253

by Geoff Ryman

  The Anorexic’s Cookbook. See how it feels?

  Car 6 map

  Contents

  201

  MR ‘BERTIE JEEVES’

  Outward appearance

  Huge, loose-limbed black man with no. 1 trimmed beard and head, in blue track suit and Planet Hollywood, Beijing cap.

  Inside information

  Real name Andre Chambers. Manufacturer and retailer of own-brand ice cream. It is a top quality product, which is why its trademark is a snooty Englishman with a monocle. Bertie’s vanilla uses real vanille from France. It is full fat, no air. ‘Like me,’ Bertie always says. He insists on being called Bertie Jeeves. His wife, Frances, drew the line at the monocle.

  Bertie plays tennis every lunchtime at Archbishop’s Park, rugby every Saturday and works out every other day. He has developed a rather embarrassing health problem.

  What he is doing or thinking

  Bertie is suffering from ice cream poisoning. His motions have turned white.

  Bertie slips into the giant fridge to cool off after sport and can’t stop himself eating ice cream. It’s cold, it’s liquid; he’s hot and thirsty. Before he knows it, he’s eaten an entire tub of Real Walnut or Canadian Maple or Surrey Strawberry.

  His wife Frances has noticed that stock is missing. She’s had to raise the price by ten pence in the pound. She’s harangued the staff for theft.

  ‘When I find out who’s been spiriting the stuff away, they’ll be gone, too,’ she warned them, ‘to jail.’ She tells Bertie. ‘You’re too easy on people.’

  Bertie lives in dread of Frances’ rage. He lives in terror of forgetting to flush the toilet and her finding the evidence.

  There are times, he thinks, when I wish I were anorexic.

  Car 6 map

  Contents

  202

  MRS MARYAN ELLIOTT

  Outward appearance

  Tiny, plump woman wearing a black shirt printed with gold leaves. Sits with a handwritten list on her lap. Eyes closed, she recites.

  Inside information

  Maryan emigrated from Armenia after marrying a British tourist. He looked big, clear-skinned, blue-eyed—the model of a Soviet citizen. Back in Britain, he simply looks fat. He’s a taxi driver.

  Maryan’s father was an economist. Her mother, heavily made-up in orange silk, frequently visits Britain, looks stricken, and lobbies the embassy to see if they can give her daughter a job. After months of applying for research or translation work, Maryan took a job in a new dry cleaning shop.

  Two days convinced her that she needed to do something else. She decided to become a taxi driver.

  What she is doing or thinking

  Maryan is studying The Knowledge. To be a taxi driver you have to pass a test to prove you know the streets of London. So, with Charlie’s help, she is memorizing London.

  She spends weekends driving up and down roads, to learn what they look like from all angles. She has to know every no-left-turn sign or one-way street.

  She can feel her brain being colonized. Sections of it feel weighed down, as if lead were being poured into a filigree mould. At night, as she goes over the names, the streets spread in her mind like frost.

  Maryan will be one of the few people who know what London really looks like. She will never again stumble on anything new by accident. She recites.

  Car 6 map

  Contents

  203

  MS LEONE SKERRIT

  Outward appearance

  Leonine older woman, with a mane of streaked hair. Carefully made up. Red jacket. Small suitcase. Glances at her watch.

  Inside information

  Leone was a Bond Girl. In Goldfinger, she lounges around the Miami pool and lowers her sunglasses as hairy-chested Sean Connery4 walks past. She was in The Liver Birds, two Carry On films and Confessions of a Window Cleaner, playing an ageing masseuse. She calls herself a one-woman barometer of the fall of the British film industry.

  Late in life she showed a talent for understanding technical briefings. Today, she demonstrates cellphones at a temporary stand in the concourse of Waterloo Station. Special offer: only ten pounds for the phone and your first three months of non-international calls free.

  She is nearly late, but elegantly as always.

  What she is doing or thinking

  About her grandchild who is coming to stay for the weekend. It will give her daughter Jemima and her new man a rest. Which is what Leone will need herself when the weekend is over.

  Leone lies about her age: she says she’s 45 which is old enough. She’s 52. At the end of the day, grinning at potential buyers, she feels like a death’s head. Her feet ache, her knees hurt.

  Jamie will want to walk in the park and be taken to see The Lion King. He is a bright, pretty little spark, and makes her feel grateful for what she’s got.

  It’s all been worth it. Jemima has just landed a small part. She’s a Russian bar girl in Goldeneye.

  Car 6 map

  Contents

  Another helpful and informative 253 footnote

  4 One of the key considerations of any Web professional such as myself is the downloading times of files and ensuring that the reader needs to download as few files as possible.

  For that reason, 253, the Internet version, made this promise about footnotes: not only did I promise that all footnotes are likely to be misleading and false, I also promised there will be no more than one footnote dedicated to each passenger, no matter how much I wanted to say.

