Dream London (3 page)

“Is it far?”

“Not at all, dear boy. We’re here already.”

We stopped outside a narrow door squeezed between two shop entrances. A haberdashers to the left, an ironmongers to the right. The ribbons and buttons, the kettles and buckets in the shop windows seemed so definite, so unchanging, and yet I could remember when these two units had housed a mobile phone shop and a coffee bar respectively. The third door hadn’t been there at all, but in the past year it had shouldered its way onto the street front, an unassuming blank face with a brass doorknob.

Alphonse rapped twice on the peeling paintwork.

“A really, really big cucumber,” he giggled.

“Is that the password?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I just like to make Charles laugh.”

The door opened up and a boy of about thirteen stood there, grinning.

“Alright, Alan,” he said. “Who’s your friend?”

“Oh, Charles, you had to go and spoil it! I’d told Jolly Jim that my name was Alphonse!”

“Call yourself what you like,” I said.

Alphonse/Alan waved a hand dismissively.

“Is my table ready, Charles?”

“They’ll have it fixed in a jiffy, Alphonse. In you go!”

W
E WALKED ALONG
a dimly lit corridor at least twice as long as the building’s depth. The floor was covered in old carpet, the walls papered in wood chip. As we walked its length, we heard the sounds from behind the shabby doors that lined the corridor. Different rooms, hidden from view, each one a little world in which people laughed or argued or sobbed or played.

“This walk gets longer every time,” said Alan. “This city is being stretched and pulled in all directions.”

We came to a narrow set of stairs, an old red runner reaching down it like a dry and dusty tongue. We began to climb. Up and up, three flights, four flights...

“Half way there,” said Alan.

Doors faced onto the landings, shabby and worn, their paint peeling. I could hear a violin playing a mournful tune somewhere nearby and I felt the floor vibrate beneath my feet.

Higher and higher. The building had only looked three storeys tall from the street. I guessed we would now be high enough to see the river. We passed through a breath of air, exhaled by one of the rooms.

“Is that garlic?” I asked. “Or is it hash?” I sniffed again. “Or are there flowerboys in there?”

“Best not to ask,” said Alan.

Finally, we reached the top of the stairs. There was no corridor there, simply a gold panelled door. It opened at our approach and Alan gestured me to enter.

I stepped into a tiny anteroom. One wall was taken by a Welsh dresser lined with wine and brandy bottles. Fur coats, velvet cloaks, caps and hats hung from pegs on the facing wall. Before me stood a matronly woman. She wore a powdered wig and way too much make-up. Her dress was pinched at the waist in a manner that enhanced her décolletage. But then, she had a lot to be décolleté about.

“Mother Clap!” called Alan loudly. “Good welcome to Alphonse and Jim!”

“And which one of you is which?” asked Mother Clap drily, closing the gold panelled door behind us.

My companion laughed. “Oh, Mother Clap! You do tease your little Alphonse! Is our table ready?”

“Of course. I shan’t take your hats.”

This last was directed at me: I was bareheaded, having pulled on my jacket when I left the room and little else. Alan stood there, top hat and gloves in hand, looking quite crestfallen.

“Shall I put the evening on your account?” asked Mother Clap.

“But of course,” said Alan.

Mother Clap led us into a little dining room crammed with tables for two. There were half a dozen couples in there already, all male. My eyes were drawn to a tall black gentleman who sat in the corner. He was incredibly handsome, his face seemingly chiselled from ebony. Obviously royalty, his lapels and cuffs were picked out in leopard skin. Seated opposite him was a flowerboy. The young man’s limpid eyes and his lean, shapely frame made him look so pretty. Yet there was slyness to his look, a knowing tilt to his face. There is something about working in the flower market, with its rich, heavy pollens and heady scents that get inside you. All the flowerboys look so pretty and yet so nasty. This one was eating oysters, picking up the shells in his long, delicate fingers and sucking them down whilst his companion watched in silence. Alan leant close to me, his face half covering mine as if he was about to kiss me.

“Show me some consideration,” he whispered, his breath sweet. “I have my reputation to consider.”

