Modem Times 2.0 (7 page)

H
E HAD BUILT
up his identity with the help of toy soldiers, cigarette cards, foreign stamps, all those books from the tuppenny lending library with their wonderful bright jackets preserved in sticky plastic. Netta Muskett was his mum’s favourite and he went for P. G. Wodehouse, Edgar Rice Burroughs, P. C. Wren, Baroness Orczy, and the rest. They were still printed in hundreds of thousands then. Thrillers, comedies, fantastic adventure, historical adventure. Rafael Sabatini. What a disappointing picture of him that was in
Lilliput
magazine, wearing waders, holding a rod, caught bending in midstream, an old gent. It came to us all.

Didi Dee seemed to feel more comfortable without her clothes, nodding to herself as she looked at his books. Was she confirming something? He sat in the big Morris library chair and watched her, dark as the mahogany, reflecting the light.

“I wasn’t exactly a virgin. My dad started fucking me when I was twelve.” She turned to study his reaction. “Does that shock you?”

Jerry laughed. “What? Me? I’m a moralist, I know, but I’m not a petty moralist. You think a spot of finger-wagging is what Jesus would have done. So I should be saying ‘Bloody hell! The fucking bastard’?”

She came back into the bedroom and started snapping on her kit. “It was all right. He got it over with quickly and then he was guilty as hell and I could go out all night and do what and whom I liked without his saying a word because he was scared I’d tell the cops and my mum would find out, though really I think she knew and didn’t care. Gave her a quiet life. So by day I was doing my mock A-levels at St. Paul’s and by night I was having all the fun of the fair.” She blinked reminiscently. “Or thought I was. It took me a bit of time to find out what I liked. What I was like. When I met you I’d just turned twenty-one. I thought I was ready to settle down.”

He didn’t make the obvious response. He licked the smell of her cunt off his upper lip. He needed a shave. Maybe he’d teach her how to use the straight razor on his face. She required training. She’d said so herself. “What a waste.” He thought of those lost nine years.

Suddenly her face opened up into one of those old cheeky grins. A lot better than nothing but it made him want to pee. No, he wasn’t really getting that old feeling. She showed him her perfect ass. So this is where nostalgia got you. She lay down next to him. A coquette. “I trust you,” she said.

This puzzled him even more. He had once understood her, even if she didn’t like him much. Her passivity was her power. It gave her what she wanted or at least it had done so up to now.

He changed the subject a little. “Why are you so cruel to the dead?”

“Because they betrayed me by dying.”

“And who will you betray by dying?”

“Who will you betray?”

A no-brainer. “Nobody,” he said. “Why?” He suspected one of those boring little traps Christians set for you. Of course God loved him, but he didn’t feel very special in this near-infinity of planes that was the multiverse. He was as big as the multiverse, as small as God. It wasn’t always this hard to understand. Space is a dimension of time. Light speed varied enormously. There was a black tide running.

“A black tide running.” He tucked her head into his shoulder.

She tensed. “Is that another dig at Obama?”

“What?” He had fallen asleep suddenly. “What about him? Has he betrayed you?”

“That isn’t the point. Electing him was what it was about.”

“Sure, he’s doing such a lot for black pride.” Jerry rolled over and found a half-smoked box of Sullivans. He lit one. “God knows what poor old Mandela thinks.”

“The Labour Party’s trying to find one just like him.”

“Hardly worth blacking up for.”

From outside came a shout of glee. They both recognized it. Mo was jumping on his prey. He must have caught a kid.

M
O WASN’T HAVING
any and neither, he remarked happily, had he been getting any. But there was this little yellow lady to the west of Kathmandu and the crew had come to know her just as “Belle.” They were banging on the wedding gongs and decorating dresses, and they were praying that she didn’t go to hell, because Mo he was a white man and not the best at that and they didn’t want their girl to wear his band. They consoledthemselves, however, that they needn’t curse the moon for poor Belle would be a widow pretty soon. So they smiled at Mo and offered him the best seat in the house until Belle herself, she said, could smell a rat. And they put their heads together and they made a little plan to see her married by some other means or man. Really, Mo thought, he was probably a goner.

“Mo?”

He turned. He had been on his feet long enough to understand his bit as he fell onto the carpet. Buggered.

He could still hear. “Of course it’s not curare.”

Jerry was wistful as he watched Mitzi Beesley drag the little fellow into the hedge. “But then again it’s not chocolate, either!”

“I wouldn’t personally be talking about sweets,” Didi Dee murmured. She had become shy. Flirtatious. Weak. Self-righteous. Religious.

Why was she searching out his contempt?

This whole thing was altogether too retro for Jerry. He cleared his throat, spat on the ground. Where was his 1954? Surely earlier? What numbers had she offered him?

Should he get into the spirit of the times? Feeling guilty. Finding places to hide. Telling lies? You needed a voice. He couldn’t muster a voice on top of everything else.

Somewhere up there in the diminishing hills he heard an engine. Jimmy van Dorn’s awful old Rolls-Royce.

Time to be shunting along. He kissed Didi on her dimpled cheek. “Tee tee eff en.”

“I
ADMIRE A MAN
who can look cool on a camel.” Bessy Burroughs presented Jerry with her perfectly rounded vowels. Born in Kansas, she had been educated in Sussex, near Brighton. Regular vowels, her dad had always said, were the key to success, no matter what your calling. “God! Is it always this hot in Cairo?”

