by Kim Newman
Bottles of Vimto and Corona were laid out on a table. Lowe uncapped a Vimto as Blair sidled up. The glow of his smile preceded him, as if his teeth were luminous.
"Sir Cliff is a marvel, isn't he?" the PR man said.
"Certainly is."
From the corner of his eye, Lowe noticed Elwood and Jake assaulting the buffet. Jake had Lowe's laminate clipped to his hat. Elwood piled up chicken legs, vol-au-vents and sausage rolls into a heap on a cardboard plate, while Jake tried to conceal an entire Black Forest Gateau in his mouth, easing its passage with swigs of Vimto.
"It's a privilege to be able to bring such British energy to this tired country, don't you think?"
The miracle was that Blair talked like that off the record.
Jake and Elwood sauntered nearby. Now, they were weighed down with guitars, a saxophone and an electric keyboard.
"You can sense the people waking up," Blair said, eyes shining.
"When I wake up, I'm usually angry."
Jake passed directly behind Blair. The PR supremo shrieked, surprising Lowe no end. How the hell had Jake goosed him with his hands full of musical instruments? Elwood touched the lip-piece of the sax to his hat-brim and smiled. Lowe had to admire them.
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Back in the USSA
The Reverend Beverley appeared, accompanied by an attractive, demure woman in a floral print dress.
"Lady Penelope! Mr. Lowe! Mr. Blair!" he beamed. "Meet my wife, Nancy."
Nancy's handshake was a wet fish. She looked at the ground, and Lowe looked at her forehead.
"Nancy is American," said the vicar. "We met in New York. At the Chelsea Hotel. I suppose you could say it was then that my love-affair with America began."
On stage, the final bars of "Congratulations" thumped flat. Applause was faint to non-existent. Sir Cliff thanked Joplin for their warm welcome.
"I think that's my cue," said the Reverend. He licked his hand and tried to slick back his hair. "Time to go out there and get Evangelical!"
If Cliff hadn't actually died on stage, then he certainly hadn't done too well. Now the mild-mannered cleric was going to go out there and give them a Thought for the Day. ("You know, I often feel that the Love of God is a lot like a Brussels sprout.")
Lowe's heart sank. He could take a certain pleasure in the humiliation of a pop singer he'd never particularly enjoyed, but it seemed a shame such a manifestly decent, modest sort as John Beverley should follow him to the lions of incomprehension and boredom.
Beverley and his wife made for the stage entrance.
"Have you seen him in action yet?" asked Penny.
"No. I don't know if I can bear to."
"I rather think you should see this," she said. "It's quite a spectacle."
He shrugged and followed her from the tent to the ramp at the side of the stage, past members of Sir Cliff's band wondering what had happened to various instruments.
The Reverend took a radio-microphone and strode out to the front of the stage. He assumed a sort of strutting swagger, almost like a drunken man. Lowe wondered if he'd given himself an electric shock.
"Good evening Joplin," he yelled, triggering a feedback whine from the big speakers. The crowd cringed, but paid attention. The electricity was coming out of him.
"I want to talk about Salvation, about the Love of God. About how even in your darkest hours, when things look like they can't get any worse, the Lord is always there {oxyou, for me, for everyone..."
His limp Home-counties accent was gone, lost in the force of his voice.
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
Lowe looked around, at the smugly-smiling Penny. Sir Cliff was struck open-mouthed, either in envy or sudden enthusiasm. Blair was rapt, a worshipper at the temple of British Energy.
Beverley gripped the mike as if choking the serpent of Eden.
"I know you got trouble, Joplin," he said, almost sneering, "I know you're all hurt. You've got fuck-all jobs, or jobs that pay jack-shit, or your marriage is a hideous trap, or maybe the Anti-Christ is stalking your kids...Am I right?"
"Amenf yelled a lone voice, not from the audience, but from the other side of the stage. Little Nancy had turned into a wide-eyed acolyte.
"Am I right? C'mon Joplin, lemme hear you say Amenl"
Joplin said Amen.
