The Romanian Question

BORN IN GEORGIA

President Ion Iliescu pledged yesterday to keep Romania on the road to democracy and to end what he called the country’s moral decay.

Reuter/Majorca Daily Bulletin, 21 June 1990

“DON’T TELL ME!” Jerry smiled at the air-stewardess as she laid her towel at the edge of the pool. He leaned his arms beside it and tried to drag his pale body higher from the water of Tooting Bee Baths. “You’re psychic too!” Her answering sneer would have sunk the Bismarck. “I knew it!” Jerry was in a fairly insensitive mood that afternoon. “I like your taste in boob-tubes,” got him reported to the life-guard and, “Come fly with me,” thrown out of the pool area.

As he slouched off across Tooting Common, whistling to his horrible dog, he wondered if his grandma was home from work and maybe good for half-a-crown, or at least a bag of toffees (she did half-time at Rowntree’s).

He jumped further backward until he was comfortably unaware of his free movement through Time and was able to turn his attention from the stewardess, still baffled by his sixties’ slang, to the toy-soldier shop back near St Leonard’s Church in Streatham Hill, a few minutes walk up the main road and down towards the Common. He wanted to make sure his naval gun-team was still there. He’d given the man 9d a week for it and he was only another l/6d away; but he couldn’t be sure of anything any more. Was he creator or the created? This unlikely thought made him pop in to the quiet of the church and glare with some respect at the stained glass prophets whom he now completely confused with God. For him, God had become a plurality of saints and angels. He’d had Rudolf Steiner to thank for that. Jerry - or someone like him - grinned into the dusty shadows of the Anglican sacristy. There was nothing left to steal.

Jerry tipped his hat to the new generation and turned back to his toys.

Two more weeks and he could land a team on Forbidden Island. His sailors almost within his grasp and the summer sun melting the sweet tar of Streatham, he sauntered down towards Norbury and Jennings’ second hand book shop where he planned to trade his wholesome volume of The Captain for a novel called Monsieur Zenith by Anthony Skene, his current literary favourite and inventor of Zenith the Albino, the smoothest crook that ever smoked an opium cigarette. It was Jerry’s ambition to smoke an opium cigarette as soon as possible. His elders by a year had already ventured Up Town to Soho and found it good.

Meanwhile, let some other Jerry carry West London for a while. He was settling down in the South. Here only Teddy Boys lay in wait for you with razors. Anything was better than Blenheim Crescent’s mephitic presence…

But thought is resurrection. He found himself struggling to force his mother back into non-existence. Mrs Cornelius was unperturbed. She, of all people, was bound to survive. There wasn’t a holocaust made that could get her. “Why don’cher come ‘ome, Jer?”

He gave up. With pouting reluctance he wheeled his big, heavy bike up the hill and down towards Elgin Crescent. He was back in Notting Dale, immediately post-Colin Wilson. His bid for some other, less melancholy, past had failed again. Somewhere, he heard his Shade saying, I was happy once.

These weren’t the kind of losses he had expected.