Modem Times 2.0 (5 page)

“T
HERE 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.”

“A
NGRY, 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.”

“H
OT 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.

“A
RE 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.”

“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.”