by Geoff Ryman
Anya says to the model: ‘Stefan? Look up.’ She decides to take another roll using her handsome husband instead.
Car 3 map
Contents
Another helpful and informative 253 footnote
7 The new British Library is Britain’s most famous overrun building project…by decades, millions. Plans were approved in 1980 but by October 1996, it still was not open. At one point, after most of the decoration was complete, all wiring had to be replaced. The final cost will be in the neighbourhood of £450 million and it will run out of space by 2000.
It’s made of red brick and looks bloody bleak. Next door is St Pancras Station, which was also regarded as an eyesore in its day and now looks like an Alice-in-Wonderland neo-Gothic palace. It doubled as one in the Ian McKellen film version of Richard III. Maybe the future will find the new British Library beautiful.
But it will have to open first.
For Your Reading Ease and Comfort
PASSENGER MAP
Car No 4
THIS MAP SHOWS YOU
WHO is in the car
WHERE they are sitting and
WHAT are their interests and concerns
110. ANDY DE VENDEUSE
Mum and fun
145. DOUGLAS ESSWOOD
image and video
111. MARIANNE DE VENDEUSE
son and funds
144. DOMINIC SHARPE
imperial war
112. PETER DEARLOVE
Toronto blessing
143. LUCIE FRIEND
silks and Y-fronts
113. MARY DZLKUNI
the wrong men
142. NANE PARELY
time and family
114. THOMAS DOWE
the dark
141. JOSETTE PARELY
licorice and Mummy
115. DEBENDRATH KARAN
art and chocolate
140. ANITA MAZZONI
another happy subscriber
DOORS
DOORS
116. ANUP AGNIHOTRI
doors and faces
139. HISHAM BADHURI
selves like fish
117. EDWARD GOSSART
Teddy and teddies
138. NICHOLAS PAGANOS
children like stars
118. ANUK DHOTRI
unwedded mess
137. XAVIER DUCORO
managars and wan grins?
119. GARY COLLIER
mad cows and bull
136. IBRAHIM GURER
teddy bears and Ulster
120. ELAINE CLEMENTS
even less sex, please
135. JACK SPUFFORD
flutes and passports
EMPTY SEAT
134. LEON DE MARCO
freestyle swimming
DOORS
121. WHO?
the light
DOORS
122. JOHN KENNEDY
sticks and stones
133. MARGARET LEVESQUE
the birds is coming
123. JOHN TEMPLETON
Samaritans and taxicabs
132. RICHARD THURLOW
feats of clay
124. TOM McHUGH
Mind the Gap
131. RON BUSBY
manors and manners
125. ANTHONY LOWICK
bagpipes and churches
130. GERTA FAZAHI
killing jokes
126. CAROL NOADES
bosses and husbands
129. JOHN MINNOTT
hugs and kisses
127. JENNY GREEN
the last laugh
128. AGATHA BEFFONT
nanny and trauma
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The 253 Guide to Homely English
Ashamed by your English?
You’re chatting up a bird at the bar. You say “The beauty of the Web is that you can utilize ftp, pdf or even telnet through one interface.” She says “Piss off, you pathetic little nerd.”
Do you find yourself using words like “prioritize” or “evanescent” in public? Unable to stop yourself using expressions like “Unix file-naming conventions”?
Do you sound like a puffed-up prof, or just like the folks back home? You will know when you use The 253 Guide to Homely English
Simply run 253 of your own words through our Ready Reckoner. Here’s how it works!
Count the number of sentences in your 253 words. Divide 253 by that number. Write down your score. (Hint: the lower the number, the better!)
Count the number of three-sound words. Try saying the word syllable. See? It’s got three sounds! Count ’em and write the number down! (Hint: the more, the worse!)
Take your first ten sentences. Count all the words in total for those sentences only. Divide by ten. Then multiply the number of sentences by that number. (Hint: the lower, the better)
Add all your scores up. Remember: the lower the score, the better you’ve done.
Here are some scores we prepared earlier:
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcelle Proust
367.35
The Microsoft Word User’s Guide
320.8
Pyramids by Terry Pratchett
233.8
The Sun newspaper
170.37
Oxford Reading Series: Stage One
0
Anything higher than 253 and you’re out!!!
Homely English
It’s as plain as the nose on your face
110
MR ANDY DE VENDEUSE
Outward appearance
Eighteen or nineteen, very tall, wearing blue jeans, black trainers, blue corduroy coat with fleecy sheepskin lining and collar. Skeletal hands and fingers. Coils of silver bangles around his wrists. Under his coat are layers of green, then red. He has a long, pale, striking face made even more so by thick-stemmed midnight sunglasses and retro-punk spiky black hair.
