For the first time Major Nye noticed that the two heavy, somewhat overdressed men, were sweating.
He felt grateful to them and a little proud that at his age he could still fetch a good price.
The limelight fell on Jerry stepping to the front of the stage to reprise his tribute to Joey Grimaldi:
“Lastly, be jolly, be alive, be light,
Twitch, flirt and caper, tumble, fall and throw,
Grow up right ugly in thy father’s sight,
And be an ‘absolute Joseph,’ like old Joe.”
KATRINA, KATRINA!
It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was the faith that was abused? They were among the most noble instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamor.
—Winston Churchill to Parliament, November 12, 1940
1.WHY YOU SHOULD FEAR PRESIDENT GIULIANI
Parts of rural China are seeing a burgeoning market for female corpses, the result of the reappearance of a strange custom called “ghost marriages.” Chinese tradition demands that husbands and wives always share a grave. Sometimes when a man died unmarried, his parents would procure the body of a woman, hold a “wedding” and bury the couple together.
—The Economist, July 28, 2007
“THERE ARE NO more sanctuaries, m’sieur. You are probably too young even to dream of such things. But I grew up with the idea that, I don’t know, you could retire to a little cottage in the country or find a deserted beach somewhere or a cabin in the mountains. Now we’re lucky if we can get an apartment in Nice, enough equity in it to pay for the extra healthcare we’ll need.” Monsieur Pardon stood upright in the barge as it emerged from under the bridge on Canal St. Martin. “And we French increasingly have to find jobs overseas. Who knows? Am I destined for a condo in Florida? This is my stop. I live in rue Oberkampf. And you?”
“This will do for me, too.” Jerry got ready to disembark. “How long have you lived in Paris?”
“Only for a couple of years. Before that I was a professional autoharp player in Nantes. But the work dried up. I’m currently looking for a job.”
They had reached the bank and stood together beside a newspaper kiosk. Jerry took down a copy of The Herald Tribune and paid with a three-euro piece.
“You seem lost, m’sieu. Can I help?”
“Thank you. I’m just trying to follow a story. I wonder. May I ask? What makes you cry, M. Pardon?”
The neatly dressed rather serious young man fingered his waxed moustache. He looked down at his pale grey suit, patting his pockets. “Eh?”
“Well, for instance, I cry at almost any example of empathy I encounter. Pretty much any observation of sympathetic imagination. And music. I cry in response to music. Or a generous act. Or a sentimental movie.”
M. Pardon smiled. “Well, yes. I am a terrible sentimentalist. I cry, I suppose, when I hear of some evil deed. Or an innocent soul suffering some terrible misfortune.”
Jerry nodded, almost to himself. “I understand.”
Together, they turned the corner in Rue Oberkampf.
“So it is imagination that moves you to tears?”
“Not exactly. Some forms of imagination merely bore me.”
2. SOUTH RAMPART STREET PARADE
Presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani recently fumbled one of the dumbest questions asked since “boxers or briefs?” Campaigning in Alabama, he was asked, “What is the price of a gallon of milk?” He was off by a buck or two, thus failing a tiresome common-citizen test. But far more important questions need to be posed. Let’s start with asking our future leaders about how affordable PCs, broadband internet connectivity, and other information technologies are transforming the lives of every American.
—Dan Costa, PC Magazine, August 7, 2007
“ANGRY, MR. CORNELIUS?” Miss Brunner unpacked her case. Reluctantly, he had brought her from St. Pancras. Mist was still lifting from St. James’s Park. He stood by the window, trying to identify a duck. From this height, it was difficult.
“I’m never angry.” He turned as she was hanging a piece of complicated lingerie on a hanger. “You know me.”
“A man of action.”
“If nothing else.” He grew aware of a smell he didn’t like. Anaesthetic? Some sort of spray? Was it coming from her case?
“When did you arrive?”
“You met me at Eurostar.”
“I meant in Paris. From New Orleans?” That was it. The perfume used to disguise the smell of mould. Her clothes had that specific iridescence. They’d been looted.
“Saks,” he said.
