Читать книгу Dead Writers in Rehab - Paul Bassett Davies - Страница 14

In the night the pain returned and kept me awake for an hour or a little more. It passed and then I slept well and woke when I was ready. There was a chill at first light but it burned away and the day was long. These days at the end of summer linger and it is the lingering of one who should leave when love is over. It is best to finish things quickly. I get these goddamned cramps in the night and my legs are an old man’s legs. You get the clarity back and it’s good to see straight and feel things real and true again but part of what is true is that your legs feel like hell and your hands ache.

A new man joins us. His body is whole but he bears scars of that other battle known to each man here. And to those women who have gone to pieces in the same way, and they are made men by their scars. And some here have also wounds that are visible, caused by the ways that men fall in that battle.

This man staggers a little in his walking but he rolls with it like a sailor on the deck and he is not new to his pain.

There is a woman here who is one of the good ones and she sees it all cold and clear and has no illusions about these things. She is a hell of a fine woman with a pleasant body and I hope I am getting to know her at least a little. Her duties may take her to attend to the new man and something rotten stirs in me at the thought, but the hell with it.

He sensed me watching him and then he was gone. The buck knows in his blood that the cross hairs are on him, and your finger on the trigger in that moment. I left him to find his own path. And screw him anyway if he’s another British prick who thinks he’s better than everyone else.