The rococo element was echoed in the room’s other furnishings— an assortment of classic items of furniture—here an oak chest, decorated with crude relief carvings, gargoyles and griffins in miniature, there a military chest with brass bindings, and a Hoshashi table from eighteenth-century Japan, low and lacquered, inlaid with filigree pattern in walnut representing storks in flight, wheeling above a restless ocean which threw up curling wisps of waves.
“Is this stuff for real?” Gance asked.
“Some of it is. Some is reproduction. There are savants who live on the levee who make their living that way.”
Venn picked up a cigarette and a matchbox from the lacquered table and handed them to her. The box was constructed from flimsy panels of real wood. There were two abrasive strips on the narrowest sides, and two pictorial panels on the widest—Champion Matches, they were called. The illustration was of a muscled man in a gaudy-coloured leotard. He was bald-headed and had a huge fiery moustache that spread from his upper lip out over both cheeks.
“It’s genuine,” said Venn. “It’s one of the most valuable things I own. The matchbox, that is. The matches are reconstructed. Do something for me—light up the cigarette.”
“I don’t smoke.”
He closed his eyes. “You don’t have to smoke it. Just light up the cigarette.”
Thumb scanned the cigarette and painted up a message on her overlay: “It’s genuine—nothing more toxic than tar and nicotine. Just one won’t kill you.”
She lit up the cigarette. Venn kept his eyes closed, only opening them when she had finished. He took it from her and stubbed it out.
“Thank you,” Venn said. “The most erotic sound in the world—a woman lighting a cigarette from a box of matches. The rattle of the matches in the closed box. The sound of the drawer sliding open. The scrape of the match itself and then the flare. The first inhalation —the air in the nostrils. The moist kiss of the lips separating, and the long sigh of the first exhalation. I just wanted to hear it one last time.
“I wasn’t sure that you’d come—this being the end of the world, the night we all die. Then I thought, Gance of all people won’t believe. Gance never believed a thing in her life. Gance has cynicism deep in her whore’s heart. Gance will come.”
“I came because you sounded desperate. What kind of mess are you mixed up in now, Venn?”
“You have an organic chip. Is it smart?”
Gance wasn’t surprised that Venn knew about Thumb. He had to have some kind of scanning implant himself to pick them up so easily on the levee.
“Probably not as smart as it thinks it is,” Gance said. “I picked it up cheap.”
“Ask it who’s working on nanoviruses and how close they are to pulling it off.”
Thumb said, “Microsoft says they had it cracked ten years ago and they’re just waiting for the market to catch up. Bullshit, of course. Stuttgart has the best biotech knowledge base and it says the technology increase required is of an exponential order of magnitude. You can’t see the end of the curve. The simplest working nanovirus is that far off. They’ll develop a faster-than-light drive sooner. But there is big military funding in there—they might be deliberately muddying the water. The biggest purely commercial concern working in that field is PolyQ. They hold the original Buckyball-Q patents, of course, and now the geostationary web is running hot and generating revenue, they’re ploughing a lot of it into nanology and they say real soon now, but they may just be talking it up for their investors. The main money is on a Buddhist enclave in Hong Kong— people reckon when you get that close to playing God it helps to know a little zen.”
“I’ve done it,” Venn said. “You’re holding it in your hand.”
Gance looked again at the box of matches. So did Thumb. “There’s something under the label,” Thumb said. “A metallic film of some sort. Chips, lots of chips. I don’t recognise any of the signatures. It’s weird, home-cultured stuff.”
“That’s just the template,” said Venn. He tapped his chest. “As for the prototype, you have to look really deep, in here.”
He gave a small gasp and a look of pain passed over his face.
“So much suffering in the world,” he said. “It would be a kindness to put the world out of its misery, wouldn’t it, Gance, to undo the work of God’s sick mind?”
“Is that what this is all about? You’ve got a virus that can do that?”
“Can’t stop it now,” Venn said. “My name is Legion; for we are many.”
Gance shrugged.
“Then we might as well fuck.”
~ * ~
Gance undressed him and ran her hands over his wounds. He was in a bad way. The colloid tissue on his old scars was regranulating, flowing, seeping, seething with a barely contained gangrene. She wondered what drugs he had been using to try to control that, and where he had got them from. Some backyard factory in the levee itself, probably. God knows what poisons he’d ingested.
Venn sighed. “I’m looking forward to this,” he said. “It’s going to be just like old times.”
Gance probed with her fingertips, skimming the suppurating flesh. She could sense the damaged meridians beneath the skin, the skeins of power, diminished but still potent, which glowed around the sinews, nerves and muscles in his extended limbs, channeling down into the lumbar regions and the base of the spine. She sensed their alignments and fed on them. She felt the intenseness of an unscratchable itch, the beauty of an unrealised orgasm, as the needles beneath her cuticles spasmed and began a slow extension of their own accord and tracked over the crippled body, searching for a point of access. She called up the maps she had committed to memory all those years ago.
