Modem Times 2.0 (8 page)

“Maybe we’ve at last dispossessed ourselves of the past. We name our children after bathroom products, fantasy characters, drugs, diseases, and candy bars. We used to name them after saints or popular politicians …” Jerry finished his beer. A bell began to ring.

“That’s just a different kind of continuity. The trusted brand has taken over from the trusted saint.” Miss B picked up her program. “We’re still desperate for the familiar. We try to discard it in favour of novelty, but it isn’t really novelty, it’s just another kind of familiarity. We tell ourselves of our self-expression and self-assertion. When I was a girl, my days were counted in terms of food. Sunday was a hot joint. Tuesday was cold sliced meat, potatoes and a vegetable. Wednesday was shepherd’s pie. Thursday was cauliflower cheese. Friday was fish. Saturday, we had a mixed grill. With chips. Just as lessons came and went at school, we attended the Saturday matinee, Sunday at a museum. Something uplifting, anyway, on Sunday. We move forward by means of rituals. We just try to find the means of keeping the carousel turning. We sing work songs as we build roads. Music allows a semblance of progression, but it isn’t real progression. Real progress leads where? To the grave, if we’re lucky? Our stories are the same, with minor variations. We’re comfortable, withminor variations, in the same clothes. The sun comes up and sets at the same time and we welcome the rise and fall of the workman’s hammer, the beat of the drum. If we really wanted to cut our ties with the past we would do the only logical thing. We would kill ourselves.”

“Isn’t that just as boring?”

“Oh, I guess so, Mr. Cornelius.” Bunny petted at his face and put down his empty glass.

As they walked towards their box, the overture was strik
ⁱⁿ
g
^u
p.

“I’
M RUNNING OUT
of memory.” Jerry put his head on one side, like a parrot. “Or at best storage. I’m forgetting things. I think I might have something.”

“Oh, god, don’t give it to us.” Miss Brunner became contemplative. “Is it catching? Like Alzheimer’s?”

“I don’t remember.” Jerry took an A to Z from the pocket of his black car coat. “It depends whether it’s the past or the present. Or the future. I remember where Berwick Street is in Soho and I could locate Decatur Street. I’m not losing my bearings any worse than usual. Why is everyone trying to forget?”

“It wasn’t part of the plan. I’m a bit new to this.” Bunny Burroughs glanced hopefully at Miss Brunner. “I think.”

Now Jerry really was baffled. “Plan?”

“The plan for America. Remember Reagan?”

“Vaguely,” said Jerry. He pointed ahead of him. “If that’s not a mirage, we’ve found an oasis.”

“He’s all turned around, poor thing,” said Miss von Krupp.

“T
HEY’VE BEEN IN
Trinity churchyard digging up the famous. I can’t tell you how much they got for Audubon.” Jerry sipped his chicory and coffee. The Café du Monde wasn’t what it had been but they’d taken the worst of the rust off the chairs, and the joss sticks helped. From somewhere down by the river came the broken sound of a riverboat bell. Then he began to smile at his friend across the table. “That was you, wasn’t it?”

Max Pardon shrugged. “We were downsized. What can I say? We have to make a living as best we can. The bottom dropped out of real estate. I’m a bone broker, these days, Mr. Cornelius. It’s an honest job. Some of us still have an interest in our heritage. Monsieur Audubon was a very great man. He made his living, you could say, as a resurrectionist. Mostly. He killed that poor, mad, golden eagle. Do I do anything worse?”

Jerry took a deep breath and regretted it.

The oil had not proved the blessing some had predicted.

I
N ISLAMABAD, JERRY
traded his Banning for an antique Lee-Enfield 303 with a telescopic sight. He had come all the way by aerial cruiser, the guest of Major Nye, with the intention of seeing, if he could do it secretly, his natural son Hussein, who was almost ten. Slipping the beautifully embellished rifle into his cricket bag, he made for an address on Kabul Street, ridding himself of two sets of “shadows.” The most recent Islamic government was highly suspicious of all Europeans, even though Jerry’s Turkish passport gave his religion as Moslem. He wore a beautifully cut coat in two shades of light blue silk, with a set of silver buttons and a turban in darker blue. To the casual eye he resembled a prosperous young stockbroker, perhaps from Singapore.

Arriving at Number Eight, Jerry made his way through a beautiful courtyard to a shaded staircase, which he climbed rapidly after a glance behind him to see if he was followed. On the third floor about halfway down the landing he stopped and knocked. Almost immediately the recently painted door was opened and Bunny Burroughs let him in, his thin lips twisting as he recognized the cricket bag.

“Your fifth attempt, I understand, Jerry. Did you have a safe trip? And will you be playing your usual game this Sunday?”

“If I can find some whites.” Jerry set the bag down and removed his rifle. With his silk handkerchief he dabbed at his sleeve. “Oil. Virgin. Is the boy over there?”

“With his nanny. The mother, as I told you, is visiting her uncle.”

Jerry peered through the slats of a blind. Across the courtyard, at a tall window, a young woman in a sari was mixing a glass of diluted lemon juice and sugar. Behind her the blue screen of a TV was showing an old Humphrey Bogart movie.

“
Casablanca
,” murmured Bunny.

“
The Big Sleep
.” Jerry lifted the rifle to his shoulder and put his eye close to the sight.

He would never know another sound like that which followed his pulling of the trigger and the bang the gun made.

He had done the best he could. That at least he understood.