I knew what he meant. I let him take my hand and allowed him to lead me to the table. He pulled out a chair for me and I sat down, then he took his place opposite me.

Mother Clap appeared at our side, her powdered bosom close to my ear.

“Gentlemen?” she said.

“You order, Jim.”

There wasn’t a menu, I noticed, but I knew the script. I knew what was expected of me.

“Those oysters look good,” I said. “A dozen each, I think.”

“With champagne!” said Alan, delighted at my response. I warmed to my theme.

“And then steak,” I declared. “Rare! And avocados, almonds and asparagus! Raspberries and strawberries, ginger and nutmeg, and chocolate pudding to follow!”

I looked across the room at the black man, but he paid us no attention. The flowerboy, however, had turned to look, oyster in hand. He was smirking. So were some of the other diners. Alan leant close.

“All the aphrodisiacs,” he said. “You naughty boy!”

“You wanted to play games,” I said. “I played games. Now, I think it’s time for you tell me what you want with me.”

The surrounding diners resumed their meals. I saw one man looking at his fob watch, and I strained to see the time, but he clipped it shut and resumed speaking to his partner who seemed uncomfortable in his badly fitting dress and wig. Now that I looked, I could see there was something slightly tawdry about the whole place, the flaking golden tables, the worn velvet chairs, the scuffed plush wallpaper. Despite its efforts, there was an air more of seediness than of immorality to Mother Clap’s.

Alan was gazing at me.

“You know, you’re half way there. That military jacket looks the part. I love the gold frogging. Now, if you grew your hair a little, affected a little moustache, dressed the part, you could look quite Byronesque. You’d have the women swooning at your feet.” He winked at me. “And the men.”

“I’m not interested in being a poet,” I replied.

“You should be. Better than what you are now.” He tapped a manicured finger on the table. “Fought in Baghdad and Helmand province. Even been into Burma. Resigned from the army. If only you could have made that a dishonourable discharge you’d be truly irresistible.”

“What do you know about my resignation? ” I asked, but he ignored me.

“Only twenty-six years old,” he said. “Who knows what you might have achieved, if only you could have kept to the straight and narrow. But men like you and me always have trouble keeping it in our trousers, eh Jim?”

I thought of Christine, speaking to me in the street outside my room.

“I was set up,” I said. “They didn’t have any evidence and they knew it.”

“Fraternising with the enemy?”

“We were friendly with the local women.”

“And you never made any money out of them...”

Alan gazed at me, and for a moment the foppish air was gone. Then he waved his hand in the air in an affected manner.

“Still, that’s all in the past. You’re a lucky man, I think, Jim Wedderburn.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You’ve done well out of Dream London. I wonder how you would have fared if the changes hadn’t happened?”

He waved a hand around the room. We both saw the occupants of the table in the far corner struggling with the seafood salad. Green tentacles batted their forks away as they tried to spear their dinner.

“I’d have got by,” I said.

“Maybe so,” said Alan. He tuned to look back at the unsuccessful seafood eaters. “You know, they should squirt that octopus with lemon and chilli. That will calm it down.” He turned his attention back to me and beamed.

“I just can’t help thinking that in the old city you’d have been just another out of work soldier. Instead, you were lucky enough to return here as a rogue.” He winked. “And the ladies love a rogue.”

Before I could answer him, Mother Clap appeared with the champagne. A maid shuffled the ice bucket into place.

“Allow me,” said Alan, opening the bottle. “Not with a pop,” he said, “but with the sigh of a contented lover.”

He poured the champagne, golden bubbles in a golden room. I took a sip and felt immediately light headed: champagne on poison and an empty stomach.

“What do you want, Alan?”

Alan wasn’t listening, he was too busy enjoying his champagne.

“Lovely,” he said, smacking his lips. “You know, you should write your memoirs, Jim. There’s good money to be had. After that, set yourself up as a poet. You wouldn’t have to be any good at it, you know. It wouldn’t matter what you wrote, with an image like yours!”

“I’m not interested in being a poet.”

“And why should you be? Jim Wedderburn, a gentleman and rogue, or so they say!”

