little Jeanette Little . . and also: if Mumsie could smell her fanny on the hippy’s dirty fingers. .’e’s gotta be miles away by now . . — A maroon Ford Zephyr is pulled over by the canal, its radiator nibbles at the stringy daisies and the stopped clocks of dried-out dandelions. A man leans out from the rolled-down window — his hair is Brylcreemed into an ill-fitting helmet, he wears. . an iron grin. He calls to her, Hey, girlie, how’d you like to go for a ride? It’s the first time Jeanie’s heard someone speak with an American accent who’s not on the telly — it’s. . tasty. She minces through the flowers and places her hands on the car’s hot roof — there’s a swan on the canal with three cygnets. . they don’t care. The man has on a sharkskin suit with a peace badge on it, a whiter-than-white shirt with a thin death-black tie clipped to it by an ace of spades tie-pin. His knee is pumping up and down, and Jeanie can see a polished shoe dancing on the floor of the car: tippety-tap-tap, tippety-tap-tap —. Hey, girlie, he says again, how’s about it — you, me, the open road? He pats the bench seat beside him, running his hand over the oxblood vinyl, gathering up. . nothing. His eyes are Pink Paraffin and there’s a big cold sore on his lip, his breath is. . VAT 69, and there’s a simmering saucepan of words in his head. . about to boil over. Jeanie says, You must fink I’m mental, I wouldn’t get in your car for all the tea in China. My mum’s told me about pervs like what you are — you’ll drive me off somewhere an’ rape me. Yeah, the man says, your mom, she’s a smart cookie — she knows the score, does Mumsie. Okey-dokey — he leans forward and turns the key, the engine snorts, then trots into life, the radio singing, Jennifer. . Juniper. . rides a dappled mare. . Y’know Mumsie, do you? Jeanie slips her hands into her jeans pockets, thumbs out. She blows the thick curls of her fringe. Sure do, the creepy Yank says, met her at a CND meeting — you know what that is, right? Genie withers at him and he grins still more and holds out his hand, the wrist cocked. Claude, he says, Claude Evenrude — and you’re Debbie, have I got that right? No, Jeanie says, shaking the man’s hand, I’m Jeanie, Debbie’s two years bigger than me. The Yank’s hand is a bit sweaty — but it’s cool, which is strange. Jeanie wonders if he might have a fridge in his car — she’s read in Look and Learn that some Yanks had crazy stuff like that in their cars. .’cause they live in their cars. Oh, OK, my apologies, young lady, forgive me, please — Jeanie, right, Jeanie. Moira’s told me ever such a lot about you — she’s real proud of you. — Claude puts on Secret Squirrel sunglasses to drive the Zephyr, one hand flops over the steering wheel, the other fiddles with his tie-pin — but they haven’t gone very far when he pulls over on a bend from where they can see the railway line cutting across the big field, and floating beside it in the heat-haze the big glossy-green teardrop of London. A goods train comes up the line, its triple-decker coaches carrying new cars. . bonnets sucking off boots, boots bumming bonnets. Claude passes Jeanie a bottle of Cherry Corona with a. . leetle drop of whisky in it. We went out West when I was a kid, he says. That was before the war — long time before the war. . My pa an’ me, we spent hours standing on the balcony of the caboose, watching the desert runnin’ out behind. I’d pick out an itty-bitty bit of sagebrush, or a cactus, or any fool thing, and I’d hang on to it with my eyes, burnin’ it inside here for-ever — he holds up Devil’s horns fingers and stabs them at his forehead, his knee pumps, his shoe taps, he lights another Chesterfield from the end of the last one and Jeanie puzzles. . Is it the same firm what made the chair? — Up through Royal Gorge, Claude says, then come the Rockies. The fruit cars heading East were so long it took mebbe half an hour for ’em to pass by. We’d stop at the foot of each pass and they’d double-team the locos to get us up the grade — some places they’d triple-team ’em. — Now the Zephyr’s fifty yards off the road, flattening the tall bracken on the edge of the common. Claude kneels backwards on the front seat, his arse on the dashboard, and takes off his shiny jacket. He’s wound up all the windows and the air is smoke and booze and rubberiness. They aren’t on a train any more but in a plane: You gotta ’preciate, Claude slurs to tipsy Jeanie, they were working in conditions near as cramped as these. Sure, a Super Bee is a big ship, but there’s only an itty-bitty nar-row tunnel connecting the fore and aft sections. . He swarms over the back of the seat, his shirt-tails pull free, and Jeanie glimpses the pale pucker of his belly hanging down. . yucky. ’Course, being the target-spotters, we didn’t have much of anything in the bomb bay — juss some gizmos for measuring the blast and the radiation and stuff — but if you were flying with Tibbets every time you crawled along that companionway you were crawling right over the bomb itself. I tellya, little Jeanie — hands on the back of the pew, he preaches smoke at her — I knew he was a fellow whose imagination wasn’t worth a damn when I saw what he’d had ’em paint on the nose of his ship. I mean, how’d he figure it? If the ship was his mumsie, what the hell did she have in her belly? A nine-thousand-pound friggin’ atom bomb baby, that’s what — right? An A-bomb that had to be his own half-brother or half-sis’, right? The radar man on the Enola Gay, Beser, he told me how Parsons — good ol’ Deak — he snuggled up right beside that bomb-baby all the way there — cuddling with it. A cold hard de-termined man, Parsons — screwdrivers were his forceps. It didn’t matter how the ship bucked about, he kept right on screwing in those charges. . — Claude isn’t bothering with the Corona any more, instead he swigs straight from the whisky bottle and lights another Chesterfield with a click-clack-rasp of his big steely lighter. The green ears of little ear-wigging weeds press against the car windows. But I ask you, hon, Claude goes on, who’s the worser guy? Man who pulls the trigger, or the one who points it at a whole goddamn row of slanty-eyed folks, all of ’em stood there in their jimmy-jammies with their pitiful empty rice bowls held out, and says: That one — that Hee-ro-sheema. He’s blindfolded, his goddamn hands’re tied — it’s a sure-fire bet you guys can shoot him dead with no trouble at all! — Later on, when Jeanie’s tipsy, they fly the ship together. Claude sits on the co-pilot’s side of the bench and explains a bit about take-off torque, rudder control and advancing throttles. Jeanie wrenches the steering wheel from side to side as she fiddles with the indicator stalk and gear stick. Then they get ready to deliver the bomb-baby: Claude explains to Jeanie how the bomb-sight works and they crouch together in the glass blister of the Zephyr’s windscreen, Claude twisting the knobs on the radio until the static tunes into a whistle and the hairs of their tangled heads cross. Leaning down, their fingers entwined, they yank up the handbrake and the car rolls forward a few yards before it grounds on a molehill. I see skin angels, Claude says rapturously as his fingers squeak out a little porthole on the misty glass. A great host of ’em flying round an’ around the mushroom cloud. I see ’em — he hisses into her scaredy face — and they’re the people we’ve just this second incinerated. . They’re like. . They’re like — his fingers wiggle expressively — the burning leaves floatin’ up from the hobos’ fires in the Hooverville on the other side of the streetcar tracks — you remember that, right? Sure, they look pretty enough from a way off, but when you get close you can see the skin scorched off their backs and arms flapping in the terrible heat, the terrible heat that bears them spiralling up and up to heaven. . Skin angels! — Jeanie sees. .