Was that a mosquito? He slapped his face.

H
UBERT LANE AND
Violet Elizabeth Bott were waiting on the corner for Jerry as soon as he reached the outskirts of the village. He had driven over from Hadley to see old Mr. Brown. Hubert smirked when he saw Jerry’s Phantom IV. “You’ve done a lot better for yourself than anyone would have guessed a few years ago.”

Jerry ignored him.

“Hewwo, Jewwy,” lisped Violet Elizabeth, rather grotesquely coy for her age. “Wovely to see you.”

Jerry scowled. He was already regretting his decision but he opened the gate and began to walk up the surprisingly overgrown path. The Browns clearly hadn’t kept their gardener on. Things had deteriorated rather a lot since 1978. The front door of the double fronted Tudor-style detached house could do with a lick of paint. The brass needed a polish, too. He lifted the knocker.

The door was opened by a woman in uniform.

“Mr. ‘Cornelius’?”

“That’s right.”

“Mr. Brown said you were coming. He’s upstairs. I’m the District Nurse. I hung on specially. This way.”

She moved her full lips in a thin, professional smile and took him straight upstairs. The house smelled familiar and the wallpaper hadn’t changed since his last visit. Mrs. Brown had been alive then. The older children, Ethel and Robert, had been home from America and Australia respectively.

“They’re expected any time,” said the nurse when he asked. She opened the bedroom door. Now the medicinal smell overwhelmed everything else. Old Mr. Brown was completely bald. His face was much thinner. Jerry no longer had any idea of his age. He looked a hundred.

“Hello, boy.” Mr. Brown’s voice was surprisingly vibrant. “Nice of you to drop in.” His smile broadened. “Hoping for a tip, were you?”

“Crumbs!” said Jerry.

B
ANNING BEHIND HIM
, Mo put the Humvee in gear and set off across a desert which reminded him of Marilyn Monroe, Charles Manson and Clark Gable. Tumbleweed, red dust, the occasional cactus, yucca, jasper trees. He was heading west and south, trying to avoid the highways. Eventually he saw mountains.

A couple of days later, he woke Jerry who had been asleep in the back since Banning.

“Here we are, Mr. C.”

Jerry stretched out on the old rug covering the floor of the vehicle. “Christmas should be Christmas now we’ve presents.” He blinked out of the window at a butte. There were faces in every rock. This was the Southwest as he preferred it.

Mo was dragging his gun behind him as he squeezed into a narrow fissure, one of several in the massive rockface. According to legend, a hunted Indian army had made this its last retreat. Somewhere within, there was water, grass, even corn. The countless variegated shades of red and brown offered some hint of logic, at least symmetry, swirling across the outcrops and natural walls as if painted by a New York expressionist. They reminded Jerry of those ochre Barsoomian Dead Sea bottoms he had loved in his youth. He had been born in London, but he had been raised on Mars. He could imagine the steady movement of waves overhead. He looked up.

Zuni knifewings had been carved at intervals around the entrance of the canyon; between each pair was a swastika.

“I wonder what they had against the Jews,” said Mo. He paused to take a swig from his canteen.

Jerry shrugged. “You’d have thought there was a lot in common.”

Now Mo disappeared into the fissure. His voice echoed. “It’s huge in here. Amazing. I’ll start placing the charges, shall I?”

Jerry began to have second thoughts. “This doesn’t feel like Christmas anymore.”

Behind them, on the horizon, a Diné or Apaché warband sat on ponies so still they might have been carved from the same ancient rock.

Jerry sighed. “Or bloody Kansas!” He started to set up his Banning. He was getting tired of this. It had turned out to be much harder work than they’d suggested.

“I
KNOW WHERE
you’re coming from, Jerry.” Bunny Burroughs closed his laptop. Of course he didn’t. He had only the vaguest idea. Jerry didn’t even bother to tell him about
The Magnet
, Sexton Blake or George Formby. They certainly had some memories in common, but even those were filtered through a mix of singular cultural references that changed the simplest meaning. Bunny’s baseball and Cornelius’s cricket: the list was endless. Yet somehow exile brought out the best in them. They would always have Paris.

Jerry sniffed. “Are you still selling that stuff?”

“Virtual vapour? It’s very popular. While thousands die in Rwanda, millions watch TV and concern themselves with the fate of the mountain gorilla whose time in the world is actually less limited. Assuming zoos continue to do their stuff.” He held up a can. “Want a sniff?” He peered round at the others. “Anybody?”

“If I had a shilling for every year I’ve thought about the future, I’d be a rich man today.” Bishop Beesley hesitated before slipping a Heath Bar between his lips and breathing in the soft scent of chocolate and burned sugar. “Sweet!” He let a sentimental smile drift across his lips. “I know it’s a weakness, but which of us isn’t weak somewhere? I live to forget. I mean forgive. I’ve a parish in South London now. Did you know?”

“I think you told me.”

“No,” said Bill.

“No? It’s only across the river. We could.”

“No.” Jerry continued to look for a channel. “I don’t cross running water if I can help it. And I don’t do snow.”

“It’s really not as cold as people say it is. Even Norbury’s warmer than you’d guess. Kingsley Amis grew up there. And Edwy Searles Brooks. Brooks was the most famous person to come from Norbury. St. Franks? Waldo the Wonderman? And Frank Bellamy. You know. In
The Eagle
. Not to mention rock and roll. Martin Stone, England’s greatest electric guitarist—”