneously, muscles moving in unison. As if, like fish, they gained courage by travelling together. And how large that challenge must look from their level! To the north-west, the angle of their swimming, there is no horizon. The Lake seems to rise higher than the land that must lie somewhere behind it so that one has the feeling of swimming not out but up. And they must have known, though they could not see, they had trespassed beyond the sinister line where the water turns from blue to dark green.

Suddenly (for the vigorousness of their perfectly matched strokes gave no indication of a slackening of the will) as if a bell has been rung, the young swimmers stop, disappear beneath the surface, then bob back into view. Only now they are heading shoreward with exactly the same determination that marked their moving out. Thus it can not have been fatigue which caused this sudden change of course. Does the blood have a barometer to measure the weather of waves? Can the skin take temperature, calculate depth from the chill of water? Is there some delicate timing device deep in the brain to sound the alarm, the secret adrenalin running, fear in the blood, in the lungs? Whatever the cause, the sun on this July day must have been as bemused as we — strangers to the vertical perspective — to watch the synchronized motion of two boys swimming back.

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