Read Bugs for Free Online Page B

‘You wanna dance?’
    ‘There’s no music.’
    Everyone laughed. Honesty led him outside to the parking-lot. ‘Where’s your car?’
    ‘I, um, haven’t got one,’ he said.
    ‘Christ. Come on, then.’ She pulled him into an alley and shoved him against a wall. After a moment of fumbling with the buckles of her black raincoat, she opened it.
    She was as naked beneath it as any Mickey Spillane dream.
    ‘OK?’
    ‘Shit,’ she said, a few moments later. ‘Oh, well, maybe next time.’
    ‘You’re a cheerful good-hearted girl, Honesty.’
    ‘Woman,’ she corrected.
    When they went back inside, Honesty was good enough not to let anyone know nothing had happened. To cover embarrassment, Fred spoke of his ambition to pass a driving test and buy a car. ‘I tried to get a provisional licence in New York, but it was impossible. When I finally found the bureau, they told me I would need my passport. I went to get it, but by the time I returned it was just past noon.’
    ‘Lunch hour?’
    ‘No, end of the day. In New York in summer the government offices open at ten A.M. and close at noon. So I don’t have even a provisional licence.’
    ‘You don’t?’ Mauve asked. ‘Don’t they have licences in England or something?’
    ‘Why, yes, I have one. Only here I don’t have a Minnesota one. Haven’t had time to take the usual course of lessons, make an appointment – I imagine, with everyone driving, there must be quite a waiting-list.’
    They all looked at him. Finally Honesty said: ‘If you can drive, you don’t need no course of lessons. And there ain’t no list; you just show up. You poor dummy, I better pick you up in the morning and take you there.’
    He felt better immediately. Soon he was describing Brides in the Bath, the Neasden Poisoner, and other English mass murders, as lighthearted as though he had not a care in the world. All the same, Honesty drifted away, and Mauve went home with Bill.
    Fred dreamed that night of a monster robot encased in ice. The dream began at the New York licence place again, only now the place was open. No one was in charge, but he filed along with everyone else past the counters and into some sort of ice-cavern.
    ‘I only came to get my licence,’ he said, but everyone was putting on their Eskimo parkas, so he followed suit. A crowd of people bundled up like Eskimos were breaking away great crystals with ice-picks, gradually revealing the placid ironface, the pulsing lights that were its eyes. It was somewhat like the reviving of a Frankenstein’s monster in some ice-cave, or the thawing of the Thing in Alaska, but he could not make out whether the features were those of Boris Karloff or James Arness.
    Then one of the ice-picks broke through and plunged into the monster. Bright red blood welled up. The monster opened its eyes and tried to scream, but no sound came.
    This was no metal monster but a foil-wrapped human being. This was his own body being stabbed. The Eskimo people were now insects. ‘It’s not summer any more,’ one of them said. ‘We can come out and work.’ Indeed, they were all working away with a chittering insect delight, as they stabbed and stabbed, plunging in their ice-picks, splurf, splurf, decision rechecking …

 
    A car horn woke him. He went to his basement window and peeped out at the morning. Honesty, dressed in dark urchin clothes, slouched against an apricot Mercedes.
    Fred threw on some clothes and groped his way outdoors, blinking at the brightness. She handed him the keys. ‘You drive all the way there. That’s your course of lessons.’
    ‘Where’d you get this car?’ he asked.
    ‘It’s got automatic everything; you can’t hardly fail,’ she said, not really answering. ‘I’ll tell you how to get there.’
    The testing-site was far enough from the city to give him some practice. Honesty had one more piece of advice. ‘Remember, they
want
you to pass.’
    ‘That doesn’t seem possible.’
    But so they did. The test