Link Arms with Toads! (6 page)

Mondrian understands the terrible irony. His hunch was right: there really are other dimensions, with rival Spice Centres and Khormanauts. A ridiculous oversight on his part! It is the convergence of these diners, these menu-explorers, which keep the establishments viable. By seeking a reason for the existence of so many restaurants, the parallel spicemen provide that reason. Never has a self-fulfilling process stuffed his mind’s belly with such insubstantial provender. “Our fault!” he bellows, struggling to disengage from the waiter.

At last, as the warmth of the ovens starts to baste his brow, he is alerted to his precarious situation. He releases the safety catch on his yoghurt tank and clasps the nozzle. “The glare is too bright. I’m unable to aim accurately. I require assistance! Which way?” Placing his cracked lips close to Mondrian’s lobe, the waiter hisses: “South!” The spiceman is bemused. He knows that there simply are no directions in Spice. “When you travel on down toward the ovens,” the waiter replies, “and food gets yellow and hot and creamy, then you’re going in one direction only.” The phantoms are pushing aside their plates.

Mondrian sees a future removed from them by the merest Naan: curry is a black-beaned meal where taste drowns its speech and kisses. Cream a big cream, but spice snuffs it out before it is half down your throat. Gourmets curry, coriander in a flaming matchbox; the dinner is dripping lava, gushing sweetcorn, nothing! In desperation, the Khormanaut presses the lever on his tank. He hates anything to do with south; north is his favourite direction. The retro-blast of the yoghurt should propel him to safety, but the nozzle sputters ludicrously: the tank is empty! With the fatalism of a dishwasher, he sends another desperate message to Mission Control: “Greenwich, cheque please.”

They are approaching the chutney-horizon, the boundary between the world of forks and that of cleavers. For the first time, he is aware of other Mission Controls, huddled next to his own. And now the ghosts are busy making their own communications — “Euston, we have a problem!” “Can you read me, Cape Kennington?” “Hampstead, kindly advise!” Mondrian commends his soul to Sydney Cradle and mumbles a prayer. As he does so, the other solid patron in the restaurant activates his own yoghurt tank and blasts from his table, intercepting the helpless pair. He clutches them round the waist and unstraps Mondrian’s useless tank.

Mondrian gasps. “Nascent Nosegay!” His old enemy has come to rescue him. As the empty tank is drawn through the double-doors and flashes out of existence, the spicemen lock eyes. Nascent’s breath smells sweet; he has obviously changed his diet. While Mondrian ponders this development, Nascent straps his spurting tank to his chest. “Not enough power for all of us,” he explains. “Don’t grieve for me!” Mondrian demands to know the recipe of this self-sacrifice.

Kicking himself away into Spice, tumbling like a drunkard, Nascent shouts: “I sabotaged your tank! I wanted you to perish! But when we collided after Vespas, our fruit got mixed up. You received one of my Schopenhauerian kumquats; it made you bold enough to risk a Vindaloo. I gnawed on a notion of goodness, which gave me a conscience. It then became imperative to precede you here.”

Mondrian weeps, partly from grief and partly from steam. Now he has the reason for Nascent’s absence at his launch. The yoghurt tank rapidly carries them away from Nascent’s floundering form. To be saved by such a glib fellow! As Nascent vanishes over the chutney-horizon, he closes his eyes. His scream is as brief as the protest of pounded cumin. The scared waiter sees Mondrian’s original table; when they pass near, he leaps for it and clings to the tablecloth. This reduction in mass accelerates the Khormanaut to a frightful velocity; he works the controlling valve, but it is jammed. He is unable to arrest his motion as he steers through the tables for the plate glass re-entry window. Mission Control flee in all directions as he connects horribly…

He wakes to find himself in his bed at the Spice Centre, swathed in bandages. He is quite alone; but he can hear muted voices emanating from the common room. Throwing back the sheets, he climbs to his feet and out the door. The stairs make few allowances for his condition; by the time he reaches the bottom, the conversation has stopped. Weiner glances up as he enters the room. Mondrian blushes. “I’ve made a complete phaal of myself,” he mutters. Weiner nods in agreement. The spiceman rotates his splinted thumbs. “How long have I been unconscious? I’ve got a stereo to demonstrate. I mustn’t be late.”

