Archiwum
- Index
- LA Banks Crimson Moon 02 Bite the Bullet
- Jack Kerouac On the Road
- Iain Banks Culture 01 Cons
- 2 Living Dead in Dallas
- Cathryn Fox Knocking On Demon's Door (pdf)
- 083 Pan Czarnej Rzeki
- Krauss Lawrence M. Fizyka podróśźy mić™dzygwiezdnych
- Laurie King Mary Russel 08 Locked Rooms
- Jump Shirley Cztery dni szcz晜›cia
- Zajdel Janusz Prawo do powrotu (pdf)
- zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- aeie.pev.pl
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regime, their jeans weren't any better or any cheaper than anybody else's, but
he had the garments made in odd sizes; waists of 29, 31, 33 inches, and so on,
as opposed to the products from all other companies, domestic and foreign,
which tended to favour the even numbers.
It was one of those brilliantly simple ideas people always wish they had had
themselves, and believe that somehow they could have had; no need to incur any
extra expense or make any more sizes than anybody else, or necessarily to
distinguish one's product in other way, yet just by the idea one has a
potential market of half the jeans-buying public, or at least that proportion
of it which has always felt that they are somehow perpetually between the
usual sizes.
I vaguely remember dreaming about Verity's jeans that night; how graphically,
geographically tight they were and how wonderful it must be to take them off
her. Then I imagined Lewis, boots tied round his neck, for some reason
suddenly resembling Shane MacGowan, skinning her jeans off, not me, and he
turned into Rodney Ritchie, at home with his parents, unpicking the individual
stitches of her jeans with a tiny knife, and the Ritchies all wore
badly-fitting jeans and had denim curtains and denim carpets and denim light
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shades and denim wallpaper with the little rivets left on like poppers so you
could just press paintings and photos onto the wall. . . except that
Mr Ritchie looked like Claude Lévi-Strauss, which is when I think I started to
get confused.
*
Either I had been put to bed, I thought, as I woke up next morning, in the wee
cold room at the top of the house, or my standard drunk-person's on-board
auto-pilot facility was improving with experience. I bathed, dressed, and
broke my fast with some left-overs from the fridge, a pint of water and a
couple of brace of Paracetamol, all without encountering anybody else in the
house. It was only eight o'clock; obviously I'd conked out some time before
everybody else, and they were still asleep (I had heard appropriate
log-sawing-like noises coming from Hamish and Tone's room on my way back from
the bathroom). The day looked bright but cold; I laced up the Docs and went
for a walk in the hills behind Gallanach.
I felt like shit and I was trying so hard not to think of Lewis and Verity
that I couldn't think about anything else, but the day was fabulous; clear and
cold, the sky crystal blue and reflecting in the waters of hill-cupped lochans
and the glinting length of Loch Add. On such days the hills hold a mixture of
azure and gold never seen at any other time of year; the cobalt sky is more
intense than it ever is in summer, and the straw-coloured hills shine strong
in the light from the low winter sun. Against the shifting mirror that is the
surface of a loch, the colours
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and dance; they take your breath away, and - for a brief, relieving while -
they can even take your thoughts away.
Up in the hills, at the place of marching water, I found Ashley Watt and one
of her more exotic cousins.
The concrete spillway below the Loch Add reservoir comes down to a stepped
slope above the confluence of several small burns draining nearby slopes. A
short bridge carries the track over the spillway, and that was where Ashley
and Aline were sitting, legs dangling over the stream in the concrete gully,
arms resting on the lower bar of the bridge rails.
They were sitting side by side, watching the marching water. What happened was
that the water first backed up behind the lipped edge of the top step, then
over-flowed, and spilled with increasing force, in a sort of
hydro-chain-reaction, down each subsequent step to the bottom of the channel.
There followed a period of comparative quiet, while the water built up again
behind the top step and those beneath. You might guess it was my dad who first
pointed out this odd (and classically Chaotic) phenomenon and brought it to
the attention of us kids. None of us had ever been able to discover whether it
was a deliberate effect, or the result of pure chance. Whatever, it was
wonderfully restful, unpredictable and therapeutic.
'Hey, Prentice,' Ash said. She looked a little worn and bleary-eyed, though
her long, lion-
coloured hair shone like health itself in the brassy sunlight of mid-day.
'Hi.' I nodded to her and to Aline, who was Franco-Vietnamese and engaged to
Hugh Watt, one of
Ashley's multitudinous cousins from the branch of the family that seemed to
favour consorts of an exotic provenance (Hugh's brother Craig was going out
with a stunning, lanky Nigerian called
Noor). Aline looked even smaller and blacker-haired than usual, beside Ashley.
'Aline; ça va?'
'Magic, Prentice,' Aline replied in fluent Glaswegian.
'Have some skoosh,' Ash said as I sat down next to her. She reached between
her and Aline and handed me a half-finished bottle of Irn-Bru. I had, over the
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course of the morning, already gulped down about a gallon of teeth-achingly
cold stream-water at various points up in the hills, but the traditional
Scottish hangover treatment was probably just what I needed. I took a couple
of mouthfuls, handed the bottle back, wiping my lips.
'You look terrible,' Ash said.
'Feel worse,' I said glumly, watching the water cascade down the concrete
stair-case of the spillway.
'Lost track of you at the Urvills' party, Prentice,' Ashley said. 'You just
slope off, or did you get a lumber?'
'Oh God,' I moaned, and lowered my head to the cool steel pipe of the bridge
rail.
'Hey . . . ' Ash said gently, putting her hand on my head and patting me.
'There there, Prentice ma man. What's the matter?'
'Oh, nothing much,' I sighed, slowly raising my head again and gazing at the
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