Kraken читать онлайн

summer brings out the weirdos,” Billy had said to his friend Leon, a few nights back, as they drank at a Thames pub. “Someone came in all Starfleet badges today. Not on my shift, sadly.”“Fascist,” Leon had said. “Why are you so prejudiced against nerds?”“Please,” Billy said. “That would be a bit self-hating, wouldn’t it?”“Yeah, but you pass. You’re like, you’re in deep cover,” Leon said. “You can sneak out of the nerd ghetto and hide the badge and bring back food and clothes and word of the outside world.”“Mmm, tasteful.”“Alright,” Billy said as colleagues passed him. “Kath,” he said to an ichthyologist; “Brendan,” to another curator, who answered him, “Alright Tubular?”“Onward please,” said Billy. “And don’t worry, we’re getting to the good stuff.”Tubular? Billy could see one or two of his escortees wondering if they had misheard.The nickname resulted from a drinking session in Liverpool with colleagues, back in his first year at the centre. It was the annual conference of the professional curatorial society. After a day of talks on methodologies and histories of preservation, on museum schemes and the politics of display, the evening’s wind-down had started with polite how-did-you-get-into-this?, turned into everyone at the bar one by one talking about their childhoods, these meanderings, in boozy turn, becoming a session of what someone had christened Biography Bluff. Everyone had to cite some supposedly extravagant fact about themselves-they once ate a slug, they’d been part of a foursome, they tried to burn their school down, and so on-the truth of which the others would then brayingly debate.Billy had straight-faced claimed that he had been the result of the world’s first-ever successful in vitro fertilisation, but