Weiner chuckles. “That was weeks ago. You’ve lost your job with the company. Ancient Electronics Ltd don’t want you. I’ve taken your place. I was working for them anyway. Old Speckled Henrietta and myself have a thing between us. It’s not a growing concern, though.” At this news, the Khormanaut wipes his cheeks with his plaster sleeves. “Don’t cry!” snaps his superior. “You must have known she was unfaithful. I dropped enough hints to that effect. I told you I was allergic to lager. Old Speckled Henrietta is dark and full bodied.” He licks his lips. “She’s using me to pick up gold coins with a magnet…”

Mondrian slumps in a chair under his portrait. Weiner ignores him and growls into the picture’s ear. “You destroyed Nascent! You set back the Biryani program by a decade! But we’re not finished with you. We discovered another restaurant this morning. The biggest yet.” Lifting the portrait, he carries it to a window. “Look up there! Seems a colony of spicemen have been living on that crescent since classical times. They finally decided to open a curry house. We’ll get you to it before prices go up. We’re converting the moped, adding wings, a pressurised cabin.” The real Mondrian lumbers over and squints into the lunar glow, soft as ghee. He silently mouths the question, “The name?” With a sneer, Weiner whispers it to the picture, but not to him.

(1996)

Lunarhampton

(i)

The city was tugging at her elbow.

It felt like that, as if the fumes, litter and rain were conspiring to irritate her. She liked cities, but this one mistrusted her. Flyovers clapped hands above, falling away in exhausted parabolas, shadowing her car but doing nothing to keep the elements at bay. The convertible was a bad idea, she realised, as she changed lanes to avoid an ancient tanker, windows tinted like a blind man’s glasses, which kicked up whole puddles of oily water to baptise her anew.

On the edge of her vision, she was aware of addicts skulking in the shadows of tenements, needles catching her headlamps and signalling like heliographs. Was there substance in these messages, ironic insights from beings who closed down veins like television channels? She passed a huddle of towers and a figure lurched onto the road before her, syringe impaled in a wrist, clutching something in a clawed hand. He seemed to tread on the pools, feet gripping the surface tension. Swerving to avoid him, catching his disappointed wail, Melissa Sting wondered if this was not a junky but a patient from some eviscerated asylum, saturated with so much lithium he was lighter than water.

In her mirror, she watched the man dance between the vehicles. His movements were jerky as he lunged at speeding windscreens. With a start, she recognised his weapon as a sponge: he was a squeegee merchant. She awaited the collision with an abstract pity, but it did not come; he was too agile. Soon her view was blocked by other drivers: a sedan attempted to overtake her on the inside, losing its exhaust as it glanced off the safety barriers. Brown smoke merged with the drizzle and was beaten into dead rainbows in the choked gutter. A second car struck the exhaust and flipped it into the air. It curved over Melissa and landed on the grassy embankment between pavement and road.

A depression, the first of the day, enveloped her as she approached the city centre. It was nearly noon, but still dark. Though this was her first visit to Birmingham, myths of its soullessness had filtered into her sceptical consciousness. Now she had to acknowledge the truth of the stories. The environment was self-parodic, and thus essentially baroque, with tangled junctions crumbling like plaster scrolls, effluents in the canals swirling into complicated filigrees. From above, the megalopolis surely resembled a shattered portico to an extravagant tomb. Once inside it was difficult to avoid the reek of putrefaction, the taste of bruised faith. The grandeur was a stamping boot.

Only when architects allowed children to scribble on their designs, she reflected, would they understand what they were producing. Modernism tries to oppose nature, a futile battle. Lines that are clean on a page turn dirty on a street, walls succumb to graffiti, glass collects grime. Without constant attention, reality and theory divorce and it is always reality that wins custody of the populace. Architecture must work with decay rather than against it, improving with neglect. Living in a fake Gaudí house, Melissa had verified the adaptive qualities of the organic aesthetic by refusing to make repairs.

