Back in the USSA

by Kim Newman

  "Oh pardner," she sang.

  "Yes, ma'am," said HI PARDNER! MY NAME'S TOM.

  "If you were to procure me an alcoholic beverage, I'd sleep with you."

  "I'm sorry, ma'am, but I've taken a vow of celibacy. I'm of the Futurian faith."

  Lady Penelope's mouth sagged open, leaking smoke.

  "Futurian faith?"

  "You should have heard of it," HI PARDNER! explained, juggling three empty glasses. "The Church of Futurity was founded by an Englishman, Arthur Clarke. I'll give you a card that's good for a free personality test at our down-town temple."

  "No thank you, darling. I already have a personality."

  "Alcohol craving and sexual incontinence are unknown among true Futurians, ma'am."

  "You poor dear. Let me give you a card that's good for French at any brothel in Mayfair."

  HI PARDNER! dropped a glass, and looked none too pleased. Lady Penelope linked arms with Lowe and dragged him towards the exit.

  "I've got the car out the back," she said. "It has a wet bar."

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  Back in the USSA

  They weaved between the orbits of Sir Robert and Hunt Thompson, and escaped from the crowded marquee.

  In the grounds of Thompson's mansion, a stage was erected by an ornamental lake. A band were tuning up as Lady Penelope led Lowe to the backstage area car-park. The best of Britpop was due on soon, filling his gut with dread. Her Ladyship posed as if for a rotogravure photograph by a pink Rolls Royce, as curvy and elegant as a swan, as potentially powerful as a panther. He thought he was in love.

  "Fab," he said, struck dumb.

  "Would you like to drive her?"

  "Is the bear a Catholic?"

  "Can you assure me you don't have a drink problem?"

  "I've driven from London to Edinburgh and back again in a single day on a bottle and a half of Scotch without any accidents. Well, nothing fatal."

  "Then you get the job as chauffeur," she smiled graciously, tossing him the keys. He held the rear door open for her to get inside.

  As she settled into her seat, he took the wheel. He breathed in the aroma of leather and walnut. A fresh cut rose was propped in a test-tube-shaped dashboard vase.

  "Your orders are to take us away from this dry hell to somewhere we can get a drink."

  Lowe started the engine as Sir Cliff took the stage. Partly because the Roller was a beautiful piece of work, and partly to avoid listening to much more of "Living Doll" he opened her right up. The clock said 60 as they swept past the Group 4 rentacops on the main gate, but the Rolls Royce seemed to glide out onto the road.

  Having joined Lady Penelope on the spacious backseat and sampled some of the Scotch from the discreet bar, Lowe found himself humming a tune under his breath between liquoury kisses. It was most inappropriate: here he was, about to make love with Royalty in an upholstered dream machine, and he couldn't get Sir Cliff's "Living Doll" out of his mind.

  She still wore her pearls. He rolled them between his teeth, recognising from the smoothness that they were real. She held his head to her body, tickling behind his ears, encouraging him to tongue wet patterns on her gloriously unmarked skin. She was soft yet supple, as if her muscles were factory-fresh and had not yet been used. Maybe it was Royal blood.

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  Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman

  He licked a tracing of moisture down between her breasts, past her neat navel, to her perfect triangle of pubic hair. It was twenty hours since his last shave: he gently sandpapered Lady Penelope's inner thighs with his chin.

  "Go low, Lowe, oh go," she cooed.

  Crying, talking, sleeping, walking, he thought, tongue active.

  Her thighs pressed tight on his cheeks. He gripped the taut velvet of her sides, feeling her ripple.

  ... best to please her.. .just 'cause she's a...

  "Oh, Lowe, well done," she said.

  St Louis, Mo.

  Perched on the edge of the motor hotel bed in his Y-Fronts, Lowe hit the "Finish Edit" key on his portable Amstrad WP. Sir Bob insisted every detail of the Freedom and Enterprise Roadshow be a showcase for "the best of everything British". The Amstrad was marvellous if you liked gadgets and certainly British-designed and owned, though manufactured in Mexican sweatshops. Lowe preferred his old Imperial travelling typewriter: it was lighter, cheaper to replace when (not if, in America) it got stolen, and you didn't need to find a telly with compatible sockets to plug it in to.

