Retromancer by Robert Rankin Page B

millions. This was no laughing matter.
    Not that I felt like laughing. My unfailing cheerfulness had now failed me. I could not imagine that I would ever be happy again. That anyone who had experienced any of this could ever be happy again.
    Although.
    Well, my Aunt Edna had been through the Blitz. She had served in the Fire Brigade. And throughout my childhood, she had always been cheery enough. She had got over the horror. And so it seemed had most people of that generation. They had struggled through. And if they had survived intact they had been grateful for it and struggled on.
    And I had heard about the Blitz Spirit.
    Although I could not really see any evidence of that right here and now.
    ‘Perhaps we should have taken the Underground,’ said Hugo Rune. ‘This must be difficult for you.’
    ‘I will survive,’ I said. ‘But it is terrible. Awful. I had no idea that it would be as dreadful as this.’
    ‘And it could get so very much worse. Which is why we are here to put things aright. Are you enjoying that Capstan?’
    I put on what I considered to be a brave face. Although, I feared, one tinged with grey. I was now having considerable trouble keeping my breakfast down.
    My brave face was spied out by a rather shabby-looking individual sporting the traditional cloth cap that marked him out as one of the working class of this particular period, poor but honest and given to a cockney singalong at the drop of his, or anyone else’s, hat.
    ‘Gawd smother my loins in liniment,’ said he, ‘but that’s a brave face you’re putting on there, guv’nor. And you a toff by the look of your right-royal raiments.’
    I glanced at Mr Rune, wondering whether this fellow’s banter might cause the Perfect Master to bring his stout stick into play. But Mr Rune now appeared to be snoozing, so I just smiled at the fellow.
    ‘You couldn’t see your way clear to sparing us three ’a’pence for a pint of porter, could you, your Lordship? I’ve been bombed out of me ’ouse and ’ome an’ ’ave naught but the rags I stand up in.’
    ‘I am sorry,’ I said, ‘but I am a bit like Twiggy at present – flat busted.’ And then I realised that I had made a joke, if naught but a feeble one. And certainly a feeble one that would have meant absolutely nothing to a fellow in nineteen forty-four. ‘I have no cash,’ I explained. In order to put the matter clearly.
    ‘A puff on your posh cigarette, then?’
    ‘Gladly so.’ And I parted with my Capstan.
    The fellow snatched it to his mouth and took great drags upon it.
    ‘So you were bombed out,’ I said to him. ‘Where are you living now?’
    ‘Right ’ere,’ he said in return. ‘Right ’ere on the top of this ’ere tram.’
    ‘And the tram company allows this?’
    ‘I won’t tell ’em if you don’t.’ And he winked a bleary eye at me.
    ‘Right.’ I watched him as he smoked my cigarette. And I wondered who he was. And, oddly, when he would die. He looked rather old and ill, which probably meant that he would not last until nineteen sixty-seven. So I would not be able to go and look him up, should I be lucky enough to return intact to that time. So in a way it was as if his days were numbered. And I somehow was doing the numbering.
    ‘That’s a queer thing you’re musing upon, guv’nor,’ said he, between great breathings-in of my Capstan Full Strength. ‘When or when not a man’s time it is to die is between that man and the God what made ’im, so it is.’
    ‘Oh,’ I said. And I was shocked by this. ‘Did you just read my thoughts? I do not understand.’
    The fellow tapped at his shabby nose with an even shabbier finger. And then he beckoned me with it and I leaned over the belly of Mr Rune to hear what this wretch had to say.
    ‘Step very carefully, young Rizla,’ he whispered into my ear. And I felt his warm breath on me and smelled that breath as well. ‘Much depends upon you. And there are those who will seek to destroy you. You must