Читать книгу Lust - Geoff Ryman, Geoff Ryman - Страница 15

The answers came quickly one after another.

There was a blurring of flesh as if reality had been dipped in turpentine. Flesh smeared like paint. Something flowed sideways out of Tarzan’s belly and ribs – skin and bone poured out of him onto the pavement.

Flesh sprouted like a plant in time-lapse photography, growing a leather skirt like leaves, long hair like flowers.

In the time it takes to pipe a musical scale, Jane had risen out of Tarzan. She stood beside him as if fresh from the depths of the river.

She was played by Maureen O’Sullivan. She was tiny, with a face as fragile as china under a mass of wiry hair.

Michael introduced them. ‘Jane, Tarzan. Tarzan, Jane.’

Click. They fitted together. They had been married in spirit from the beginning.

Michael spoke quickly to Jane, who always spoke for both of them.

Michael asked, ‘Can you go elsewhere?’

Jane’s chin thrust out, and her voice was chilled. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.’ It was the voice she used with New York lawyers.

‘Can you go back to your jungle?’ he asked. ‘I mean, does it exist somewhere?’

Jane’s face softened. Her voice quickened. ‘I think we can, yes.’

Back to the treehouse, with its Flintstone home conveniences, waterwheels driven by elephants. Back to a land where animals spoke and Tarzan could talk with them, where lions lived in forests, where chimps and gorillas mingled in the same tribes. A world where there was always another wonder, another lost tribe, another adventure.

Protectively, Jane took the arm of her innocent. ‘Come, Tarzan,’ she said, her voice cracking like an adolescent’s on the love she felt for him. ‘We’re going home.’

And Michael felt the same ache of yearning he had felt as a feminine boy. He yearned for love, for that particular love between them. He heard the MGM strings, swelling like his heart, like his adolescent sexuality, for them both.

So Michael sent them home. He sent them to their monochrome jungle full of giant trees with conveniently placed trapeze swings. Tired old predators prowled slowly, but were speeded up when anyone was looking. Where love filled their days in pre-lapsarian innocence.

The pub lights rippled again, and the two of them evaporated into fiction, reels of film that had never been shot.

Hypothesis: Angels are a kind of fiction.

Method: call up an Angel who is entirely fictional.