The Condition of Muzak by Michael Moorcock

doing moderate business. At his favourite roadside fish-and-chip bar he stopped and paid four pounds for a piece of warm carp and some fried reconstituted mashed potato. It had been days since he’d had any real food. He wasn’t looking after himself properly. There were too many fresh shadows. He enjoyed the meal, eating it off the passenger seat as he drove, but felt sick afterwards and had to munch a couple of Milky Way bars to make himself better. He was already improving by the time he drove through the back gates of his house and garaged the Phantom beside the Duesenberg.
    He went into the house and found his old black car coat, his black flared trousers, his high-heeled boots, his white linen and, as he dressed, he became depressed. It was probably association, he thought. Dark clothes often brought him down. He turned away from the wardrobe, seeking a stereo, and at last found a deck and amplifier where he must have shoved them under an old-fashioned bentwood and china washstand. He switched the kit on. From the ceiling came the miserable, neurotic drone of the Everly Brothers. He let it play, deepening his mood. If a mood was worth having, he thought, it was worth having profoundly.
    He went downstairs and turned up some mail which must have come with one of the last runners to get through. There was a letter from Mr Harvey, one of Frank’s wholesalers, saying that he had some information which might be useful to Jerry and Mr Smiles, Jerry’s sometime business partner. Although he had made at least a million in the last job he was disinclined to work with Mr Smiles again. Smiles usually claimed to have a ‘purpose’ to his ventures and thus tended to confuse Jerry. He crumpled the letter, wondering why Harvey should wish to double-cross Frank, an excellent customer for any new chemical to come in.
    Jerry began to worry about Catherine again. She was his ideal, his goddess, his queen; he loved her and she represented everything else he loved, no matter how she changed, whereas Frank represented everything Jerry hated: greedy hypocrisy. If Frank got hold of Catherine again Jerry knew that he would have to risk repercussions and kill his brother. It would be a shame, since events were just beginning to stabilise into a fixed pattern, like a clockwork train on its little oval track. After a while one got to know the dodgy bits of line. Any deaths at this stage would produce a whole new train set, with all kinds of bends and twists, moebius strips and dead ends: exactly what he was hoping to escape. He gave in to his instincts’ demands. He must check to see if Catherine were all right, no matter how irrational the impulse was.
    He left the house, taking the Duesenberg to Westbourne Park Road and stopping outside the convent. There was no other traffic. The walls of the convent seemed higher than usual in the darkness.
    Against every desire his mind had filled up with prescience, with a knowledge of the futures he refused to accept.
    With a groan he went straight over the wall, using the hooked nylon ladder from the back of the car. He dropped amongst runner-bean poles, scraping his shin, trod as lightly as possible through the flower beds and vegetable patches, crossed the garden, hit his shoulder on the corner of the potting shed, and arrived at the main door. There was some sluggish movement from within, but not much. He got the door open and went inside; raced on tiptoe through the corridors until he came to the top of the flight of stairs leading under ground. So far he had not been spotted by a single nun. He went down the stairs and reached the cold corridor. There were stirrings, now, behind many of the doors; they were conclusive. As he approached, lights went off one by one in the cells until only the light in Catherine’s cell remained. Her door was open. He looked in on a discarded habit, an unmade bed, an empty lipstick case, an unread paperback with a cover reproducing an Adolphe Willette poster, the