  The Dis-United Ex-Socialist States of America is in trouble. Since he was shot two years ago, President John Ross Ewing has not been a healthy man. Like one of those red gerontocrats from the late '70s and early '80s, Ewing clings to power because the people who work for him have too much to lose. If you talk to senior government figures or the eager young reformers who form the backbone of the administration, you have to think of the Raft of the Medusa. Starving, thirsty, maddened people clinging to one another atop waterlogged pieces of wood lashed together in a desperate hurry. If anyone falls off, they won't just drown quietly, they'll be torn to pieces by sharks. The predators who want to gorge on the carcass of a ruined country range from old CP hacks reinvented as democrats (Newton Gingrich, Hal Phillip Walker) to new millionaires with shady reputations (Ivan Boesky, Milo Minderbinder).

  Policy is made up on the hoof in an attempt to cope with major insurrectionist or secessionist movements in California and Texas (which

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  Back in the USSA

  would have gone by now were Ewing not himself Texan). Washington State wants to federate with Canada, Alaska wants to re-join wealthy Russia, Florida is trying to become part of the "Caribbean Rim" economy. In places like Montana and Wyoming, ex-Communists, fundamentalist Christians, Mormons and other lunatic backwoodsmen form communities —protected by armed militias—which recognise no government at all. Those plains Indians (or "First Americans" as they call themselves) who survived collectivisation, purge and genocide in the '30s demand the return of their lands. The former slave states have effectively introduced apartheid, which they call "separate development" or "democratic segregation". Swedish Lutheran missionaries who started out encouraging negroes to use the law to challenge the system have ended up supplying them with weapons.

  For all practical purposes, the Confederation of Independent North American States (CINAS), as we're trying to remember to call it, exists as a geographical expression only. It would take Garibaldi, Bismarck, Joan of Arc and Garth to re-unite this country.

  One of the things you notice very quickly is how patriotic Yanks are. In Britain, especially since Indo-China, patriotism is rather quaint, the preserve of Daily Torygraph readers in the golf club bar. In America, it has all the power of religion. Yanks of every age and class see their country falling to pieces in a wave of crime, swamped by capitalist hucksters like Robert Maxwell, their young people corrupted by trashy telly, by porn masquerading as sexual freedom, by European and Russian evangelists, by tawdry consumerism. They compare this with the days when people respected the police, when there was free schooling, medical care, libraries, and very little crime. Most Americans forget the disappearances (which, after all, happened to other people), the shortages of food and consumer goods. Then they feel a profound, visceral anger that their country has turned from global superpower to banana republic in under five years.

  It's not that there are no contenders for the title of Saviour of America. There are too many, all soldiers. In messes up and down the land junior and middle ranking officers drink to the day when General Colin Powell leads them to power to form a government of national salvation. Powell seems to be humane, he is certainly immensely able (he defeated the Panama uprising a few years ago with almost no bloodshed) and is popular with all ranks. There's only one problem. He's a negro. 98% of the population could beg him to become President tomorrow,

  Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman

  but racialists and fascists would take pot-shots until they eventually got him. The thing is, Powell might st
ill do it anyway. He is only the sanest and best-known of a pack of Caesars-in-waiting. Of the others, several should have been cashiered for insubordination before now for making political speeches. The most dangerous is undoubtedly the deranged, incontinent old General "Buck" Turgidson who famously claimed he could restore the country to red glory by using the nuclear arsenal on secessionist states. But one would do well to keep an eye on a whole string of Generals and Colonels: Ross Perot, Oliver North, Nicholas Fury, Dale Dye, William Calley, James M. Scott. God help America!

  Not very funny, perhaps, but horribly truthful. He should go through it and put in more jokes. Or even some.

  Penny leaned over his shoulder, pushed a cigarette into his mouth and lit it with her Faberge.

  "What are you writing?" she asked.

  "The truth," he said.

  "For Fatty Maxwell? Poor baby, you're ill, let me get you a drinkie."

  "No, not for Bob."

  She bounded off the bed, naked, and fetched a bottle of Scotch from her overnight bag. She poured a generous slug into the motor hotel tooth-mug, drank half in one go, and handed the rest to him.

