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Bova, Ben Asteroiden Trilogie Asteroidenfeuer
Ben Patterson [Living on the Living in Freefall (epub)
Bova Ben Droga przez uklad sl Wschod ksiezyca
Ben Bova [Grand Tour Privat Empire Builders (epub)
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Droga przez uklad sloneczny #10 Ben Bova
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Droga przez uklad sloneczny #01 Ben Bova
Droga przez uklad sloneczny #05 Ben Bova
Ben Galley [Scarlet Star 01] Bloodrush (epub)

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.I looked at them.They were like two old inosculated trees: different stock but rooted in the same ground, until the branches and trunks had curled and conjoined, then grafted together.I wondered what kind of axe it would take to split them.We turned to go.‘Back in a few minutes, Dad,’ I said.As we padded towards the lift, my mum said, ‘Do you think there’s a little shop down by the entrance?’‘Possibly.I didn’t notice one though.’‘Do you think there’s an off-licence?’‘Not in a hospital, Mum, no.’We walked on in silence.Every brief trip out in someone’s car dangled the slender possibility of a half-bottle.Downstairs we stood by the doors waiting for Roly to pull up.People came and went.‘So strange,’ she pondered.‘Having him in here.’There was a pause.I felt a clot of sympathy rise in my throat, but she carried on before I could reply,‘.among these awful people.’I stared straight ahead.The theatrically snobbish ennui chimed loud and familiar – languid, affected, dismissive, unlikeable – born of a deeper dissatisfaction I’d heard in her for years, a perceived sense of injustice swollen with time.She resented the moment not because she really found the circumstances repellent but because of how they hampered her, as if today had been just one more unfair cross for her to bear.I wondered – not for the first time – where it all came from, what she thought she was still owed, what had caused her such disappointment, and what brought it to the front of her mind, even now, with her own husband in a hospital bed upstairs, with them both in need of each other as never before.Did she still see her tragedy as the greater? Was this still her scene? I looked out towards the car park and wished she’d made peace with it all years ago.Or toughened up, or something.Roly arrived.I helped her into the car.‘Bye, then, Mum.’She turned on a smile, gave a royal wave through the window, and they were gone.Back upstairs my dad was still awake.I stroked his dry white hair again for a while.I was conscious of only being able to do such a thing unselfconsciously since I’d had kids of my own.The selfless affectionate act seemed to be part of being a parent, part of stepping to one side and putting someone else in the place of importance, of no longer always having to be at the heart of your own life all the time.With me, it also came from being used to hospitals now; I’d spent a long time in one of them in 1992.I recognised the equipment.I wasn’t alarmed by the drips and drains and the sugary smell of illness.I had no urge to walk away the moment I stepped on to the ward.I knew the value of the warmth of human contact.‘You are a kind boy,’ he said as I was leaving.Later, I caught the train home, and, as it hurtled through the landscape, past the flashing trees, the blankets of wheat, the sheep walking slowly on the hillsides, I wondered if it would be the last thing that I’d ever hear him say to me.Chapter 2Five years earlier, the first week of July 2001 had been hot and thundery.Headache weather.My mum and dad were living in Oxford, where they’d been since selling the family home in Barnes in south-west London at the end of the eighties.My dad was seventy-five.He’d smoked a packet of twenty cigarettes a day without filters for fifty years until he was nearly seventy, and was now spending most of his time sitting in a green leather armchair overlooking a nondescript urban stretch of the river with an oxygen tank within easy reach.His bed had been moved into a room on the same floor and he hadn’t used the stairs in weeks.When he coughed, it was a condensed and heavy sound.His doctor had him on asthma inhalers; it sounded worse than that to me.‘Your father’s low,’ my mum would say.‘Not a word all day.’ Some mornings he wouldn’t even get up, or returned to his bed after only a couple of hours – twenty-seven shuffling footsteps from his armchair – like a sick dog to its basket.My mum was seventy-six.Robust yet weary.‘We can’t go on like this,’ she said bleakly on the phone to me one evening.‘Well, he can, but I can’t.’I knew we were at a fork in the road [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]