“It used to be lovely in the winter.” Jerry jumped down from his kneeling beast and came to help Bessy dismount. Only Karen von Krupp preferred to remain in her saddle. Shieldingher eyes against the rising sun, she peered disdainfully at a distant clump of palms.

Bessy had none of her father Bunny’s lean, lunatic wit. Her full name was Timobeth, a combination of those her parents had chosen for a girl or a boy. Bunny believed that old-fashioned names were an insult to the future. They pandered to history. Her parents still hated history. A sense of the past was but a step on the road to nostalgia and nostalgia, as Bunny was fond of saying, was a vice that corrupts and distorts.

Jerry remembered his lazy lunches at Rules. Bunny had loved Rules. But he had come to hate the heritage industry as “a brothel disguised as a church.” Jerry wasn’t sure what he meant and had never had a chance to find out. If he turned up, as promised, by the Sphinx, perhaps this would be a good time to ask him.

“Dad loves it out here.” Pulling her veil from her hat to her face, Bessy began to follow him across the hard sand towards the big pyramid. “Apart from the old stuff. He hates the old stuff. But he loves the beach. The old stuff can crumble to dust for all he cares.” She paused to wipe her massive cheeks and forehead. That last box of Turkish delight was beginning to tell on her. She had been raised, by some trick of fate, by Bishop Beesley as his own daughter until Mitzi had finally objected and Bunny had been recalled from Tangier to perform his paternal duties.

“You don’t like to be connected to the past?” asked Karen von Krupp, bringing up a lascivious leer and with a curious-looking whip thwacking her “Charlie” on its rump. “I love history. So romantic.”

“Hate it. Loathe it. History disgusts me. Hello! Who’s this type, I wonder?”

“Good god!” Suddenly fully awake, Jerry pushed back his hat. “Talk about history! It’s Major Nye.”

Major Nye, in the full uniform of Skinner’s Horse, rode up at a clip and brought his grey to a skidding stop in the sand.

“Morning, major.”

“Morning, Cornelius. Where’s that hotel gone?”

“I gather it had its day, major. Demolished. I can’t imagine what’s going up in its place.” His knees were cramping.

“I can.” With a complacent hand, Bessy patted a brochure she produced from a saddlebag. “It’s going to be like The Pyramid. That’s why I asked you all here. Only three times bigger. And in two buildings. You’ll be able to get up in the morning and look down on all that.” She waved vaguely in the direction of the pyramids. “It’ll be a knockout. It will knock you
unconscious
! Really!” She nodded vigorously, inviting them, by her example, to smile. “It did me. I daren’t ask what diverting the Nile’s going to cost. But it’s guaranteed terrorist free.”

“Gosh,” said Jerry. Major Nye peered gravely down at his horse’s mane.

“We are born unconscious and we die unconscious.” Karen von Krupp gestured with her whip. “In between we suffer precisely because we are conscious, whereas the other creatures with whom we share this unhappy planet are unconscious forever, no? I was not. I am. I shall not be. Is this the past, present and future? Is this what we desire from Time?”

“Rather.” Bessy nodded for good luck, approval and physical power. All the things deprived her in her childhood. Massive tears of self-pity ran rhythmically down her face. “This heat! These allergies!”

“I must apologize, dear lady. I’m not following you, I fear.”

“This hotel I’m talking about. Two big pyramids. Sheraton are interested already.”

“Ah, but the security.” Karen von Krupp laid her whip against her beautiful leg and arranged her pleated skirt. “These days. What can you guarantee?”

“No problem. Indonesians. Germans. French. British. The cream of the crop.”

“I prefer Nubians,” said Jerry.

“These will be as stated. No Saudis or Pashtoon, either. That’s non-negotiable.”

Jerry looked up. From the far horizon came the steady thump of helicopter engines, then the sharper thwacking oftheir blades. He had a feeling about this. “Nubians or nothing,” he said. And began to run back towards his camel.

Almost at ground level, rising and falling with the dunes, eight engines roaring in a terrible, shrill chorus, the massive, two-tiered monster of mankind’s miserable imagination, the Dornier DoX flying boat appeared over the oasis and attempted to land on the brackish water from which their camels were now shying. Their clothing and harnesses were whipped by the wind from its propellers. As soon as she had made a pass or two over the watering hole and failed, the Dornier lumbered up into the air and out of sight, still seeking to complete the round-the-world-flight she had begun to break when she set out from the Bavarian lakes four and a half years ago.

“What I can’t work out,” said Jerry, “is how it took them so long to get the power-weight ratio right.”

He cocked his head, listening for the plane’s return.

“I wonder who’s flying her this evening.”

“W
E NEED RITUALS
, Jerry. We need repetition. We need music and mythology and the constant reassurance that at certain times of the day we can visit the waterhole in safety. Without ritual, we are worthless. That’s what the torturer knows when he takes away even the consistent repetition of our torment.” Bunny Burroughs ordered another beer. There were still a few minutes to Curtain Up. This was to be the first time Gloria Cornish and Una Persson had appeared on the same stage. A revival.
The Arcadians
.

“These are on me.” Jerry signed for the bill. “Repetition is a kind of death. It’s what hopeless people do—what loonies do—sitting and rocking and muttering the same meaningless mantras over and over again. That’s not conscious life.”

“We don’t
want
conscious life.” Miss Brunner, coming in late, gave her coat to Bishop Beesley to take to the cloakroom. “Have I got time for a quick G&T? We don’t want real variety. From the catchphrase of the comedian to the reiteration of familiar opinions, they’re the beating of a mother’s heart, the breathing of a sleeping father.”