"Say it louder, Joplin," he shouted. "Shame the Anti-Christf
Joplin said Amen a lot more as the Rev. Bev. stomped across the stage, thrashing his arms, enunciating every conceivable milestone in the vale of tears, promising the Almighty was there for them, all of them.
Lowe had seen Baptist preachers in Virginia and South Carolina, but never a performance as frenzied as this, and never from a white man. If Beverley had been working in Britain, the Anglican establishment would have kicked him out for excessive fervour, but here in America he'd found his true voice and calling. Lowe had never heard an Anglican swear in a pulpit, but it went over big.
After ten minutes of frenzied ranting, Beverley's voice fell to a croak.
"Brothers and sisters, beloved people of Joplin, I shall call upon the Holy Spirit to descend upon this town and fill it with the light and strength of the Almightyl"
Beverley looked down, mumbling. Words poured through the speakers.
"And now... the end is near... "
It took a moment for it to become clear that the Reverend was singing, quietly first, almost to himself, but growing louder. Lowe vaguely recognised the words of some old song Ken Dodd used to sing.
"I did it...God's Way" yelled Beverley
He went stiff as if impaled by a spear from above, every muscle stretched tight. Sweat shone on his twisted, ecstatic face. Lowe was still concerned for his health, but Penny's amused calm suggested this was all part of the usual show.
Beverley collapsed onstage, tearing at his clothes with his free hand, jamming the mike to his mouth.
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Back in the USSA
"I feel His presence," he shouted. "He is come among us! He is come to give this town His blessing!"
Then he stopped making sense altogether, mumbling loudly in Double-Dutch.
"I believe it's called glossolalia," said Penny. "Speaking in tongues."
"This sort of thing never happened at St Botolph's when I was a kid," he said.
"You think he's remarkable, you should see the crowd."
"Are they liking it?"
"A lot of them are, yes. The Rev. has a dozen helpers at the front of the stage to sign up new believers. Then he'll send an organiser to live here for a year or two to get a church started."
Beverley twisted, shouting what sounded like Babylonian obscenities at the crowds. There were indeed minions with forms mingling with the thunderstruck Joplinites.
Penny let him kiss her cheek. Already, everyone from Blair to the roustabouts knew they were an item.
The Reverend Beverly came offstage, half-crawling, half-carried. He seemed to have sweated a stone off his scarecrow frame, and his suit was shredded. His wife scurried along next to him, dabbing at several cuts on his face with a hankie. He wiped froth (puke?) off his chin with a tattered sleeve.
The crowd were howling amen and hallelujah like a hurricane.
"You know, my dear," Beverley said to Nancy, "I do believe that went off rather well."
His wife agreed with him.
"I need a drink," Lowe said to Penny.
Joplin was still rejoicing.
"Darling," she said, "I fear we've reached the bottom of the barrel, and it's time to give it a good old scrape."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning a crate of something I've saved for desperate times. Come on. It's in the car."
From the tour vehicle park, they saw the crowds start to drift home, though a few thousand remained by the front of the stage, signing up for the Reverend Beverley's crusade to bring God to America.
Penny tossed him the keys of the Roller.
"In the boot," she said. "Sorry, what do they call it here? Tr
unk. Like an elephant."
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
Lowe remembered he needed to get into the boot on business of his own. He opened it up and took a Concise Oxford English Dictionary from his holdall. Then he saw the box of bottles.
"Those are the fellows," Penny said. "Fetch us one, would you?"
He took out a bottle. Its label was Russian.
He joined Penny on the back seat and screwed the cap off the bottle. Its contents smelled vile. He could read the Cyrillic label, but not translate it.
"Chernobyl? What's that mean, then?"
"Wormwood."
"What? The Star of the Apocalypse?"
"An educated man, eh? What this particular Wormwood means is that we haven't got any proper booze left, so we've got to drink Russian absinthe. I bought it in Canada, from a naval officer. Probably a spy, actually."
She took the bottle from him and downed a hefty swig. Her big eyes started watering.
"Any old port in a storm," he said.
"It's interesting," she admitted. "No glowing insects yet."
