expression). Robot imitates man imitating man playing man impersonating robot: but the tangle of associations would not leave him there. For clowns were playing The White Statue in the streets of London in Mayhew’s time, in the 1840 slum streets, alongside Punch and Judy, marionettes and real clockwork dolls, amid the sounds of hurdy- gurdy and barrel-organ, mechanized street theatre for the new industrial age, where almost the only recognizable features of the past were starving beggars and burning Guys.
Death everywhere, white-faced on every corner, turned into sentiment at home and comedy in the streets: the marionettes always included a Bluebeard and a skeleton; the shadow-puppet man tells how a mob overturned his van and burned it (with his assistant inside); Punch and Judy must always have the hanging in the last act:
He was still scowling at the decrepit clown when Mr Kratt’s thick hand clapped his shoulder. ‘Guess you seen enough here, let’s get back to town. We can take a look at that stock list on the way.’ The V of eyebrows descended on tiny black eyes. ‘Hey, something wrong?’
‘Uh, no sir. No sir. I was just wondering why you still keep your headquarters here? I mean you could easily afford permanent offices instead of this, I mean a tent show after all—’
‘Like to keep on the move, see? Like the gipsies.’
‘Nostalgia, I guessed as much, nost—’
‘Nostalgia hell, saves me five figures in state taxes, not to mention depreciation and all the substantial advantages of running a cash business…’
Roderick didn’t see much from the bus window. His eye on that side was out, and if he tried turning his head to look out with the other eye, something funny happened to his hand which began to twitch open and closed. Seeing the scared look of the woman in the seat in front of him, Ma made Roderick sit still and read his robot book.
It was the story of an iron man who falls apart and puts himself together again — boy this Hughes guy didn’t know the first thing about robots, here they were going two hundred miles to the city for one crummy eye — but Roderick liked the idea of an iron man who goes around scaring people and then turns into a big hero.
In the back of the book he found a blank page where he could work out some alphabet stuff:
‘What does it mean?’ Ma asked, as the bus left the smooth highway to start bucking its way through broken streets.
‘Nothing I guess. Stories. I mean nobody really falls apart and puts themself together again — do they?’
Ma thought the question over, while behind him Roderick heard someone say, ‘…like teeth only… dank wish… the Omaha disaster we decided… a peep in Coventry, was it?’
‘Sure sure sure sure sure.’
Ma continued to think while the bus pulled into a greasy terminal, and the driver ordered them to ‘debark’.
The city at first seemed to fall apart without putting itself together: Roderick saw tall glass buildings falling over on him, people pushing each other along the sidewalk, cars honking and revving their engines while waiting to move an inch forward, six abreast, towards the bleeping traffic lights where people pushed each other past the walls of black garbage bags and out on to the street. A yellow taxi pulled up next to him and a man with blood running down his forehead and nose jumped out and ran inside a shoe store, elbowing aside a woman whose little dog made a dash to the end of its tether trying to bite the kid who was being chased out of a narrow doorway marked MASSAGE THERAPY; the dog twisted and snapped instead at the crowd of little wind-up dolls a man with dirty fingers was setting in motion on the sidewalk where they tottered in circles and fell over, looking much like the man with a bottle in a paper bag who sprawled next to an alley where two boys were dividing the contents of a woman’s purse. They were ignored by the man wearing sandwich-boards (FOLLOW ME TO JUNIOR’S DISCOUNT CAMERAS) who entered the alley (no one following), flipped up his forward board and began urinating on a wall beneath a poster, VOTE J. L. (‘CHIP’) SNYDER FOR LAW & ORDER, a duplicate of the sign Roderick saw a moment later on a wall behind the hot-dog stand where a man of a thousand pimples reached for his hot-dog with one hand and for the crotch of the boy next to him with the other, this being a thin kid engrossed in a photograph which he then dropped — ‘Jeez, whaddya—?’ and Roderick looked down at the picture of a dismembered woman as Ma dragged him past the thin kid, who wore a jacket marked JUNKERS S.A.C. almost the same neon orange as a sign BURGER BELLE in the window where the top half of a black man could be seen frying grey meat and — whenever he noticed anyone looking at him — spitting into the top half of each roll. Hardly anyone but Roderick did look, any more than they looked at the transparent plastic box of newspapers (headline: ARMY MOM COOKS BABY IN M’WAVE OVEN, EATS IT) which someone was trying to break open, next to a video pay-phone on a post, under whose plastic canopy a woman in wrinkled stockings leaned, weeping and pleading with the face on the tiny screen, which seemed to have hair as bright and green as the sweater on the little dog held back now from a puddle of vomit by a smiling woman in a tiny silk skirt no larger than a cummerbund who called out to the sailor lurching towards the door of SUGAR’S SAUNA past two figures leaning together in so friendly a fashion that the knife held by one at the other’s throat seemed a mistake (as the victim kept insisting it was), past the JOYS OF JESUS mission towards the amusement arcade, a place of flashing coloured lights, bells, buzzers and bleeps under the defective sign TEST YOUR SK*LL flickering next to an empty store plastered with SNYDER FOR LAW & ORDER and a poster advertising STREET MUSIC overwritten with hundreds of obscure slogans all beginning SUCK. This was next to a novelty shop featuring dribble glasses, rubber pencils, loaded dice, a talking crucifix, marked cards, plastic snot, a fake finger (hideously injured), itching powder, cayenne candy and a ‘Sacred Heart lighter — REALLY WORKS — useful and devotional — Butane extra’. Ma dragged him on, past a larger-than-life photo of two naked women embracing under the legend THIS WEEK ONLY TRIPLE ADULT SEXATION: DOLLS OF DEVIL’S ISLAND — ‘Brutally frank’; ‘Sexplicit revealing confession’ — I WAS A SAUNA BITCH; ‘Inside bare facts of Hitler’s mad nuns’ — ANGELS WITH DIRTY HABITS and the long line of tired old men before the ticket-office nearly as long as the similar line across the street before the Unemployment Office where a policeman sprang on one of the grey figures, knocked it to the sidewalk, and began beating it with his truncheon, while shoppers pushed their way past this as they had pushed past a man with missing fingers trying to play a harmonica, on their way from FURNITURE WAREHOUSE to DENIM INIQUITY ignoring the bright neon of MARV?S SEX DISCOUNTS above a bewildering array of objects identifiable only by fluorescent signs (Condom’s Slashed, Vibey’s Reduced; Manacles Cut; See Our Selection of Custom Rubber & Leather Unclaimed Specialties) signs all but obscuring the next place where a feeble neon sign proclaimed from behind heavy iron grilles, NO CREDIT LIQUORS. Before it a machine like a kind of automatic pogo-stick pulled its operator along as it tore at the street, holding up a line of bleating cars including a limousine flying Ruritanian flags, a panel truck shaped like a turkey and labelled GOBBLE KING, a sound truck whose message echoed (‘…law and order… sick of bleeding hearts… man with guts… man with experi… an with integrity… n with the know-how to turn this city into the kind of… to grope up in, to grow up in…’) through the sounds of car horns, bleeps, bells, buzzers, the Brandenburg Concerto, laughing, screaming, moaning, the hammering of the street- ripper, coins going into a telephone, replays clacking on a pinball machine, revving engines and a singing clutch, the thunder of an invisible plane overhead shaking the glass walls of the tipping buildings, rock music fighting jazz fighting country western over the loudest horn of all, on a yellow taxi with blood down the door.
‘Well ma’am, your lucky day, we got just one in stock. Not exactly the same colour but — well the fact is, we had this stockroom fire last week, pretty well cleaned us out. Yup, your lucky day. My partner bought it too, he was back there takin’ inventory see, and it looks like he was smoking or something, so. So here I am, half a ton of assorted high-grade hardware up in smoke along with the only guy who knows how to design and build it. I was just supposed to be the money man, only now I can’t even pay the rent on this crummy little store unless I sell off our
