‘You’ll see she gets this today, Bugger.’
Henry now stood and moved to his desk where, using an ivory shaving-brush and a silver saucer of water, he fixed the envelope containing his letter to the Princess, adding the Royal Seal with the ring on the third finger of his right hand.
Brendan gathered his things. First the blow-up, the grotesque enlargement, like a plastic tablecloth. Then the photograph itself. He was glad he couldn’t see Victoria’s face, with her pupils on the top left-hand corners of her eyes, which disquieted him so. He thought he knew what the Princess was doing. She was listening.
The sprawling map of the fleur-de-lis, now that was just a detail: the crest. Why, who knew? With a bar of soap that size, maybe you could wash all Fucktown clean …
Laterally the Royal Train moved across North London, continuing west.
Andy New saw it pass. He was down on the actual track (his fresh stashpoint), and he saw the curtained carriages, the crests and emblems. He thought: taxpayers’ money! Not that And was much of a taxpayer …
And was a pusher: of drugs, and of pornography.
And And was an anarchist, a street-partyer, and a committed savager of junkfood restaurants during antiglobalisation riots. Two years earlier his common-law wife, Chelci, had presented him with a child: little Harrison.
Having vaulted the gate, he made his way up the back slope, meanwhile fielding a call from his older brother, Nigel. Nigel had been a bit savoury in his earlier days but now he was dead straight just like any other cunt.
Nigeclass="underline" ‘You’re not still peddling that muck, are you?’ And: ‘The videos and that: course. Freedom of expression. But not that stuff.’ Nigeclass="underline" ‘Because that’s a no-no, that is.’ And: ‘Definitely no go.’ Nigeclass="underline" ‘It’s not on.’ And: ‘No soap whatso.’ Nigeclass="underline" ‘I worry about you, And. On the train to Manchester.’ The brothers had recently travelled to Manchester, to watch the match and see their dad. The City Hall wearing a green fishnet vest, and the cabbie’s shortwave going Britannia Ridgeway, Rodger-Rodge, Oxnoble, Tango Three, Midland Dinsbury. Nigeclass="underline" ‘Us sitting on the floor between the compartments? Okay, there’s nowhere else to sit. But I look at you and I think: He fucking loves it. Down there in the dirt with his can of lager.’ And: ‘What’s this in aid of, Nige?’ Nigeclass="underline" ‘I worry about you, And.’ And: ‘Well worry about your fucking taxes.’
As he came muttering up over the bridge a voice hailed him from behind:
‘I say! Excuse me! Young man!’
Turning, And saw a compact gent of late-middle years, wearing a chalkstripe suit with its three jacket buttons fastened, dark glasses, and a black borsalino.
‘Thank you, thank you. Now. I wonder if you could very kindly direct me to …’
With some difficulty he detached an envelope from his inside pocket. He smiled. ‘How are you?’ he asked heartily.
‘All right. How are you?’
‘I’ve never felt better in my life, thank you, and I’m thoroughly enjoying this spell of fine weather we’re having.’
One of those accents: posher than the King.
‘I’m looking for Mornington Crescent, do you see. Not Mornington Terrace, Mornington Crescent …’
Andy soon set him right.
‘Ah. Thank you so much.’
At this point, with an elegant rotation of the wrist, the man in the suit removed his dark glasses — to reveal the strangest eyes And had ever seen. So bright yet so pale: Antarctic blue, with yellow haloes. For a moment Andy wondered where the bloke had left his guide dog.
‘Tell me. Would you be Andrew New?’
‘Who wants to know?’
‘My name is Semen Figner …’
Pronouncing the name in a different voice: Slavic. And New saw that the blue eyes had foully darkened.
‘Your woman is shit,’ Semen Figner said normally. ‘Your kid is shit.’
February 14 (10.41 a.m.): 101 Heavy
First Officer Nick Chopko: Hey, that’s kind of cool …
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Excuse me?
Chopko: See it? Second to go, runway right.
Captain John Macmanaman: … Well well. The old De Hav Comet. What? Nineteen fifty-five? Where’s that going?
Ward: Croydon, maybe? The Aviation Museum?
Macmanaman: … This wait is going to eat into my retirement.
Chopko: Yeah. I would like to take off while I’m still quite young.
After the seventy-minute weather delay, CigAir 101 had pushed back from its stand and joined the queue on runway nine. Flight regulations insisted on a three-minute interval between ascents. But on this day, of course, all the transatlantic equipment had to be off the ground by eleven o’clock sharp. The tower decided on the Emergency Interval of 130 seconds. And the Captain coolly advised his passengers to prepare for some ‘slipstream turbulence’; with slipstream turbulence, he might have gone on to say, the passenger will feel more like a mariner than an aeronaut, shouldering through heavy seas at 200 miles per hour.
Tower: One oh one heavy, you are cleared.
Macmanaman: Acknowledge.
Tower: Up and dirty.
At 10.53, 101 Heavy put its head down and went looking for the escape velocity. Reynolds Traynor was bolt upright in seat 2B. She had a cigarette in her mouth and the trigger of a lighter waiting beneath the print of her bent left thumb.
Chopko: V1 … V2. Out of here.
The instant the tyres left the tarmac the Captain extinguished the no-smoking sign.
A climbing plane normally welcomes the surge of a stiff headwind; but the headwind facing 101 Heavy, while no longer describable as a storm, was still, at forty-six knots, a severe gale. The Captain thus faced two immediate dangers, one grave, one merely very serious, with or without the slipstream turbulence and its ‘funnelling’ effect. The first danger was that the aircraft would go ‘beneath the BUG’, or the minimum flying speed, and submit to its own gravity load (resulting in a black box which consisted of a brief squall of obscenities). The second danger was that of ‘nose-lift’: here, the windforce meets the plane on its rising breast and renders it vulnerable to ‘toppleback’. Nose-lift was what happened to 101 Heavy. Lighting a cigarette from its predecessor’s trembling ember, Reynolds leaned into the aisle and looked aft. The inter-compartment curtains had fluttered up to head height. She was staring into a lift-shaft — but one thickly peopled. The women she could see wore contorted faces: bared teeth, incredulous scowls. As for the others, their brows were marked by the childish, the calflike frowns of men expecting death.