When she was feeling in a didactic mood with herself, it generally boded ill for the remainder of the day. She turned onto potholed Digbeth High Street and accelerated past the Coach Station. If Birmingham really was a tomb, then this was the actual site of the corpse: a heaving jelly of decomposing humanity, a gateway between this unsatisfactory world and the comparable hells of Wolverhampton and Coventry. As if lying in wait, a bus pulled out and tried to block her path, but she roared ahead. Like Charon ferrying souls, the driver was a bony fellow, long teeth grinding in frustration as he missed his target. His debased passengers stared at her diminishing form, tarnished coins for eyes. And for an instant, she had a metallic taste on her tongue.

(ii)

She skirted the giant Bull Ring, where cattle had once been tortured to improve the flavour of the meat. Now shoppers were baited in their place by the commercial hooks of shoddy goods and pseudo-bargains. Beyond this monstrous precinct, the Rotunda kicked the grey sky like a broken femur. She cruised down New Street, proceeding as far as Victoria Square, where she stopped on a shattered pavement below the library, which she mistook for a multistorey car park. A guard came to escort her into the Council House, which had somehow lost part of its dome. The interior was filthy, strewn with old papers and cigarette filters. The guard ushered her into a room full of charred furniture. Holes in the roof allowed the rains to tumble in, slicking the mosaic floor.

A council official sat behind a desk in a corner of the office. The guard bowed stiffly and departed, leaving Melissa to pick a route among blocks of fallen masonry. The official shifted uncertainly, as if he had forgotten the appropriate greeting. He began to stand, thought better of it and offered a limp handshake. Behind him, nailed to the wall, dripped the new city flag, a tricolour composed of various shades of grey. Under his shirt something bulged and rustled.

“
Ms Sting? I’m so pleased you could make it,” he muttered, stroking his pockmarked face. “Please sit down.”

He indicated a chair piled high with storm-damaged cardboard files. Melissa stood silently until, with a deep blush, he leant over and swept them aside. Easing herself onto the damp leather, she waited for him to say something else, but he was too shy or indifferent, it was impossible to decide which. At last she announced:

“
The Lunar Commission expect my report within the week. I trust you will issue me with full security clearance?”

He was offended. “That is not a problem. All our documents will be turned over for your inspection and, naturally, you will be allowed into our research zones. We’re ahead of schedule.”

Melissa grinned. “That’s what they all say.” Turning up her collar, she huddled into the seat. With an apologetic cough, the official passed her a twisted umbrella, which she struggled to open. During this hiatus, he cleared his throat again.

“
Allow me to introduce myself, Ms Sting. I am Alleneal Asherley. Not my real name, of course, but a pseudonym chosen by committee. We believe it safer not to become too informal with outside agencies. However, this initial meeting between us requires a gesture of trust, so at this point I wish to make a statement. Birmingham City Council is only a month away from founding a working moon colony.”

Melissa was unable to suppress a laugh, but compassionate enough to stifle it when she saw the pain it caused him. “This is news indeed. The front-runners are still developing their ecology systems. They’re having trouble with the hydroponics.”

“
We don’t want to recreate Earth, Ms Sting. Our colonists have been adapted to cope with existing conditions.”

A violent desire to be sarcastic overwhelmed her. “What will they say in Newcastle and Oxford? There’ll be rioting in the greenhouses!” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Bookies are giving you odds of a trillion-to-one against. If what you say is true, you will be able to clean up and retire to Luton.”

Alleneal raised his eyebrows. “What other municipal authorities see fit to spend money on is none of my concern. And as you should be aware, Ms Sting, no council worker, or Lunar Commission agent for that matter, is permitted to gamble on this project.”

Melissa brushed her damp hair out of her eyes. Better not to waste time trying to decide whether he was an imbecile or joker. Probably he was both: council employees trained themselves to be inscrutable, hiding their motives even from themselves. After an awkward pause he fumbled in a soggy cardboard box under the desk and retrieved a bottle of blended whisky. She drank only malt and refused his offer of a glass, watching carefully as he filled one for himself and rotated in his swivel chair to face the faded flag. Squeezing water from one frayed end into his tumbler, he swirled the mixture in his mouth and gargled.