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By Root 1124 0

here, in what was officially called ‘the informal sector’: London’s shanty-town fringe, where the Republic’s experiments in local government overlay an experiment in anarcho-capitalism that made the space movement’s enterprise zones look over-regulated. The second, third, and subsequent storeys of most buildings were afterthoughts. Organic farming made the absence of sewage pipes something less than a disaster, but it didn’t make the night-soil tankers any less smelly. The exhaust fumes did. The population was a mixture of the native marginals and refugees from Europe’s and Asia’s wars. Not many beggars, but they were distressing enough: people whose protectors had skimped on their nuclear insurance policies.

Like I say, I was used to it, but at that moment – an after-effect of the clinic, or the picket – it all got too much.

‘I feel terrible,’ I said. ‘My head hurts, and my stomach feels like it’s been pumped.’

‘Oh, quit moaning,’ Annette said. ‘It’s no worse than a hangover.’

‘What a happy thought,’ I said. There was a pub on the pavement in front of us. ‘Half a litre of Amstel would just about hit the spot.’

Annette waved a Health Service handout in front of me. ‘It says here –’

‘Yes, I know what it says. Do I look like I’m about to be handling weapons or heavy machinery?’

‘I suppose not.’ She grinned and lowered herself into a plastic chair, perilously close to the gutter. ‘Pils for me. And those kebabs look good.’

I shouted the order to the garson, who disappeared through a hatch and re-emerged a minute later. There was the usual poster of Abdullah Ocalan above the hatch. I could never figure why even the exiles from Democratic Kurdistan – entrepreneurs to the bone – still honoured the Great Leader. Possibly a shakedown was going on in the townships. I made a mental note to have it checked out. There might be money in this for a defence company that could offer them a better deal than their Party’s protection racket. Or I might be misreading the situation entirely – nationalism was still as foreign to me as ever.

The crowd, Kurds and Turks mostly, flowed around the pavement pub. Behind us beasts and vehicles followed some unwritten highway code, in which precedence depended on a coefficient of momentum and noise. A television by the hatch showed a game-show from Istanbul. Overhead, airships drifted to the distant masts of Alexandra Port. I sat back, warmed by the sun and the spreading glow of the food and drink.

‘Did you dream?’ Annette asked.

I shook my head. ‘Did you?’

‘I thought I did,’ Annette said, smiling mysteriously. ‘I heard a warm, friendly voice and I saw a white light, and I remember thinking, “Great! I’m finally having a Near Death Experience!” and then the light was just sunlight, and the voice was the technician, counting.’

‘That’s the real thing,’ I said. ‘The sunlight really is the white light.’ This materialist insight was all that survived of a magic-mushroom trip I’d taken as a student. That and a vision of three goddesses: Mother Nature, Lady Luck and Miss Liberty, who were – I realised after coming down from it – necessity, chance and freedom, and indeed the rulers of all.

‘Imagine,’ Annette said, ‘if that’s the nearest we ever come to dying.’

‘Touch plastic!’ I rapped the table. We laughed, clasped hands across the table. I gazed at her face, aged but not deteriorated, its lines a map of her life’s laughter and grief, and I felt I could love her for ever.

‘“Till all the seas gang dry, my dear, and the rocks melt wi’ the sun…”’

‘Oh, stop it before I report you for senility.’

The traffic and the noise stopped. I looked over at the slowing cars, and thought everyone was looking at us. Turning the other way, I saw they were looking at the television. The commentary, and the loud conversations that suddenly replaced the hush, were all in Turkish and Kurdish. But the televion image needed no translation: a German tank, and a Polish road-sign.

Berlin – twenty-first century, pre-war Berlin, Old Berlin – was the most exciting city in Europe. The post-reunification construction boom