  "So, man of mystery," she smiled. "Special report for MI5, perhaps?"

  He smiled, "Look..."

  "Don't worry," she said, jumping back onto the bed. "Your secret's safe with me." She nibbled his ear-lobe and whispered, "...Joanna."

  He tried to turn around. She darted away and held up a grottily-produced magazine, open to a column headlined by a picture of a chain-smoking slut with a typewriter.

  "How did you know?" he asked.

  "Didn't. Educated guess. When you socialise for a living, you learn to read people. I saw you as someone who could only function as an employee of Repellent Robbie through the strategic use of conscience-appeasing treachery. Besides, I'm a huge fan of Joanna Houseman's 'Letter from America. I noticed at once that you talk like she writes."

  For three years, Lowe had been contributing "Letter from America" to Lilliput, the gadfly magazine owned by Viv Stanshall, co-edited by Michael Foot and John Lennon. America was a haven for every sort of

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  Back in the USSA

  British weirdo, fraudster and crook; there was a ready market back home for humorously cynical tales of their activities. Naturally, Sir Robert's travelling freak-show was next up for the satirical chop.

  "You should do this full-time," said Penelope, pointing to his latest column. "This is what people need to know."

  Lowe shook his head and smiled. She shot him a don't-patronise-me-you-bastard look. He raised his hands in surrender.

  a Lilliput don't pay, Penny. Unless you count the odd parcel of Marmite, HP Sauce and Branston Pickle that John sends me. It's all they can afford. The money is spent defending libel cases. That civil servant Hislop nearly bankrupted John and Michael for calling him a 'smug baldie get'. It may be what folk need to know, but it's not what most of them want. The great unwashed want the Daily Mirror and its crime and celeb tittle-tattle."

  "You swine," Penny said, mock-swatting him with the magazine. "All this time you've had Marmite and refused to share!"

  The door barged open. Maxwell exploded in, sporting a shiny plastic bowler hat and an immense Union Jack waistcoat.

  "Come on, Ladyship," he roared. "Time to meet and greet the good people of Saint Lewis. You, too, Lowe. I want you to write about how Sir Cliff is taking the country by... Fucking hell!"

  Most women would have grabbed for the bedclothes to cover themselves or snapped something about the basic courtesies of knocking. Penny stood up stark naked and faced the tycoon, one hand on her hip, the other fanning her breasts with Lilliput.

  Maxwell stared, not at Penny's body but at the magazine he had made his life's work to sue out of existence. It was always running stories about his bullying, monstrous bombast and financial irregularities. Lowe ought to know: he was the main source funnelling the stories.

  Maxwell detested Lilliput mostly because it spared no effort to make him look ridiculous. Lennon and Foot were counting on "Joanna Houseman" to feed them tit-bits about Sir Bob's adventures in America. If Maxwell found out Lowe was Joanna, it wouldn't just mean the end of his career, but of his functioning testicles. He tried to cover the trail with a female pseudonym and regular hints in the column that "Joanna's business in the States was organising cultural and educational exchange visits.

  "If I find any of my employees reading that toilet paper," Maxwell growled, eyebrows converging like angry earwigs, "they are fired. Brutally."

  He tore the magazine out of Penny's grasp and ripped it in half, like a circus strong-man destroying a telephone book.

  Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman

  "Now put some clothes on and bloody well get to work. Mill and swill, you two."

  Joplin, Mo.

  The Roadshow had set up at the Missouri State Southern College. The place had once trained engineers, chemists and farm managers but was now trying to get by teaching accounting, marketing and business management. About one window in ten was broken, the chill kept out with cardboard and sticky-tape.

  There was a huge brass mural of Debs, Capone and Goldwater shoulder-to-shoulder at the barricades. An embarrassed lecturer in Creative Advertising had explained to Lowe that it would be torn down as soon as the college had funds for the demolition. In the meantime, it was feebly plastered over with posters hawking free enterprise.

  The crowd was huge. Much bigger than in Oak Park or St Louis, sprawled across the college grounds, most of it in front of the scaffolding stage hung with a huge banner reading "VIMTO—THE TASTE OF FREEDOM'! Beneath it, Sir Cliff and his band belted out "Summer Holiday" Someone had decided to change the words to "summer vacation" so as not to confuse the Americans. It didn't sound right at all.

