Radiance

Obviously I ran away to Camden Town just as soon as my nicely turned calves could carry me. No more dinners with those lurid leviathan gullets staring at my peas and potatoes with pointedly erect stamens. No more Greek origins of simple household words and I say, we’ve started in on the J’s this year and you know what that means: Jackals and Juggernauts and Jungles! Deriving respectively, of course, from the Sanskrit roots srgalah, “the howler,” jagat-natha, “the lord of the world,” and jangala, which, oddly enough, signifies “aridity.” Couldn’t you just scream?

I could. Because when you draw a really rotten lot in life, you stick it out, make your best, tighten your belt. But when your draw is just a touch irritating, just a squidge confining, well, you hightail it and right quick. I’d have been good and goddamned if I was going to end up painting roses like my life depended on it in some snivelling doctoral candidate’s hut. Oh, but you didn’t stay in Camden! Not if you could help it. Not if you were a Girl Like Me.

No, in those days—and by those days I mean these days, and by these days I mean all the days to come—it was the heavens or nothing at all. If you had a brain to rub against a lust for something better than shabby old Earth and her crabby old empires, you were saving up for a rocket or already long gone. It was fifty years on from the great train robbery perpetrated by Master Conrad Xavier Wernyhora and his big sister Miss Carlotta Xanthea, a couple of Australian-born Polish kittens run off from the Hobsons Bay rail yards with spare parts, lunch, and a working knowledge of engineering to set off their little cherry bomb in Hawaii, where the equator loves us and wants us to be happy. I used to draw pictures of that first fabulous ship in my schoolbooks. The Tree of Knowledge, shot out of a bloody circus cannon, a snug capsule with their handprints on it in gold paint. It carried Conrad and Carlotta all the way up here to the Moon, crash-landing through a genteel sort of gravity into…well, just about where I sit, where the Savoy in Tithonus now stands, with the silver-choked shores of Mare Nubium in sight.

It’s a fair bit nicer now, with pistachio meringues, a nice pot of white-tips, and a waiter with a rear that I daresay won’t quit. Although I’ve not developed a taste for creaming my tea with callowmilk yet, I’m sad to report. It’s just not right. Milk shouldn’t taste like much of anything but vague thickness and sweetness. Callowmilk has a spice to it. A tang. I expect I shall learn to savour it soon enough. I need it, after all. We all do. Slaves of Venus where the callowhales lie silent offshore and ooze. Without callowmilk we couldn’t stay. It’s a matter of density, see. Skip the cream in our tea and our bones would go as light as hat-straw within a year or two and we’d keel over with a sad Irish slide whistle. So I stir and stir and stir and it still tastes positively beastly.

Once upon a time I played Conrad and Carlotta with the neighbour boy, the son of a lowly junior lecturer in astronomy and therefore utterly delicious with the frisson of slumming it. I do not imagine Conrad and Carlotta did half the things in their capsule that I did in the peach trees with…oh, what was his name? Lucius. Or Lawrence. Lawrence! From the Latin Laurentius, meaning from the city of Laurentum, near Rome.

Well, I missed the first big rush. One always does. The good bit is forever one generation back. But I’m not such a latecomer that I escaped the sense of being historical. Here I sit, writing in my little green book while I gnaw over whether or not I can afford a bowl of the monkfish soup to insulate my belly against the fact that I’ve (finally!) gotten a part in the new Stern flick but not been paid yet. I know, I just know, that my little diary will be read by somebody someday, and not just to divine how to get me in the sack. It’ll be read because I’m an actress in the early days of cinema and the somewhat later days of interplanetary immigration. I don’t have to do a thing to be interesting! Did she or did she not have the monkfish soup? Did the thyme taste like the thyme she knew back home? (Or the scrubbly stuff we call thyme even though it’s lunar native and in no sense of the word thyme. Though, for that matter, it wouldn’t be monkfish either, but we call our local long scaly bastards with their razor snouts and six vestigial legs monkfish because the Savoy, good sir, does not serve moon-monster soup!) Did the flavour make her think of innocent days in the manger of man?

Not especially, no.