Читать книгу Hard, Soft and Wet - Melanie McGrath - Страница 8

Nancy was there at the barrier as I’d expected, her hair shorter and still beautiful, with tracings around the eyes. We rumbled along highway 280 into San Francisco, past the industrial centre, past the university and down into 19th Avenue, chirping like caged birds, our heads darting about and our tongues full of this and that. The city was looking just so in the afternoon sun.

‘When Brezhnev came, he asked if people had to pay an extra tax to come and live here,’ said Nancy.

‘Well it’s not cheap.’ We’d already stopped off for a long shot of latte. I’d noticed the prices of a few things.

‘No, but it’s pretty.’

And with the broad light showing off the pastel-coloured porches and bougainvillaea flowers strewn along 19th Ave, it was pretty. Fine and pretty.

As we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge I turned in my seat so as not to miss the view of the Bay with the Transamerica building shining like a chunk of Toblerone still wrapped in its foil and the rocky bubbles of Alcatraz and Angel Island. Coit Tower was murky red against the haze with Pacific Heights and Nob Hill behind and North Beach at the other side, the lot piled up against the hills as rumpled as a plate of pastel berries, or maybe a volcano cast in scumble glaze. I began to smile. The car tyres continued tocking over the metal stress bars of the bridge while Nancy and I fell silent and happy.

At Strawberry Point we dropped down onto the slip road and lost sight of the city. Fuddled with pride, Nancy turned to me and said in a choked-up voice:

‘Shall we get something to eat?’

‘Yeah,’ I replied in an instant. ‘McDonald’s apple pie.’

And now it is the middle of the Californian night, and I’m sitting on the bed in Nancy’s spare room listening to the crack of the cedar shingles and the distant mechanical blur of traffic running along the Golden Gate Bridge and into the Waldo tunnel. A sweep of light from a passing car flares against the books pinned up about the room. Four shelves on the history of science, two more on computing, a small collection of modern novels, software guides and a couple of teach yourself programming manuals, all smelling of must and chemicals.

Somewhere below the house, at the water’s edge along the rim of shingle, a nightbird caws.

America. Here I am once more.