Читать книгу The Testimony - James Smythe, James Smythe - Страница 57

I was trying to get on with the work at hand, trying to make sure we had everything covered. I – Look, I believe in God. I believed in God then, so much, because I was sure that it was Him speaking to us. So I wanted to work out what the static was, because if it was important, a message, another language, maybe, that would be crucial. So we kept working, but Jacques kept filling up my glass, and I thought, what harm would a little wine do? We started saying the stuff, the phonetics, out loud, seeing if they resembled anything, and then we recorded us saying the noises, sped it up, slowed it down, tried to see if the software matched anything to any languages, that sort of thing, but nothing was happening. People kept coming in, as I say, and asking us to party, and then other people were coming in and asking us to go and pray with them, but we stayed inside, doing the work (apart from Jacques, who was drinking really heavily). Then somebody ran in, told us to come outside, and we said, No, no, we’re busy, and they said, There’s somebody on the roof. So we all went outside and looked, and there was, and we saw him – it was a man, but we didn’t know him, probably a student in another department – as he fell. It was awful. I asked a girl there why he did it, and she said, I don’t know, he just kept saying, Sorry, sorry, apologizing for something, and then he jumped. They call it jumping; it’s not jumping, not when you just step off like that.

We all took that badly, but Patrice dealt with it the worst. He was already looking a bit ill before it happened, and then he just started crying. Oh my God, he kept saying, so we got David to watch him, check he was alright (David was huge, built like Andre the Giant or something, so we knew Patrice would be alright if he went off on one), and we tried to get back on with the work. I was so drunk by then it was pointless, and we pretty much went back and passed out, I think.