Transition (7 page)

Anyway, compared to that time-consuming nonsense E isn’t that bad, like drinking spritzers instead of whisky sodas or something,
but you still need to organise everything to come up at the right time and it really is mostly about dancing, being loved-up
in amongst lots of fellow travellers and boppers. Fine for that long drawn-out moment of collective euphoria, but it’s more
like part of a sort of rite, a ritual. What was that song that went, “This is my church”? Something like that. Like a service.
Bit too collective, too chummy for my taste.

Cannabis was sort of similar in some ways in that it made you mellow, didn’t it? Though how that squares with the fucking
Hashisheen I’ve never quite understood. But it’s all that lying around like old hippies, wreathed in smoke and talking bollocks,
that I could never take. All that claggy brown tar gumming up the cigarette papers and your brains and making you choke and
splutter and wrecking you to the point where it seemed like a great idea to drink the old bong water for the final hit that’ll
really take you over the edge into some other realm of understanding. What a load of bollocks. I can see it was a great Sixties
drug when everybody wanted to smash the system by having love-ins and painting flowers on their bum, but it’s all too hazy
and vague and sort of aimless, know what I mean?

H is proper hard-core, got to respect that. It’s a serious lifestyle commitment for most people, and it’s like discovering
the mother-lode of pure pleasure that all the other drugs including the legal ones like drink have all come from, like finding
something utterly pure beyond which there can’t possibly be anything better, but it’s a selfish drug. It takes you over, it
becomes the boss, everything else becomes about the next hit and it takes you away from the real world, seems to say that
the one where the H is is the real world and the one you’ve lived in all this time and where everybody else still lives, the
poor fools, and where the money is, sadly, annoyingly, is just a sort of game, a kind of grey, grainy shadow-place where you
have to go back to far too often to make these sort of robotic responses that’ll let you get back to the tits-out Technicolor
of the wonderful and enchanting world of the H. Proper commitment, H is, and the way it’s served up is potentially lethal
too. Bit like joining the army or something.

Plus, all that melting the mucky-looking stuff in ancient-looking spoons and searching for a vein and pulling ligatures tight
with your teeth and having to draw your own blood out to mix it up in the syringe. Messy. You don’t need that. Not clean like
coke. Exact opposite. And you need a bucket by you cos the first thing that happens when it hits is you chuck your guts up!
Call me old-fashioned but I thought drugs were supposed to be about fun! What sort of fucking fun is that?

Like I say, respect to people prepared to suffer that sort of degradation for the sake of the river of warm bliss you end
up submerged in, but fuck me, it’s not a drug you take to make your life better, which is what I’m looking for, it’s a drug
that empties you out of one life and pours you wholesale into another one completely where it’s all very fucking wonderful
but the drug is the only way into it and the only way of staying there. It’s like becoming a deep-sea diver in one of those
old brass-helmet jobs with the porthole grilles and the air hose leading back to the surface. The H is the air hose, the H
is the air. Total dependency.

No, give me coke every time. Not crack, though. Not cos it’s instantly addictive, that’s another load of bollocks. It’s just
overrated, that’s all, and because you smoke it it’s got that messiness factor again, know what I mean? Something a bit sordid
about crack, frankly. It’s like coke for junkies.

Proper, pukka coke is clean, sharp, accelerating, and like a smart drug, a precision munition you take exactly when you want
it and need it and delivering for as long as you keep taking it. Of fucking course it’s the drug of choice of your masters
of the universe, your financial wizards, your high-financiers. It’s like just-in-time exhilaration, isn’t it? A toot in both
barrels and suddenly you’re a fucking genius and totally invincible. Just what you need when you’re juggling telephone numbers
of money about and making bets with everybody else’s dosh. Not without its downsides, obviously, though for most people these
days loss of appetite is brilliant. I mean, who wants to be fat? Collateral benefit, kind of. But the runny nose and paranoia
and risking losing your septum and, so they say, having a heart attack, that’s all a bit toss. Still, no gain without pain
and all that.

So it’s funny that I hardly ever took the stuff myself, given that I loved it, and still do, and I had access to the purest
supplies at the best prices. Still do, too, through my contacts, of course. Just being cautious, basically. Also proving to
myself who’s the boss, know what I mean? It’s called keeping things in proportion, keeping things balanced. I treat drink
the same. I could guzzle vintage champagne and ancient cognac every day but that’d be giving in to that particular monkey,
so that has to be rationed too. Same with the girlies.