  Officially, the population of Joplin ran to something between forty and fifty thousand. About half had turned out to see the show, not to mention several thousand more in from the sticks.

  Lowe had started mingling with the crowd at the beginning of the show, as Sir Robert delivered a matey lecture about the wonders of capitalism. He'd arrived in Britain as a penniless refugee during the War, he claimed, and pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Lowe's story idea for the day, relayed from the boss's desk, was to describe how the people of Joplin, Missouri were inspired to go out and start their own businesses by Captain Bob's inspirational speech.

  The only quote he had in his notebook was "what does that fat old asshole know? Probably got rich by stealing it."

  Oh well, he'd just make it up as usual... This is just what we need to turn this town round. I'm gwine go out there starting tomorrow morning first thing an set up a shoe-shine stall. Yeah, Captain Bob, he's dang right — Til start me a protection racket.

  Back in the USSA

  Few had turned out just to see Sir Robert or Sir Cliff; few had even heard of them. They were here because it was something to do, a day out. Joplin was that kind of place; once upon a time, its air and rivers had been polluted by the by-products of heavy industry: zinc and lead, machine tools and chemicals, aircraft parts and slaughterhouses. Now, exposed to the chill winds of the global economy, most of the old factories had closed down or put their workers on part-time shifts. Driving through the rusted, mostly-abandoned industrial estate in a pink Roller was an entirely apt introduction to the place. Along the highway from the factories to the town were dotted dusty white concrete oblongs, apartment buildings built block-on-block on the Lego principle.

  This was USSA Profonde, the sort of place no-one had much heard of, even in America, a place that communist politicians hadn't cared about as long as production targets were met. Now nobody cared at all, apart from the people living here, lured to the Freedom and Enterprise Roadshow by the promise of a free show, not to mention free bottles of Vimto and packs of Strands.

  The audience applauded politely. Sir Cliff thankyoued and asked Joplin if it was feeling good. A few people mumbled a mild "yurp" When asked a second time, the response wa
sn't any louder, so the Peter Pan of Britpop turned to the band and waved them into "Jolly Jolly Sixpence"

  Lowe started towards the VIP enclosure in the backstage area.

  "He's got jolly jolly what?" someone asked.

  Lowe turned. Two white men stood, hands in pockets, one short and fat, one tall and thin. They wore black suits, white shirts, black ties, black trilby hats and sunglasses, and expressions of amused contempt.

  "Sixpence," Lowe said to them. He reached into his pocket and fished out the 1946 tanner he always had on him. It wasn't legal tender anymore, but it was as old as he was. He carried it for luck, and for tossing when a difficult decision had to be made.

  "About a dime, huh?" said the taller man, inspecting the coin in Lowe's outstretched hand. "Shoot, we don't even have that much."

  Lowe introduced himself. The two men were Jake Papageorge and Elwood Delaney, musicians who specialised in what had once been condemned in the USSA as "degenerate negro music"

  "Excuse the funeral outfits," Elwood explained. "Stage gear, and the only clothes we've got left anyway."

  Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman

  They'd been touring the country, hadn't made any money, the rest of the band had left, their van was kaput and they'd just lost everything else in a poker game trying to raise the price of escape from Joplin.

  "Still, like the fat guy said, mustn't grumble."

  Elwood managed a fair Maxwell impersonation. Lowe gave them five dollars and continued on his way. At the VIP enclosure he discovered the Access All Areas laminate clipped to his lapel was gone.

  "Can't let you through without accreditation," said the jobsworth at the gate.

  The mysterious William Brown appeared out of nowhere and just touched the guard on the shoulder. Lowe was admitted, no further questions, have a nice day. He said "thanks" to Brown, who gave the faintest nod and was gone again.

  So Brown was in charge of security, was he? Was there a story there?

  The marquee was quiet. There might be a huge crowd outside, but Joplin was notably thin on VIPs, or at any rate the kind of VIPs Maxwell would want to cosy up to. There were a few civic types, a chief of police and a couple of businessmen, but most of the people here were with the Roadshow.