‘It doesn’t surprise me. We had some mustard that couldn’t have been more than a day old.’
‘The wallop’s first-class down at the George, and as for the scoff – the bluest piece of ham you ever saw. A really memorable thrash. I’m getting the secretary of the Mob to crack them up in the next issue of the Boozer Rag.’
‘Have you bagged stools, sir?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Sorry, mate. Have you bagged, mate?’
‘No, I’m afraid not. May I see the head potman?’
‘I’ll get him over directly, mate.’
‘Shall we start thinking about what we’re going to have? Pickled onions to start? With a glass of mild?’
‘Nuts for me. Mixed and salted.’
‘Right, that’s three onions, one nuts. And then I can recommend the cheese rolls. They know me here and always see that I get the three-day-old, with plenty of rind.’
After some time, Simpson obtained a stool and ordered a pint of bitter from the grubby barmaid.
‘Certainly, love. A fresh barrel has just come on.’
‘Oh, I’ll have mild instead, then.’
‘By all means, love, if you wish for it. Your taste is your own. And what will you have in the way of scoff, love?’
‘Oh, er – nothing to eat, thank you.’
‘If I may say so, love, with all due respect, you might perhaps do better at the wine-bar if you don’t wish for any scoff. We have standards to maintain here, love.’
‘I’m awfully sorry. What . . . scoff do you recommend?’
‘Our gherkins have frequently been cracked up, love. Not a dish is sold till it’s two days old.’
‘They sound delightful. One dish, please.’
‘Very good, love. With cigarette-ash garnishings, of course.’
The beer came. It was horrible. The gherkins came. Simpson took no notice of them. Dazedly he watched and listened to those around him. A kind of ritual seemed to be being enacted by a group of four immediately next to him. The two couples raised their pints in concert, intoned the word ‘Cheers’ in a liturgical manner, poured a few drops on to the front of their greasy pullovers, and sank their drinks in one swallow. Afterwards they all sighed loudly, wiped their mouths with their hands, banged the empty glasses down on the counter, and spoke in turn.
‘Lovely drop of wallop.’
‘First today.’
‘I needed that.’
‘Lays the dust.’
‘You can’t beat a decent pint.’
‘Full of goodness.’
‘Keeps your insides working.’
‘It’s a real drink.’
When this point was reached, all four shouted ‘Let’s have another’ in unison, and were immediately served with fresh drinks and small plates of sandwiches. The bread on these was curled up at the corners, revealing purple strips of meat crisscrossed with gristle. One of the men felt the texture of the bread and nodded approvingly. ‘I told you this place was good,’ his friend said. Then the party got down to what was clearly the pièce de résistance, alternately biting at the sandwiches and taking pulls of beer, chewing the resulting mush with many a belch of appreciation. Simpson lowered his head into his hands. The talk went on.
‘What’s the fighting like here?’
‘Oh, excellent. The governor of the boozer gets it under way at ten-thirty sharp, just outside on the corner. I did hear a whisper that he’s going to allow broken bottles for the last five minutes tonight. The police should be with us by then. They’re very keen round here.’
‘At the Feathers, you know, they kick off at ten-fifteen inside the bar. Don’t know whether I agree with that.’
‘No. After all, it’s only the finale of the evening.’
‘Absolutely. Shouldn’t make it too important.’
‘Definitely not. Getting tight’s the object of the exercise.’
‘Quite. By the way, who’s that fellow next to you?’
‘No idea. Wine-bar type, if you ask me.’
‘Hasn’t touched his gherkins. Refused fresh bitter. Shouldn’t be here at all.’
‘Couldn’t agree more. I mean, look at his clothes.’
‘Wonder how long since they were slept in.’
‘If they ever have been.’
‘Disgusting.’
‘And what would you like to follow, love?’
This last was the barmaid. Simpson raised his head and gave a long yell of fury, bewilderment, horror and protest. Then he ran from the room and went on running until he was back at the point where the TIOPEPE was to pick him up. With shaking fingers he put the trance-pill into his mouth.
The Director broke the silence that followed the end of Simpson’s story. ‘Well, it’s a long time ahead, anyway,’ he said with an attempt at cheerfulness.