I do love the ladies, but I wouldn’t want to be totally beholden to one of them, would I? True love and wanting kids and settling
down and all that, it’s fine for most people and it makes the world go round and all like my old man said, but apart from
the fact no it doesn’t, it’s gravity that does that, well, all right maybe it does make the world go round in the sense of
creating the next generation, but it works just fine and dandy thanks as long as most people do it. Not all. Doesn’t need
to be compulsory, doesn’t require every single person to take part, just most, just enough. What was that song, “Love Is The
Drug”? Never a truer word, know what I mean? Just another temptation, another way of losing yourself. Making yourself vulnerable,
that’s what it’s doing, giving in to all that romantic guff. Just putting your head on the chopping block, isn’t it?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not stupid and I know it can happen to anybody and maybe one day it’ll happen to me and I’ll be giving
it all that It Just Feels Right and She’s The One and This Time It’s Different, and if it does then I just hope I don’t make
a complete cunt of myself, excuse my language but you know what I mean. Even the mighty fall, they say. Nobody’s invulnerable,
but you can at least show yourself the respect of holding out as long as possible, know what I mean?

The Transitionary

Temudjin Oh, Mr Marquand Ys, Snr Marquan Dise, Dr Marquand Emesere, M. Marquan Demesere, Mark Cavan; Aiman Q’ands. I have
been called many things and I have had many names and though they sometimes sound very various they tend to gyrate round a
certain set of sounds, clustering about a limited repertoire of phonemes. My name changes each time I flit, never predictably.
I don’t always know who I am myself. Not until I check.

I tap a tiny white pill into my espresso, rearrange the table condiments a little, drink my coffee in two gulps and sit back,
waiting (another part of my mind isn’t waiting at all, it’s concentrating furiously, darting down a single filament of purpose
within an infinitude of possibilities, a lightning strike zigzagging its way through a cloud, searching). I’m outside another
pavement café, in the 4th, looking out across a branch of the Seine to the Ile St Louis, just entering the trance that will
guide me to exactly the right place and person. Meanwhile, space to think, to review and evaluate.

My meeting with Madame d’Ortolan was most unsatisfactory. She was sitting asquint in the booth, and the tablecloth was off-centre,
hanging down twice as far on one side as on the other. The only way I felt able to compensate was by jiggling one leg up and
down, which was really no help at all. And then she treats me like an idiot! Self-satisfied salope.

“Plyte, Jésusdottir, Krijk, Heurtzloft-Beiderkern, Obliq, Mulverhill,” I find myself muttering, for these things must be fixed
in the mind. A waiter, scooping change from the next table, turns and looks at me oddly. “Plyte, Jésusdottir, Krijk, Heurtzloft-Beiderkern,
Obliq, Mulverhill,” I mutter at him, smiling. In theory a security failing, but so what? In this world, essentially, these
are nonsense words. Meaningless to anybody who knows only this reality, or any single world for that matter.

The little aluminium tube lies inside my chest bag. Amongst other things it holds a tiny mechanical one-time reader; a metal
device like two miniaturised measuring tapes joined by a short collar, a sort of slide with a glass window in it. One of the
spools has a little pull-out handle on it. You deploy this, wind it up and let it go; it starts to pull the paper strip from
the other spool past the little window. You need to watch this very carefully. You can read about a dozen letters at a time
before they’re gone, into the other spool, where the specially treated paper comes into contact with the air and turns to
dust, its message for ever unreadable. The clockwork mechanism, once started, cannot be stopped, so you need to pay continuous
attention. If you miss any part of the message, well, you’re stuck. You will need to go and ask for another set of instructions.
This does not go down well.

I read my orders in the toilet. It was a little dim so I used a torch. Taken with the highly irregular verbal changes to the
instructions, it would seem that certain elisions, as we call them in the trade, are called for. I am to elide. Rather a lot
of eliding required, in fact. Interesting.

