Modem Times 2.0 (9 page)

Jerry shuddered. He’d be hearing about the wonders of Wimbledon next. Tactfully he asked if Beesley knew a second-hand tire shop easily reached.

“There’s even a beach of sorts.” The bishop breathed impatience. “Where Tooting Common used to be. The water’s invigorating, I’m told. Though they haven’t axed the chestnut trees.”

“They must be borders,” suggested Bill.

“Still plenty for the little ‘uns.”

“Plenty?”

“Conkers.” The bishop put a knowing hand on Jerry’s arm. “Don’t worry. No ward of mine has ever come to harm.”

“Conkers? No, you’re barmy. Bonkers.” Jerry shook him off, swiftly walking to the outside door.

“Pop in. Anytime. You’ve not forgotten how to pray?” The bishop’s voice was muffled, full of half-masticated Heath.

Jerry paused, trying to think of a retort.

Bunny Burroughs stood up, his thin body awkward beneath the cloth of his loose, charcoal grey suit. “I am a gloomy man, Mr. Cornelius. I have a vision. Follow me. Of the appalling filth of this world, I am frequently unobservant. Once I revelled in it, you could fairly say. Now it disgusts me. I am no longer a lover of shit. I came on the streetcar. That’s what I like about Europe, the streetcars. Environment-friendly and everything. They have a narrative value you don’t run into much any more. Certainly not in America. My mother was German. Studied eugenics, I think. On the evidence. But I’m English on my father’s side. I fought on my father’s side.”

He turned to look out of the window. “The slaveships threw over the dead and dying. Typhoon coming on.” He picked up the laptop. “Trained octopi drove those trams, they say.”

Jerry said, “OK. I give up. When can you get me connected?”

“It depends.” Burroughs frowned, either making a calculation or pretending to make one. “It depends how much memory you want. Four to seven days?” His long, sad face contemplated some invisible chart. His thin fingers played air computer. “Any options?”

Jerry had become impatient. “Only connect,” he said. God, how he yearned for a taste of the real world. The world he had been sure he knew. Even Norbury.

The old trees they knew as the Manor grew in ground surrounding the Barclay’s Bank and were more or less public until the cricket club became more conscious of its privacy. The egalitarian spirit disappeared rapidly with the success of the first postwar Conservative government.

The best woods lay on top of Biggin Hill where one of wartime Britain’s most active airfields had lain in the flat delta where two valleys met. Croydon had been another. Then Norbury Cross, carved out of Mitcham Common and restored, when Jerry first went back, to a replica of its prewar appearance.

It didn’t do to get sentimental. Jerry felt cold again. His breath was thick on the rapidly cooling air. But he had spent too many years finding this place to risk losing it completely.

High elms where the rooks nested making the sharpness of an autumn evening, the smell of wood smoke, the red and orange skies on the horizon, the noise of the returning birds. Like laughter. Sneering, quarrelsome laughter.

Once real wealth came into the equation, the seeds of fresh class warfare were sewn as the salaries grew farther apart and bonuses became a kind of Danegeld to dissuade directors from taking their strength elsewhere. Most of that strength lay in guilty secrets.

“What the bloody hell do ya think you’re doing sitting there dreaming, ya silly-looking toad! Go and get us some fish and chips.”

“Yes, mum.” He climbed out of the sheet under whichhe’d been hiding to frighten his brother Frank.

“Can you smell pee?” she asked anxiously as he went out through the front door. “Tell me if ya can smell it when ya come in, love.”

“W
HAT I CAN’T
understand about you, Mr. Cornelius,” Miss Brunner said, opening a cornflower blue sunshade only slightly wider than her royal blue Gainsborough hat, “is why so many of your mentors are gay. Or Catholic. Or both.”

“Or Jewish,” said Jerry. “You can’t forget the Jews. It’s probably the guilt.”

“You? Guilt? Have you ever felt guilt?” “That’s not the point.” He found himself thinking again of Alexander, his unborn son. Invisibly, he collected himself. “I reflect it.”

“That’s gilt. Not guilt.”

“Oh, believe me. They’re often the same thing.”

From somewhere beyond the crowd a gun cracked.

She brightened, quickening her high-heeled trot. “They’re off!”

Jerry tripped behind her. There was something about Surrey he was never going to like.

B
ACK IN ISLAMABAD
Jerry read the news from New Orleans. He wondered if the French were going to regret their decision to buy it back. How could they possibly make it pay? The cleanup alone had already bankrupted BP. It hadn’t been a great couple of years for the oligarchs. Of course, it did give France the refineries and a means of getting their tankers up to Memphis, but how would the American public take to the reintroduction of the minstrels on the showboats?

“People who are free, who live in a real republic, are never offended, Jerry. At best they are a little irritated. They should be able to take a joke by now. In context.”

“Wait till they burn
your
bloody car.” Jerry was still upset about what had happened in Marseilles.

“They are citizens. They have the same rights and responsibilities as me.” Max Pardon swung his legs on his stool. He had rewaxed his moustache. Possibly with cocoa butter.

Jerry lit a long, black Sherman. “At least you’ve brought back smoking.”

“That’s the Republic, Jerry.”

Max Pardon raised his hat to a passing Bedouin. “God bless the man who discovered sand-power.” Overhead the last of the great aerial steamers made its stately way into the sunrise just as the muezzin began to call the faithful to prayer. Monsieur Pardon unrolled his mat and kneeled. “If you’ll forgive me.”