‘Is it?’ Simpson shouted. ‘Do you think that sort of situation develops in a couple of weeks? It’s starting to happen already. Wine-snobbery spreading, more and more of this drinking what you ought to drink instead of what you like. Self-conscious insistence on the virtues of pubs and beer because the wrong people are beginning to drink wine. It’ll be here in our time, don’t you worry. You just wait.’
‘Ah, now, Simpson, you’re tired and overwrought. A glass of champagne will soon make you see things in a different light.’
‘Slip away with me afterwards,’ I murmured. ‘We’ll have a good go at the beer down in town.’
Simpson gave a long yell – much like the one, probably, he vented at the end of his visit to 2010. Springing to his feet, he rushed away down the lab to where Schneider kept the medical stores.
‘What’s he up to?’ the Director puffed as we hurried in pursuit. ‘Is he going to try and poison himself?’
‘Not straight away, sir, I imagine.’
‘How do you mean, Baker?’
‘Look at that bottle he’s got hold of, sir. Can’t you see what it is?’
‘But . . . I can’t believe my eyes. Surely it’s . . .’
‘Yes, sir. Surgical spirit.’
THE FRIENDS OF PLONK
The (technical) success of Simpson’s trip to the year 2010 encouraged the authorities to have similar experiments conducted for a variety of time-objectives. Some curious and occasionally alarming pieces of information about the future came to our knowledge in this way; I’m thinking less of politics than of developments in the domain of drink.
For instance, let me take this opportunity of warning every youngster who likes any kind of draught beer and has a high life-expectancy to drink as much of the stuff as he can while he can, because they’re going to stop making it in 2016. Again, just six months ago Simpson found that, in the world of 2045, alcoholic diseases as a whole accounted for almost exactly a third of all deaths, or nearly as many as transport accidents and suicide combined. This was universally put down to the marketing, from 2039 onwards, of wines and spirits free of all the congeneric elements that cause hangovers, and yet at the same time indistinguishable from the untreated liquors even under the most searching tests – a triumph of biochemitechnology man had been teasingly on the brink of since about the time I was downing my first pints of beer.
Anyway, by a lucky accident, the authorities suddenly became anxious to know the result of the 2048 Presidential election in America, and so Simpson was able to travel to that year and bring back news, not only of the successful Rosicrucian candidate’s impending installation at the Black House, but also of the rigorous outlawing of the new drink process and everything connected with it. After one veiled reference to the matter in conversation, Simpson had considered himself lucky to escape undamaged from the bar of the Travellers’ Club.
For a time, our section’s exploration of the rather more distant future was blocked by a persistent fault in the TIOPEPE, whereby the projection circuits cut off at approximately 83.63 years in advance of time-present. Then, one day in 1974, an inspired guess of Rabaiotti’s put things right, and within a week Simpso
n was off to 2145. We were all there in the lab as usual to see him back safely. After Schneider had given him the usual relaxing shots, Simpson came out with some grave news. A quarrel about spy-flights over the moons of Saturn had set Wales and Mars – the two major powers in the Inner Planets at that period – at each other’s throats and precipitated a system-wide nuclear war in 2101. Half of Venus, and areas on Earth the size of Europe, had been virtually obliterated.
Rabaiotti was the first to speak when Simpson had stopped. ‘Far enough off not to bother most of our great-grandchildren, anyway,’ he said.
‘That’s true. But what a prospect.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Well, no use glooming, Baker,’ the Director said. ‘Nothing we can do about it. We’ve got a full half-hour before the official conference – tell us what’s happened to drink.’
Simpson rubbed his bald head and sighed. I noticed that his eyes were bloodshot, but then they nearly always were after one of these trips. A very conscientious alcohologist, old Simpson. ‘You’re not going to like it.’
We didn’t.
Simpson’s landing in 2145 had been a fair enough success, but there had been an unaccountable error in the ground-level estimates, conducted a week earlier by means of our latest brain-child, the TIAMARIA (Temporal Inspection Apparatus and Meteor-ological-Astronomical-Regional-Interrelation Assessor). This had allowed him to materialize twelve feet up in the air and given him a nasty fall – on to a flower-bed, by an unearned piece of luck, but shaking him severely. What followed shook him still further.
