What's Up, God?
A Romance of the Apocalypse.
Gollancz, 1995; Indigo (Gollancz) paperback 1996
He marched me down towards Great Windmill Street
and up into Soho. The ghost town of earthly delights. Where only two
months before were cheerful open doorways, at which pale ladies called
all and sundry to enjoy the fruits of a mild transgression. The peep
shows, the videostores, the rows of magazines with tiny red dots plastered
over any incident of penetration to vainly placate the vice laws. Everything
in the best possible taste. But it is all boarded up and shut now.
The old Windmill, once La Vie en Rose, is now the London Mormon Center,
while the magshop opposite has been taken over as a distribution depot
for The Watchtower. Other clipjoints have now been pasted over by all
the usual calls to shape up in readiness to ship out. The Mormons,
the Church of the Latter Day Saints (and you can't get any more latter
than now) are using the old hall for video projections of Life in Heaven
For the Blessed. A long line of quiet, anxious punters stretches round
the bend into Brewer Street, shuffling, weeping and clearing their
throats.
"Good to see business is finally booming," said my Tory seducer, revealing
a dim dabble of wit. We passed through the line, muttering our 'Scuse I's, into
the narrow bone of Lexington Street. Warehouses, print shops and a smatter of
eateries. Restaurants have been doing well, too. The one sin the Angels could
not care less about, it turned out, was Gluttony. They took to it like ducks
to pate. Not an evening passes in which one cannot see them stuffing their gobs
in the Gay Hussar, the Red Fort, Luigi's, or the Frog's Legs. The one thing they
had clearly not anticipated was the narrowness of British doors: the struggle
to squeeze their wings through them might have sparked a thousand and one skits
and satires, only yesterday... Nix the thousand, if only we had the one.
But the Tory Rebel was not ushering me, alas, into the nice Cypriot kebabery
on the corner of Beak Street, but into a small photocopying establishment on
the other side of the road, where a bespectacled balding man with a smudge of
toner on his nose nodded us towards a little grey owl like lady sorting piles
of name cards at an old formica table, who pressed a buzzer, and otherwise ignored
our presence. We passed into a back room full of museum piece printing machines,
which I remember my father using to churn out the leaflets of his International
Socialist Worker's Movement (ISWORM), when I was but a child in rompers. As Groucho
might correct, I was not brought up in Rompers, but in deepest Islington, back
in the Soaring Seventies, the last real boom before the bust.
We were quite close, my Dad and I, until I started taking the piss, in a professional,
rather than a personal way. "I don't care what you think of the Movement," he
used to tell me, "as long as you don't go Rabbi or Tory. Socialism is not
as dead as you think it is." The other thing he disliked was what he called "fucking
bad language." "Don't you fucking use fucking bad language in my fucking
'ouse." The unspoken hurt was, I used him as a model for one of my early
acts. He was really Heckling Ham, the Opposites Man. Everything opposed on the
spot. But he felt he was carrying through the tradition of Great-Grandpa Joseph
Duvid, who was the Secretary-General of the East London Branch of the Amalgamated
Schmutter Workers and Allied Trades (ASWAT) and had personally split open the
skull of fifteen Mosleyites in the Battle of Cable Street of 1936. He repudiated
his son, my grandfather, Vladimir V. Davis (the V stood for Vissarionovitch,
poor bugger, but he changed his first names by deed poll to William and became
a chartered accountant in Ipswich). But he doted on my Dad, named Joseph, after
him, though he didn't live to see Dad become a Trotskyist. All those dead creeds,
my God! I carry redundancy in my blood stream...
My mother, Sophie, was the daughter of Italian immigrants, who named her Sophia
Benedicta (Dad always said she was named for the mustard). Her Ma and Pa returned
to Italy to retire, and died there while I was still a bambino. She met Dad at
a Day of Action in Hackney. She was a nurse, and was standing nearby when he
was hit on the head with a brick by a supporter of the rival Socialist International
Revolutionary Workers Group (SIRWOG, later renamed Workers Power, or WOPOs).
It was love at first sight, and eighteen stitches. She had been a member of an
all women's rock group called the Sufferin' Jets, but by the time I came along
had put aside childish things and redefined herself, after reading a book by
Germaine Greer, as a "crone." Although she was barely thirty she dyed
her hair white and began gathering mushrooms in Epping Forest. Later she published
a whole series of Funghi cookery sagas and thus sustained our small menage. I
am an only child. Thank God at least for that.
I found them on Christmas Eve, after the Manifestation, spending the night in
cardboard boxes on the Embankment, to raise consciousness in aid of the homeless.