“Make it hurt, Gance,” Venn said. “When I hurt, there’s only me and then I’m big, bigger than the universe. Then I am the universe. Alcephus be damned. I am infinity. De Quincey knew what it was about. He had an opium dream once—he was on the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz mountain range. There’s an optical illusion up there they call the Spectre of the Brocken, where you see yourself writ large upon the distant mists. We’re all something projected. Our ghosts are larger than ourselves.”
“Be quiet now,” said Gance. “I’ll help you.”
She found it then—a birthmark, a tiny discolouration of skin the shape of a small star on the nape of Venn’s neck. That was where she inserted the first needle.
~ * ~
Thumb guided her down from the levee. She stumbled once, gashing the palm of her hand against a skewed rung on an iron ladder. She licked away the blood.
“You’re a compassionate woman, Gance,” said Thumb. “I’m beginning to learn more about the human condition every day.”
“Nuts,” said Gance. “You think I killed him? I could have. I wanted to. But I didn’t have to. There was something in there, something dark, waiting for me to direct it, to channel it. His nanovirus maybe. It took my energy and just used it to complete a circuit. He killed himself.”
“Was he capable of constructing a nanovirus, then?”
“Maybe—but one designed to bring an end to everything? Your bet is as good as mine. I’m not sure I want to know.”
Gance looked about her. There was nothing she recognised. Then she heard the throttled-up roar of another HTOL ramming off the strip. She took a step forward and stopped. A dead dog lay in a puddle at her feet. At least she thought it was a dog. It could have been anything.
A burst of sparks shot up into the sky a short way away. Fireworks. Somebody was celebrating something. She heard the sound of laughter. A woman’s voice struck up a song and she was joined by a deeper male baritone. She recognised Jesus Hitler’s voice. He sounded drunk.
“What’s the time?” Gance asked Thumb.
“Past midnight.”
“There you are, then. Venn was a fantasist and he got what he wanted. It was the end of the world tonight. For him, and a few others, I’d guess. But we’re still alive. For us the world goes on. For the time be
ing. God knows how many other solipsist nuts are out there with grand designs for the extinction of their private universes—which just might include ours too.”
“You still have the matchbox,” said Thumb. “We can have it analysed. Then we’d know about the virus for sure.”
“No—we’ll give it to Jesus. He could use a light.”
Gance looked up at the sky. The dark clouds that obscured the geostationary web were clearing. One by one the stars were coming on.
<
~ * ~
LONDON BONE
BY MICHAEL MOORCOCK
ONE
My name is Raymond Gold and I’m a well-known dealer. I was born too many years ago in Upper Street, Islington. Everybody reckons me in the London markets and I have a good reputation in Manchester and the provinces. I have bought and sold, been the middleman, an agent, an art representative, a professional mentor, a tour guide, a spiritual bridge-bulkier. These days I call myself a cultural speculator.
But, you won’t like it, the more familiar word for my profession, as I practised it until recently, is scalper. This kind of language is just another way of isolating the small businessman and making what he does seem sleazy while the stockbroker dealing in millions is supposed to be legitimate. But I don’t need to convince anyone today that there’s no sodding justice.
‘Scalping’ is risky. What you do is invest in tickets on spec and hope to make a timely sale when the market for them hits zenith. Any kind of ticket, really, but mostly shows. I’ve never seen anything offensive about getting the maximum possible profit out of an American matron with more money than sense who’s anxious to report home with the right items ticked off the beento list. We’ve all seen them rushing about in their overpriced limos and mini-buses, pretending to be individuals: Thursday: Changing-of-the-Guard, Harrods, Planet Hollywood, Royal Academy, Tea-At-the-Ritz, Cats. It’s a sort of tribal dance they are all compelled to perform. If they don’t perform it, they feel inadequate. Saturday: Tower of London, Bucket of Blood, Jack-the-Ripper talk, Sherlock Holmes Pub, Sherlock Holmes tour, Madame Tussaud’s, Covent Garden Cream Tea, Dogs. These are people so traumatized by contact with strangers that their only security lies in these rituals, these well-blazed trails and familiar chants. It’s my job to smooth their paths, to make them exclaim how pretty and wonderful and elegant and magical it all is. The street people aren’t a problem. They’re just so many charming Dick Van Dykes.
Americans need bullshit the way koala bears need eucalyptus leaves. They’ve become totally addicted to it. They get so much of it back home that they can’t survive without it. It’s your duty to help them get their regular fixes while they travel. And when they make it back after three weeks on alien shores, their friends, of course, are always glad of some foreign bullshit for a change.
Even if you sell a show ticket to a real enthusiast, who has already been forty-nine times and is so familiar to the cast they see him in the street and think he’s a relative, who are you hurting? Andros Loud Website, Lady Hatchet’s loyal laureate, who achieved rank and wealth by celebrating the lighter side of the moral vacuum? He would surely applaud my enterprise in the buccaneering spirit of the free market. Venture capitalism at its bravest. Well, he’d applaud me if he had time these days from his railings against fate, his horrible understanding of the true nature of his coming obscurity. But that’s partly what my story’s about.
