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bars alone seemed to be trying to live up to their reputation in movies, as dark scenes of passion, violence and despair. The movies had set the formula: a mahogany slab, a brass rail, a mirror, Joe thebartender polishing glasses, a garrulous drunk, a weepy tart, and one solemn suicidal drinker. Often there was a peach-coloured mirror behind the bar, designed to tone up the pallor of that lone drinker who might at any moment utter a cry of self-loathing and hurl his glass into the peachness. Or one could easily imagine a B-girl sliding on to an adjacent stool and asking if the gentleman had a light. Or a sudden savage fight around the pool-table.
    There was always an electric charge in the air, a synthetic feeling of excitement that could not be the alcohol alone, but had something to do with expectations. Maybe American bars were still coasting on the illicit excitement of Prohibition, nightclubs, blind tigers, neon and jazz. It was hard to picture an American bar where an old man might fall asleep by the fire, while his arthritic dog laps up a dish of bitter. That would be an anachronism, like Japanese Scotch.
    This bar had an empty band-platform in the corner, illuminated with coloured lights. The walls were covered with blown-up photos of out-of-date antiheroes: Belmondo in a hat, William Hurt as a murderous lawyer, Bogart as Mad Dog Earle … Why did so many actual murderers have the name Earl …?’
    Ms Mauve Toaster was waiting in a booth, a black drink before her.
    ‘Hiya, Mansour.’
    ‘Just call me Fred.’
    ‘Neat!’ She looked around as he sat beside her. ‘I got some friends I want you to meet.’
    A waitress floated over and placed a beer-mat in front of him.
    ‘Scotch,’ he said.
    ‘Straight up?’
    ‘Yeah, really.’ The waitress looked at him strangely before she departed. He didn’t seem to be receiving and passing cues very well.
    ‘Who are these Condoms?’ he asked Mauve.
    ‘They’re neat,’ she said. ‘They’ve all got AIDS, you know? None of them is going to live to thirty.’
    As that seemed to dispose of the Condoms, Fred studied his beer-mat. He was surprised to learn that the name ‘Ed Gein’ was not that of the owner. It was instead the name of a particularly loathsome mass-murderer of the 1950s. In search of an antihero, Minneapolis youth had rediscovered Gein, an unsavoury insane farmer who (according to the beer-mat) hung his victims on hooks and feasted on their corpses. The bar served ribs.
    The waitress interrupted his reading by delicately removing the beer-mat from his hands, replacing it firmly on the table, and anchoring it with his drink.
    He did not taste the drink until she had glided away with the best part of five dollars. The stuff seemed to be Japanese Scotch, though possibly the Koreans were now producing a twelve-month-old variety of their own; Glen Pusan or Wee Bonny Seoul.
    ‘Three-pound drinks,’ he muttered.
    Mauve said: ‘If you’re worried about your weight, why don’t you drink a
light
Scotch?’
    ‘Weight? No, I was just noticing how expensive these drinks are. In pounds sterling.’
    She continued to look blank.
    ‘British money.’
    ‘British money?’
    ‘The money they use in England. Here, wait a minute.’ He fished in his wallet and found a crumpled five-pound note. ‘Like this.’
    She took it and looked it over, frowning. ‘But this isn’t real, is it?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘You mean, in England, they got different money?’ she said, disbelieving.
    ‘That’s right.’
    ‘They don’t have dollars?’
    ‘Nope.’
    ‘Well … what
do
they use?’
    ‘These. Pounds sterling.’
    ‘Pounds sterling,’ she repeated. ‘Well, I’ll be fucked.’
    He said he sincerely hoped so, which made her laugh again. Yet almost immediately it was necessary for her to stop laughing and arrange her face in a snarl, because the band had taken the stage.
    The Condoms turned out to be ten or a dozen young men with bleached hair, all wearing black