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A Rude Awakening
Brian W. Aldiss

Copyright 1978 by Brian W. Aldiss
First published in Great Britain by
Weidenfeld and Nicolson
11 St John's Hill London SW11
ISBN 0 297 77448 4

My suspicion is that in Heaven the Blessed are of the opinion that the advantages of that locale have been overrated by theologians who were never actually there. Perhaps even in Hell the damned are not always satisfied.
-Jorge Luis Borges, THE DUEL

'The idea of prostitution is a meeting point of so many elements lechery, bitterness, the futility of human relationships, physical frenzy and the clink of gold that a glance into its depths makes you dizzy and teaches you so much! It makes you so sad, and fills you with such dreams of love!'

'But one can live a full life,' suggested Claudin, 'without frequenting prostitutes.'

'No, you can't,' thundered Flaubert. 'A man has missed something if he has never woken up in an anonymous bed beside a face he'll never see again, and if he has never left a brothel at dawn feeling like jumping off a bridge into the river out of sheer physical disgust with life.'
-Robert Baldick, DINNER AT MAGNY'S

'Remember you were of the Fourteenth Army and never say die.' General Sir William Slim, disbanding the Forgotten Army

The wild life in Medan was something neither night nor DDT could stop.

Beyond our steamy windows, the darkness held all the breathability of a sailor's armpit. A winged and nameless shitbag came hurtling in from the murk, full of offence and fury. Its manner was of one intent on shattering preferably for ever the world speed record for Tropical Hirsute Insect Nuisance Flying.

It burst across the room at drunken velocity, maintaining an altitude of approximately two inches above the heads of the assembled drinkers. The drinkers were tanking themselves up for the arrival of a lorry-load of unleashed Dutch girls, and failed to notice this freak of evolution. Still accelerating, the shitbag gained height and ploughed its way through a cloud of assorted mosquitoes, flies, moths, and fluttering uglies which had appropriated our central light as a zone for combined aerial combat and propagation of species.

I saw it because I was leaning against the far wall of the mess, listening with Jock Ferguson to Johnny Mercer on War.

'The generals have done their best, but it's been a bloody untidy war all along,' he was saying. 'Do you wonder we're stuck here in such a right old cock-up? You can't say the war is over, even now.'

'Och, you're exaggerating, man,' said Jock Ferguson, straightening up, squaring his shoulders, and pouring a half-pint of whisky down his throat. 'You'll be saying next it didn't begin properly, either.'

'When did it begin, then?'

'September, 1939, of course, when Britain went to war against Germany over Poland,' Jock and I said together, with minor variations.

Johnny shook his head. He had been a teacher in civvy street, and liked to lecture. 'Wrong. I'm talking about when the World War began the one we're still involved with, not the little local European war starring Adolf Hitler. The World War began in 1931, when Japan invaded China. The poor old Chinks have been at it ever since. That was when Japanese aggression started.'

It was at this point that I spotted the winged shitbag, cutting a swathe through the lesser phyla of its kind.

'Ah, but the real war started in '39,' said Jock.

'If so, then it ended in 1940,' said Johnny. 'After the fall of France in the summer of 1940, all of Europe was at peace, unified by Hitler. Nothing else was going on, except the British buggering about on the fringes. The Yanks were reading their comic books. The Russians were frigging around doing nothing in particular. It was only later that the yellow-bellies got things stirred up again.'

Johnny gave his high-pitched laugh and scratched his arse.

Some of us had heard his weird version of history before.

'Whatever you say, VE and VJ days finished the war, all the separate bits of it,' I said.