  The result was some very long footnotes. This single footnote deals with the following subjects:

  The Confessions series

  Sean Connery

  The Lion King and English accents

  Confessions

  Confessions of a Window Cleaner really did exist as a film. It was terrible, but not as bad as its sequels. The Confessions films were meant to be similar to the Carry On series, only cheaper and dirtier. They starred Robin Askwith, a beefier version of Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits. I think he was meant to be a kind of identification figure for thuggish beer-swillers. He certainly was ugly enough with a small enough dick.

  The absolutely lowest moment of the series was in, I think, Confessions from a Holiday Camp. The title has been blotted out of my memory. The target of Askwith’s unbridled lust was a black woman. The script was so racist that plainly no attractive black actress could be found to stoop so low as to take the part. I seem to remember the camera focusing on a butt in hot pants while Askwith’s voice-over went something like: The jungle rhythms of her body pounded a primitive beat into my brain…’ Yes folks, in the 1970s, you could still make films with dialogue like that.

  The only actress they could find to accept the part was fully Askwith’s equal in terms of physical charms. It’s hard not to be unkind, but she was not qualified to take the part of an attractive person of either gender. The effect was strange: it was almost touching that ugly, loutish Askwith was drawn to women who were his match.

  Films were the bane of my existence in the early ’70s, because I had to see them. I was a trade reviewer; it was unprofessional to leave. It was a privilege, after all, even to be admitted to trade showings. It was a privilege to sit next to Marge Bilbow of Screen International. It was a privilege to listen to the Sight and Sound completists read full credit lists into tape recorders, spelling out all the foreign names; it was a privilege to be next to the deadbeats who managed to talk their way in as journalists, like the mad Czech with staring, delighted eyes who couldn’t see why people were so shocked by the bugging devices in The Conversation. Or Smelly Derek, someone whose devotion to films meant he forgot to wash, scrape the green from his teeth, or find accommodation. I last saw Smelly some time in the 1980s, leaning against a wall in Soho. He was plainly staring at the ruin of his life, at the top of the buildings, muttering. He didn’t answer when I said hello.

  In addition to the superb company, it was the 1970s. No other medium in history has accepted materia
l as bad as the dying national film industries of the 1970s. Spanish Westerns that did not star Clint Eastwood, extraordinarily badly dubbed kung-fu movies, the first vituperatively women-hating slash nasties, increasingly feeble British horror movies or laugh-free versions of TV series like On the Buses, British rock movies like Slade in Flame or anything starring David Essex, low budget American ‘thrillers’ starring Susan George. Such films simply never hit screens any more unless in the straight-to-video market.

  It put me off movies for the rest of the 1970s. Except for Robin and Marian, even Sean Connery was having trouble in the 1970s.

  Sean Connery

  Proof positive of the unrequited love affair the English have for Scotland. Not only was James Bond, the only post World War Two English national film hero, played by a Scot, but research shows that the English trust people with regional accents more and people with Scottish accents most. The person the English would most want to hear at the end of a helpline is someone who sounds, specifically, like Sean Connery.

  He is, of course, a Scots Nationalist, who wants to free his country from the colonial yoke of the Sassenachs. That’s what the English get called on a good day. The Scots hate and loathe the English. The English dream of hard, tough, straight-talking folk who you would trust your life savings to. Having dreamt of them, they decided that they must be Scottish. The current (1997) success of the Labour Party is due in part to the Scottish accents and regional accents, of Robin Cook, Gordon Brown etc. and the putatively Scottish origins of Tony Blair.

  The English don’t feel this degree of admiration for the other Celtic peoples. They see the Welsh as little, nittering, harp-playing elves with a strong line in double-dealing. To paraphrase for a moment. They cordially regard the Irish as forelock-tugging peasants who are either at your feet (‘Top-o-dah-mornin-to-yah!’) or at your throat (bombs). In return, the English are seen as murderous at worst, at best snobbish and devious, imperialists. At least the feelings are mutual.

  The Scots, however, are seen as hard headed, forthright and reliable. All of which shows that racism, even when it says positive things, is still racism.

  Which brings me to my next topic.

  The Lion King and English accents I’m not alone in noting how anyone not very nice in American movies sprouts an English accent. In the Lost World, you can finely grade how approving Spielberg is of Richard Attenborough’s family by their accents. The nice grandchildren talk American, Attenborough who is misguided but loveable is Scottish; while his villainous nephew is a posh Brit. Similarly, the evil cats in the Fievel series are English, while the nice cat is American. Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun turns Ballard’s epic novel into a story of how an English kid wises up and becomes an American. In Disney’s The Lion King the nasty, faggy uncle in a family of American lions is British for no reason other than his decadence. In Pocahontas all the evil Englishmen sound English and the nice ones sound like Mel Gibson.

  Mel is smart. He’s an Aussie, but he now gives interviews as himself with an American accent. Most Americans think he is American too and Mel knows that’s how they like it.

  The simple fact is that America is another unrequited British love affair. The Brits think Americans like and respect them. They, in turn, patronize the Yanks, but have made up another race of people to love: friendly, polite, energetic and likely to open fire at any moment.

  Brits fondly imagine that they have a special relationship with America. Most Americans don’t think about Britain from one decade to the next, and have the most peculiar notions about the place.

