Modem Times 2.0 - Michael Moorcock [20]
“I wasn’t exactly a virgin. My dad started fucking me when I was twelve.” She turned to study his reaction. “Does that shock you?”
Jerry laughed. “What? Me? I’m a moralist, I know, but I’m not a petty moralist. You think a spot of finger-wagging is what Jesus would have done. So I should be saying ‘Bloody hell! The fucking bastard’?”
She came back into the bedroom and started snapping on her kit. “It was all right. He got it over with quickly and then he was guilty as hell and I could go out all night and do what and whom I liked without his saying a word because he was scared I’d tell the cops and my mum would find out, though really I think she knew and didn’t care. Gave her a quiet life. So by day I was doing my mock A-levels at St. Paul’s and by night I was having all the fun of the fair.” She blinked reminiscently. “Or thought I was. It took me a bit of time to find out what I liked. What I was like. When I met you I’d just turned twenty-one. I thought I was ready to settle down.”
He didn’t make the obvious response. He licked the smell of her cunt off his upper lip. He needed a shave. Maybe he’d teach her how to use the straight razor on his face. She required training. She’d said so herself. “What a waste.” He thought of those lost nine years.
Suddenly her face opened up into one of those old cheeky grins. A lot better than nothing but it made him want to pee. No, he wasn’t really getting that old feeling. She showed him her perfect ass. So this is where nostalgia got you. She lay down next to him. A coquette. “I trust you,” she said.
This puzzled him even more. He had once understood her, even if she didn’t like him much. Her passivity was her power. It gave her what she wanted or at least it had done so up to now.
He changed the subject a little. “Why are you so cruel to the dead?”
“Because they betrayed me by dying.”
“And who will you betray by dying?”
“Who will you betray?”
A no-brainer. “Nobody,” he said. “Why?” He suspected one of those boring little traps Christians set for you. Of course God loved him, but he didn’t feel very special in this near-infinity of planes that was the multiverse. He was as big as the multiverse, as small as God. It wasn’t always this hard to understand. Space is a dimension of time. Light speed varied enormously. There was a black tide running.
“A black tide running.” He tucked her head into his shoulder.
She tensed. “Is that another dig at Obama?”
“What?” He had fallen asleep suddenly. “What about him? Has he betrayed you?”
“That isn’t the point. Electing him was what it was about.”
“Sure, he’s doing such a lot for black pride.” Jerry rolled over and found a half-smoked box of Sullivans. He lit one. “God knows what poor old Mandela thinks.”
“The Labour Party’s trying to find one just like him.”
“Hardly worth blacking up for.”
From outside came a shout of glee. They both recognized it. Mo was jumping on his prey. He must have caught a kid.
12. POPSCI’S GUIDE TO SUMMER SCI-TECH MOVIES
Staring at the vast military history section of the airport shop, I had a choice: the derring-do of psychopaths or scholarly tomes with their illicit devotion to the cult of organized killing. There was nothing I recognized from reporting war. Nothing on the spectacle of children’s limbs hanging in trees and nothing on the burden of shit in your trousers. War is a good read. War is fun. More war, please.
—John Pilger, New Statesman, May 10, 2010
MO WASN’T HAVING any and neither, he remarked happily, had he been getting any. But there was this little yellow lady to the west of Kathmandu and the crew had come to know her just as “Belle.” They were banging on the wedding gongs and decorating dresses, and they were praying that she didn’t go to hell, because Mo he was a white man and not the best at that and they didn’t want their girl to wear his band. They consoledthemselves, however, that they needn’t curse