“You can’t see the label from there, can you? You wouldn’t believe how cheap they were.”
“Laissez les bon temps roulez.” Jerry had begun to cheer up.
“I’m so tired of the English.”
3. POMPIER PARIS
Meet TOPIO.3, the ping-pong playing robot. Made by Vietnam’s first ever robotics firm, TOSY the bipedal hu-manoid uses two 200-fps cameras to detect the ball …
—Popular Science, March 2010
“HOT ENOUGH FOR YOU? Everyone’s leaving for the country.” Jerry and Bishop Beesley disembarked from the taxi at the corner of Elgin Crescent and Portobello Road. All the old familiar shops were gone. The pubs had become wine bars andrestaurants. Tables and chairs stood outside fake bistros stretching into the middle distance. The fruit and veg on the market stalls had the look of mock organics. Heritage tomatoes. The air was filled with braying aggression. If the heat got any worse there might be a Whiteshirt riot. Jerry could imagine nothing worse than watching the nouveaux riches taking it out on what remained of the anciens pauvres. The people in the council flats must be getting nervous.
“Après moi, le frisson nouveau.”
“Do what?” Bishop Beesley was distracted. He had spotted one of his former parishioners stumbling dazedly out of Finch’s. The poor bugger had tripped into a timewarp but brightened when he saw the bishop. Sidling up, he mumbled a familiar mantra and forced a handful of old fivers into Beesley’s sweating fist. Reluctantly, the bishop took something from under his surplice in exchange. Watching the decrepit speed freak stumble away, he said apologetically, “They’re still my flock. But of course there’s been a massive falling off compared to the numbers I used to serve. Once, you could rely on an active congregation west of Portobello, but these days everything left is mostly in Kilburn. Not my parish, you see.”
Jerry whistled sympathetically.
Beesley stopped to admire one of the newly decorated stalls. The owner, wearing a fresh white overall and a pearly cap, recognized him. “You lost weight, your worship?”
“Sadly …” The bishop fingered the stock. “I’ve never seen brussels as big.”
“Bugger me.” Jerry stared in astonishment at a fawn bottom rolling towards Colville Terrace. Who needed jodhpurs and green wellies to drive a Range Rover to the Ladbroke Grove Sainsbury’s? “Trixie?” Wasn’t it Miss Brunner’s little girl, all grown up? Distracted, Jerry looked for a hand of long branches that used to hide a sign he remembered on the other side of the Midland Bank. The bank was now an HSBC. Who on earth would want to erase his childhood? He remembered how he used to have a thing against the past. Maybe it was generational.
“Are you okay?” His hand moving restlessly in his pocket, Bishop Beesley looked yearningly across the road at a new sweet and tobacconists called Yummy Puffs. “Would you mind?”
Jerry watched him cross the road and emerge shortly afterwards with his arms full of bags of M&Ms. Where, he wondered absently, were the chocolate bars of yesterday? The Five Boys? He could taste the Fry’s peppermint cream on his tongue. Dairy Milk. Those Quakers had
known how to make chocolate. As a lad he had wondered why the old Underground vending machines, the Terry’s, the Rowntree’s, the Cadbury’s, were always empty, painted up, like poorly made props meant only to be glimpsed as the backgrounds of Ealing comedies. The heavy cast-iron machines had been sprayed post office red or municipal green, and there was nothing behind the glass panels, no way of opening the sliding dispensers. They had slots for pennies. Signs calling for 2d. They had been empty since the war, he learned from his mum. When chocolate had been rationed and prices had risen. Yet the machines had remained on tube train platforms well into the late 1950s, awaiting new hope; serving to make the Underground mysterious, a tunnel into the past, a labyrinth of memory, where people had once sought sanctuary from bombs. Escalators to heaven and hell. The trains, the ticket machines, the vast escalators, the massive lift cages had all functioned as well as they ever had, but the chocolate machines had become museum pieces, offering a clue to a certain state of mind, a stoicism that perceived them as mere self-indulgence, at odds with the serious business of survival. Not even the most beautiful, desirable machines survived such Puritanism. How many times as a little boy had he hoped that one sharp kick would reward him with an Aero bar, or even a couple of overlooked pennies? And then one day, in the name of modernization, they were carried off, never to be replaced. It was just as well. They had vanished before they could be turned into nostalgic features.