He pats the seat next to him and an older woman crosses the aisle to sit beside him. He snuggles up to her and puts his head on her shoulder.
Inside information
A musician without a band at the moment. He and his mum have decided to chuck everything in and go to France for a few months. His father is French and the hope is that they will get some of the money he owes them. Andy doesn’t want to spend too much time with his father: he works for some kind of bank, and puts waves in his hair.
What he is doing or thinking
He yearns to put his feet on the vacated chair opposite him. His long skinny legs stretch across the aisle. His mum says, ‘Andy, don’t, come on, darling,’ in an East End voice. He has an inspiration. He puts his feet on the arm rest instead. His mum nips the baggy knees of his trousers and lifts his leg. At that moment an old geezer comes to sit down, so he moves anyway. Andy smiles. His mum is great. France, whatever happens, will be fun. He looks over her shoulder at a magazine.
Car 4 map
Contents
111
MRS MARIANNE DE VENDEUSE
Outward appearance
Brown coat to the floor, delicate scarf in different shades of brown, long soft boots in fake alligator-pattern cloth. Her hair is highlighted but is naturally light brown. Her face, though deeply lined, is somehow also young in attitude: forthright, impatient, open, defensive. She moves next to her son and thumbs through a free recruitment magazine.
Inside information
Works in a friend’s plant shop. She speaks impeccable French. Worked in France for many years as a ski instructor, where she met her rich, French husband. Now impoverished, she often nips across the Channel in order to buy cigarettes in bulk to sell in the UK. Sometimes she takes a van if she can afford the rental and buys wine for resale. Sometimes it’s cigarettes, which are light enough for the train. She worries about finance, but only for the sake of her son. Otherwise she would live anywhere, anyhow.
What she is doing or thinking
The magazine consists mostly of job ads within a shell of second
-hand articles. She hopes to find something that will use her skills in French. They all want something I don’t have,’ she sighs. ‘I can speak the language probably better than someone who’s been to university, but they all want qualifications.’
‘You could get one of these qualifications teaching English to foreigners,’ her son says. He thumbs back to the course ads.
Indeed, she could. She smiles and kisses him. Her reward for being brave is Andy. She looks at his black rucksack, with the logo ‘Mon Viso 3’.
‘My face,’ she muses.
Car 4 map
Contents
112
MR PETER DEARLOVE
Outward appearance
Tall nervous black man, gets on at Embankment. Brown leather jacket hangs off narrow shoulders. Green jeans, green socks, wispy moustache, butterfly-delicate ankles. Lopes apologetically to his seat then twitches in place. Charming, childlike and disjointed all at once, like an innocent Martian, or Charlie Chaplin. Keeps clearing his throat.
Inside information
Has returned from Canada, where he accepted the Toronto Blessing.1 He walked straight from Toronto airport to the church. It was small, ordinary and that seemed right. Peter had to line up for most of a day, but when he got inside, all was as promised. He talked in tongues, thrashed on the floor, and Jesus came and sat with him and held his hand. Jesus said to him that he was to love everyone and everyone would love and forgive him.
What he is doing or thinking
Peter blesses everyone he walks past. He thinks he is about to bear witness, and speak about God’s love, but something holds him back. Wanting to speak is an ache inside. Why is he so silent? It feels like shame. The man across from him looks forbidding, the girl next to him is too pretty. Perhaps God will unleash his tongue when the right time comes.
He wishes there were someone here with the Blessing. The Blessing sings like the universe. People with the Blessing hum its tune. Peter may not have a job, but he knows why he is on this train: to bear witness.
So he keeps clearing his throat, and is swept on, towards Elephant and Castle.
Car 4 map
Contents
Another helpful and informative 253 footnote
1 The Toronto Blessing is a worldwide charismatic phenomenon which started in a small church not far from what I think of as Malton Airport (now Lester B. Pearson International). The Blessing sets people talking in tongues. It appears to be passed on from one congregation to another, a bit like a virus.
Worldwide charisma? Canada? It doesn’t sound like the country I left.
It’s a typical Canadian story. My father was poached by the American head office and, like so many Canadians, we moved south to LA. It was 1962, and we arrived in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is another story. I’d grown up in a village that was, in those days, the boonies. My best friend lived on a 600 acre farm that had been in his family since the 19th century. The Credit River flowed through it; you could see deer running the fields. In winter, rabid foxes staggered drooling out of the undergrowth. The farm is now a suburb. The grand old house was torn down.
In 1995, I went back for the first time since 1969. I expected to drive through fields of tract housing. Instead, along the old Highway 10, I drove through skyscrapers. I recognized one barn, alone in their midst. It had a white painted dancing horse on its roof.
