Armadillo

Chapter 6

That night he slept, even by his reduced standards, badly. Alan had told him he was alone in the Institute and normally that information helped. Also, following Alan’s instructions, he had pondered lengthily on Gérard de Nerval’s fraught and difficult life but his mind refused to obey dithering skittishly between images of Flavia Malinverno and the prospective adjust at Gale-Harlequin. He forced his mind back to poor tormented Gérard and his hopeless love for Jenny Colon, the actress. De Nerval had hung himself one freezing winter’s night – the 25th January 1855. Now that was the sort of fact one read in a biography with little pause, unless you had seen a hanged man yourself. Mr Dupree, Gérard de Nerval. Rue de la Vieille Lanterne, hung himself on some railings, apparently… Jenny Colon broke off with de Nerval and married a flautist. Irina was a flautist…Were these coincidences or signs? Subtle parallels… There was a photograph by Nadar of de Nerval at the end of his life – he’d never seen such a wrecked, ravaged face … visage buriné, the French called it, a whole lifetime of grief and mental anguish etched there… He must have slept at some stage because he did dream… he dreamt about Flavia and Kenneth Rintoul. It was Rintoul who was waiting, dishevelled and glum, at his dinky mews house, Rintoul who ran to embrace Flavia…
Lorimer had woken and had dutifully jotted the facts down in the dream diary by the bed. Then he had dozed and drifted for a while, his mind intermittently involved with pragmatic details of his work, wondering whether to spend more time backgrounding Gale-Harlequin or simply to march in and play it by ear. At around 4.30 a.m. he made himself a strong cup of tea – two tea bags, a three-minute steep – and somehow managed an hour of dreamless slumber.
‘Just the one dream,’ Alan said to him later that morning, disappointment heavy in his voice.
‘I’ve got a lot on my mind,’ Lorimer protested. ‘You’re lucky I slept at all, lucky to have anything. Jesus.’
‘This fellow,’ Alan looked at the dream diary, ‘Rintoul. You don’t like him?’
‘Well, he doesn’t like me. He threatened to kill me.’
‘Interesting. But you couldn’t eradicate him from the dream, this nemesis-figure?’
‘It wasn’t a lucid dream, Alan.’
‘What about the girl? Do you know her?’
‘I’ve seen her in a taxi. She’s in a TV ad. I found out her name.’
‘You couldn’t sexually interpose yourself in this dream?’
‘It wasn’t a lucid dream, Alan. The last thing I want to see is this Kenneth Rintoul bloke with this Flavia Malinverno girl in his arms.’
‘Damn. Damn and shit. These are promising ingredients, Lorimer. Next time concentrate on them.’
‘I gave de Nerval a whirl, like you said.’
‘Leave Gérard on the sub’s bench, next time around. Next time I want you to fantasize about this girl. Strong sexual fantasies, as perverse as you like. Can you come in tonight?’
Lorimer said no. He was beginning to have his doubts about Alan’s lucid dream programme. It had all sounded fine initially but now it seemed not to be helping him at all. Light sleepers, Alan claimed, had fifty per cent more lucid dreams than ordinary people and claimed further that in the machinations of the lucid dream – the way it was controlled and influenced by the dreamer – lay the solution to one’s sleep disorder. But at this juncture the theory grew a little vague, links in the causal chain sundered, and Lorimer ceased to understand what Alan was talking about, the jargon was too opaque. What was more irritating was that, after six weeks of participation in the Institute’s programme, it was ever more clear to Lorimer that the dream segment of the research, rather than the curative outcome, most intrigued Dr Kenbarry.
‘You don’t really care if I ever sleep normally, do you?’ Lorimer accused him as they walked downstairs to the entrance.
‘Nonsense,’ Alan said, emphatically. ‘If you don’t end up sleeping normally my work is worthless, that’s the whole point.’
His breezy confidence was encouraging and Lorimer felt a little flutter of hope shiver through him as they walked through the building. Corridors were being swept and polished and the air was loud with the plaintive hum of industrial machinery. There was also a fresh smell of mass catering emanating from some canteen or cafeteria and the day’s first sleepy, lank-haired students were assembling wordlessly by the revolving doors, swigging sugary colas from two-litre bottles, patiently rolling their thin fags.
‘How can you be so sure this is working, Alan ?’ Lorimer said, scepticism returning again. ‘Because I’m not sure, not sure at all.’