I have to say in my own favour that I’m not merely a speculator or, if you like, exploiter. I’m also a patron. For many years, not just recently, a niagara of dosh has flowed out of my pocket and into the real arts faster than a cat up a Frenchman. Whole orchestras and famous soloists have been brought to the Wigmore Hall on the money they get from me. But I couldn’t have afforded this if it wasn’t for the definitely iffy Miss Saigon (a triumph of well-oiled machinery over dodgy morality) or the unbelievably decrepit Good Rockin’ Tonite (in which the living dead jive in the aisles), nor, of course, that first great theatrical triumph of the new millennium, Schindler: The Musical. Make ‘em weep, Uncle Walt!
So who is helping most to support the arts? You, me, the lottery?
I had another reputation, of course, which some saw as a second profession. I was one of the last great London characters. I was always on late-night telly lit from below and Iain Sinclair couldn’t write a paragraph without dropping my name at least once. I’m a quintessential Londoner, I am. I’m a Cockney gentleman.
I read Israel Zangwill and Gerald Kersh and Alexander Barron. I can tell you the best books of Pett Ridge and Arthur Morrison. I know Pratface Charlie, Driff and Martin Stone, Bernie Michaud and the even more legendary Gerry and Pat Goldstein. They’re all historians, archeologists, revenants. There isn’t another culture-dealer in London, oldster or child, who doesn’t at some time come to me for an opinion. Even now, when I’m as popular as a pig at a Putney wedding and people hold their noses and dive into traffic rather than have to say hello to me, they still need me for that.
I’ve known all the famous Londoners or known someone else who did. I can tell stories of long-dead gangsters who made the Krays seem like Amnesty International. Bare-knuckle boxing. Fighting the fascists in the East End. Gun-battles with the police all over Stepney in the 1900s. The terrifying girl gangsters of Whitechapel. Barricading the Old Bill in his own barracks down in Notting Dale.
I can tell you where all the music halls were and what was sung in them. And why. I can tell Marie Lloyd stories and Max Miller stories that are fresh and sharp and bawdy as they day they happened, because their wit and experience came out of the market streets of London. The same streets. The same markets. The same family names. London is markets. Markets are London.
I’m a Londoner through and through. I know Mr Gog personally. I know Ma Gog even more personally. During the day I can walk anywhere from Bow to Bayswater faster than any taxi. I love the markets. Brick Lane. Church Street. Portobello. You won’t find me on a bike with my bum in the air on a winter’s afternoon. I walk or drive. Nothing in between. I wear a camel-hair in winter and a Barraclough’s in summer. You know what would happen to a coat like that on a bike.
I love the theatre. I like modern dance, very good movies and ambitious international contemporary music. I like poetry, prose, painting and the decorative arts. I like the lot, the very best that London’s got, the whole bloody casserole. I gobble it all up and bang on my bowl for more. Let timid greenbelters creep in at weekends and sink themselves in the West End’s familiar deodorised shit if they want to. That’s not my city. That’s a tourist set. It’s what I live off. What all of us show-people live off. It’s the old, familiar circus. The big rotate.
We’re selling what everybody recognises. What makes them feel safe and certain and sure of every single moment in the city. Nothing to worry about in jolly old London. We sell charm and colour by the yard. Whole word factories turn out new rhyming slang and saucy street characters are trained on council grants. Don’t frighten the horses. Licensed pearlies pause for a photo-opportunity in the dockside Secure Zones. Without all that cheap scenery, without our myths and magical skills, without our whorish good cheer and instincts for trade—any kind of trade—we probably wouldn’t have a living city.
As it is, the real city I live in has per square inch more creative energy at work at any given moment than anywhere else on the planet. But you’d never know it from a stroll up the Strand. It’s almost all in those lively little sidestreets the English-speaking tourists can’t help feeling a bit nervous about and which the French adore.
If you use music for comfortable escape you’d probably find more satisfying and cheaper relief in a massage parlour than at the umpteenth revival of The Sound of Music. I’d tell that to any hesitant punter who’s not too sure. Check out the phone boxes for the ladies, I’d say, or you can go to the half-price ticket-booth in Leicester Square and pick up a ticket that’ll deliver real value—Ibsen or Shakespeare, Shaw or Greenbank. Certainly you can fork o
ut three hundred sheets for a fifty-sheet ticket that in a justly ordered world wouldn’t be worth two pee and have your ears salved and your cradle rocked for two hours. Don’t worry, I’d tell them, I make no judgements. Some hardworking whore profits, whatever you decide. So who’s the cynic?
I went on one of those tours when my friends Dave and Di from Bury came up for the Festival of London in 2001 and it’s amazing the crap they tell people. They put sex, violence and money into every story. They know fuck-all. They soup everything up. It’s Sun-reader history. Even the Beefeaters at the Tower. Poppinsland. All that old English duff.
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