lightning after-imaged the clouds, and the silence was close to absolute.
“Can I be War as well?” asked Big Ted.
“Course you can’t be War. How can you be War? She’s War. You’ve got to be something else.”
Big Ted screwed up his face with the effort of thought. “G.B.H.,” he said, eventually. “I’m Grievous Bodily Harm. That’s me. There. Wott’re you going to be?”
“Can I be Rubbish?” asked Skuzz. “Or Embarrassing Personal Problems?”
“Can’t be Rubbish,” said Grievous Bodily Harm. “He’s got that one sewn up, Pollution. You can be the other, though.”
They rode on in the silence and the dark, the rear red lights of the Four a few hundred yards in front of them.
Grievous Bodily Harm, Embarrassing Personal Problems, Pigbog, and Greaser.
“I wonter be Cruelty to Animals,” said Greaser. Pigbog wondered if he was for or against it. Not that it really mattered.
And then it was Pigbog’s turn.
“I, uh … I think I’ll be them answer phones. They’re pretty bad,” he said.
“You can’t be ansaphones. What kind of a Biker of the Repocalypse is ansaphones? That’s stupid, that is.”
“S’not!” said Pigbog, nettled. “It’s like War, and Famine, and that. It’s a problem of life, isn’t it? Answer phones. I hate bloody answer phones.”
“I hate ansaphones, too,” said Cruelty to Animals.
“You can shut up,” said G.B.H.
“Can I change mine?” asked Embarrassing Personal Problems, who had been thinking intently since he last spoke. “I want to be Things Not Working Properly Even After You’ve Thumped Them.”
“All right, you can change. But you can’t be ansaphones, Pigbog. Pick something else.”
Pigbog pondered. He wished he’d never broached the subject. It was like the careers interviews he had had as a schoolboy. He deliberated.
“Really cool people,” he said at last. “I hate them.”
“Really cool people?” said Things Not Working Properly Even After You’ve Given Them A Good Thumping.
“Yeah. You know. The kind you see on telly, with stupid haircuts, only on them it dunt look stupid ’cos it’s them. They wear baggy suits, an’ you’re not allowed to say they’re a bunch of wankers. I mean, speaking for me, what I always want to do when I see one of them is push their faces very slowly through a barbed-wire fence. An’ what I think is this.” He took a deep breath. He was sure this was the longest speech he had ever made in his life.44 “What I think is this. If they get up my nose like that, they pro’lly get up everyone else’s.”
“Yeah,” said Cruelty to Animals. “An’ they all wear sunglasses even when they dunt need ’em.”
“Eatin’ runny cheese, and that stupid bloody No Alcohol Lager,” said Things Not Working Properly Even After You’ve Given Them A Good Thumping. “I hate that stuff. What’s the point of drinking the stuff if it dunt leave you puking? Here, I just thought. Can I change again, so I’m No Alcohol Lager?”
“No you bloody can’t,” said Grievous Bodily Harm. “You’ve changed once already.”
“Anyway,” said Pigbog. “That’s why I wonter be Really Cool People.”
“All right,” said his leader.
“Don’t see why I can’t be No bloody Alcohol Lager if I want.”
“Shut your face.”
Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking toward Tadfield.
And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty to Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You’ve Given Them A Good Thumping But Secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People traveled with them.
IT WAS A WET AND BLUSTERY Saturday afternoon, and Madame Tracy was feeling very occult.
She had her flowing dress on, and a saucepan full of sprouts on the stove. The room was lit by candlelight, each candle carefully placed in a wax-encrusted wine bottle at the four corners of her sitting room.
There were three other people at her sitting. Mrs. Ormerod from Belsize Park, in a dark green hat that might have been a flowerpot in a previous life; Mr. Scroggie, thin and pallid, with bulging colorless eyes; and Julia Petley from Hair Today,45 the hairdressers’ on the High Street, fresh out of school and convinced that she herself had unplumbed occult depths. In order to enhance the occult aspects of herself, Julia had begun to wear far too much handbeaten silver jewelry and green eyeshadow. She felt she looked haunted and gaunt and romantic, and she would have, if she had lost another thirty pounds. She was convinced that she was anorexic, because every time she looked in the mirror she did indeed see a fat person.
“Can you link hands?” asked Madame Tracy. “And we must have complete silence. The spirit world is very