Modem Times 2.0 - Michael Moorcock [14]
“I’m never angry.” He turned as she was hanging a piece of complicated lingerie on a hanger. “You know me.”
“A man of action.”
“If nothing else.” He grew aware of a smell he didn’t like. Anaesthetic? Some sort of spray? Was it coming from her case?
“When did you arrive?”
“You met me at Eurostar.”
“I meant in Paris. From New Orleans?” That was it. The perfume used to disguise the smell of mould. Her clothes had that specific iridescence. They’d been looted.
“Saks,” he said.
“You can’t see the label from there, can you? You wouldn’t believe how cheap they were.”
“Laissez les bon temps roulez.” Jerry had begun to cheer up.
“I’m so tired of the English.”
3. POMPIER PARIS
Meet TOPIO.3, the ping-pong playing robot. Made by Vietnam’s first ever robotics firm, TOSY the bipedal hu-manoid uses two 200-fps cameras to detect the ball …
—Popular Science, March 2010
“HOT ENOUGH FOR YOU? Everyone’s leaving for the country.” Jerry and Bishop Beesley disembarked from the taxi at the corner of Elgin Crescent and Portobello Road. All the old familiar shops were gone. The pubs had become wine bars andrestaurants. Tables and chairs stood outside fake bistros stretching into the middle distance. The fruit and veg on the market stalls had the look of mock organics. Heritage tomatoes. The air was filled with braying aggression. If the heat got any worse there might be a Whiteshirt riot. Jerry could imagine nothing worse than watching the nouveaux riches taking it out on what remained of the anciens pauvres. The people in the council flats must be getting nervous.
“Après moi, le frisson nouveau.”
“Do what?” Bishop Beesley was distracted. He had spotted one of his former parishioners stumbling dazedly out of Finch’s. The poor bugger had tripped into a timewarp but brightened when he saw the bishop. Sidling up, he mumbled a familiar mantra and forced a handful of old fivers into Beesley’s sweating fist. Reluctantly, the bishop took something from under his surplice in exchange. Watching the decrepit speed freak stumble away, he said apologetically, “They’re still my flock. But of course there’s been a massive falling off compared to the numbers I used to serve. Once, you could rely on an active congregation west of Portobello, but these days everything left is mostly in Kilburn. Not my parish, you see.”
Jerry whistled sympathetically.
Beesley stopped to admire one of the newly decorated stalls. The owner, wearing a fresh white overall and a pearly cap, recognized him. “You lost weight, your worship?”
“Sadly …” The bishop fingered the stock. “I’ve never seen brussels as big.”
“Bugger me.” Jerry stared in astonishment at a fawn bottom rolling towards Colville Terrace. Who needed jodhpurs and green wellies to drive a Range Rover to the Ladbroke Grove Sainsbury’s? “Trixie?” Wasn’t it Miss Brunner’s little girl, all grown up? Distracted, Jerry looked for a hand of long branches that used to hide a sign he remembered on the other side of the Midland Bank. The bank was now an HSBC. Who on earth would want to erase his childhood? He remembered how he used to have a thing against the past. Maybe it was generational.
“Are you okay?” His hand moving restlessly in his pocket, Bishop Beesley looked yearningly across the road at a new sweet and tobacconists called Yummy Puffs. “Would you mind?”
Jerry watched him cross the road and emerge shortly afterwards with his arms full of bags of M&Ms. Where, he wondered absently, were the chocolate bars of yesterday? The Five Boys? He could taste the Fry’s peppermint cream on his tongue. Dairy Milk. Those Quakers had known how to make chocolate. As a lad he had wondered why the old Underground vending machines, the Terry’s, the Rowntree’s, the Cadbury’s, were always empty, painted up, like poorly made props meant only to be glimpsed as the backgrounds of Ealing comedies. The heavy cast-iron