Читать онлайн «Even the Dogs»
Автор Джон Макгрегор
Even the Dogs
Jon McGregor
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published by Bloomsbury in 2010
This eBook published by 4th Estate in 2017
Copyright © 2010 by Jon McGregor
Jon McGregor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008218713
Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008218720
Version: 2016-12-08
To Alice
Cut off from hope, we live on in desire.
– Dante Alighieri, The Inferno
Contents
Copyright
Read an exclusive extract from Jon McGregor’s new novel,
By the Same Author
About the Publisher
They break down the door at the end of December and carry the body away.
The air is cold and vice-like, the sky a scouring steel-eyed blue, the trees bleached bone-white in the frosted light of the sun. We stand in a huddle by the bolted door.
The street looks quiet, from here. Steam billows and sighs from a central-heating flue. A television flickers in a room next door. Someone hammers at a fencing post on the far side of the playing fields behind the flats.
An overflow pipe with a fat lip of melting ice drips on to the walkway from three floors up, the water pooling and freezing in the shade of a low brick wall.
Cars drive past, from time to time, their windows fogged and their engines straining against the cold.
We see someone getting out of a taxi parked further up the hill. She leaves the door open, and we see two carrier bags stuffed full of clothes and books and make-up on the back seat.
She comes up the short flight of steps, and bangs on the door. This is Laura. She shouts through the letterbox. She gestures for the taxi-driver to wait, and goes round to the side of the building. We see her climbing on to a garage roof and in through the kitchen window of the flat. She stands in the kitchen for a few moments. She looks like she’s talking to someone. She climbs out again, drops down from the garage roof, and gets back into the taxi.Later, in the evening of the same day or the day after that, with the other flats glowing yellow and blue from behind thin curtains and pinned-up sheets, we see Mike scrambling up on to the garage roof. We hear shouting, and something being broken. We see Ben, running down the hill towards town.