“I
AM SICK
of people who can’t distinguish the taste of sugar from the taste of fruit, who can’t tell salt from cheese, who think watching CNN makes them into intellectuals and believe that
Big Brother
and
The Bachelor
are real life. The richest, most powerful country in the world is about as removed from reality as Oz is from Kansas or Kansas is from Kabul or Obama is from Kenya.” Major Nye was in a rare mood as he leaned over the rail of
The Empress of India
searching with his binoculars for his old station. His long, ancient fingers with their thin tanned skin resembled the claws of an albino crow he had once kept at the station. “Which half knows Africa best? Bleeding Africa …”

From somewhere among the bleak rolling downs, puffs of smoke showed the positions of the Pashtoon.

“I remember all the times the British tried to invade and hold Afghanistan. What surprises me is why these Yanks think they are somehow better at it, when they’ve never won a war by themselves since the Mexicans decided to let them have California. Every few years they start another bloody campaign and refuse to listen to their own military chaps and go swaggering in to get their bottoms kicked for the umpteenth time. Then they turn on the French and the Italians whom they consider inferior warriors to themselves. The Europeans learned their lessons. They knew how easy it was to start a war and how difficult it was to finish one. The Americans learned an unfortunate lesson from their successes against the Indians, such as they were. If you ask me, they would have done better to have taken a leaf from Custer’s book.”

“Education’s never been their strength.” Holding her hat with her left hand, Miss Brunner waved and smiled at someone in the observation gallery. “It’s windy out here, don’t you think?”

“Better than that fug in there.” Major Nye indicated the Smoking Room. With a gesture close to impatience, he threw his cigarette over the side.

As if in answer, another rifle-shot echoed below.

Miss Brunner looked down disapprovingly. “There should be more public shootings, if you ask me. Why are the decent ones always the first to be taken? They should just be more selective.” She looked up, directing a frigid smile at Mitzi Beesley, who came out to join them. Mitzi was wearing a borrowed flying helmet, a short, pink divided skirt, a flounced white blouse, a knitted bolero jacket.

Mitzi was going through her radical phase. “That’s exactly what the YCFA says. You pinched that from the Left.”

“Oh, we pinched a lot from the Left. Just as the Right pinched from us. When the Left have become Centre Right and the Right has become reactionary, you know exactly where you stand, eh? Exactly. How many times in the last century did you see that?” Miss Brunner laughed happily. “Oh, I do love old times, don’t you? And the one-party system.”

Jerry remembered her closing the gate of her Hampstead Garden Village bijou cottage, as she left him in charge for a week. That had been the last time they had met. She was no longer speaking to him. He went back into the bar and closed the door. It seemed almost silent here; just the soft hum of the giant electric motors. He accepted a pint of Black Velvet. He had a rat buttoned inside his coat. Its nose tickled his chest and he gave an involuntary twitch. Mitzi still didn’t know he had rescued “Sweety” from the fire. He had grown attached to the little animal and felt Mitzi was an imperfect owner.

The Bengali barman polished a glass. “Life’s a bloody tragedy, isn’t it sir? Same again?”

Outside, the rain began to drum on the canopy. Major Nye and the women came running in. “I for one will be glad to get back to Casablanca,” said Miss Brunner.

J
ERRY HAD SHOWERED
and was putting on his regular clothes when Professor Hira came into the changing rooms.

“You were superb today, Mr. Cornelius. Especially under the circumstances.”

Jerry accepted his handshake. “Oh, you know, it’s not as if they got the whole of London.”

“Hampstead, Islington, Camden! The Heath is a pit of ash. We saw the cloud on TV. Red and black. The blood! The smoke. Of course, we know that our bombs, for instance, are much more powerful. But Hampstead Garden Village! My home was there for over four years. The Beesleys, too. And so many other dear neighbours.”

“You think it was their target?”

“No doubt about it. And next time it will be Hyde Park or Wimbledon Common. Even Victoria Park. They are easy to home in on, you see.”

“Another park is where they’ll strike next?”

“Or, heaven forbid, Lords. Or the Oval.”

“Good god. They’ll keep the ashes forever!”

“Our fear exactly.” Professor Hira took Jerry’s other hand. “You plan, I hope, to stay in Mombai for a bit? We could do with a good all-rounder.”

Jerry considered this. It was quite a while since he’d been to the pictures. “It depends what’s on, I suppose.” He bent and picked up his cricket bag. “And I’m sure it’s still possible to get a game or two in before things become too hot.”

“Oh, at least. And, Mr. Cornelius, it will never be too hot for you in India. Pakistan has far too many distractions, what with the Americans and their own religeuses.”

Jerry scratched his head. Reluctant as he was to leave, he thought it was time he got back home again.

T
HE BATS WERE
rising over Austin as usual. Mo had at last given up trying to count them and was eating a hot dog. He was resentful. He had been told that Texas was the most gun-friendly state in the Union, but had been stopped four times from carrying his Banning into the Capitol. “Fucking hypocrites.”

“Sir, I must really ask you again to watch your language.”

Mo recognized the Texas Ranger. Jerry caught him in time. The bats rose in a long, lazy curve against the dark blue evening sky. It was time to get back to the desert. Jerry had had enough of culture.

He had only come here to get himself a real cowboy hat.

He explained this to the Ranger. “I suppose you couldn’t sell me yours? I think we’re about the same head size.”