The nuclear war had set everything back so much that the reconstructed world he found himself in was little more unfamiliar than the ones he had found on earlier, shorter-range time-trips. His official report, disturbing as it was, proved easy enough to compile, and he had a couple of hours to spare before the TIOPEPE’s field should snatch him back to the present. He selected a restaurant within easy range of his purse – the TIAMARIA’s cameras, plus our counterfeiters in the Temporal Treasury, had taken care of the currency problem all right – found a vacant table, and asked for a drink before dinner.
‘Certainly, sir,’ the waiter said. ‘The Martian manatee-milk is specially good today. Or there’s a new delivery of Iapetan carnivorous-lemon juice, if you’ve a liking for the unusual. Very, uh, full-blooded, sir.’
Simpson swallowed. ‘I’m sure,’ he said, ‘but I was thinking of something – you know – a little stronger?’
The waiter’s manner suffered an abrupt change. ‘Oh, you mean booze, do you?’ he said coldly. ‘Sometimes I wonder what this town’s coming to, honest. All right, I’ll see what I can do.’
The ‘booze’ arrived on a tin tray in three chunky cans arranged like equal slices of a round cake. The nearest one had the word BEAR crudely stamped on it. Simpson poured some muddy brown liquid from it into a glass. It tasted like last week’s swipes topped up with a little industrial alcohol. Then he tried the can stamped BOOJLY. (We all agreed later that this must be a corruption of ‘Beaujolais’.) That was like red ink topped up with a good deal of industrial alcohol. Lastly there was BANDY. Industrial alcohol topped up with a little cold tea.
Wondering dimly if some trick of the TIOPEPE had managed to move him back into some unfrequented corner of the 1960s, Simpson became aware that a man at the next table had been watching him closely. When their eyes met, the stranger came over and, with a word of apology, sat down opposite him. (It was extraordinary, Simpson was fond of remarking, how often people did just this sort of thing when he visited the future.)
‘Do excuse me,’ the man said politely, ‘but from your expression just now I’d guess you’re a conozer – am I right? Oh, my name’s Piotr Davies, by the way, on leave from Greenland Fruiteries. You’re not Earth-based, I take it?’
‘Oh . . . no, I’m just in from Mercury. My first trip since I was a lad, in fact.’ Simpson noticed that Piotr Davies’s face was covered by a thick network of burst veins, and his nose carried the richest growth of grog-blossom Simpson had ever seen. (He avoided looking at the Director when he told us this.) ‘Yes,’ he struggled on after giving his name, ‘I am a bit of a connoiss – conozer, I suppose. I do try to discriminate a little in my—’
‘You’ve hit it,’ Piotr Davies said excitedly. ‘Discrimination. That’s it, the very word. I knew I was right about you. Discrimination. And tradition. Well, you won’t find much of either on Earth these days, I’m afraid. Nor on Mercury, from what I hear.’
‘No – no, you certainly won’t.’
‘We conozers are having a hard time. The Planetary War, of course. And the Aftermath.’ Davies paused, and seemed to be sizing up Simpson afresh. Then: ‘Tell me, are you doing anything tonight? More or less right away?’
‘Well, I have got an appointment I must keep in just under two hours, but until then I—’
‘Perfect. Let’s go.’
‘But what about my dinner?’
‘You won’t want any after you’ve been where I’m going to take you.’
‘But where are you—?’
‘Somewhere absolutely made for a conozer like you. What a bit of luck you happened to run into me. I’ll explain on the way.’
Outside, they boarded a sort of wheel-less taxicab and headed into what seemed to be a prosperous quarter. Davies’s explanations were copious and complete; Simpson made full use of his supposed status as one long absent from the centre of things. It appeared that the Planetary War had destroyed every one of the vast, centralized, fully automated distilleries of strong liquors; that bacteriological warfare had put paid to many crops, including vines, barley, hops and even sugar; that the fanatical religious movements of the Aftermath, many of them with government backing, had outlawed all drink for nearly twenty years. Simpson shuddered at that news.
