welled up in her and poured forth.
Why am I crying? What could have provoked it? My life has changed. I’ve grown away from him. I feel nothing for him any more. I live in an entirely different climate.
Of course he looked awful.
EMV must be a new thing in this country – we’re freer in LA. We’ve got everything. Everything. Humbert goes for it, says he’s lived a hundred lives, shooting EMV.
Yet she was angry and could not understand her own mood. While the divorce was pending, she had flown out to California, hired a camper, lived in Palm Beach with a stud of whom she soon tired. She hated the memory; perhaps it meant she had hated herself at the time. Sex may be the cure for many things but it is no cure for misery; not in my case. Oh, no, Steff – cease this soul-searching. You know it’s sick.
But her recent freer past – her past since the divorce – rose up against her as if in accusation. There seemed no way of stopping it.
In a seafood restaurant in Santa Barbara one day, she had come across an older woman called Ann Summerfield, tanned like everyone else at the white tables. They drank margaritas together and talked. Ann had divorced and not remarried. She had a lover who was on the fringe of the film world, Sam de Souto. Ann too was English, despite her American accent. She and Stephanie became friends. Initiating her into West Coast ways, Ann taught her to sail.
Only a block away from Ann and Sam’s apartment lived Ann’s younger sister, Jane Barrieros. Jane was undergoing a divorce of unusual bitterness, and fighting for the custody of her son.
When Stephanie was introduced to Jane, the latter was a pale worried creature dependent on a then fashionable shrink, plus every known drug. She was, however, well established in a software company, Micromanser. Neuroticism fuelled her drive to excel. When at last she won her battle in the courts on grounds of cruelty, and collected several million dollars, Jane bought into Micromanser and married the boss.
Stephanie and Ann looked on in admiration – and cared for Page, the disputed son – as Jane’s fortunes spiralled upwards in truly Californian fashion.
Jane bought a small computer company, building it up rapidly with the latest technical advances, slanting it towards the greying end of the population, and producing a revolutionary new game series, Loveranger, laced with plenty of VR sex. Loveranger soon became the leading trade name across the nation. The ladies lived a life of sun, fun, and success.
Loveranger computers came in tough ceramic cases. It was during a party at Ann’s new place that Stephanie met the ceramics designer, blue-jowled Humbert Stuckmann. And fell for his line of talk … Humbert, too, with a name practically synonymous with quality fabrics, was also a part of the good life of sun and success. That he had already run through three wives seemed to Stephanie, at the time, to be a part of Humbert’s charm.
They were married in Hawaii the next New Year’s Day.
Humbert flew in his favourite group, Ceren Aid, to sing at the wedding.
And poor scholarly Roy has nothing to do with all that. I’ve just left him behind, as I’ve left England behind. Everything over here seems so small and drab. I ask myself how I ever …
She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, staring out into the deserted car park.
Why am I going on at myself like this? I need to get back to the sun and the beaches. I must lose a pound or two – I’m getting too hefty for those glittering shores. Roy – I don’t know him any more. It’s a different life …
Then a traitorous thought, unexpected. And do I know myself any more?
But she swiftly negotiated that thought, not wishing to remind herself how she had once been a tidy little English housewife, doting on her husband and her house … She had even enjoyed ‘doing the ironing’. The old-fashioned phrase came back to her with emetic force.
Shit… She started the car engine. All that was a different lifetime. Could it have been an EMV experience – what they called ‘lietime’? Her Now was real, with the sun blazing above their air-cond beach hut. And Humbert standing naked on the bed with a great erection, one of his scuzzies coming on. Ceren Aid playing over the 8D. Humbert’s fave disk.
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
