Danny waited at the threshold, at the top of the steps down to the pavement, while Sharon prepared herself. She rarely wore make-up, just occasional gaudy lipstick, yet it could still take her fifteen minutes to get ready to go out. What she did in that time was one of the mysteries of the sexes, and he was so sure that he wouldn't understand that he'd never been tempted to ask.
It was a beautiful day for waiting, much warmer than it should have been for spring still turning into summer. Small clouds littered the sky, little puffs of steam pulled out of shape by high-altitude winds. Give or take a few lampposts, telegraph wires, tarmac and cars, this pretty street wouldn't have looked very different a hundred years ago. He took in all the lovely Georgian townhouses joined wall to wall in what might have been called a terrace if they hadn't been worth a million pounds each, and the church opposite, the same church he'd viewed in darkness the night before, with different thoughts in his head, now in daylight. Five years ago its walls had been steam-cleaned, but they were beginning to stain again, from the inside.
London's smoke had become embedded in its bricks, though oddly this gave the church an
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organic look, like it was made of living bricks rather than dead ones.
Sharon arrived next to him and they set off towards the Angel shopping district. Their street was filled with parked German cars -
BMW's, Mercedes, Audi R8 coupes. Danny's neighbours were lawyers and bankers, still trying to get used to the idea of a mere computer professional affording the million-pound entry fee to their select community.
Seventy years ago, this area had been a slum, now it was as expensive as Kensington or Chelsea, though little bits of the old order clung on, in council flats built in the gaps where Hitler's bombs had fallen - those that hadn't been sold off in the Thatcher era - and in the sixties blocks of the nearby Boxington Estate. Two hundred yards away, just out of sight, a traditional North London pub; The Rose & Crown, survived on the custom of these true locals. Danny and his neighbours would never dream of visiting this bar, any more than they would imagine joining a school of dolphins.
At dinner-parties and barbecues his neighbours would ask him what he did for a living, and he would reply, 'Something to do with computers.' That made him a man with no clear social status. The more curious of his
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neighbours wanted more details, wanted to understand this strange phenomenon of a mere technical person enjoying enough money to live alongside them; this representative of a new power in a world of long-established professions, a representative of the digerati, that peculiar group of individuals who can adjust their heads to ones and zeroes, when most people cannot.
Their interest in him was sociological. Then they'd get bored and turn to Sharon, who was more attractive and more approachable, since she worked in TV production, and at least TV was real.
"So," said Sharon, "they wanted to know what you were doing on Wednesday, and you were working in Scotland."
"That's about it."
She squeezed his hand. "Sweetheart, I don't want you getting in trouble with the police."
"I know."
He still hadn't told her about Frank, but there was no hurry. Frank was all about technology, not one of Sharon's priorities.
They passed her car, Miss Daisy, a fifteen-year-old automatic Mercedes from the company's bad design era, in a filthy Yellow colour and decorated with minor dents down both sides. It was what Sharon called a London car,
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easier to drive around the confined streets than a new model, because other drivers saw the state of the bodywork and allowed extra space.
Shopping on her own, she liked to take Miss. Daisy rather than struggle with heavy bags, but with her donkey with her, as she affectionately called Danny on these occasions, she preferred to walk. The supermarket was only a fifteen minute stroll away, and queuing for the car park could take longer.
They walked through the odd chicane at the end of the street where the road narrowed to a single carriageway, between ancient houses built with no anticipation of the motor car. As they approached Dover Road the traffic noise increased, like the sound of an approaching waterfall along an explorer's tributary. Then on toDover Road and whoosh! The whole rush of London. Red buses, black taxis, multicoloured cars. Traffic snaking by then snarling up.
