excerpt
It was a period ambience even then but it drew the global punter and I didn’t
want to tinker with the formula. The curios and the industrial relics were
doing well, a famous designer had just bought the shell of a Wurlitzer jukebox,
while over in the clothes section, some sunny blonde creatures in cheesecloth
and tight jeans were rummaging daintily through the old lace. Pauline the Sex
Police Person would accuse me of self-indulgence there—yes, she was firing
accusations even then—but this is a spiritual exercise, to recreate through sensuous
evocation the exact details of that crucial afternoon.
I was half-listening to the ritual shamblings of a local freak who claimed to
be a secret roadie for Hawkwind. Every week he expounded his scheme for a
Silver Machine to transport himself and the group to a deep space colony; then
he’d pester me for obscure sword’n’sorcery items. “Thrustmasters of the
Gormlands . . . Come on, man. It must be in here somewhere.”
I never replied, because Larry was strolling through the doorway. As I got
up, his long stone face, like an ethnic sculpture of Jean Paul Belmondo,
cracked into a smile. Lawrence Alexander Zachoides-Dunbar, my general
dealer with multi-way connections: a Greek father, a Scots mother, and an
assumed Balham accent. His multiple pasts included Cambridge, half a doctorate
in mediaeval literature, the curious end of the antique trade, and a
cameo role in a celebrated dope bust.
“You’re going to love this, Nick,” I can recall the exact cadence of his
catarrhal chuckle, his leer, as he wedged open the bronze door of his old Jaguar
3.4. (I have to get his status details right. Before the Puritan Paramilitaries
erase his memory from the surface of the earth.)
I helped him inside with a tea-chest. Then we struggled with the battered
black trunk on the roof-rack.
“This little business is for the upper room,” he murmured. I told my assistant
Willy to mind the shop; and hoped that his preoccupation with Krishna
Consciousness wouldn’t leave him at the mercy of the more mercenary customers.
We humped everything upstairs, cursing rusty protruding nails, and
dumped it all beside the sagging sofa bed in my office, pushing aside the rumpled
scrolls of day-glo posters,the heaped comix and sex mags. My fibre-optic
desk ornament had been left switched on, like a luminous jelly-fish slowly
expiring in the gloom. For the blinds of the upper room were never raised.
This was my sanctuary, where I could get stuck into my tacky stuff. PP called
it, with decreasing levity, the Chamber of Horrors.
I fumbled at the sink with dirty cups and coffee powder. Larry pulled out
Rizlas, and his tiny brass bird-shaped casket. He began skinning up.
Mayanaam
vequinox
Manolis 