‘I can see the signs,’ he said, cryptically. ‘You’re my best light sleeper ever, Lorimer. Seven bona-fide lucid dreams in five weeks.’
‘Six.’
‘Six weeks already? Don’t let me down, son. Don’t quit while you’re ahead.’
‘Yeah, but I –’
‘Once I work out your lucid dream triggers, you’ll be laughing. Physician heal thyself, sort of thing.’ He smiled. ‘Come back soon, we’re on the verge of great things, my child. Mind how you go.’
It was an abnormally dark morning, the mass of cloud seemed to have settled, still and unmoving, about fifty feet above the surrounding rooftops. It did not threaten snow or rain but the light was absurdly feeble for the time of day, tired and puny, greying everything it touched. Perhaps he was suffering from Solar Deprivation Syndrome, or S A D – Seasonal Absence Deficiency or whatever it was called, Lorimer thought, easing himself into his car. Perhaps he should sit for an hour in front of a high-wattage light bulb as, reputedly, melancholy Scandinavians did to revive themselves from their hibernal torpor, a blast of ultra-violet dispelling their winter blues?… At least it wasn’t raining.
As he drove back to Pimlico – up Church Street and Creek Road, crossing the river at Tower Bridge and on to Lower Thames Street, across Parliament Square to Vauxhall Bridge Road – he wondered again about the credibility and validity of Alan’s programme. True, it was highly, not to say impressively, funded: the sleep lab and the monitoring machines had all been paid for by a Department of Education research fund and Alan had two postgraduate assistants logging and collating the data as well as a contract from a university press for the eventual book – Timor Mortis: The Lucid Dream Phenomenon (working title). There were even whispered hints of a television documentary. Yet Lorimer still could not rid himself of this feeling of aggrievedness: for Alan he was simply an interesting specimen, an exemplary set of symptoms. He felt as he imagined rats in a psychiatrist’s maze might feel, or Pavlov’s salivating pooches, or a chimp being soused with perfumes and aftershave. Frankly, Alan did not really care about his troubled nights, in fact as far as he was concerned the more troubled the better.
At the front door in Lupus Crescent a thin black man with waist-length dreadlocks, thick as coaxial cables, was talking animatedly to Lady Haigh. He was introduced as Nigel – the Santafurian from number 20, Lorimer surmised, the mulch-provider. Lady Haigh said she was considering an herbaceous border and Nigel knew where to lay his hands on some excellent compost. Nigel, it turned out, worked for the Westminster Council’s Parks Department, tending Pimlico’s few forgotten squares – Eccleston, Warwick, St George’s, Vincent – its floral roundabouts and roadside plantations. He seemed amiable enough, Lorimer thought, as he clambered up the stairs to his flat, realizing that he really should quell his instant suspicion of all those who worked for municipal parks departments. It was unjust: one rotten apple did not spoil the whole barrel, not every local authority gardener was like Sinbad Fingleton, after all.
54. The House at Croy. I went to Scotland to escape, to be alone and, I suppose, as convention dictates, to find myself. All I knew, after I left school, was that I had to go far away, far from Fulham and the family Blocj. So I sought out the most distant institution of higher education in the land that offered a course I was qualified to take and, after some research, decided that the North Caledonia Institute of Science and Technology provided me with the perfect geographical and academic conditions I required. I took the train north and travelled eagerly six hundred miles to the neat and tidy city of Inverness, with its castle, its cathedral and its clear, shallow river and the enfolding purple hills beyond. It was, for a while, everything I had asked for.
I lost my virginity in my second term at college to Joyce McKimmie, a mature student (mid-twenties) who sat in on some of the art history seminars I attended. Joyce was a fresh-faced, blowzy redhead who looked full of confidence but in fact was the opposite, her answers to questions in the seminar rooms beginning in an uncertain small voice and swiftly diminishing to a hushed whisper or sometimes even terminating in total inaudibility, leaving us all straining to hear, or creatively interpreting her almost–silence and rounding off her sentences on her behalf. She wore voluminous, improbable combinations of clothes, long, lacy skirts with cleated trainers and a nylon anorak, or in summer went bra-less beneath a man’s waistcoat with blue pedal-pushers and flip-flops on her dusty feet. She had a three-year-old child, a boy, Zane, who lived with her mother in Stonehaven during term-time. While she was at college she rented and sub-let rooms in a fair-sized house in a village called Croy to an odd selection of tenants.
