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.That way, I only save a quid a bottle instead of two, but I don’t have to sit on a bus for ten hours going back and forth between Reading and France.”“The trouble with the younger generation,” Kit said, trying as best she could to age the sound of her voice, “is that they’re not willing to graft.” It wasn’t the kind of thing that her mother would ever have said, and the voice wasn’t anything like her mother’s anyway, but the effort of trying to sound older than she was proved to be more discomfiting than she had imagined, so she cut the joke short.Fortunately, Stephen had spotted a play on words that would take it in another direction entirely.“The trouble with the younger generation,” he said, “is that they’re far too willing to graft.They develop their lives by grafting on new interests, new relationships and new activities any-old-how, without any real regard for issues of compatibility and organic integrity.We all think yuck when people on TV talk about genetic engineering and they show pictures of that mouse with the ear grafted on to its back, but it’s just an empty reflex.Actually, we’ve absorbed the principle into our world-view so completely that it forms the bedrock of modern analogical thought.”Kit hadn’t a clue what he meant by “modern analogical thought” but she couldn’t ask because, although she was a bus driver, she wasn’t fucking stupid.She was, however, well used to steering around such difficulties in the course of everyday conversation.Steering around things was probably her most obvious and most extensively-practiced talent—which was perhaps as well, given that she was a bus driver, and her mother’s daughter.“I blame nicotine patches myself,” she said.“Time was you had to use willpower to give up smoking.”“You still do,” Stephen pointed out.“It says so on the ads.”“It says on the packets that smoking kills you,” Kit pointed out.“It’s all a matter of degree.People buy the patches because they think it reduces the amount of willpower they need.” She daren’t say so, in case it made Stephen back off again, but she wondered whether that might be part of the problem with ghosts that got stuck.Maybe they simply hadn’t the willpower to go on, and needed a patch—or, if not a patch, some other kind of fix.A bus—a bus driven by someone with a ready-made talent for steering around things.“I tried it once,” Stephen said.“Smoking, that is.Didn’t like it and gave it up on the spot.It’s useful not to be tempted, in a way, but inhibiting too.I don’t smoke pot because I don’t smoke, not because it’s pot.I tried beer too.Once.”“And now you’re stuck with wine and cider,” Kit said, figuring that she could see the argument through to its moral.“You shouldn’t let yourself be so easily put off.Sure, it’s a policy with one or two advantages—but it has disadvantages too.What else have you given up because you couldn’t be bothered to acquire the taste?”“Cabbage,” he said.“Brussels sprouts.Chicken tikka masala.Darts.Trying to use two-pin plugs overseas without an adaptor by sticking paper clips into sockets to form a bridge.”“Okay.You’re sticking to the bright side.Suppose you hadn’t liked sex the fist time you tried it? I sure as hell didn’t.Or swimming.My first encounter with chlorinated water was no picnic.Or driving.The first time Dad put the steering-wheel of a two-tonner in my seven-year-old hands I was terrified.Some first things you have to get past.”“Not necessarily,” he countered.“I can’t swim and I don’t drive, although I concede the point with respect to driving, which I shall certainly have to learn to do when I have enough money to pay for the lessons.As for sex, I thought the modern opinion was that it only comes in three varieties—good, very good and absolutely fucking fantastic.”“I don’t think so,” Kit told him, although she was still being careful enough not to call on Rose Selavy as a hypothetical witness for the defense, “but perhaps I’m not modern enough to qualify as an appropriate opinion-holder.I do come from Sheffield, after all.And I started young, way back in the twentieth century.”“Seven is a little young to be put in charge of a two-ton truck,” Stephen said—quite cleverly, considering that anything he’d said or asked about when and how she’d come by her first and potentially off-putting experience of sex would have sounded tacky and tempted fate, even though the truth was far duller than he probably imagined and certainly hadn’t involved her Dad, who had presumably sought solace for Mum’s unfitness for those kinds of wifely duties among temptresses who followed Rose Selavy’s profession without too many unnecessary embellishments.“It would have been okay,” Kit assured him, “if my legs had been long enough to reach the pedals.As it was, Dad and I had to work in collaboration.It worked, after a fashion, but it was always a makeshift.Come to think of it, sex wasn’t all that different, to begin with.Maybe it’ll continue getting better for a while yet, although my legs stopped growing some time back, long before I’d reached the height I was ambitious to attain.I could have been a model, you know, if I’d only been ten inches taller and ten times as beautiful.Not that I would have been, given that I’d still have had my vocation—but it would have been nice to have had the option.”“I could have done with a few more inches myself,” Stephen admitted, “but you just have to make the most of what you’ve got.That’s life.”It’s probably much the same when you’re dead, Kit thought.Except that you’ve got even less.Maybe the lingering dead were scheduled for reincarnation, but decided against it because they didn’t much like incarnation the first time around.Maybe they’re like Even Stephen, who doesn’t smoke pot because it’s smoking, not because it’s pot.Maybe they’re still waiting, with way too much patience, for their legs to grow just a little bit longer before they get back in the driving-seat of life, or maybe they just want to the bus to arrive
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