The Condition of Muzak (21 page)

“It sounds a bit dodgy to me,” said Jerry. He was still unclear of the issues or of his brother’s ambitions. “They’ve had a lot more experience. They’ll turn on you, Frank.”

“I know too many secrets.”

Jerry shrugged. “Well, maybe you’re right.”

“Are you on, then? Comin’ in with me?” Frank grinned an eager grin.

Jerry shook his head. “I’ll keep moving, I think. This isn’t my decade at all.”

“You won’t get a better opportunity.”

“I’ll wait and see what the future brings.”

“The future?” Frank laughed. “There isn’t any future. Make the most of what you’ve got.”

Jerry scratched his damp head. “But I don’t like it here.”

“You never believed you’d be visiting your brother in Buckingham Palace, I bet.”

“I never believed in Buckingham Palace,” said Jerry helplessly. He began to smile. “And I’m not sure I believe in you any more.”

“Oo, you snooty little sod.” Frank glowered. His pallid lips set in anger. “You stupid, stuck-up shitty little bastard! And I was trying to ’elp you! Well, if that’s the way you wanna play it. I’ve got powers to enlist you. And once you’re fuckin’ enlisted, me old son, you’ll see the error of your fuckin’ ways.”

Jerry drew his needle gun from a pinstriped pocket. “I think I’ll have to borrow your uniform if I’m going to get through. I’ll let you have it back later.”

Frank was hardly aware that his life was being threatened. He stared curiously at the needle gun. “What’s that?”

Jerry said: “The future.”

Jerry shrugged himself back into his frilly Mr Fish jacket and kissed Mitzi Beesley heartily on her exposed left buttock. Mitzi twitched. Her voice from beneath the pillow was lazy. “You could stay another couple of hours. My dad won’t be back yet. We haven’t tried it with those bottles.”

“We’d only get stuck.” He made for the stairs. “Besides, you’re not nearly old enough.” It seemed to him, as he went down, that he was still surrounded by the aura of her juicy lust. “See you.” He opened the street door.

He walked out into the Chelsea sunshine. The bishop, a popular local figure, had not done too badly for himself since the dissolution. King’s Road was crowded with pretty people, with music, foodstalls, hawkers of disposable clothes, fortune-tellers, prostitutes of every possible persuasion, beautiful buttons and blossoming bows; soft bodies brushed against him on all sides, delicious perfumes swam into his nose; his flesh sang. He pressed through the throng, whistling an Animals tune to himself, on his way to The Pheasantry, which Mr Koutrouboussis had recently purchased. There was no doubt about it, thought Jerry, Utopia had been worth hanging on for. Everyone was happy.
Here, there and everywhere
, sang the Beatles as he passed a daytime disco; they were the poets of paradise.
Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream
…

There was, Jerry found himself bound to admit, still a minority of people who would have preferred the euphoria of austerity to all this and, indeed, the King’s Road was not what he would have considered his own natural environment, even on festival days such as this one. Nonetheless, if he missed an egg and chips there was always someone to provide a fantasy of more generous proportions, with a hurdy-gurdy and a rebuilt tram or two. If anything got to him here, then it was the self-consciousness, absent from his own territory further north, where hangovers of the poverty trance still operated to the advantage of the natives. And, too, it was in King’s Road that he saw the seeds of disaster, of the destruction of everything he held dear. He put these thoughts from his mind and shouldered his way a little more aggressively up the road only to stop dead as he reached the stone gates of The Pheasantry and confronted none other than Miss Brunner. She wore a white angular Courrèges suit with shorts, white PVC boots and a white PVC floppy hat and satchel. On her nose were huge, round sunglasses and her red hair was cut quite short. A very noisy radio went by—
Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a gas, gas, gas
—so he could not hear her greeting but, to his astonishment, he was sure she had mouthed the word “Darling” at him. He stopped, leaned his thin body against the opposite gatepost and sniffed at her Young Lust. “Swinging along okay, Miss B?”

“What? Oh, yes. Fabulously. You look pretty psychedelic yourself.”

“Thanks. I do my best.”

“No, I mean it. As tasty as anything. Are you going in?” She peered towards the gloom of the hallway. “You live here?”

“I’ve a friend who does. Well, he’s a friend of Catherine’s really.”

“How is your sister? That job—or did she get—?”

“She’s resting at the moment.”

“Frank said something.”

“He’s improving, then. Well, I’ll be seeing you.”

