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Dance and screw, get the bug so fine.
Screw and dance, yee-hew, surf the style
Surf then dance, shed it, shed your mind
He shouting at her, roaring, kindalaughing. ‘Kid, you and I we are the future, know that? The future in flames, all experience open to us. We’ve inherited the globe, it’s our fruit to squeeze and drink right up, down the throat, right down your gullet like champagne.’
She lapped up this stuff from him and his friends. Gleeing, it was called. It turned her on, drove her crazy, made her wet between the thighs, gleed her right up, all the way.
‘We’re the high, the privileged, every day’s one long sunfuck. One long motherfucking sunfuck. What’s our duty? What’s our duty? What is it? To rejoice, kid, that’s what. You realize America grows enough food to feed the whole planet twice over? Well, let me tell you, kid – that goes for semen too!’
Why had she then said – except to prompt him on – that if there was so much abundance, how come thirty million Americans were on the bread line?
Of course Humbert had an answer. He said there were always winners and losers. That was just good old Nature’s way. Starvation was just a way of telling someone they had better get lost and make way for good men. If the losers didn’t like it – why, they could go and live on Mars! He roared with laughter. Was still laughing when they played his game of Animal on the bed.
She was at a loss to understand why she now recollected those days of merriment with so little joy. Damn Roy Burnell! She should never have come to see him. She popped another upper from her purse, put a foot on the accelerator, and rapidly left the hospital behind, on the start of her journey back to California and happiness.
But she remembered a quiet rabbi friend in New York, who had said to her, ‘Have a little happiness while you are young – but never forget how trivial happiness is.’ Or had he been a part of someone’s lietime?
Burnell ran Monty Broadwell-Smith to ground in a bar in Pest. Monty was drinking with a few cronies and did not see Burnell. Which was hardly surprising: every line of sight ran up against gilded statuary or supernumerary columns. This nest of rooms, given over to most of the pleasures of the flesh, had been somewhere wicked under an earlier regime, and in consequence was well – indeed floridly – furnished. The posturing plaster Venuses consorted oddly with the group of tousled heads nodding over their glasses of Beck. Burnell stood in an inner room and told a waiter to fetch Monty, saying a friend wished to see him.
Monty was still wearing Burnell’s sweater. When he saw who was awaiting him, he raised his hands in mock-surrender. Burnell put a clenched fist under his nose.
‘Pax, old man. No offence meant. Honest Injun.’ He put a hand up and lowered Burnell’s fist. Barely ruffled, he explained that since he had lost his job in England he had had to find work in Europe – like thousands of other chaps down on their luck. Eventually, he had found a job acting as decoy for Antonescu and his illegal EMV enterprise. His role as an Anglophone was to lure in innocent foreigners who arrived in Budapest to take advantage of low Hungarian prices. It was economic necessity that drove him to it. His eyebrows signalled sincerity.
He knew, he said, it was a bit of a shady enterprise. ‘Rather like wreckers luring ships on the rocks in the old days.’
‘So you’ve fallen so low you’d even prey on your friends.’
‘Be fair, Roy, old man.’ He breathed alcohol over Burnell. ‘I have to pick and choose my clients. You’ve no idea, no idea, how uninteresting some people’s memories are, all through life. Mine wouldn’t be worth a sausage. But yours – well, perhaps you don’t remember, but I met you and your wife at university. She was a real stunner, so I knew your memories would be worth having.’
‘You little bastard! You had your paws in the till at university. Now you’ve had them in my mind. Stealing memory is a form of murder.’
Wincing slightly, Monty agreed. ‘Wreckers again, you see. Poor old mariners … Look, come and have a drink with my friends. No doubt there will be tighter legislation in Hungary when e-mnemonicvision becomes less than a seven days’ wonder. Until that time, Antonescu earns a modest dollar from his bootleg memory bullets and tosses me the occasional crust. Now then, let me stand you an aperitif. It’s almost lunchtime.’
‘It’s three in the afternoon, you boozy git!’
Monty put a persuasive hand on Burnell’s arm. Burnell wrenched his arm away. ‘You’ve poisoned my life, you bastard. You’d probably poison my drink. Now I’ve got you, I’m going to turn you in – you and your precious Antonescu.’ There was canned music in the room. Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ was playing, dripping away like a tap.
Monty drew himself up and smoothed the sweater down. ‘Don’t threaten me. You have a contempt for me. Fair enough – you always were a supercilious bastard. But just think how I might feel about you! I’ve had to edit ten years of your stupid life down to make a presentable bullet. It wasn’t too edifying, old sport, let me tell you. A ten-year plod down the recesses of your memory! A bit like looking down into a sewer at times – no offence meant.’ He elaborated on this in some detail, concluding by saying, ‘You ought to be glad to be rid of stuff like that. You’re free of it – Free Of All Memory!’
‘Oh, I see, Broadwell-Smith. The FOAM theory of history: never learn anything … Just bloody forget, is that it? Have you ever heard that saying about those who forget history being doomed to repeat it? Why do you think the world’s in such a fucking mess?’ With a quick move, he twisted Monty’s arm and had him in a half-Nelson. ‘It’s retribution time, Monty, and a stinking Hungarian cell for you.’ He gave Broadwell-Smith’s arm an extra wrench, till the man howled. A waiter came to watch, without interfering.
‘God, that’s no way to treat … Listen Roy, Roy, look, stop this. Do you really want unpleasant publicity? This is what I’ll do. I’ll make a deal. A generous deal.’
‘No deals, you sod. You caught me once – you aren’t going to catch me again. Out of that door.’
‘Wait, wait. Ouch! Listen, you sadist, here’s the deal. Just let me go, savvy?’
‘Don’t let him go,’ advised the waiter from the sidelines.
‘Let me go and I will nip straight round to the clinic. It’s locked but I’ve got a key. I’ll nip straight round to the clinic and I’ll steal the master-bullet and bring it back to you. Where are you staying? The Gellert again, I suppose? You plutocrats … I’ll bring you back the memory bullet we made.’
Burnell twisted the arm again. The waiter said, appreciatively, ‘This man, he never pays a round.’
Another twist, more details. ‘There are two bullets, to be honest. I’m being honest, Roy. Ow! I’ll bring them both back to you. And you can then go somewhere – England, Germany, France – and get those squalid years of yours reinserted back in your noddle, if that’s what you want. What do you say?’
Burnell relaxed his hold. ‘I’ll come with you.’
Straightening, Monty regained confidence.
‘No, you won’t. There’s a guard on the clinic door these days. He’d kill you. I’ll get the bullets. Promise. Bring them to the Gellert without fail at –’ he looked at his watch ‘– give me two hours. Say six o’clock, OK. I think I can swing it.’
With some reluctance, Burnell agreed to this plan. He let go of Monty entirely. Recent sessions with Rebecca Rosebottom had made him, he felt, unusually alert to fraudulence. Accordingly, he watched to see what Monty might do when he left the bar.
Monty performed somewhat as expected. The moment he was in the street, he started to run. Burnell ran after him. Monty dodged along