‘And when people came to their senses,’ Davies said glumly, ‘it was too late. The knowledge had died. Oh, you can’t kill a process like distillation. Too fundamental. Or fermentation, either. But the special processes, the extra ingredients, the skills, the tradition – gone for ever. Whisky – what a rich, evocative word. What can the stuff have tasted like? What little there is about it in the surviving literature gives a very poor idea. Muzzle – that was a white wine, we’re pretty sure, from Germany, about where the Great Crater is. Gin – a spirit flavoured with juniper, we know that much. There isn’t any juniper now, of course.
‘So, what with one thing and another, drinking went out. Real, civilized drinking, that is – I’m not talking about that stuff they tried to give you back there. I and a few like-minded friends tried to get some of the basic information together, but to no avail. And then, quite by chance, one of us, an archaeologist, turned up a primitive two-dimensional television film that dated back almost two hundred years, giving a full description of some ancient drinks and a portrayal of the habits that went with them – all the details. The film was called ‘The Down-and-Outs’, which is an archaic expression referring to people of limited prosperity, but which we immediately understood as being satirically or ironically intended in this instance. That period, you know, was very strong on satire. Anyway, the eventual result of our friend’s discovery was . . . this.’
With something of a flourish, Davies drew a pasteboard card from his pocket and passed it to Simpson. It read:
THE FRIENDS OF PLONK
Established 2139 for the drinking of traditional liquors in traditional dress and in traditional surroundings
Before Simpson could puzzle this out, his companion halted the taxi and a moment later was shepherding him through the portals of a large and magnificent mansion. At the far end of a thickly carpeted foyer was a steep, narrow staircase, which they descended. When they came to its foot, Davies reached into a cupboard and brought out what Simpson recognized as a trilby hat of the sort his father had used to wear, a cloth cap, a large piece of sacking and a tattered brown blanket. All four articles appeared to be covered with stains and dirt. At the s
ame time Simpson became aware of a curious and unpleasant mixture of smells and a subdued grumbling of voices.
In silence, Davies handed him the cap and the blanket and himself donned the sacking, stole-fashion, and the trilby. Simpson followed his lead. Then Davies ushered him through a low doorway.
The room they entered was dimly lit by candles stuck into bottles, and it was a moment before Simpson could take in the scene. At first he felt pure astonishment. There was no trace here of the luxury he had glimpsed upstairs: the walls, of undressed stone, were grimy and damp, the floor was covered at random with sacks and decaying lumps of matting. A coke stove made the cellar stiflingly hot; the air swam with cigarette smoke; the atmosphere was thick and malodorous. Against one wall stood a trestle table piled with bottles and what looked like teacups. Among other items Simpson uncomprehendingly saw there were several loaves of bread, some bottles of milk, a pile of small circular tins and, off in a corner, an old-fashioned and rusty gas-cooker or its replica.
But his surprise and bewilderment turned to mild alarm when he surveyed the dozen or so men sitting about on packing-cases or broken chairs and squatting or sprawling on the floor, each wearing some sort of battered headgear and with a blanket or sack thrown round his shoulders. All of them were muttering unintelligibly, in some instances to a companion, more often just to themselves. Davies took Simpson’s arm and led him to a splintery bench near the wall.
‘These blankets and so on must have been a means of asserting the essential democracy of drink,’ Davies whispered. ‘Anyway, we’re near the end of the purely ritualistic part now. Our film didn’t make its full significance clear, but it was obviously a kind of self-preparation, perhaps even prayer. The rest of the proceedings will be much less formal. Ah . . .’
Two of the men had been muttering more loudly at each other and now closed physically, but their blows and struggles were symbolic, a mime, as in ballet or the Japanese theatre. Soon one of them had his adversary pinned to the floor and was raining token punches upon him. (‘We’re rather in the dark about this bit,’ Davies murmured. ‘Perhaps an enacted reference to the ancient role of drink as a sequel to physical exertion.’) When the prostrate combatant had begun to feign unconsciousness, a loud and authoritative voice spoke.
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