Brands meant familiarity and familiarity meant repeated experience and repetition meant security. Once. Now Londoners had achieved the semblance of security, at the very momentwhen real protection from the fruits of their greed was needed. The Underground had been a false shelter, too, of course. They had poured down there to avoid the bombs, to be drowned and buried. Yet he had loved the atmosphere, the friendship, as he had played with his toy AA gun, his little battery-powered searchlight hunting the dusty arches for a miniature enemy. Portobello began to fill with the yap of colons settling their laptops and unfolding their Independents, pushing up their sweater sleeves as they sauntered into the pubs, as familiar with their favourite spots as the Germans who had so affectionately occupied Paris.
“They defeated the Underground,” Jerry said. “Captured our most potent memories and converted them to cashpoints. They’re blowing up everything they don’t like. And anything they don’t understand, they don’t like.”
Beesley was looking at him with a certain concern, his lower face pasted with chocolate so that he resembled some Afghan commando. With a plump, dainty finger he dabbed at the corner of his mouth. “Ready?”
Mournfully, Jerry whistled the Marseillaise.
4. LES BOUDINS NOIRS
Blood-spurting martyrs, biblical parables, ascendant doves—most church windows feature the same preachy images that have awed parishioners for centuries. But a new stained-glass window in Germany’s Cologne Cathedral, to be completed in August, evokes technology and science, not religion and the divine.
—Wired, August 2007
“ARE YOU FAMILIAR with torture, Herr Cornelius?” Karen von Krupp hitched up her black leather miniskirt and adjusted his blindfold, but over the top he could still see her square, pink face, surrounded by its thick blonde perm, her peachy neck ascendingabove her swollen breasts. When she reached to pull the mask down he was grateful for the sudden blindness.
“How do you mean ‘familiar’?”
“Have you done much of it?”
“It depends a bit on how you define it.” He giggled as he heard her crack her little whip. “I used to be able to get into it. Between consenting adults. In more innocent days, you know.”
“Oh!” She seemed impatient. Frustrated. “Consent? You mean obedience? Obedient girls?”
Jerry was beginning to understand why he was back in her dentist chair after so many years. “It’s Poland all over again, isn’t it?”
He heard her light a cigarette, smelled the smoke. A Sullivan’s.
She said, “I believe I ask the questions.”
“And I respect your beliefs. Did you know that the largest number of immigrants to the U.S. were German? That’s why they love Christmas and why they have Easter bunnies, marching bands and think black cats are unlucky.” He settled into his bonds. It was going to be a long night.
“Of course. But now I want you to tell me something I don’t know.”
“I can still see some light.”
“We’ll soon put a stop to that.” Again, she cracked the whip.
“Are we on TV?”
“Should we be?”
“These days, everyone’s on TV. Even miners. And riggers. Don’t you watch the Guantánamo dailies? Or is it too boring?”
“We don’t have cable. Just remember this, Mr. Cornelius. There’s more than one way of gassing a canary.”
5. LES BOUDINS BLANCS
The railway from Nairobi to Mombasa is a Victorian relic. But it’s the best way to see Kenya.
—New Statesman, June 25, 2007
“I GOT THESE rules, see.” Shakey Mo looked carefully into the mirror. “That’s how I keep on top of things. You can’t survive, these days, without rules. Set yourself goals, yeah? Draw up a flow chart. A yearly planner. And then you stick to it. OK? Religiously. Rules is rules. It’s survival. It’s Mo’s survival, anyway.” He had begun talking about himself in the third person again. Jerry guessed he was in a bad way.
“Fun?” Jerry stared at the cabinets on the walls. He had to admit Mo kept a neat ship. Each cabinet held a different gun, with its clips, its ammunition, its instruction manual, the date it was acquired, whom it had shot and when.
“Clubbing,” Mo told him. “Whenever you get the chance. Blimey, Jerry, where have you been?”
