Interesting Times

not over there, I am sure whatever you are looking at is very interesting, but please pay attention—is to practice our grasp of social intercourse.”
    “Hur, hur, hur,” said Caleb the Ripper.
    “I mean, Mr. Ripper, that you should go and enquire how much it would be for a duck,” said Mr. Saveloy.
    “Hur, hur, hur—What?”
    “And you are not to rip all her clothes off. That’s not civilized.”
    Caleb scratched his head. Flakes fell out.
    “Well, what else am I supposed to do?”
    “Er…engage her in conversation.”
    “Eh? What’s there to talk about with a woman?”
    Mr. Saveloy hesitated again. To some extent this was unknown territory to him as well. His experience with women at his last school had been limited to an occasional chat with the housekeeper, and on one occasion the matron had let him put his hand on her knee. He had been forty before he found out that oral sex didn’t mean talking about it. Women had always been to him strange and distant and wonderful creatures rather than, as the Horde to a man believed, something to do. He was struggling a little.
    “The weather?” he hazarded. His memory threw in vague recollections of the staple conversation of the maiden aunt who had brought him up. “Her health? The trouble with young people today?”
    “And then I rip her clothes off?”
    “Possibly. Eventually. If she wants you to. I might draw your attention to the discussion we had the other day about taking regular baths”—or even a bath, he added to himself—“and attention to fingernails and hair and changing your clothes more often.”
    “This is leather,” said Caleb. “You don’t have to change it, it don’t rot for years .”
    Once again Mr. Saveloy readjusted his sights. He’d thought that Civilization could be overlaid on the Horde like a veneer. He had been mistaken.
    But the funny thing—he mused, as the Horde watched Caleb’s painful attempts at conversation with a representative of half the world’s humanity—was that although they were as far away as possible from the kind of people he normally mixed with in staffrooms, or possibly because they were as far away as possible from the kind of people he normally mixed with in staffrooms, he actually liked them. Every one of them saw a book as either a lavatorial accessory or a set of portable firefighters and thought that hygiene was a greeting. Yet they were honest (from their specialized point of view) and decent (from their specialized point of view) and saw the world as hugely simple. They stole from rich merchants and temples and kings. They didn’t steal from poor people; this was not because there was anything virtuous about poor people, it was simply because poor people had no money.
    And although they didn’t set out to give the money away to the poor, that was nevertheless what they did (if you accepted that the poor consisted of innkeepers, ladies of negotiable virtue, pickpockets, gamblers, and general hangers-on), because although they would go to great lengths to steal money they then had as much control over it as a man trying to herd cats. It was there to be spent and lost. So they kept the money in circulation, always a praiseworthy thing in any society.
    They never worried about what other people thought. Mr. Saveloy, who’d spent his whole life worrying about what other people thought and had been passed over for promotion and generally treated as a piece of furniture as a result, found this strangely attractive. And they never agonized about anything, or wondered if they were doing the right thing. And they enjoyed themselves immensely. They had a kind of honor. He liked the Horde. They weren’t his kind of people.
    Caleb returned, looking unusually thoughtful.
    “Congratulations, Mr. Ripper!” said Mr. Saveloy, a great believer in positive reinforcement. “She still appears to be fully clothed.”
    “Yeah, what’d she say?” said Boy Willie.
    “She smiled at me,” said Caleb. He scratched his crusty beard uneasily. “A bit, anyway,” he added.
    “Good,” said Mr. Saveloy.
    “She, er…she said she’d…she wouldn’t mind seein’ me…later…”
    “Well done!”
    “Er…Teach? What’s a shave? ”
    Saveloy explained.
    Caleb listened carefully, grimacing occasionally. He turned round occasionally to look at the duck seller, who gave him a little wave.
    “Cor,” he said. “Er. I dunno…” He looked around again. “Never seen a woman who wasn’t running away