Stories

Начало книги

THIS IS THE STORY OF MY FRIEND Rex Fisch who blew out his complicated brains in his Lake District library all over his damned books one Sunday afternoon last September. Naturally the place was a horror to clean, but Rex never really cared much about the mess he left in his wake. What pissed me off was the waste: each blasted cell was a story he’d never tell; a story no one else would ever tell. Rex knew how to hurt himself and the old friends who loved him. Only a few of us are now left. Cancer took Hawthorn, Hayley, Slade and Allard that same year. The first three had shared digs with Rex when he first lived in London. It didn’t seem fair of the bastard to deliberately deplete what remained of our joint memory.

As I said at his funeral Rex had more fiction in him than could ever come out, no matter how long he’d lived. A superb raconteur, he produced stories in every form, from dry, funny narrative verse to self-dramatising social lies. Novels, plays, short stories, comic strips, operas, movies, RPGs: throughout his career he was never stuck for a narrative. In that respect we were pretty much alike and shared a kind of discomfort at our own facility. We both identified with Balzac, sharing a fascination for Jacques Collin, his sinister and ubiquitous many-named master villain who set out to ruin La Torpille in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. Rex discovered that most people prefer a good story and a bit of conventional prejudice to honest ambiguity; they made their most profound life decisions based on tales they saw in the tabloids or on reality TV. That didn’t stop Rex telling the truth when it frequently occurred to him. Truth was always in there somewhere, even when he thought he was lying.

Читать дальше →