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By Root 156 0

machines had been sprayed post office red or municipal green, and there was nothing behind the glass panels, no way of opening the sliding dispensers. They had slots for pennies. Signs calling for 2d. They had been empty since the war, he learned from his mum. When chocolate had been rationed and prices had risen. Yet the machines had remained on tube train platforms well into the late 1950s, awaiting new hope; serving to make the Underground mysterious, a tunnel into the past, a labyrinth of memory, where people had once sought sanctuary from bombs. Escalators to heaven and hell. The trains, the ticket machines, the vast escalators, the massive lift cages had all functioned as well as they ever had, but the chocolate machines had become museum pieces, offering a clue to a certain state of mind, a stoicism that perceived them as mere self-indulgence, at odds with the serious business of survival. Not even the most beautiful, desirable machines survived such Puritanism. How many times as a little boy had he hoped that one sharp kick would reward him with an Aero bar, or even a couple of overlooked pennies? And then one day, in the name of modernization, they were carried off, never to be replaced. It was just as well. They had vanished before they could be turned into nostalgic features.

Brands meant familiarity and familiarity meant repeated experience and repetition meant security. Once. Now Londoners had achieved the semblance of security, at the very momentwhen real protection from the fruits of their greed was needed. The Underground had been a false shelter, too, of course. They had poured down there to avoid the bombs, to be drowned and buried. Yet he had loved the atmosphere, the friendship, as he had played with his toy AA gun, his little battery-powered searchlight hunting the dusty arches for a miniature enemy. Portobello began to fill with the yap of colons settling their laptops and unfolding their Independents, pushing up their sweater sleeves as they sauntered into the pubs, as familiar with their favourite spots as the Germans who had so affectionately occupied Paris.

“They defeated the Underground,” Jerry said. “Captured our most potent memories and converted them to cashpoints. They’re blowing up everything they don’t like. And anything they don’t understand, they don’t like.”

Beesley was looking at him with a certain concern, his lower face pasted with chocolate so that he resembled some Afghan commando. With a plump, dainty finger he dabbed at the corner of his mouth. “Ready?”

Mournfully, Jerry whistled the Marseillaise.

4. LES BOUDINS NOIRS

Blood-spurting martyrs, biblical parables, ascendant doves—most church windows feature the same preachy images that have awed parishioners for centuries. But a new stained-glass window in Germany’s Cologne Cathedral, to be completed in August, evokes technology and science, not religion and the divine.

—Wired, August 2007

“ARE YOU FAMILIAR with torture, Herr Cornelius?” Karen von Krupp hitched up her black leather miniskirt and adjusted his blindfold, but over the top he could still see her square, pink face, surrounded by its thick blonde perm, her peachy neck ascendingabove her swollen breasts. When she reached to pull the mask down he was grateful for the sudden blindness.

“How do you mean ‘familiar’?”

“Have you done much of it?”

“It depends a bit on how you define it.” He giggled as he heard her crack her little whip. “I used to be able to get into it. Between consenting adults. In more innocent days, you know.”

“Oh!” She seemed impatient. Frustrated. “Consent? You mean obedience? Obedient girls?”

Jerry was beginning to understand why he was back in her dentist chair after so many years. “It’s Poland all over again, isn’t it?”

He heard her light a cigarette, smelled the smoke. A Sullivan’s.

She said, “I believe I ask the questions.”

“And I respect your beliefs. Did you know that the largest number of immigrants to the U.S. were German? That’s why they love Christmas and why they have Easter bunnies, marching bands and think black cats are unlucky.