My father tossing unhappily in his old March for Jobs sleeping bag while my mother's
mussed hair and bleary eyes stared at me over the flap of a Zanussi Washer-Dryer
carton. One side of them a bedraggled Labour M.P. who was obviously regretting
the generous impulse blinked unhappily. On the other side, the Bishop of London,
Eddie "the Mouth" Edwards siphoned up a lentil soup from a paper cup.
"Mum, Dad, howy'doin'? Whadyouthink of what's going on?"
"People are hungry, Jerry, that's what's going on." said my mother
primly, "hungry for bread and butter, meat and potatoes. None of this Tory
God crap, begging your pardon, Bishop."
"Don't worry about me, Sophie," said the Bishop, "I have a few
bones to pick with God myself. I'm really looking forward to the opportunity."
"Its all the same old con," said my Dad. "Wait a couple o' days,
they'll find all these Angel bastards are from some crazy cult in Texas. The
world's going to buggery and this is all they can think of. Come and join us,
son. There a spare box 'ere. The Liberal Democrat's buggered off."
"No thanks Dad, I have to get back to Karen." I didn't mention the
turkey in the oven. But now Karen's gone and the only turkey is me and I'm hobnobbing
with the vilest class enemy...
The genetic whiff of printer's ink faded as the Tory Rebel opened a side door
with two keys. We found ourselves in a tiny enclosed storeroom full of broken
machines, empty crates, used toner cartridges and other spare parts.
"What now brown cow?" I asked, veering to the conclusion that I had
fallen prey to yet another of the city's proliferating paranoiacs.
"Its down the rabbit hole for us," he said dryly, looking not unsatisfied
at my confusion. Perhaps if I brained him with one of the empty cartridges and
crashed through the door back into real life I might yet make good an escape.
But to what? I hesitated long enough to hear the hum of something moving behind
the blank peeling wall in front of us. And then the whole caboodle slid aside.
My Carrolian interlocutor motioned me forward onto the floor of a sturdy looking
lift, all gleaming corporate grey walls, but no control panels or floors numbers
that one could notice.
The door slid shut behind us and my seducer spoke to the ceiling in a loud and
clear voice.
"Roast mutton," he said.
I saw no sign of it. But the lift moved and began to descend.
"Voiceprint identification," explained the Tory. "I have not introduced
myself. You may call me the Dodo. We have adopted Alice names in this facility.
Its the human touch. Keeps us alive. Not that Alice is, as yet, with us."
I wish he wouldn't use that name. But I had barely time to think, before the
lift stopped and the oppposite wall slid open. We stepped out, into a barren
steel corridor with pipes running along its top, into a blank wall which consisted
almost entirely of a thick looking, bomb shelter door. It was emblazoned with
a nuclear shelter symbol and the legend: AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ON ULTIMATE DUTY
ONLY. We waited, while a buzzing, clicking noise emanated from a concealed source.
"We have to wait before entering the Caucus," the Tory Dodo said politely. "Ultimate
Security is a morass of precautions. If I had not been voiceprint identified
above we would have been gassed and incapacitated for inspection. Equally, if
we don't pass muster here..." He paused, giving me a mischievous look.
"They turn us into pumpkins," I suggested.
"Pumpkin stew, more like," he said, breezily. "No chances down
below. The shredding pellets. Its shoot first and don't bother with the questions."
"I'm so glad the government trusts the people," I told him. It seemed
clearer now that he was on the level. Though what level was yet to be discovered.
"Foresight," he said, obviously passing the time while we waited for
the passage or the pellets. "You never know when a thing comes in useful.
We voted to abandon all this, you know, back in '92. End of the Cold War. No
more nuclear panic. Stuff Civil Defence. The people hated the idea. Politicians
scurry down the boltholes leaving the general populace to shrivel and burn. Not
a great vote-catching wheeze. Sealed up a couple of Regional Caucauses in Sheffield,
Hull. Labour fiefs. The nuclear free zones. But the only nuclear-free zone is
here. Cheated on our promises as usual. Good thing we did. Comes an unexpected
Event like this, thank our lucky stars. Foresight. I think they've decided we're
Friendlies. Jolly good."
The great door swung open from inside. Three thugs in sky blue overalls stood
within, guns at ease. A huge Alsatian dog sprang forward, sniffing at both our
crotches, arse, thighs, rising up to shove its massive schnozzle in our armpits.
Then it barked three times and scurried off.
"They love us, they love us not," said the Dodo. "But we have
as clean a bill of health as you can get in this burg. Come, lets go to the Mad
Hatter's Tea Party." He ushered me into a waiting golf buggy and we drove
off, just the two of us, leaving the blue goons by the door.
"Or is it you," he said, "that's Alice?" Looking at me sharply
as he noticed that something made me wince at that name.
"Struck a raw nerve? Special jitters? Something we ought to know?"
"Personal."
"Dear boy, the Personal is over. Isn't that what this is all about?"
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