Zero History by William Gibson

’Cept George. He knew her.”
    “Where from?”
    “Cordwainers. London College of Fashion. She’d studied shoe design. Had two seasons of her own line. Went back to Melbourne after that, making belts and purses. Serious girl, George said.”
    “He was at Cordwainers?”
    “Fucking Oxford, George. Seeing another Cordwainers girl, friend of hers.”
    Hollis realized that she was framing all of this, visualizing it, in a Melbourne that had almost nothing to do with any actual city. They’d played Melbourne and Sydney twice each, touring, and each time she’d been so jet-lagged, and so embroiled with band politics, that she’d scarcely registered either place. Her Melbourne was a collage, a mash-up, like a Canadianized Los Angeles, Anglo-Colonial Victorian amid a terraformed sprawl of suburbs. All of the larger trees in Los Angeles, Inchmale had told her, were Australian. She supposed the ones in Melbourne were as well. The city in which she was imagining Clammy now wasn’t real. A stand-in, something patched together from what little she had available. She felt a sudden, intense urge to go there. Not to whatever the real Melbourne might be, but to this sunny and approximate sham. “And she got them for you?” she asked Clammy.
    “Came in the morning. Drove me to Brunswick Street. Eggs and bacon in a vegan lesbian café bar.”
    “Vegan bacon?”
    “Open-minded. We talked about Hounds. I got the idea she’d met someone here, London, when she’d been at Cordwainers, who was in on the start of Hounds.”
    “It started here?”
    “Didn’t say that. But someone here had known something about it, early stages.”
    The bottom of the cage was perfectly dark now, the insectoid wallpaper dimly floral. “We have a deal,” she reminded him.
    “We do,” he agreed, “but there may be less to it than you’re expecting, now I’ve had time to think about it.”
    “Let me be the judge of that.”
    “So breakfast, and we talk, then we hit the market. I’d thought it would be more like the clothes end of Portobello, or Camden Lock. But it was more artists, craftsy stuff. Japanese prints, paintings, jewelry. Things the sellers had made.”
    “When was this?”
    “Last March. Still hot. People had been lining up, for Hounds, while we ate. Market’s not very big. Mere leads me straight to this queue, inside, I’d say twenty people, more after us. Out in a yard. I’m thinking, That’s not for us, but she says it is, we have to queue too.”
    “What were the other people like, waiting?”
    “Focused,” he said. “No chatting. And they all seemed to be alone. Trying to look casual, like.”
    “Male? Female?”
    “More male.”
    “Age?”
    “Mixed.”
    She wondered what that meant, to Clammy.
    “And they were waiting for … ?”
    “There was a table, in under this old beach umbrella. We were in the sun, getting hotter. He’s sitting under there behind the table.”
    “He?”
    “White. Maybe thirty. American.”
    She guessed Clammy might be unable to estimate age accurately, over about twenty or so. “How do you know?”
    “Spoke with him, didn’t I, when I got up there.”
    “What about?”
    “Shrinkage,” Clammy said. “Sizing. Hounds are sized to shrink to the label size. Just under, in the waist, then that stretches a little. True sizes, no vanity sizing.”
    “Anything else?”
    “He’d only sell me the one pair. Had three in my size. Showed him the readies. Said he couldn’t. One to a customer. Kept things moving. ’Nother twenty, thirty people behind us.”
    “What was he like?”
    “Reddish hair, freckles. A white shirt I wondered about.”
    “Why?”
    “If it might be Hounds. Simple, like, but then not so simple. Like Hounds. He had his cash folded in one hand. No coins. Cash only.”
    “How much?”
    “Two hundred Australian.”
    “Was he alone?”
    “Two Aussie girls. Friends of Mere’s. It was actually their pitch he was using. Sell Mere’s belts, T’s they print,