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.This is how it begins.Anew, now, but always the same.He rubbed the long, twisting scar etched across his stubbly scalp, unsure where the thought was coming from.In the dark.In a one-night cheap hotel and restless, or under a bridge, or even a cozy doorway in the middle of that great, roaring dark, full of coal smoke and the clopping of hooves on cobblestones and the fog.The fog.The fog—But this darkness was different.The fog outside his open window smelt different, tasted different.The air was so much cleaner.He could smell shite, and coal-gas, but the breeze beneath that had a smell which made no sense to him whatsoever.Above the window, most of the smoke was gone from the puffy blue-white cumulus clouds.Even the sky made no sense.It was too blue, blue as cobalt glass, bright as a hateful operating-theatre where there were always slop-buckets of guts to cart to the incinerator, nurses with mobcaps and round arses and skin as pale as cream…Green girls, all, within, who nonetheless scowled at him as though they knew.And the damned sniping doctors he could have been, once, whose looks were far more imperious, their every order barked at their little resurrection-man with a mop, their whipped Quasimodo who nightly quaffed the same Nepenthe that got him there in the first place.“It were the drink that did for you,” Mollie and Mum always said, but Mum was long in her grave from the bad heart she had, and Mollie was—Oh, but his head was coming undone, or perhaps fusing back together in this refiner’s fire that crawled along the scar from within.This healing, healing itch where there’d but been a rift.A rip.In his sour-milk-sweat-stained undershirt and the drawers to a set of long-handles, all stinking of whisky, he trembled out of bed and put his head out the window.“Better,” he rasped, breathing that clean, clean breeze that tasted of little he knew.He was in a long block, by the look, with many other windows like his above and below.Most were shut.Occasionally, one was propped open with a pine board or a piece of lath.There was snow in the air.He could smell opium sweet as perfume, and tsa tsui cooking someplace.“I’m in Piccadilly, most like,” he mumbled as the headache took his eyes and he rubbed them, backing away.“Cor.How long’s it… How long’s it been? Needs must, I s’pose, but… What kind of piss I been out on, t’come to’n such a state?”But he knew everything he was mumbling was wrong.It was the fog that told him, the air, the sky… and the cold, cold room.More than that, it was the other occupant of the bed.A woman.A woman.He shuddered.No woman had fouled his bed, not since Memory permitted.But Memory was slowly permitting now.Not since Mollie went off her head and tried to do for me, all that time ago, the dirty bitch.His lower lip trembled.All that time ago, when I was still me.Before me own blushing bride took me own razor to my… to my… When I was sleeping, she…His hand dropped to the other scar, and the damage there.The incomplete damage that still half-worked.She were mad, Mollie were.I were never no whoremonger.Never done what she said, what she shrieked, before I bent her wrist back and took back me razor and I—“Nnnn,” said the skinny whore in his bed, turning over and wrapping herself in the whole lot of the bedclothes, now that he was out of bed.Blonde locks rustled on her bare, tattooed shoulderblades.He saw a face tattooed on the right one, that looked of heathen Indian design, like a totem-pole, and something that could have been a mermaid, an angel or a demon in the dim light, crawling down the slattern’s arm.He could smell rut in the room, and it made him sick.Not opium, not absinthe, not morphine.Nowt could’ha’ caused this thing to be.She’s a woman, for one thing, no rent-boy I take and use and send away.Could never make it wi’no woman, even if I wanted to.Can’t even make it wi’the rent-boys, half the time, like, but…The thought was gone.That window’d had frost on the outer sill, he remembered, and trembled back to shut it.I never knew she was expecting, when I did for her.Mad and maybe a month along, and what expecting mother ain’t a little bit mad? What’s done is done, but if I’m damned then by God I’ll have my Day of Judgement, I—CRASH [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]