No Future (Paul Cornell) by No Future (by Paul Cornell) (html)

Author:No Future (by Paul Cornell) (html)
Language: eng
Format: epub

11

Finally Facing My Waterloo

Ace found Danny down on the sands by the river, watching the lighted boats go by. The night was warm and the air tasted sweet.

He was wearing his sunglasses, hugging a timber. He looked up when Ace hopped down the ladder from the jetty above. ‘Hey. How’d you find me?’

‘One of the barmen at the Prospect told me you came down here. I can see why. I like it.’

‘Yeah,’ Danny turned back to look at the black water. ‘So what’re you doing?’

‘Not much. Saving the world.’

‘Seen Benny?’

Ace ignored the offhand plaintiveness in his voice. ‘From a distance.’

‘I got told to go home by that weird old bloke. So I did.’

‘After he got your autograph?’

‘You saw that? He asked for it. All I had was some Priory Records paper. He was so eager that I thought he’d ask me to sign his forehead.’

‘That’s just the Doctor. You don’t have to do what he says.’ Ace sat down on some old bricks beside Danny.

‘You know, this is where they used to execute pirates. They’d bury them in the sand up to their necks and wait for high tide. It was a really great spectator sport. Brutal, eh?’

‘I’ve seen worse.’ Ace made the decision. ‘I haven’t got long, Danny, and I wanted to see you.’

‘What, you dying or something?’

‘Maybe. Just soldier stuff. Dunno who I can trust, except you.’

‘How can you trust somebody who only knows three chords?’

‘Maybe ’cos of that. And ’cos we had the same dream.’

‘What, the woman in the cornfield? I don’t think we did, I don’t think any of that psychic stuff is true, that’s all Mike Oldfield.’

‘You said that you’d offended the Goddess. That sounds really down to earth, right?’

‘Well,’ Danny shrugged his bitterly thin shoulders. ‘I can’t help what I say in dreams. Dreams are where we’re free, they would have us believe.’

‘You remind me of somebody.’

‘You and Benny both. Must have been a kid, that one.’

‘We were lovers.’

‘Yeah? Well, that’s nostalgia for you, innit?’

‘What did you do to offend this Goddess of yours, anyway?’

‘Well…’ Danny took a deep breath. ‘If you’re gonna go away anyway, you might as well go thinking badly of me.’

‘I won’t think badly of you.’

‘You will. There was this girl, mate of a mate. Met her at a club. This is when I was still looking for something to be, in my rocker gear. I was really young.’

‘When?’

‘Last year. We got pissed, ’cos I drank then, and she told me that she’d been raped. Long time back. Didn’t know the guy. Before that, I’d kind of been thinking that maybe, well, yeah, but that stopped me from thinking that. We went back to her place, and spent a few hours talking about stuff and listening to Lou Reed. I was well out of it, but I knew what was going on, I wasn’t totally gone. For some reason, I took her hand, and kissed it, and tried what I thought was gonna be the ideal bloody seduction number on somebody who’d been raped.

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