Joyce, like many shy people, found liberation in alcohol and our first coupling took place – while we were both drunk – in a back room at someone else’s party. We bussed back to Croy at dawn and I spent the next three days there. Joyce seemed to have more money than the rest of us – child benefit? Zane’s absent father contributing? – and this had allowed her to rent the house, which she ran, surprisingly, as a kind of prissy, strict commune, introducing washing-up rotas, waste recycling, a partitioned fridge with prominently labelled milk bottles and coffee jars as well as permitting a tolerant attitude towards sexual activities, alcohol – and drug-consumption. At the centre of this routine was the evening meal, served promptly at eight o’clock, which all members of the house currently present beneath the roof were expected to attend. Amongst the shifting tenants was a hard-core of regulars, two genial, moon-faced brothers from the Isle of Mull, Lachlan and Murdo, a postgraduate Japanese girl called Junko (studying life sciences, to which mysterious end she spent many days out at sea on fishing boats quantifying and analysing catches), Joyce’s cousin Shona (thin, wiry, promiscuous) and Sinbad Fingleton, the feckless, gormless son of a local laird, recently expelled from his public school with one GCSE in biology to his credit, who worked for the Inverness Town Council Municipal Parks Department. To my vague surprise I found I liked Joyce’s uncomplicated company and the curious regimen in the House at Croy with its blend of licence and order and preferred to spend more time there than alone in my boxy cell in the college hall of residence, with its drab view of muddy football pitches and the dark, impenetrable green of the pine-clad hills beyond.
The Book of Transfiguration
Gale-Harlequin PLC resided in a new granite and polished steel building off Holborn. There was abstract art in the lobby and dark clumps of palm, fern and weeping fig. Uniformed security guards sat behind a rough-hewn ziggurat of slate. The harlequin logo was subtly present in the canvases on the walls, variations on its theme painted by eminent contemporary artists, two of whom Lorimer could identify through the plate-glass from the street. This was not going to be a simple adjust, he felt with small tremors of foreboding, there was a whiff of moneyed respectability about this place, the solid heft of solvency and success.
He checked his notebook: Jonathan L. Gale, chairman and managing director, and Francis Home (pronounced ‘hume’, doubtless), finance director, were the men he had to see, a far cry from Deano Edmund and Kenny Rintoul, he had to admit, but also, he had to admit further, on occasions these sophisticated types could match anyone in the cupidity and venality stakes. He turned away and strolled off in the direction of Covent Garden, trying to clear his mind of worries: the appointment was scheduled for the next day and he had done as much backgrounding as he was prepared to do. This adjust had to be done newborn, slick and shiny – so the expression ran in GGH – just sprung from the womb, innocent, untarnished, slick and shiny.
Stella had called and left a message on his answering machine: could they meet, with Barbuda, no less, in Covent Garden for a pre-shopping lunch? Her voice had sounded unusually hesitant, not pleading so much as apologetically urging this rendezvous. Lorimer wondered vaguely what was afoot, trying to keep further foreboding at bay – his future was dark enough with foreboding as it was, he had to maintain some light in his life.
He was far too early he saw, as he stepped down the wide circular staircase into the huge basement room that was the Alcazar. Beyond the generous horseshoe of the bar tables were still being set up and there was a clatter and rattle of glasses and bottles being stacked on shelves or slammed into racks, like shells into breeches, ready for the day’s offensive. A barman (shaven head, chin beard) looked up from his glass-fronted fridge and said he would be with him in a couple of ticks, chief.