The village was even spookier. Its name, Meadowvale, had been hijacked by a suburban development on the other side of Streetsville, and so it was now called Meadowvale Village. A collapsed sign just outside it announced that it was a Heritage Village.
A kind of invisible bell jar had been dropped over it, protecting it from change. This may be because no one wanted to develop land under flight paths. Meadowvale looked as it had done in 1962, except that the faces of the eleven-year-olds I left behind were now as lined as my own.
Meadowvale had been inhabited by the descendants of Scottish immigrants. We used their vowel sounds and said ‘aye?’ instead of the American ‘you know?’ I went to a one-room schoolhouse that had been built in 1871, and prayed in a United Church of Canada Sunday School.
I hated it. Canada was a raw country. My schoolmates were tough little kids who wanted to grow up into car mechanics. Toronto was grey, blustery, its port in decline. Many of the people my age have since moved north, deeper into the bush, perhaps to escape the bland gloss of what Toronto became.
Just beyond the border of the Magic Circle was a mound of earth, where the preserving bypass had been built, burying the old 2nd Line West. In the other direction, the road plunges into Toronto’s ethnic suburbia. About a mile from my old church, now an evangelical centre, there is a Coptic Orthodox Church. There is a mosque. Canada was once rich, and monolithic. As someone else said, Canadian artists expressed alienation. Now they express difference: gay Canadians, Coptic Canadians, Armenian Canadians, Italian Canadians. Let alone French Canadians.
Talking in tongues?
113
MISS MARY DZLKUNI
Outward appearance
Stunningly beautiful black girl, black coat, long red dress with big buttons up the front, left dangerously undone. She stares ahead through narrowed eyes, lips pulled down in a distracted frown. Pokes at her face, unconsciously looking for spots to squeeze. There are some, but not where she is squeezing.
Inside information
A temp, now a receptionist at the Peebrane Trust near Lambeth North. She does not quite know she is beautiful. She feels unloved. Her father and mother split up and divided their six children. Her father took three to England, separating Mary from her twin sister.
What she is doing or thinking
She has just been dropped again. Ken seemed a big, strong, noble man. He visited her father’s house, courted her father, booming all the time about his prospects, about his standing back home. Foolish girl, she got carried away, gave in to him and now of course he treats her differently.
The men Mary meets are bold egotists who are confident enough to treat her like a Bastille to be stormed. Being beautiful could be enough to ruin her life.
The man next to her, strange, thin, says gently, ‘Do you have Jesus in your life?’
‘What? No.’
‘If you get to know Jesus, he makes everything all right.’
This is a shy man. It is like talking to a nervous deer.
‘I have to get off at the next stop,’ she says. ‘You can talk to me on the way if you like.’
He does and she does not worry when he gets off with her.
Car 4 map
Contents
114
MR THOMAS DOWE
Outward appearance
Balding, rotund man, queasy with sweat in a pistachio shirt and jacket. Pressed white trousers. No briefcase, or heavy overcoat. Body language awkward, twisted, at odds with studied smartness of casual dress.
Inside information
A fireman on long-term sick leave, being treated for depression. Came to London from Northampton after a certain incident that he calls a near miss. Lives alone in a spotless flat. Only companion a female cat he grooms ruthlessly. Has kept secret, even from his doctors, a completely unacceptable sexual longing. On his way to St Thomas’ Hospital to request chemical castration.
What he is doing or thinking
The dreams are getting worse, truly terrible. His sexual fantasies shock him, leave him wanting to escape his own body, his own self. But they are there and he knows that now, at 32, they will never go away. They will keep pushing him until, drunk or giddy from his other treatments, he goes under.
He remembers the face of the Northampton girl, her hollow eyes as she realized what he meant to do. He remembers the guilty rush, like a colliding train bearing down the track. He imagines real sex is like that, the rising towards a climax. He turned away that time.
He looks at the girl next to him, her long, vulnerable, fleshy legs. It would be so easy to do it now and be shut away forever. The
n the girl begins to speak to the boy next to her. Thank you, Jesus.
The train comes into Waterloo, and unnoticed, he gets up to go.
Car 4 map
Contents
115
MR DEBENDRATH KARAN
Outward appearance
Cuddly young Asian man. Knitted ethnic hat with earflaps, knitted coat down to his knees. Frankly fat tummy. Sits with a portfolio and a briefcase. Loosely bandaged thumb.
Inside information
Talented animator who works on the Asterix series, and Kia-ora ads. Going to present his work to a South Bank Technopark studio. Confirmed chocoholic who is missing his fix. Bandage from a wound inflicted by a dropped scalpel.
What he is doing or thinking
Dreaming either of a Topic or a Yorkie. He normally has a cup of cocoa for breakfast, but this morning the tin was empty. The thought of Waterloo Station’s confectioners tugs at his heartstrings.