I opened my mouth to deny it, but Alan was still speaking.

“... but then, this is a romantic age, and people love a villain as much as a hero, don’t they? And neither really exists...”

Alan sat back and gazed at me, and once more I saw the shrewdness there. I hadn’t doubted he was playing a part when I met him. Now I began to suspect there was something substantial behind the act.

Alan sipped his champagne.

“Have you ever considered leaving Dream London, Jim?”

I laughed.

“Who hasn’t? This place is like a lobster pot. Easy to enter, impossible to leave. You get lost on the trains trying to escape, find yourself missing connections or standing on the wrong platform. Before you know it you’re riding back into Angel Station once more.”

“True. But if there were a way, would you take it?”

“If you know of a way, I’d love to hear of it.”

“What? You’d leave all this?”

“Like a shot. Is there a way?”

“Not that I know of.”

The oysters arrived, split open and laid out on ice. My stomach was rumbling again, so loudly that I was sure the gentleman on the next table heard it. He was looking across at me now. I flipped him the finger. He poked out his tongue at me in return.

“Try the horseradish,” said Alan, pointing to the little tray of accompaniments. “It’s delicious.”

I was starving. I finished my oysters and ate four of his.

“Lovely,” said Alan as the maid cleared the dishes. When the table was clear,he placed something onto the cloth before me. A picture, lights twinkling across it. He looked at me, expectantly.

“That’s London,” I said.

“Taken from an airship, just before the airport slid below the marshes.”

I gazed carefully at the picture. It had been taken using a slow glass camera – a shawscope.

“How long ago?” I asked.

“Five months,” he said.

I still felt as if I was in a dream of a dream, lost somewhere between night and morning. I didn’t know the time, and Alan had led me to a place without clocks.

I looked at the right hand side of the photograph, looked for the square mile. The towers in the picture cast moonlight shadows into the river. Today the Thames curls around itself like a snake getting ready to strike. Five months ago the river still retained some of its old shape, and I followed it along, finding the Houses of Parliament.

“Look here,” said Alan, pointing to a space near to the centre of the map.

“That’s Hyde Park,” I said.

“Green Park,” he said. “Look how the other parks are moving towards it.”

I could see, all the other green spaces, distorted as they crept towards the middle of the city.

“Have you ever been to Green Park?” asked Alan.

“Not lately. The river wraps it in bands, and the parks around it are growing wider, and it’s virtually impossible to find a way into the parks these days...”

I looked again at the picture. Had all those spaces joined up by now, I wondered?

“Something is happening in the centre of the city,” I said, slowly. “That’s what I’ve been hearing, anyway.”

“From whom?”

I looked at him.

“Contacts. Business partners. People in the know.”

“I think I know the sort of people you mean. What do you hear?”

“Only rumours and tales, Alan. Nothing but rumours and tales. But there are hints. Follow any story back along its course, and sooner or later the parks are mentioned.”

We both looked at the map again. I noticed the second river that flowed down from the north to join the Thames in the east. The River Roding, much, much wider than it used to be.

Alan spoke in a low voice.

“We want you to find out what’s going on, James.”

I looked up at the sound of my real name, and saw that now the mask had slipped away. I was sitting opposite the real Alan.

“Who are you, Alan?” I asked.

“Me? I’m a man who doesn’t like the way the world is changing.” He tapped a finger on the table. “I’m a man whose way of life is being pushed back into the shadows. I’m a man who doesn’t want things to go back to the way they were a hundred years ago when people like me were outcasts. And I’m not alone. This new world is creating winners and losers, and some of the losers still have enough power and influence to try and fight back. We want you to help us.”

“Why me?”

“Because of who you are, James.”

“Who I am? Captain Jim Wedderburn is a rogue. He drinks and whores, he fights and steals.”

“But people listen to you, James. You’ve got the looks, you’ve got the voice. There are wiser men, it’s true – no offence,” he raised a hand at that, “and there are people who may be better placed to give advice. But there’s something about you that makes people want to follow you. You’re a natural leader, James.”

“Maybe so,” I admitted. I knew that people listened to me. I’d risen through the ranks in the army because of that.