Lorimer sat on a bar stool, sipped at his tomato juice, and selected a newspaper from the layered pile made available to clients. He wondered what the Alcazar had been before its new incarnation as bar-restaurant. Probably a failed bar-restaurant, or nightclub, or storeroom. Yet the ceiling was high and elaborately moulded, the cornice picked out in lime-green and indigo. He enjoyed being in these establishments as they prepared themselves for their day’s business. He watched a young guy, wearing a suit but tieless, carrying a copy of the Sporting Life, come shiftily in and order a bottle of champagne – one glass. He looks even more tired than I do, Lorimer thought. Another light sleeper, perhaps? Should he introduce him to Alan Kenbarry’s Institute of Lucid Dreams, have his sleep disorder solved? Then two other young men sauntered in, fit-looking, also suited but oddly out of sorts in formal wear, as if their bodies were more accustomed to shorts and sweatpants, T-shirts and track suits. They ordered pints of extra-strength lager with a dash of citron vodka – an interesting variation on an old theme, Lorimer thought, making a mental note to try the mix himself when he felt particularly close to the end of his tether. A Japanese family entered, two elderly parents with teenage daughters, and asked to be sat down immediately for an absurdly early lunch. Slowly, the Alcazar accommodated itself to its incoming customers: the music was switched on, the empty crates cleared from behind the bar, the last lemons quartered. Two young women with cold faces and harsh make-up) (style: Berlin cabaret 1920s) took up position by the wrought-iron lectern at the restaurant’s entrance and pored frowningly over the register like cryptologists close to a solution. Sporting Life was joined by a male friend who also ordered his own bottle of champagne. Lorimer consulted his watch: Stella had stipulated between 12.45 and 1.00, the table was booked in her name, she had said, and Lorimer wondered if, given the chilly demeanour of the two seaters, he should confirm that at least one –
Flavia Malinverno walked in.
Flavia Malinverno walked in and there was a rushing in his ears as of surf foaming and fizzing on a sandy beach. Curious portions of his body – his nostril flanges, the little webs of skin between his fingers – seemed to grow unnaturally hot. For an instant he felt – stupidly – that he should avert his face, before remembering in a second instant that she would not know him, would not know him from Adam. So, covertly, innocently, shifting slightly on his bar stool, he watched her over the top of his newspaper. Watched her have a brief word with the ice maidens at their lectern and watched her take a seat in a far corner of the bar area and order something to drink. Meeting somebody? Obviously. Early like me, over–punctual, good sign. He shook out his newspaper ostentatiously, turning and flattening a flapping page. Extraordinary coincidence. To think that. In the flesh. At more leisure he took her in, drank her in, imprinted her permanently on his memory.
She was tall – right, good – slim, wearing different shades and textures of black. A black leather jacket, sweater, black shawl-scarf thing. Her face? Round, almost blandly even-featured. She seemed neat and clean. Her hair parted, straight, shortish, cut sharp to just below the jawline, glossy dark brown hair, chestnut shot with a purplish-red – some sort of henna? In front of her on the table a fat leather notebook diary, a packet of cigarettes, dull silver block of a lighter. Her drink comes, big glass of yellow wine. She drinks but does not smoke, interesting. Something faintly tomboyish about her. Flat black cowboy boots, small raked Cuban heels. Black jeans. She was looking round the room and he felt her gaze wash over him like the beam of light from a lighthouse and keep on going.
He loosened his tie, very slightly, and with his fingertips mussed his hair, untidying it. Then, to his astonishment, he found he was crossing the room towards her, a voice in his ear– the inner man – shouting, YOU ARE OUT OF YOUR F*ckING MIND, as he heard his own voice saying to her, quite reasonably:
‘Excuse me, are you by any chance Flavia Malin-verno?’
‘No.’
‘I’m so sorry, I thought –’
‘I’m Flavia Malinverno.’
Ah. Flahvia, not Flayvia. Idiot. Fool.
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ he proceeded, ‘but I saw you on television the other night and —’
‘In Playboy of the Western World?
What the hell –? Quickly now.
‘Ah, no. An advertisement. A Fortress Sure advertisement. That, ah, advertisement you did.’
‘Oh, that.’ She frowned. He liked her frown immediately, enormously. A serious, unequivocal buckling of the forehead, an inward coming-together of her eyebrow ends registering huge doubt. And suspicion.
‘How do you know my name, then?’ she said. ‘I don’t think they run credits on ads, do they?’
Jesus Christ. ‘I, ah, I work for Fortress Sure, you see. P R department, marketing. There was a screening, a presentation. Um, these things stick in my mind, names, dates. I saw it on cable the other night and I thought how good it –’
‘Have you got the time on you?’
‘Five past one.’ He saw her eyes were brown like unmilked tea, her skin was pale, untanned forever and her nails were bitten short. She looked a little worn out, a little tired, but, then again, didn’t everybody? We all look a bit tired, these days, some more than others.
‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘I’m meant to be meeting someone here at half twelve.’ It seemed to signal a change of tone, this change of subject, a partial admission of him into her own day’s routines.
‘I just wanted to say you were great, I thought, in that ad.’
