Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois Read Online Free PDF

the water-quality is, and if the relative sparseness of water-birds this trip is another effect of the prolonged drought. Finally get tired enough to settle for a bench not in the shade, and we sit there feeding bread to Canada geese and pigeons. A father comes strolling up with a little girl, a toddler, who is completely naked. We lend her some bread, and the little naked girl feeds it solemnly to the geese, who are almost as big as she is. I think that this would be a good photo, but hesitate to take it for fear of offending the father. They walk off without a word having been spoken, and I end up wondering if they were French; the little girl’s nudity was a little too casual for the English, I think—in the States, they probably would have been arrested. We walk on to another bench, in front of the Peter Pan statue, and feed bread to coots and ducks, wondering sentimentally if one of the ducks could be the duckling we’d seen there in ‘87, all grown up.
    Susan gets tired, and wants to go back to the room for a nap, so we walk up past the Italian Fountain to the Lancaster Gate. At the last moment, I decide that I don’t want to go back to the room, so I put Susan in a cab on the Bayswater Road about 4 P.M., and then go sit on a bench in Kensington Gardens. The smell of burning leaves is heavy, and there are lots of dogs, some being walked on leashes, some running free across the park, some barking in the distance, too far away to see. Small groups of tourists go by, speaking in French or Spanish or German. Try with indifferent success to feed bread to ravens, who keep hopping nervously away (although they do want the bread, and come sneaking back as soon as I get far enough away), then walk on. Settle the great controversy over whether there are squirrels in England or not—which we had been discussing on the plane—by seeing one; make it run like mad for cover by going over for a closer look (squirrels can’t be as common here as in the States, though; only saw one more during the entire trip, where in similar country at home we probably would have seen dozens). Walk down to the Round Pond, which, it turns out, is where most of the geese and ducks and swans have been hanging out. Stroll around the curve of Round Pond, throwing the rest of the bread in the water for the birds, who end up following me in swarms as if I were the Pied Piper, particularly the aggressive and nasty Canada geese, who will crawl right up your pantleg if you let them. Someone sailing a model sailboat on the Round Pond, just as people had twenty years ago, when I used to walk around this pond as a young man. Drifted slowly over to the Broad Walk, sat on a bench, and reflected sadly on how little this haunt of mine from years ago has changed, and how greatly I have. Is there really any connection between that boy who used to stride excitedly around here so long ago and me, except that we share some continuity of memory? Perhaps I just think that I used to be him, and that belief, taken on faith, is the only connection there really is.
    Walk up to Queensway. Finally manage to put in a call to the Gay Hussar for a reservation by the expedient of buying a phonecard, since I can’t seem to get any of the coin phones to work; notice that the phone booths along Queensway are still festooned inside with advertisements for massage parlours and prostitutes, although the discretely worded advertisements of my youth—“Madam Colette gives lessons in French”—have been replaced by much more explicit solicitations of the “Want a spanking?” “Like hot oral sex?” kind that leave little or no room for misunderstanding. Walk along the Bayswater Road for a while, then catch a cab back to the Russell. Wake Susan up, and we catch a cab to 2 Greek Street, to the Gay Hussar, a Hungarian restaurant just south of Soho Square. Dinner alone there in the upstairs room, the waiter dividing his time between us and a private party in the room upstairs, whose