A sneeze, and when I open my eyes again I am a dapper gent in a frock coat with a hat, cane and grey gloves. My skin is a
little darker. A language check reveals Mandarin is back and Farsi is my third language after French and English. Then German,
then a smattering of at least twenty others. A much-divided world. Paris has changed once more. There is a canal through the
breadth of the Ile St Louis, the street is full of gaily dressed hussars on clopping, head-tossing horses being politely applauded
by a few passers-by who have stopped to watch and everything smells of steam. I look up, hoping for airships. I always like
it when there are airships, but I can’t see any.

I let the troop of horsemen pass, then hail a sleek-looking steam cab to take me to the Gare Waterloo and the TGV for England.
“Plyte, Jésusdottir, Krijk, Heurtzloft-Beiderkern, Obliq, Mulverhill,” I mutter once more, and wink at the uncomprehending
look of the cabbie. There is a mirror in the buttoned lining of the cab’s passenger compartment. I look at myself. I am well
turned out, with a very neat haircut and an exquisitely trimmed little goatee, but I am otherwise undistinguished, as usual.
The cab is number 9034. These numbers add up to 16, whose own numbers then add up to 7, which – as any fool knows – is by convention
the luckiest of lucky numbers. I adjust the sleeves of my chemise where they protrude from my coat until they are exactly
equal in length.

I allow myself a deep sigh as I settle into the plush of the cab’s seat, positioning myself as centrally as possible. Still
with the OCD, then.

The Perineum Club sits on Vermyn Street, off Piccadilly. It is late afternoon by the time I arrive and Lord Harmyle is taking
tea.

“Mister Demesere,” he says, holding my card as though it might be infected. “Oh well. How unexpected. I suppose you’d better
join me.”

“Why, thank you.”

Lord Harmyle is a gaunt, spare figure with long white hair and a face that appears halfway to being bleached from his skull.
His thin lips are pale purple and his small eyes rheumy. He looks ninety years old or more but is apparently only in his early
fifties. The two schools of thought regarding this anomaly cite either predisposing familial genes or an especially outré
addiction. He eyes me beadily from the far side of the table. The Perineum is as calm, reserved and sparsely occupied as the
Café Atlantique was frenetic, rowdy and crowded. It smells of pipe smoke and leather.

“Madame d’Ortolan?” the good lord enquires. A servant wafts to our side and dispenses weak-looking tea into an almost transparent
porcelain cup. I resist the urge to swivel the cup so that the handle points directly towards me.

“She sends her regards,” I tell him, even though she did no such thing.

Lord Harmyle sucks in his already hollow cheeks and looks as though somebody has laced his tea with arsenic. “And how is that…
lady?”

“She is well.”

“Hmm.” Lord Harmyle’s fingers hover thinly, like the claw of a predatory skeleton, over some crustless cucumber sandwiches.
“And you. Do you bring a message?” The claw retreats and lifts a small biscuit instead. There are seven of the small, anaemic-looking
sandwiches on one plate and eleven biscuits on the other. Both primes. Added together, eighteen. Which is not a prime, obviously.
And making nine, the throwaway number. Really, this sort of thing could be both distressing and distracting, over time.

“Yes.” I take out the little ormolu sweetener case and shake free a tiny white pill. It disappears into the tea, which I stir.
I lift the cup to my lips. Lord Harmyle appears undisturbed.

“One is supposed to lift the saucer and cup together to one’s mouth,” Lord Harmyle observes distastefully as I drink my tea.

“Is one?” I ask. I replace the teacup on the saucer. “I do beg your pardon.” I lift both saucer and cup this time. The tea
tastes diffident, whatever flavours it might possess holding back as though ashamed of expressing themselves.

“Well?” Harmyle asks, frowning.

“Well?” I repeat, permitting myself a look of polite puzzlement.

“What’s the message you bear, sir?”

I hope I shall never lose my sincere admiration for those able to invest the word “sir” – on the face of it a genuine honorific – with
the level of brusque contempt that the good lord has just achieved.

“Ah.” I put cup and saucer down. “I understand you may have expressed some doubts regarding the direction the Central Council
might be taking.” I smile. “Concerns, even.”

Harmyle’s already pallid complexion appears to lose whatever blood it previously contained. Which is rather impressive, really,
given that all this is basically an act. He sits back, glances around. He puts his own cup and saucer down, rattled. “What
on earth are you talking about?”