Clown Town полностью

. . . but the unexpected happened, because the unexpected always does, and on this occasion it arrived in a storm of light which poleaxed the gunman, sending his weapon Catherine-wheeling across the floor towards the old man to Louisa’s left, who scooped it up and aimed it in one motion, and never jump on an armed man, that was an instruction learned on the mats at Regent’s Park, never jump on an armed man because bullets can go anywhere, but she jumped anyway, catching him hip height and spilling him just as he fired, and then she was on top of him, and he wasn’t fighting back but she had to be sure he wouldn’t start so she punched him quickly in the face, which wasn’t where she’d thought she’d ever be—punching a senior citizen—but you don’t write your own story, you’re propelled by it, and she was levering herself upright when it was her turn to be side slammed, leaving her on all fours, though the assault was quieter than hers had been, more subtle, and the woman who’d been sent sprawling by Judd moments ago was looking down on her, something dripping in her hand, but she wasn’t there long before River was there instead, saying Louisa’s name, panic in his voice which didn’t seem necessary because panic was for when you didn’t know what was happening, for when you were coming adrift, and she felt strangely anchored to the here and now, knowing what her story held in store, it held in store what all stories hold; what it holds in store is an ending.

Ash lay staring at the ceiling, which was far away, aware, as she hadn’t been a moment ago, of how cold she was, and also how hot; the two states existing side by side, which felt unlikely. She should call her mother—she was bound to have an explanation, or, failing that, an opinion. But as the clamour around her grew, as people knelt and shouted and generally filled the club with the kinds of noise that suggested the evening had taken a bad turn, and as doors slammed and lights went on and off, it became troublingly apparent to her that her phone was nowhere to hand.

I must have dropped it somewhere, she thought, and closed her eyes.

St. Leonard’s, as has been noted before, puts on a lovely funeral. Then again, it’s had practice. Funerals are its speciality, or at any rate, occur with more frequency than other services, which are advertised at distant intervals and cancelled at near notice; and while the doors of this discreet brick building in a quiet corner of Hampstead are always open in the figurative sense—or so the flyers decorating its porch assert—they are, in a more literal manner, generally locked, though directions to less inaccessible places of worship are included among the ephemera on its noticeboards. To the majority of local residents this is simply the way things are, and while it is cheerfully acknowledged that St. Len’s is the Spooks’ Chapel, the name rarely triggers more than a knowing look and the occasional titbit, delivered as tradecraft—for example, that the plaques on the east wall, memorialising the unflamboyant dead, are tributes to fallen spies. Legend and rumour, of course, and if these particular legends and rumours are true, this barely matters in an age where the difference between the true and the false is held by many to be a matter of opinion.

That afternoon, the day after the rumpus at Nob-Nobs, there was no funeral. The doors were closed. Behind the church, where a small, immaculately tended graveyard could be found, trees were dripping. Unexpected clouds had gathered early over London, calling time on the heatwave, and rain had fallen in its least attractive manner, forswearing squalls and bluster and settling for the mediocrity of the time-server everywhere: steady, uninspired, looking only to get through the next half hour. And each half hour followed the last, and in turn gave way to another.

In the graveyard, on a bench near a matching pair of headstones, sat a bulky man in a raincoat that might have been recycled from a chimp’s hammock. He was smoking, or at any rate holding a cigarette, though his thoughts seemed elsewhere. A hat which looked as if it had been buried with a fisherman then dug up by a tramp was keeping his head dry, but his shoes were failing to do the same for his feet: The upper of the left was peeling from the sole, leaving a piece of duct tape poking out. A picture of desolation, in fact, or would have been, had its subject given the impression that he cared.