Hundreds of people walking urgently on the pavement, all going somewhere. Rubbish in the gutters, close to the bins but not quite in them, filling any crease between the horizontal and the vertical, twirling in slipstreams. Islington Green over to the right with its magnificent plane trees and drunks on the park benches, Sir Hugh Middleton's statue pompously looking away from
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them, his head and shoulders white with pigeon shit. The first restaurants - Ghorans, the Afghan Kitchen, Pizza Express. Then Upper Street joining Dover Road from the right to create the real heart of the Aldwych, with its incredible mass of restaurants and bars - eighty of them on Upper Street alone.
Danny and Sharon crossed the zebra-crossing by the Business Design Centre to reach the causeway, the wide pavement on the west side of Upper Street, raised six feet above road level. Restaurateurs were making the most of the warm weather and had their plastic or metal chairs set out on the paving stones, continental style, though there were few clients. On a warm summer weekend night, a few thousand young people would turn up here on the causeway and around Islington Green to drink and ogle the opposite sex, or, for a lot of Islington men, the same sex.
Danny called by at a cash machine to refill his wallet. He typed in his number and clicked the key for a hundred pounds. An unusual message appeared at the bottom of the screen.
—You can have fifty, Frank.
"What's wrong?" asked Sharon.
"Damn thing will only give me fifty."
"We could try another."
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"It doesn't matter."
Danny took his fifty pounds from the slot and contemplated Frank's message. That was pure power-play, a demonstration that Frank had the power to give or withhold funds as he felt fit.
After all, money was a virtual commodity, not stored in gold or currency any more, but in ones and zeros in banking computers, and Frank was a virtual being. He and the world's money were flatmates, sharing the same domain.
At Liverpool Road they turned off Upper Street and walked past Marks and Spencer, and Woolworth, and into Sainsbury's supermarket.
Sharon started off reasonably enough, pausing by the trimmed leeks, courgettes and mange tout, handling packs of avocados and artichokes before returning them to the shelves.
For a couple of minutes, Danny felt there was a chance this could turn into a normal shopping expedition. At least he couldn't find an obvious pattern in what she was doing, and generally when things went wrong there was a pattern.
On the meat aisle she paused at pre-packed chicken, pork and lamb, even choosing between different cuts of the same meat before moving on, her trolley still empty.
Danny stayed quiet. Once she was in here, fending off baskets and running with the
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rest of the trolley gladiators, locked into her own strange version of the consumer thing, she was beyond communication. Not that he had any preferences to state. He really didn't care much about food.
The meat in its plastic packs looked particularly unappealing, lines of uniform pink flesh under fluorescent lights, white fat, never yellow, moist flesh but never blood. There was something deeply unnatural about it, a kind of theme-park version of meat. The supermarket punters didn't want to associate these products with life, or more specifically with death, the death of animals, and with this blandness of uniformity, packaging and lighting the supermarket got the dissociation just right. These meat-like products looked like they had been produced in a factory, not a farm. No animal had ever died making them. At least not a real one, just artificial ones produced through years of intensive breeding, unreal humanised animals, sheep too fat to run, beach-ball-sized turkeys with legs thicker than human arms, cows that have to be milked every day or their udders burst, and pigs weighing more than a motorcycle.
This particular part of London, this area that Danny adored for its history, had a long association with the capital's meat industry, going
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back seven hundred years or more. Before the railways arrived and changed everything, drovers herded their sheep and cattle and turkeys along Upper Street, just a hundred yards away, walking here with a thousand oxen from as far afield as Scotland to get the best price at London's main meat market, Smithfield, a few miles further south. They rested overnight in Islington, before approaching Smithfield next morning.
The fat cattle in the paintings on Danny's dining room wall were part of this Smithfield history, and so was the raised causeway on the western side of Upper Street, now home to restaurateurs' chairs and tables. It had been built around 1600 to keep pedestrians' feet out of the mud and mire of the drovers' route. The Islington inns shown on the dining room wall were where the drovers stayed. Next day, they'd sell their herds to Smithfield butchers' merchants, who had them herded down to the Fleet riverside to be slaughtered. The Fleet was eventually covered over and became Farringdon Road, leading to Fleet Street, but in the early days the slaughterers killed and dressed the animals by the riverside and brushed the entrails into the river, giving it another name - the Red Fleet. This practice was stopped hundreds of years ago, an early example of a sanitization process refined through the ages
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until it magically produced meat-like products with no real animals involved.