He took the bottle and had an experimental sip. Absinthe didn't just get you drunk, it made you hallucinate. It didn't taste that rough, so he took a hefty gulp, warming his throat and tummy.
He passed the bottle back to Penny and started to work with his notebook and dictionary, first drafting his message and then finding the page number, column number and paragraph number that each word appeared in.
"A secret message?" she asked. She lit up a Strand and screwed it into her holder.
"Tomorrow, I'll telegraph this to a friend in London. I need some detective-work done."
"Why not use the telephone like everyone else?"
"The deeper you get into America, the more useless the phone service becomes. Even if I manage to put a call through to London, there's no guarantee we'll be able to hear one another. Also, I've a strong inkling calls made by anyone on the Freedom and Enterprise Roadshow are listened to with great interest by the gnomes in Cheltenham."
"GCHQ? That's illegal, isn't it?"
"Never stopped 'em before. It's the beauty of an unwritten constitution. What our beloved Prime Minister Alan Clark likes to call 'the most mature democracy in the world' when he's being patronising to
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Back in the USSA
foreigners is actually a cloak for a bunch of self-serving, casually corrupt crooks who don't give a monkeys about anyone except themselves."
"Poor baby," she said. "Can I have the soap-box when you've finished?"
There was a bitter aftertaste in his mouth.
"You're a bloody aristocrat. What would you know?"
He hadn't meant that. His tongue was possessed. It slithered in his mouth like an open razor.
She shrugged and looked out of the window.
"In my blue-blooded parasitical way, I may not know much. But I'm pretty certain that those two in the black hats are driving off with all the cricket gear."
A four-ton Scammel—loaded with pads, bats, balls and stumps— pulled out of the car park. While Elwood wrestled with the immense steering-wheel, Jake leaned out of the window on the passenger side of the cab, smoking a Strand.
"Who are those fellows?" Penny asked.
"They said they were musicians."
Oklahoma City
"D'you think they'll do Watney's Red Barrel?" he asked as he unscrewed the Spirit of Ecstasy ornament from the bonnet and pocketed it.
"I'll settle for a gin and tonic," said Penny, putting on her sunglasses. "Anything but absinthe."
He took the windscreen-wipers off, too, dropped them on the driver's seat and locked the car. Anything that could be removed from a car in the new America could be stolen. The streetwise motorist always took precautions.
They had fled the inanities of the Roadshow, currently setting up shop in the big park in the middle of town. Lowe had chauffeured Penny off in search of a half-decent bar in a part of town where a pink Rolls Royce wouldn't be vandalised or stolen. Limey Louie's Authentic British Pub looked like a prospect both fascinating and appalling. They hadn't been able to resist pulling in for a look.
Aside from the spittoons, the pub looked authentic enough: sawdust on the floor, those mahogany-topped wrought-iron tables, a bar with ceramic pump-handles. The walls were hung with pictures of the Royal Family. Queen Sarah looked quite slimline in her wedding snaps. There
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
was even the rare shot of King Andrew and his last-but-one Royal Mistress, Patsy Stone.
"Good arfternoon folks, wot'll you have to drink, then?" said the man behind the bar. He wore a butcher's apron and a pork pie hat. Limey Louie himself, presumably.
"A gin and tonic for the lady, and I'll have a pint of bitter," said Lowe.
"Sorry mite, but we're aht've gin at the moment, an' I don't keep bitter."
Lowe had heard such an accent before. Three decades ago, he had tried and failed to get off with a girl studying fine art at the Slade and she'd dragged him to several dreary American socialist realism films at the Everyman. He had endured the "genius" David O. Selznick's ham-fisted stabs at Hard Times, The Ragged- Trousered Philanthropist and A Child of thejago. Back then, the commies liked to think London a mid-Victorian hellhole of gruesome industrial accidents, filthy rookeries and bloated, whiskered capitalists. The cockney proletarians of those films all spoke like Limey Louie, in an adenoidal whine somewhere between Brummie and Australian.
"Okay," said Penny, "do you have any Scotch?"
"Sorry," said Limey Louie. "That's way too expensive. All I 'ave in that line is Bourbon."
