Got to distract myself. Got to have some new ideas.
She thought for a while.
Eventually she scribbled a list and reached for the switch of the phone, after another quick glance at herself to make sure the image on the screen would be fitting.
A forfeits party. Always a good way to make other people look small. And at the head of the list that haughty brownnose Norman House—which meant having his dismal roomie along. Plus everyone else who had failed to fall down and worship lately.
Forfeits for what? Twentieth century, how about that? Ancient Rome or somewhere a bit more exciting would be better, but that was the sort of area where you’d expect people like that drecky Donald Hogan to know more than the organisers about what was and what wasn’t correct for the period. Hire a professional arbitrator, some nose-in-book student maybe specialising? No. Tried that once, didn’t work. Glummy boy was shocked by some of the forfeits and caved in—correction, avoiding forfeit: chickened in—not that, either. Out? Up? Check a dictionary of twentieth-century usage.
And if let’s say Mel Ladbroke could be persuaded to come, and bring some of that fascinating new stuff they’re experimenting with at the hospital …
With a sort of savage delight she stabbed at the buttons of the phone.
You say one word, make one gesture, even, that’s not in the context and I’m going to make you piss your pants, you horrible black bastard.
continuity (4)
ROOMIE NATION
When Donald reached home at six poppa-momma, Norman was there already, sitting in his favourite Hille chair, feet up on a hassock, scanning his day’s mail. To his roomie’s hello he returned merely a distracted nod.
By this time Donald was sufficiently recovered from the fit of depression he had experienced at lunchtime to note the various clues to Norman’s state of mind which the visible evidence afforded. Being a Muslim, Norman refused to touch alcohol, but marijuana was traditionally socialised in the Muslim countries of Africa and he permitted himself to unwind the day’s accumulated tension with a few reefers. Despite the excessive cost—every state which had legalised pot discriminated against that grown outside its own boundaries with a fierce tariff—he smoked the brand appropriate to a junior vice-president of GT: the acknowledged field-leader, Bay Gold. One rested in an ashtray at his side, but its smoke was winding up unheeded.
Furthermore, on the floor at his feet, as though tossed aside in a moment of impatience, there lay a Wholographik picture, an endless flowing series of echoingly rhythmical light and dark lines, along the edge of which was printed the colophon of the Genealogical Research Bureau.
Donald had long ago learned to accept as a foible his roomie’s susceptibility to the various gimcrack Genealogical Research outfits that catered, in this progeny-obsessed age, for people worried about their genotype. It was the first time he had ever known Norman not to fetch his monochrome reader immediately and study the latest come-on they had sent him.
Conclusion: something had disturbed Norman very badly, shifted him clear off his regular orbit.
Accordingly he made no attempt to start a conversation, but carried on with his own arriving-home routine: check the phone for personal calls recorded while he was out—there were none—collect the mail, which was as ever bulky and mainly commercial, from his delivery slot, and pour himself a little whisky from the liquor console before settling down in his own chair.
But he did not at once proceed to read the mail. Instead, he looked over his surroundings with a shadow of nervousness as though expecting this familiar setting too to take on the kind of strangeness he had experienced out on the street at lunchtime.
The open living-area reached directly from the entrance door was the section of the apartment they used in common. Even so, it bore little trace of Donald Hogan. It had been decorated and partly furnished before Norman agreed to accept him as a roomie; on moving in, he had contributed certain items like this chair, and a few ornaments Norman approved of, and the liquor console—not being a drinker, Norman had previously owned nothing but the kind of small wine-frame bottle-holder imposed by convention on a householder entertaining non-Muslim friends. Those things did not, on inspection, add up to a paradigm of Donald Hogan. Moreover, all of them were to be found on the same side of the room, as though an undefined boundary ran between the occupants of the apartment.
On the other hand, one could hardly say the place reflected Norman’s personality, either. The realisation was a minor surprise to Donald. But all of a sudden he saw that there was a pattern implicit in Norman’s choice both of furnishings and of colours. The shimmering russet of the walls, the facsimile William Morris design of the carpet, the Picasso, the Pollock and the Moore—even the worn Hille chair—seemed calculated, as though without warning a high corporation zeck might walk in and look around, then nod over the impression derived from the layout and decide that Norman House was a good steady type, worthy of promotion.
Donald repressed a shudder, wondering if the attempt to convey an aura of solidity and reliability might be aimed at himself as well as other, more influential, visitors.
Exactly one thing in the room jarred—his own possessions, that could be seen, were too neutral to matter, which was presumably why Norman had allowed them to remain out here on public display—and that was the polyorgan standing behind Norman’s chair in the extreme corner of the room, the property of his current shiggy Victoria. It was marginally too modern, too gaudy, to fit in with the rest of the décor. But that, inevitably, would be transient.
Perhaps Norman’s bedroom was a more honest reflection of him? Donald concluded that was unlikely. His own was not, because in theory at least, if not at present in practice, it was shared by a visiting shiggy. Additionally each of them had another small room for total privacy. Donald had never set foot over the threshold of Norman’s, though he had glimpsed it through the open door. He had seen too little to judge if that was genuinely personalised. His own—probably not. It was more of a library than anything else, and half the books had been chosen on orders from his employers, not to suit his own tastes.
If the consequences of having to share an apartment were as negative as this, he thought, how would he justify his and Norman’s preference for it and the widespread incidence of the habit, to a foreigner from a less healthy—hence less crowded—country, or to an old man who remembered when the first aspiration of a successful bachelor was a place entirely of his own?
Well … there was one obvious advantage, plus a number of minor additional ones. The easiest to see was that sharing enabled both of them to enjoy a standard of accommodation which for spaciousness and comfort exceeded what either could have afforded alone. Even on his GT salary Norman would have been hard put to it to live this well otherwise, what with the way prices had rocketed since the Fuller Dome was erected.
Some of the additional inducements were almost equally plain, like the shiggy-trading which was taken as a matter of course. Others were subtler, like the convenience of being able to let strangers assume that they were not just living together but living together. It grew so tiresome to be asked over and over again, “But if you’re allowed to be a father, why aren’t you?”
* * *
There was nothing in his own mail to attract his interest; Donald dumped the whole lot into the disposall. Sipping his drink, he grew aware that Norman had glanced at him, and he forced a smile.