Sharon moved away from the theme-park meat section. This wasn't turning out well, decided Danny. She was going through all the normal motions of supermarket shopping except one - putting stuff in her trolley. Not good at all.
The equivalent of little wisps of cloud in a sky that foretell of next day's storm.
She went back to the fruit and veg section for a second go. Danny stayed silent, trying not to think too hard, watching the lioness circle the vegan version of zebras and make up her mind.
She did three or four full circuits of the greenery, slowed by the mass of other trolleys and hand-baskets hanging from people's arms.
"Too busy," she said, almost inaudibly.
"Tut tut. Tomatoes for a pound eighty. Who do they think we are?"
Still Sharon had chosen nothing. She continued to circle. Danny stifled a sigh. More clouds. More unnatural produce. When Adam bit an apple, was it a Granny Smith, a Braeburn or a Golden Delicious? Potatoes originally came from the Andes, but did Jersey Royals? Grapes growing without seeds to reproduce - hardly the outcome of natural selection. Like insipid meat, all these products were mankind's choices, not
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nature's. Without humans, barely any of them would exist.
Sharon had been in the supermarket for fifteen minutes and still hadn't selected a single item. She took the trolley back to the entrance door and dumped it, ignoring the pound deposit.
"We need a basket."
"Sure." Danny chose a basket with handles approximately straight. By the time he looked up, Sharon was twenty feet away. "Good Lord."
She hadn't gone back to the shelves, she'd gone straight to the nearest checkout. Eight people were in the queue. They watched her pick among the pile of leftovers that other customers had brought as far as the conveyor before realising they didn't want them or couldn't afford them.
"Excuse me." She made her choice from the discard pile - a packet of Wheatabix, a can of kidney beans, a half-pound bundle of asparagus and two avocados.
Danny arrived with the basket. At the next checkout Sharon found a bag of mixed lettuce and two frozen éclairs. The third conveyor offered better leftovers, including a tin of salmon, a box of chocolates and a bottle of blush Californian wine. And so it went on. At the
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eighth counter was a box of panty-shields. "Ah, that's lucky," said Sharon. At the tenth, a whole litre of Luccese extra virgin olive oil. "One of your favourites."
People did stare, mainly at Sharon but also sometimes at Danny. 'Do you know your partner's mad?' said the stares. He didn't feel embarrassed, just slightly self-conscious. At least everybody gave them a wide berth when they broke through a queue to reach the next haul. He felt they were doing a grand job of supplying entertainment to the bored faces waiting to pay.
And what a mixed audience of bored faces it was. Parents with small children, old people with lightly loaded trolleys, Middle European women in drab clothes and equally dull shawls, a few Islamic women showing nothing but their eyes and hands, middle-aged men with twitches, young men in branded jackets and trainers, the odd beauty, some monsters from the deep. All the world was here. Well, perhaps not the poorest, who right now might be in the Iceland store or at a stall on Chapel Market, and not the discerning rich, who drove to Waitrose in Holloway, but a good mix of the middle without extremes. A supermarket was always a great place to see society as a whole. Pubs were mainly for young people, and restaurants for the
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childless and well-off. The vast majority of the population kept itself to itself and maybe snuck off to work in the day but otherwise sat at home with the kids, perhaps with the TV on, getting on with the important business of populating the planet, until it was time for the weekly shopping expedition and they pitched up here for a rare public showing.
As Danny was stared at by all the glum faces, and as he inspected them back, it struck him how similar this oddball mix of people was to the aisles of meat and racks of fruit and vegetables. Similar in a physical way, of course, since many of the molecules of skin he was looking at had originally been bought as food in this supermarket, but also in a genetic way.
