Modem Times 2.0 - Michael Moorcock [5]
“And these days all he’d need for the same thing would be a speck or two of dandruff.” Miss Brunner passed her hand through her tight perm and then looked suspiciously at her nails. “Can we go in?” She sat down on the chopper’s platform and started pulling her thick wellies up her leg.
High above them, against the dark beauty of the night, a rocket streaked, its intense red tail burning like a ruby.
Jerry laughed. “I thought all that was over.”
“Nothing’s over.” She sighed. “Nothing’s ever bloody over.”
Mo remembered why he disliked her.
They began to trudge through the clutching mud which oozed around them. Melting chocolate.
“Bloody global warming,” said Jerry.
“You should have concentrated harder, Mr. C.”
He didn’t hear her. In his mind he was eyeless in Gaza at the doors of perception.
5. THE WANTON OF ARGOS
People claim that Portugal is an island. They say that you can’t get there without wetting your feet. They say all those tales concerning dusty border roads into Spain are mere fables.
—Geert Mak, In Europe, 2004
UP AT THE far end of the hall Miss Brunner was enjoying an Abu Ghraib moment. The screams were getting on all their nerves. Jerry turned up Pidgin English by Elvis Costello but nothing worked the way it should any more. He had systematically searched his father’s house while Miss Brunner applied electrodes to his brother Frank’s tackle. “Was this really what the ‘60s were all about?” he mused.
“Oh, God,” said Frank. “Oh, bloody hell.” He’d never looked very good naked. Too pale. Too skinny. But ready to talk:
“You think you’re going to find the secret of the ‘60s in a fake French modernist villa built by a barmy lapsed papist romantic Jew who went through World War II in a trench coat and wincyette pajamas fucking every sixty-a-day bereaved or would-be bereaved middle-class Englishwoman who ever got a first at Cambridge, who was fucked by a communist and who claimed that deddy had never wanted her to be heppy? Not exactly rock and roll, is it, Jerry. You’d be better off questioning your old mum. The Spirit of the bloody Blitz.” He sniffed. “Is that Bar-B-Q?”
“They all had the jazz habit.” Jerry was defensive. “They all knew the blues.”
“Oh, quite.” Miss Brunner was disgusted. “Jack Parnell and his Gentleman Jazzers at the Café de Paris. Or was it Chris Barber and his Skiffling Sidemen?”
“Skiffle,” said Jerry, casting around for his washboard. “The Blue Men. The Square Men. The Quarry Men. The Green Horns. The Black Labels. The Red Barrels.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Mo. He was rifling through the debris, looking for some antique ammo clips. “Someone went to a lot of trouble to bring this place over, stone by stone, to Ladbroke Grove. Though, I agree, it’s a shame about the Hearst Castle.”
“It was always more suitable for Hastings.” Miss Brunner stared furiously at Jerry’s elastic-sided Cubans. “You’re going to ruin those shoes, if you’re not careful.”
“It’s not cool to be careful,” he said. “Remember, this is the ‘60s. You haven’t won yet. Careful is the ‘80s. Entirely different.”
“Is this the Gibson?” Mo had found the guitar behind a mould-grown library desk.
Miss Brunner went back to working on Frank.
“The Gibson?” Jerry spoke hopefully. But when he checked, it was the wrong number.
“Can I have it, then?” asked Mo.
Jerry shrugged.
6. WILLIAM‘S CROWDED HOUR
… and does anyone know what “the flip side” was? It was from the days when gramophone records were double-sided. You played your 78 rpm or your 33 1/3 or your 45 and then you turned it over and played the other side. Only nostalgia dealers and vinyl freaks remember that stuff now.
—Maurice Little, Down the Portobello, 2007
CHRISTMAS 1962, SNOW still falling. Reports said there was no end in sight. Someone on the Third Program even suggested a new Ice Age had started. At dawn, Jerry left his flat in Lancaster Gate, awakened by the tolling of bells from the church tower almost directly in line with