Penny shrugged.
"What beers do you do?" Lowe asked.
"Bud. Might 'ave some malt liquor out the back, mind."
"Enough," said Penny. "I'll have a triple Bourbon on the rocks and he'll have a jug of Budweiser."
"Sorry, can't do jugs Ma'am. This is an authentic British pub. We only serves beer in pints and half-pints."
"Whatever. Just get us some drinks."
Limey Louie looked at his pocket watch. "Sorry, I can't serve you alcohol now."
"In the name of God, why?" said Penny through clenched teeth, delicate little hands balling into fists.
"It's quarter to three. I called time ten minutes ago."
"So you're closed for the afternoon? Why didn't you tell us when we came in?"
"I'm not closing," he said indignantly. "That'd be terrible for business. This is supposed to be an authentic British pub, so I keep to British pub hours. They call them licensing hours in Britain, you know. They shut
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Back in the USSA
the pubs at half past two so's the workers will go back to the factories. I can sell you soft drinks and mineral water."
"Let me get this right," said Lowe. "There's no local law against you selling alcohol in the afternoon." Louie smiled and nodded. "But you won't because it'd spoil the gimmick of this place." Another nod and smile. "Well, how about you break your rule just this once? There's no-one else here to see you do it, and I promise we won't tell."
Limey Louie looked pained. "I'm sorry, sir, truly I am, but this is my vision. I've been to night classes to learn how to run my own business, and Mr. Leeson from the London School of Business Excellence said that to make it work you've got to have a vision, and stick with it. I've never been to Great Britain myself, but I'm a great admirer of everything British, and my vision was to make my pub as bloomin' authentic as possible."
"So how's business?" said Lowe.
"Not so good, but it'll come right any day now, I just know it.. .Listen, sorry to disappoint you over the drinks. Tell you what I'll do. I'll give you both a nice glass of Vimto. On the house."
Lowe glanced at Penny, assuming she'd be all for going somewhere else or back to the Chernobyl in the boot. Instead she shook her head resignedly. They both felt sorry for Limey Louie, who had doubtless sunk his life savings into this idiotic business after listening to bullshit
from some wanker who probably wasn't good enough to lecture in Britain.
"I can tell from your accents," said Limey Louie as he poured the drinks, "that you're not from round these 'ere parts. Where you from, then? Canada?"
"Something like that," said Lowe. If they admitted they were British, they might never escape.
They took their Vimto and sat at a table by the window. Lowe reached into one of the inside pockets of his jacket, pulled out his hip-flask and unscrewed the top. Without bothering to hide the fact, he poured a hefty tot into Penny's glass and something likewise into his own.
"Cheers," she said as they clinked glasses.
The Vimto masked the hideous, bitter taste of the Chernobyl rather well.
"I think you've stumbled on a drink that could be the sensation of the Home Counties Set next season," said Penny, licking her lips. "My one social indulgence is a marquee for a few friends at the Henley Regatta, and next year I shall serve absinthe and Vimto."
"Isn't it illegal in Britain?"
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
"Who cares? So is bhang, but everyone smokes it these days. Absinthe on the other hand is truly decadent. Absinthe and Vimto. A new cocktail. I name it...Meltdown."
They downed their drinks in one.
Lowe felt as if a sledge-hammer had been taken to his forehead.
"Mr. Louie!" Penny shouted, "my companion and I will have another two glasses of your vintage Vimto, please."
"Okay, Ma'am," said Louie, opening two bottles, "just as long as you understand that I cant bring it over to you. You or the gentleman have to come to the bar to fetch it because..."
"...this is an authentic British pub."
At that moment, the window shattered, spilling away from its frame as though the glass had turned to water. Penny raised her hands to brush away the fragments. Lowe thought for a moment that he had been hit, but it was just another absinthe kick.
Louie was beside them in an instant, holding a sawn-off shotgun. Having checked that they weren't hurt, he flew out of the front door. Lowe looked out. A pick-up truck was pulling away. Red stars were painted on its sides. Three men stood in the back, jeering and waving fists.
"Are you all right," he asked Penny.