“No!” She placed her white plastic fingers on his arm. “I was actually looking for you. I know we’ve had our differences.”

“And our likenesses. There’s no need to rake up the past.”

“Certainly not. I wouldn’t dream… Could we have a chat?”

“You’re not trying to recruit me for anything, are you?”

“Not really. I think we’ve more in common than we knew.” She looked distastefully down at her body. “As you can see, I’m quite ‘with-it’ now.”

“What are you doing with yourself?”

“Ha, ha! I’ve been trained. I’m a fully qualified computer programmer. Shall we have some coffee?”

Jerry shook his head. “It makes me too wary, eating in Chelsea. At best I can only do it if my back’s well to the wall and my eye’s on the door. You know how it is.”

“But there are some charming places.”

“That’s what I mean.”

He moved into the courtyard, a zone of relative silence, and sat down on the lip of the pool. Blue, green, yellow and red water came at intervals from the fountain in the centre. After a pause, she sat beside him. “I can’t remember where it was we last met,” she began.

“Neither can I,” said Jerry. “Perhaps it hasn’t happened yet?”

“Well, yes, possible, certainly.” She had lost her old confidence while Jerry had gained quite a lot. She was evidently distressed.

“I know how interested you are in science,” she said.

“Not any more.” Jerry tried to catch a striped fish which floated to the surface. “Sorry. Technological art now.”

“Oh, well. Even better. Technological art. Yes! Yes! Good. That. Well, science is the answer, I’ve decided, at any rate. I thought you’d be pleased. And computers are very definitely where we are going. My backers have invested in some of the absolutely latest equipment. You’ll be familiar with it, of course.”

“Don’t judge me too hastily. I might leave it alone. I don’t fancy…”

“Ha, ha. Now…” She removed a pearlite case from her white bag. She offered him a cigarette. “Sobranie, I think. Are those all right?”

Jerry shook his head.

“Oh, well.” She closed the case without taking one of the cigarettes herself. She looked at her Zippo lighter for some time while she continued to talk. “Anyway, you know a lot about the less orthodox branches of science, don’t you? Your father—?”

“I’m afraid I’ve lost faith in science as anything but a pastime,” Jerry said.

“You were always flippant. You mustn’t say things like that, Mr Cornelius. It is technology which will pull us out of our current difficulties.”

“I didn’t know we had any.”

“Of course we have. All this glitter simply hides a deeper malaise. You must agree. You’re intelligent. This can’t last. We must think ahead.”

“I’d rather not think at all.” He got up and looked into the water of the fountain at the multicoloured carp. “This is where I belong. I’m happy.”

“Happy, Mr Cornelius? How can you be?”

“I don’t know, but I am.”

“There’s more to life than drugs and sex, Mr Cornelius.”

“There’s more than life to drugs and sex. It’s better than nothing.”

“You need a goal. You always have. This rejection of your potential is silly. You believe in science as much as I do.”

“What about land?”

“It’s abstracts now. It would be ludicrous to continue thinking in old terms about a new situation, don’t you agree?”

Jerry became uncomfortable. “I was thinking of going into the assassination business. You know what a dreamer I am. Would it be too much of a hit and myth operation, do you think?”

“Do you believe in aeroplanes, Mr Cornelius?”

“It depends what you mean by ‘aeroplanes’.” He yearned for the cool gloom of The Pheasantry, to bask in Koutrouboussis’s envy.

“A properly organised technology is the only hope for the world unless we are to plunge into total decadence and from decadence into death,” she said. “If we act now, we can save almost everything of value. Don’t you see?” Her circular shades were cocked at an earnest angle. “If we can somehow produce a programme, feed in all the facts, we can get a clear idea of what we must do to prepare for the future. Imagine—the whole future in a single chip.”

For once Jerry refrained from the obvious response. “I’m only interested in the present.” He sat down close beside her. He put a hand on her knee. “Give us a kiss.”

She sighed and gave him a quick one. He found that his hand could continue up her shorts unchecked. With a shock his fingers touched her cold cunt. “Sorry,” he said.

“It doesn’t make any difference,” she told him.

He glanced around the courtyard at the flowers. He picked at a tooth. From somewhere overhead there came a bass drone. He smiled without much interest into the sky. “Bombers,” he said. “I thought we were going to have a peaceful day.” They were in sight now. A large formation of F111As. “It’s a free country, I suppose.”