“Rules.” Jerry wiped his lovely lips. “The jugged hare seemed a bit bland today. Out of season, maybe? Frozen?”
“There aren’t any seasons, these days, Jerry. Just seasoning. Man, you’re so retro!” Mo rearranged his hair again. He guffawed. “That’s the nineties for you. You need a more fashionable lexicon. You want au naturel, you gotta pay for it.”
“It wasn’t always like this.”
“We were young and stupid. We almost lost it. Went too far. That costs, if you’re lucky enough to survive. AIDS and the abolition of controlled rents. A high price to pay.”
Jerry regarded his shaking hands. “If this is the price of a misspent youth, I’ll take a dozen.”
Mo wasn’t listening. He had found still another reflection. “I think Mo needs a new stylist.”
6. HOW TO DEAL WITH A SHRINKING POPULATION
There’s a lot of hot air wafting around the Venice Biennale. But one thing is for sure: the art world can party.
—New Statesman, June 25, 2007
“HI, HI, AMERICAN pie chart.” Jerry sniffed. A miasma was creeping across the world. He’d read about it, heard about it, been warned about it. A cloud born of the dreadful dust of conflict, greed, and power addiction, according to old Major Nye. It rose from Auschwitz, London, Hiroshima, Seoul, Jerusalem, Rwanda, New York, and Baghdad. But Jerry wasn’t sure. He remarked on it.
Max Pardon buttoned his elegant grey overcoat, nodding emphatically: “D’accord.” He resorted to his own language. “We inhale the dust of the dead with every breath. The deeper the breath, the greater the number of others’ memories we take to ourselves. Those wind-borne lives bring horror into our hearts, and every dream we have, every anxiety we feel, is a result of all those fires, all those explosions, all those devastations. Out of that miasma shapes are formed. Those shapes achieve substance resembling bone, blood, flesh, and skin, creating monsters, some of them in human form.
“That was how monsters procreated in the heat and destruction of Dachau, the Blitz and the Gaza strip; from massive bombs dropped on the innocent; from massacre and the thick, oily smoke of burning flesh. The miasma accumulated mass as more bombs were dropped and bodies burned. The monsters created from this mass, born of shed blood and human fright, bestrode the
ruins of our sanctuaries and savoured our fear like connoisseurs: Here is the Belsen ‘44; taste the subtle flavours of a Kent State ‘68 or the nutty sweetness of an Abu Ghraib ‘05, the amusing lightness of a Madrid ‘04, a London ‘06. What good years they were! Perfect conditions. These New York ‘01s are so much more full-bodied than the Belfast ‘98s. The monsters sit at table, relishing their feast. They stink of satiation. Theirfarts expel the sucked-dry husks of human souls: Judge Dredd, Lord Horror, Stuporman. Praise the great miasma wherever it creeps. Into TV sets, computer games, the language of sport, of advertising. The language of politics, infected by the lexicon of war. The language of war wrapped up in the vocabularies of candy-salesmen, toilet sanitizers, room sprays. That filth on our feet isn’t dog shit. That city film on our skins is the physical manifestation of human greed. You feel it as soon as you smell New Orleans, Montgomery, or Biloxi.
“That whimpering you heard was the sound of cowards finding it harder and harder to discover sanctuary.
“Where can you hide? The Bahamas? Grand Cayman? The BVAs? The Isle of Man or Monaco? Not now that you’ve stopped burying treasure, melted the icebergs, called up the tsunamis and made the oceans rise. All that’s left is Switzerland with her melting glaciers and strengthened boundaries. The monsters respond by playing dead. This is their moment of weakness when they can be slain, but it takes a special hero to cut off their heads and dispose of their bodies so that they can’t rise again. Some Charlemagne, perhaps? Some doomed champion? There can be no sequels. Only remakes. Only remakes. But, because we have exhausted a few of the monsters, that doesn’t mean they no longer move amongst us, sampling our souls, watching us scamper in fear at the first signs of their return. We are thoroughly poisoned. We have inhaled the despairing dust of Burundi and Baghdad.”