‘You’re most kind.’ She looked at him flatly, sceptically, mildly curious. Her accent was neutral, unplaceable, the city’s demotic middle-class voice. ‘I must have been on screen for a whole five seconds.’
‘Exactly. But some presences can –’
‘Lorimer.’
He turned to see Stella waving at him from the lectern. Barbuda stood beside her, looking at the ceiling.
‘Nice meeting you,’ he said, weakly, hopelessly. ‘Just thought, I’d, you know –’ He spread his palms, smiled goodbye, turned away and crossed the bar area to join Stella and Barbuda, feeling her eyes on his back and hearing in his head an inarticulate, strangely joyous jabber of accusation and exhilaration, of shame and pleasure and regret – regret that the moment was past, was gone forever. Happy – amazed – at his audacity, though. Furious, seething, that he had forgotten to look at her breasts.
He kissed Stella and half waved at Barbuda, as he suspected strongly she did not like being kissed, by him or any male over twenty.
‘Hello, Barbuda, half-term, is it?–
85. The Seven Gods of Luck. At the end of one term in Inverness Junko gave me a present She gave all the household gifts (she was returning home to Japan for the holiday), gifts of food or articles of clothing that were markedly personal, the result, one assumed, of Junko’s particular assessment of the character of the recipient Shona received a single earring, for example, Joyce a full set of thermal underwear including a thermal bra, while Sinbad was given two bananas. ‘Why two?’ he asked, wrinkling his nose with a baffled smile, flicking back the corkscrew tendrils of hair that he liked to have fall in front of his eyes. ‘One for each hand,’ Junko said with a polite smile, which silenced him.
She gave me a postcard, bought in Japan, stiff and shiny, a bright picture of seven symbolic figures aboard a junk in an extravagantly stylized choppy sea.
‘Who are they?’ I asked.
‘The Shichifukujin. The seven gods of luck,’ she said. ‘What you must do, Milo, is put this picture under your pillow on the night of January first and in this way your first dream of the year will be lucky.’
‘This will bring me luck?’
‘Of course. I think you are a person who has much need of luck, Milo.’
‘Haven’t we all?’
‘But for you, Milo, I wish you special luck.’
She told me who the seven gods were and I wrote down their names: Fukuro kujo and jurojin, the gods of long life; Benzaiten, the only female, goddess of love; Bishamonten, warlike, armoured, god of war and good fortune; Daikokuten, god of wealth; Hotei, god of happiness with his bulging belly; and finally Ebisu, the god of self-effacement, carrying a fish, the deity of one’s job or career.
Junko said, ‘Ebisu is my favourite.’
That New Tear I did as she suggested and slipped the card under my pillow and tried to dream a lucky dream, endeavoured to force good luck into my life with the help of the seven gods. I dreamt of my father – was that good luck or bad luck? The year turned out to be a bad one for him and a momentously bad, life-changing one for me. The seven gods of luck. Not the seven gods of good luck. Luck, you must remember, like many things in life, is two-faced – good and bad – something I think the seven gods implicitly recognized, adrift in their little boat on their stormy sea. I left my card from Junko behind during my harassed and rushed departure from Inverness. For a while that loss perturbed me more than it ought to have done.
The Book of Transfiguration
He sensed her leave just as their first courses arrived, he glanced over and saw in the corner of his eye a fleeting dark figure for an instant at the stairs’ beginning. He looked around but she was gone.
Stella was talking: she seemed upbeat, cheery today. ‘Isn’t this nice?’ she kept saying. ‘The three of us.’ At one stage she reached under the table and surreptitiously ran her hand up his thigh until it touched his cock.
‘Barbuda’s going to her first proper party –’
‘Mum, I’ve been to tons of –’
‘And I think there’s going to be a certain young man present. Mmm? So we have to find something very ultra mega glamorous, don’t we?’
‘Mum, for God’s sake.’
Lorimer refused to join in. He remembered this mortifying adult banter all too well from his own hellish adolescence. It was only the impending purchase of expensive clothes, he knew, that explained Barbuda’s sullen tolerance of this leering speculation at all. In his own case he recalled similar hours of prurient inquiry from Slobodan about his non-existent sex life, but with no promise of reward to sweeten the pill: ‘Who do you fancy then? Got to be someone. What’s her name, then? She got specs? It’s Sandra Deedes, isn’t it. Doggy Deedes. He fancies Doggy Deedes. Disgusting.’ And so, endlessly, on.