“Eloi! Eloi!” Miss Brunner became agitated. She sprang to her feet. “Peaceful? This enclave of lotus-eaters? Don’t you realise the world’s rotting about your ears? Haven’t you got eyes? Can’t you smell the corruption? Can’t you feel the whole world going out of kilter? Where’s your sense? And all you can think of is feeling me up!”

He glanced at her from beneath embarrassed eyebrows. He felt a twinge of self-pity. “I was only having a bit of fun.”

Some distance to the south, probably over Barnes, the planes began to drop their loads.

She made efficient arrangements to her clothing. She headed for the languid street, still crowded with the festive and the free. “Fun!”

He was thoroughly demoralised, more by what he had found in her trousers than by what he had done. “I’m very sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“That’s all right.” She waved a polyvinyl chloride gauntlet. “For the present.”

For the last three weeks Jerry Cornelius had remained in the roof garden of the empty department store. The roof garden was overgrown and lush; parts of it were almost impassable. Flamingoes, ducks, macaws, parakeets and cockatoos inhabited the tangles of rhododendrons, creepers, climbing roses and nasturtiums; yellow mimosa grew adequately close to the various dividing walls of the garden: and, through the ceiling below, several large roots had broken and begun to find the tubs of earth Jerry had removed from the botanical department and placed on the floor so that ultimately the plants would gain purchase here. It was his ambition to bring in increasing supplies of earth so that in time the entire store would become a jungle to which he could then, perhaps, begin to introduce predators and prey, possibly from the zoo of the store’s nearby rival.

Jerry had his consolations: a battery-operated stereo record player on which he listened to traditional folk music and laid-back C&W, some light reading; he could feed himself from what was left of the Food Hall and from the canned supplies in the roof garden restaurant, where he had also set up his camp-bed. The restaurant was more like a conservatory now, for he had been pleased to admit as many plants as would enter. He was never disturbed. He enjoyed the novels of Jane Austen, avoided interpretation, and dreamed of safer days.

Occasionally he would creep from the upper storeys to the bowels of the building and attend to his generators, thus maintaining his freezer and, of greater importance, the central heating. He had turned this to maximum so that his plants would be encouraged to extend their roots towards the distant ground. It was his hope that eventually the remains of Derry & Toms would be preserved in a gigantic shrubbery, impenetrable save by those who, like him, understood the labyrinth. At the top of this mountain of foliage and masonry he would then possess remarkable security. Already a number of peonies were blooming in the soft-furnishing department and various vines and ivies, without training, had carpeted the floors and festooned the walls of Hardware and Electrical Goods. He remained armed, but he had lost much of his caution. Aerial warfare was almost a thing of the past, the fashion having changed primarily to tanks and infantry which, ultimately, provided greater satisfaction to those who still enjoyed such exercises. London was no longer regarded as a major objective.

Jerry gathered that most of the battles were won in the world and that conferences were rapidly agreeing territorial boundaries. The Continent of Europe had apparently become a vast conglomeration of tiny city states, primarily based on an agricultural economy, with certain traditional crafts and trades (Bohemian glass, German clocks, French mustard) flourishing: forming the basis of barter between the different communities. Not that war was unknown, but it had become confined to the level of local disputes. Jerry had been unable to see this development as a wholesome one, but he supposed it suited the petite bourgeoisie who constituted, as always, the majority of the survivors. It seemed to him that in some obscure way Miss Brunner had, after all, triumphed, through no fault of her own.

The image of a Britain become a nation of William Morris wood-carvers and Chestertonian beer-swillers drove him deeper into his jungle and caused him to abandon his books. He was only prepared to retreat so far. He was forced to admit, however, that the seventies were proving an intense disappointment to him. He felt bitter about missed opportunities, the caution of his own allies, the sheer funk of his enemies. In the fifties life had been so appalling that he had been forced to flee into the future, perhaps even help create that future, but by the sixties, when the future had arrived, he had been content at last to live in the present until, due in his view to a conspiracy amongst those who feared the threat of freedom, the present (and consequently the future) had been betrayed. As a result he had sought the past for consolation, for an adequate mythology to explain the world to him, and here he hid, lost in his art nouveau jungle, his art deco caverns, treading the dangerous quicksands of nostalgia and yearning for times that seemed simpler only because he did not belong to them and which, as they became familiar, seemed even more complex than the world he had loved for its very variety and potential. Thus he fled still further, into a world where vegetation alone flourished and only the most primitive of sentient life chose to exist. He was thinking of giving up time travel altogether.