  When I migrated to Britain, an American saw I had an issue of Esquire magazine and warned me in all seriousness that I should hold on to it carefully: the British didn’t have nice magazines like Esquire and might be driven by lust for glossiness to steal it.

  Americans moan continually about the British loss of Empire; something that Brits never talk or think about as most of them weren’t born when the Empire collapsed. They simply want to get on with making money and become as successful as Belgium.

  There is another problem. Despite their wealth, their air of sophistication and their confidence, Americans are curiously certain that they will be snubbed by the Brits. They fear that the Brits will be smarter and more erudite than they. This is pretty rich when you compare the educational achievement of the two countries and the relative quality of the newspapers.

  Thinking someone is smarter than you is bound to make you dislike them. English voices make Americans feel creepy. Whenever Americans wish to indicate high-toned prejudice, over-wordy pomposity, over-nice precision, they edge towards a British accent. For them, the accent is the embodiment of closed and corseted, twisted emotions. They are right, of course, about that. But emotional constipation is not the same as villainy.

  I felt the same thing when I first arrived in Britain. I was billeted in a medical school and bubbled with pre-emptive loathing of the very smart people in British universities who were bound to snub me. Instead, they rapidly became friends or lovers, their response conditioned by the mask of Americanness that I wore. They were disappointed to learn my parents were English. ‘So you’re really just a Brit,’ said one of them glumly.

  All right, spit it out. A lot of Brits have a sexual kink for Americans. They went off me very slightly when they found out I wasn’t. See what I mean about positive racism?

  The British think they would love to live in America. What the Brits don’t know is that there is no freedom in American life. Everything is ruled by the dollar and its logic and there is no escape. Just great movies and great manners and terrible religion to mask the imprisonment, and get people through to the end of their lives.

  What Britain is now achieving is the commercial slavery of America, but with no movies, no religion except possibly Islam, and the worst, most sullen manners in the world.

  And the people they love least in the world are themselves.

  Question: The term ‘Brit’ specifically abuses the English, and yet technically includes the Scots and Welsh who are, of course, also British. Does this derive from the assumption that Britain really is run by the English?

  204

  MR HARRY MIGSON

  Outward appearance

  Bulky, youngish man with teddy-boy hair. Purple, broken veins map his cheeks. Corduroy overcoat with fake fur collar. Soft shoes masquerading as office shoes rest on a large cardboard box tied with twine to form a handle.

  Inside information

  Record dealer. He and his brother Terry run two separate cut-price CD stalls and supply numerous others. Friends in warehouses supply them with returned job lots. What’ll cost you fourteen quid in a shop, Harry will sell you on Lower Marsh for £9.99, or he’ll get it for you. It’s a cold job this time of year.

  Today, his brother’s got the van to make a collection from Polygram (and to keep Rufus, their bull terrier, with him and out of trouble).

  Going through stock this morning, Harry opened up a cardboard box full of reggae and Jamaican imports. He has a terrible feeling that Ashley Watkins got the box meant for a Carpenters Fan Club Sale.

  Now on his way to swap boxes.

  What he is doing or thinking

  What he is going to say to Ashley. Sorry, mate? Ashley always looks so long-faced and grim.

  Nothing personal? Got to see the funny side, don’t you? Somehow Harry doesn’t think Ashley will.

  Maybe, thinks Harry, I should go into classical. Different kind of clientele. After all there’s that second hand shop by Waterloo. They do all right, and the same places will supply job lots of old Nigel Kennedy stuff. Three Tenors and all that.

  He decides to talk to Terry when he gets back from the Elephant.

  Car 6 map

  Contents

  205

  MRS DODIE McGINLAY

  Outward appearance

  Professional woman, all in black, knees neatly together. Shiny, childlike shoes with buckles. Large legs in black tights. Slightly straggly fac
e between gold spirals of hair.

  Inside information

  Works in Pall Mall Oil, supervising orders and invoices for the company’s helicopter fleet. Her eldest son Dave wants to be a helicopter pilot. So does she.

  Dodie is Captain of the Netbusters women’s football team. They are top of their league and have a big game this Saturday.

  Dodie has pulled Catherine, an ageing player, out of the starting line-up. Last season Cath was scoring brilliantly. In the game against the Girl Pipers, Dodie fed her, Cath dummied, cut inside the Pipers’ defence and bent a superb shot round Relper into the top corner.

  But Cath started doing benders of a different kind, burning the candle at both ends, and her game went right off. A spell on the benches might just focus her thinking.

  What she is doing or thinking

  Wondering what to do. Cath and Dodie have been an item. Cath’s a big, raw Irish girl with a mouth, and she warned Dodie in no uncertain terms.

  If she’s pulled, she’ll bring a case of sexual harassment.

  Dodie considers her husband. He plays in his matches while she plays in hers. A peck on the cheek, teenage children: it’s a settled life.

  She imagines the scandal, the embarrassment. She has just learned that football is the most important thing in her life. But she’ll have to betray it for that life.