He smiled over at Barbuda in what he hoped was an understanding, non-patronizing, non-avuncular way. She was an ungainly girl, made more lumpy by pubescence, with dark hair and a sly, pointy face. Her small, sharp breasts caused her huge embarrassment and she was always swathed in the baggiest of jumpers, layers of shirts and jackets. She was wearing make-up today, he noticed: a smear of grey above the eyes and a violet lipstick that made her small mouth smaller. She looked a darker, bitterer version of her mother, whose strong features spoke instead of confidence and will-power. Perhaps it was the mysterious Mr Bull’s genetic contribution that brought this out in her – hints of low self–esteem, a mean spirit, destined to find life a disappointment.
‘Mum, tell Lorimer, will you?’
Stella sighed theatrically. ‘Load of nonsense,’ she said. ‘Still, listen to this. Barbuda doesn’t want to be called Barbuda any more. She wants to be called – wait for it – Angelica.’
‘It’s my middle name.’
‘Your middle name is Angela, not Angelica. Barbuda Angela Jane Bull. What’s wrong with Jane, eh, Lorimer? I ask you.’
Jane Bull, Lorimer thought, bad idea.
‘The girls at school all call me Angelica. I hate being called Barbuda.’
‘Rubbish. It’s a beautiful name, isn’t it, Lorimer?’
‘It’s the name of an island not a person,’ Barbuda/Angelica said with passionate loathing.
‘I’ve been calling you Barbuda for fifteen years, I can’t suddenly change to Angelica.’
‘Why not? More people call me Angelica than Barbuda.’
‘Well, you’ll always be Barbuda to me, young lady’ She turned to Lorimer for support. ‘Tell her she’s being silly and stupid, Lorimer.’
‘Well, actually’ Lorimer said, carefully. ‘You know, I sort of understand where she’s coming from. Excuse me, I must make a phone call.’
As he rose from the table he caught Barbuda/Angelica’s stare of candid astonishment. If only you knew, girl, he thought.
At the payphone by the stairs he punched out Alan’s number at the university.
‘Alan, it’s Lorimer… yeah. I need a favour. Do you know anyone at the BBC?’
‘I know them all, darling.’
‘I need to find out the telephone number of an actress who was in Playboy of the Western World the other night. BBC2, I think.’
‘It was Channel Four, actually. Fear not, I have my sources. An actress, eh? Who’s she sleeping with?’
Lorimer was inspired. ‘It’s the girl in the dream. From the ad. Turns out she was in this play. I think I may be on to something, Alan, dreamwise. If I could see her, meet her, talk to her, even. I think I could lucid dream all night.’
And I thought you were going to say you’d fallen in love.’
They both laughed at this.
‘I just have a hunch. She’s called Flavia Malinverno.’
‘I shall “procure” her for you. In a jiffy’
Lorimer hung up the phone suffused by a strange feeling of confidence, confident that if there were one motive force likely to galvanize Alan Kenbarry it was the prospect of a spouting silver fountain of lucid dreams.
381. Market Forces. This evening Marlobe said to me, pointing the wet stem of his pipe at my chest, ‘It’s dog eat f*cking dog, my friend. Market forces. You cannot buck the market. I mean, face it, we are all, like it or not, capitalists. And the amount I pay in f*cking taxes justifies me, personally, in saying to those whingeing f*cking scroungers – PISS OFF. And you, matey, f*ck right off to your own sad f*cking stinking country, wherever it is.’ Two old women waiting for a bus moved huffily away, saying loudly they were going to a nicer bus stop. Marlobe appeared not to hear this. ‘You understand these matters,’ he said. ‘You in your business, just like me in mine. We got no choice. Market f*cking forces rules. If you go to the wall, you go to the wall.’ So I decided to ask him what he felt about the recently installed flower stand in the ShoppaSava. ‘Load of f*cking rubbish,’ he said, although his grin looked a little sick. ‘Who wants to buy a flower from a checkout girl? You want personal service. Someone who knows flora, the fluctuations of the seasons, the proper nurture and attention of the flower. I’ll give it a month. They’ll lose a fortune.’ I made a worried face and said, I thought, bravely, ‘Well… Market forces?… He laughed and showed me his surprisingly strong – looking white teeth (are they false?). ‘I’ll give them market forces,’ he said. ‘You wait.
The Book of Transfiguration