But we haven't had much luck with our seasons. Not yet, anyway. We did satire in summer, and comedy in autumn, and romance in winter.
And this was spring. The season of comedy.
But comedy has two opposites; and tragedy, fortunately, is only one of them. Never fear. You are in safe hands. Decorum will be strictly observed.
Marco Tull hurried down the Portobello Road, hand in hand with Lizzete. Unless he was being directly entertained, Marco, on the street, always wore a leer of settled skepticism. You could see his two-sized upper teeth, anxiously yet resignedly bared. He didn't seem frightened so much as overloaded: too many lines of inquiry, too many sense impressions, too many narratives to pursue and complete. Today was Friday: the end of a week of mild illness. Lizzete's pace was brisk. To keep up, Marco didn't jog or trot but walked and ran, walked and ran.
They approached PriceSlash. This was the first shop Lizzete aimed to visit. Gina had called her up the night before. Friday was her day off and she wanted a little peace: a working mum. She offered Lizzete the usual truancy bonus as well as the flat rate for three hours with Marco. But Lizzete was planning to play hooky anyhow, and get some shopping done.The truancy bonus she had fair-mindedly waived. She looked down at him. He looked up at her. She said, "All right? You've got a Megabar coming your way." 13 was watching them from the confines of the orange van, which was currently impeding access to Lancaster Road. He looked completely sick. Not like he looked after a night at the Paradox or on the M25. Being black, he couldn't look green, or gray, or white as a ghost. He just looked completely sick.
"PriceSlash is it."
Steve Cousins said, "There's this mouse driving through the jungle in his Porsche. Hears this cry of Help! and pulls up by this pit. Gets out of the Porsche, looks down-there's this fucking great gorilla. Trapped in this pit. 'I'm trapped, mate. Can you help me out?'
"So the mouse grabs a-grabs this vine. He slings one end down the pit and ties the other to the tow-hook on his Porsche. 'Hold on tight.' He jumps in the Porsche and starts revving. And sure enough. Bit by bit … Hello? I said hello? Are you with me?"
"With the Porsche or whatever," said 13. He looked completely sick.
" 'Thanks a million, mate,' says the gorilla. 'I'll do the same for you one day. Shake.'… Five years later the gorilla is walking through the- through the prairie. And he hears this little cry. Help! Help! There's this pit. He looks down. It's the mouse! 'Where's the Porsche? Don't worry. We'll soon have you out of there.' And the mouse goes, 'How, mate? There's no vines round here.' And the gorilla says, 'It's okay. I'll use me cock.' So he slings his cock down the pit and the mouse scampers up it. And he's free."
Steve waited. He said, "Don't you want to hear the moral?"
"Uh?"
"And the moral of the story is: If you've got a big cock, you don't need a Porsche. Park in Basing Street. In the garage that went bust. Do it."
Marco's father was fifty yards away, in Kensington Park Road. He shook his glass like a maraca at the waiter and said, to Rory Plantagenet,
"Stumbling on Melons, by Thad Green. It came in a plain brown envelope. London postmark. No covering letter. Copyright 1954. I didn't even look at it for a couple of days. And when I did I just thought wow."
"I can't understand," said Rory, "why they put us downstairs."
"Plot, characters, location. He's changed some of the names of course. There are whole pages that are word for word."
"It's too dark down here. And there's a kind of pissoir smell. Can you smell it? Sorry. Go on. Waiter!"
Rory Plantagenet wasn't his pen name. It was his real name. And it suited him. He looked cornily patrician. And altogether vestigial. A generation ago he would have been living in Cap d'Antibes with a mature ladyfriend called something like Christabel Cambridgeshire. He and Richard were schoolfriends, or schoolfellows. For several years they had simultaneously attended the worst and most paranoid public school in the British Isles.
"The thing with plagiarism is," said Richard, "-it always comes out. It's just a matter of time. And that's why I came to you. You know what a novel is. And how much a novel can matter."
This was news to Rory Plantagenet. Agreeable news, on the whole. He was Richard's age. After nights out during which he had attended three or more parties, Rory often found himself wondering about his place in the larger scheme of things.
Richard said, "I want to control all this. Damage limitation. The one / feel sorry for," he added, briefly pondering the wisdom of that third gin-and-tonic, "is Lady Demi. Considering everything else she has to put up with."
"Women?"
"Don't ask me. Ask Audra Christenberry. Ask Mercedes Soroya. You know he even has a … But that's another story. Look. The last thing I want to do is make this any worse for Gwyn than it has to be. He's my oldest friend for Christ's sake. I fucking love the guy."
Marco's godfather, and the object of Richard's love, was also but a block distant. Gwyn was walking west up Ladbroke Grove. He had not informed Phil of this excursion. Actually, it wouldn't have been Phil anyway, so early in the afternoon. It would have been Simon. Boldly he walked on, past the tube station, past Mick's Fish Bar, past Westway. If anything was going to happen, it would surely happen under Westway. That black cavity, where the very walls and pillars were drenched in eel juice and snake's hiss, and tattooed with graffiti. If something was going to happen, it would surely happen under Westway. But nothing was going to happen. Gwyn was clear.
The night before, Phil had told him, in the kitchen (Simon and Jake were also present, tacit, collusive, sloped over their Gold Blends), that all this "nonsense," all this recent "rubbish," all this "silly-buggers," would presently be "sorted." Presently: like tomorrow. "Who is he?" said Gwyn. "What are you going to do about him?" From Phil, a quick shake of the head and a downward glance; but Jake, without raising his crushed, Rugby League face from his coffee mug, simply said, "\bu don't want to know." And Gywn didn't want to know. Gwyn was clear. The universe loved him again. He was clear. He walked on.
When he reached the turning into Calchalk Street he paused and then entered the Adam and Eve. His expression was timid, tolerant, with anthropologist's protuberance of eye. And his voice sounded more Welsh than usual when he ordered his drink . .. Barry would often strollthe streets and sit in simple. Sit in rude. Sit in simple. Sit in unpretentious pubs enjoying a "jar" with the common. With ordinary. With the. Just like anybody else . . .
Gwyn confirmed the presence of his wallet with the inside of his wrist and then glanced masterfully at his watch.
In PriceSlash children on tautened reins pressed ahead of their guardians: little rickshaw runners, leading the way to the millennium.
To save money, or because the shops had all sold out, many parents had improvised with washing-line cord and roof-rack grapplewire. These children had enemies and these enemies were everywhere and everyone. Marco was not on reins. Lizzete usually kept a hand lightly resting on his hair. And Marco liked to grip you: by the waistband, by the jacket pocket.
Lizzete was singing a song as they moved up and down the strip-lit canyons of PriceSlash. At present they were in the domestic-hygiene section with its plastic and polythene and all the colors associated with the spick and span.
13 was across the street, in Ultraverse. Ultraverse sold second-hand comics: X-Man and She-Hulk, Count Zero and RoboBabe. Donnama-trix meets Dr. Strange.
"I'm dead," he whispered, and steadied himself against a comic rack. Aquavixen v. Animalman. "I'm dead."