Survival of the fittest no longer applied to people any more than it applied to sheep or pigs or grapes or oranges. All these humans were the product of human selection. And humanity's view of human selection - at least in European countries - is that all should survive. Take away this non-selection process and the modern medical care that accomplishes it, rely solely on nature and evolution, survival of the fittest, and this supermarket would be almost empty, populated by a handful of freaks who'd gone through their lives with no accidents, no
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inoculations, and no life-threatening diseases, rather than the ragtag bundle of miss-shapes he found himself looking at right now.
By the time they'd reached the twelfth conveyor, Sharon had pretty much finished her shopping. She was beginning to take stuff out of the basket and swap it for better quality leftovers at the next checkout. Somehow the basics had arrived - bread, a fancy and expensive pain de
compagne, a pint of milk, and of course Danny's olive oil - plus exotics like a pack of ostrich steaks and a tin of Italian octopus in its own ink.
Looking into the basket, Danny was surprised to see how well things had turned out. She'd often dabbled in leftovers as they waited at a checkout, but this was the first time she'd completely ignored the shelves. It had been fast, easy, and the result was fairly complete and far from dull.
It was an astonishing success.
"Excuse me, excuse me." A Sainsbury supervisor tried to get Sharon's attention. "What are you doing?"
"Shopping."
The supervisor was in her late thirties.
She had an air of efficiency, a busy person who makes quick decisions and gets things done.
Although her voice was authoritative there was
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no edge to it. Her tone with Sharon was more of concern.
"It's not a good idea to shop from the tills," she said. "Some of the refrigerated and frozen goods may be warm."
"I'll look out for that," said Sharon.
The supervisor inspected Sharon for a few seconds, took in her lack of make-up, her mass of dark hair, then inspected Danny and seemed to decide these were just two regular Islington space cadets and not worth her time. She pulled a stern and mildly unhappy face and walked away.
Sharon joined the end of a short queue for baskets only. Danny followed. Quite out of the blue, he realised that despite the traumas of the last twenty-four hours he was very happy, and doubly happy to be with Sharon right now.
Sometimes her strange and unpredictable shopping behaviour bugged him. But today, for no reason he could fathom, it had inspired him with a sudden burst of love and affection. He wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now apart from standing next to this wonderful woman he shared his life with. It hit so hard his eyes began to glisten.
He watched the checkout and an old woman chatting to the assistant while packing her bags, very slowly, life run at a different pace.
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And when her bill was announced, naturally it came as a surprise. She spent a while looking for her purse, like it was the last thing she'd imagine needing at a checkout.
"Do you remember my first line?" he asked Sharon, as their own shopping had its bar codes scanned, and all those small black lines were transformed by computer into prices and product descriptions, except the three lines at beginning, middle and end, the three check-lines, the three sixes, 666. The question was kind of relevant to what he'd been thinking before.
"Of course. 'Do you think evolution's been a success?'"
That was the one, at Zap in Brighton. She was standing at the bar in a backless dress having her order messed up by a dumb bartender. His strange first line dissolved her irritation.
"It was a crummy line, but I fancied you anyway."
She always said that. This was a conversation they'd had before, and no doubt would have again.
The checkout assistant asked for thirty-four pounds fifty-six pence. Danny handed over a credit card.
"I think evolution's been deselected," he said, "fizzled out, reached a dead-end."
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"If it's taken you that long to come up with an answer," replied Sharon, "you could be right."
Danny grinned.
The assistant rang the bell for a supervisor. The same woman appeared, very quickly, like she might have watching this particular till and expecting trouble from it. She looked at the till screen. "I'm sorry, sir, your card is on the list to be retained."
"What do you mean?"
"Your bank has issued instructions for this card to be retained when it's presented."
"But why?"
"I'm sorry, you'll have to talk to your bank about that. Do you have an alternative means of payment?"
"We can pay cash," said Sharon.
What was going on here? - wondered Danny. There were thousands of pounds of credit left on that card. But there had been thousands of pounds in the account he'd accessed at the cash machine.
This was Frank again, being a pain.