Dream Paris (14 page)

But all that’s to come. The waiter had switched languages.

“Ah! English! I thought so! I saw your shoes!”

We both looked down at our feet.

“We’re trying to get to Dream Paris,” I said.

“The railway station is just down the road. But first, you must eat. Come! Sit down!”

Francis nodded. He must have felt as hungry as I.

We propped our backpacks against the wall and took our places at a little table.

“
Un café au lait et un croissant, s’il vous plait.
” I was showing off, putting Francis in his place after his behaviour last night.

“I’ll have the same,” he said.

“We have no croissants. There is coffee and
tartine
. And I will need to see your papers.”

Francis and I exchanged glances.

“Papers…?” I said.

“You have no papers?” The waiter didn’t seem very surprised by this. “You won’t get very far…”

Francis took the hint.

“Perhaps you can help us?” he said, pulling out his wallet and removing a couple of coloured notes. The waiter shook his head, pointed. Francis counted out more Dream Francs until the waiter suddenly beamed, closed his hand and stuffed the notes into his pocket.

“
D’accord
! And now I will fetch your breakfast!”

He bustled off, leaving us to take in our situation.

The table afforded a good view down a wide street lined with plane trees, their dappled trunks reflecting the Dream light in yellow and green and gold. There were people out there, waking up the town. People dressed a little like Francis and me in old-fashioned clothes: pinafores and uniforms and high-collared shirts. They were pulling up shutters, setting out trestle tables, hurrying to work.

“What’s
tartine
?” asked Francis, unhappily.

“Bread and jam.”

“I wanted eggs.”

“You’re getting bread and jam. It’s French.”

“Don’t they have eggs in France, then?”

The waiter brought our breakfast. Pieces of baguette sliced lengthways, the crust golden brown, the interior soft and light and white and smelling of paradise. Two pots, one containing green jam, the other black. Two cups and a little metal coffee pot. Everything smelled so much
more
. But that was the Dream World.

I spread green jam on my bread and took a bite. A picture of an orchard filled my mind. Green leaves above green grass, people climbing ladders to pick green fruit. There were dolls in the orchard… porcelain dolls.

Francis was blinking.

“It’s like that cider…” he said. “You taste where the jam comes from.” He shook his head. “Was this normal? Did this happen in Dream London? The food speaks to you. You go down the wrong set of stairs and finish up in a different country?”

“The food changed you, but it never spoke to you like this. And distances… Well, they had a way of changing. Distances weren’t absolute in Dream London. You could climb five stories inside a building and only be on the second floor. Francis, I saw dolls. Porcelain dolls in an orchard.”

“I saw bushes, and young woman picking blackberries. No dolls.”

“Dolls everywhere,” I said. “Those ones in England that brought the message from my mother… Is she working for them, do you think?”

I thought about my mother, I imagined her being taken to the workhouse, stripped of her clothes, dressed as a doll, a porcelain mask pressed to her face. I shivered. It was too horrible.

The waiter reappeared.

“I’m sorry,
mademoiselle
. You appear to have dropped your papers…”

“Oh! Thank you!”

He handed across two pieces of ivory paper.

“You’d be surprised how many of our guests do that.”

I took my document and examined it. My name was written there:
Anna Margaret Louise Sinfield
. I looked over at Francis’s document and saw that his full name was
Francis Christopher Cuppello
.

“How did you know our names?” I asked.

“In Dream France, every object is referenced. If not then…” He open his hands. “
Poof!
”

I looked at the beautiful black handwriting, the way it covered the ivory paper. I noted that it had my name, age (17), marital status (single) and profession (
espion
).

“
Espion
?” I said. “What does that mean?”

“Spy.”

“I’m not a spy!”

“Of course not!” smiled the waiter. I could have punched his smug, self-satisfied, superior Dream French face.

W
E FINISHED OUR
breakfast and paid the bill, the waiter helpfully showing Francis which of the notes in his wallet to use and passing him a handful of hexagonal coins as change. Then we hoisted our backpacks and stepped out into the street.

The first thing we saw was the square pillar of the clock tower, rising up from the rooftops, higher and higher into the sky.

“That’s what we saw from Dream Dover,” said Francis, voice low with awe. He’d never have seen something so tall before. I was from Dream London, I’d seen towers rise up way too high, but this…

“I can still see the clockface,” said Francis. “It should be impossible at this angle.”

“Don’t look at it,” I advised. “The perspectives in the Dream World can drive you mad.”

“
Bonjour(4)
!
Tu(4) cherche la gare
?” The words were spoken by a man dressed in an immaculate primrose suit. Did you hear that
Bonjour(4)
? He was saying he was four social points above us. Not that I properly recognised that at the time.

“The railway station,” I said. “
Oui
!”

“
Là-bas
!”

He pointed down the street, touched his hat and was on his way. He’d addressed me, not Francis, I noted. Something occurred to me.

“What does it say your job is on your papers?” I asked.

“
Garde du corps
.”

It took me a moment to work it out. “Bodyguard.”

Francis shrugged.

“Fair enough.”

We were in Dream Calais. It said so in golden letters over the entrance to the railway station, a building that was a joy to behold, a poem written in curved iron arches and glass, filled to overflowing with light from the Dream sun. Gentlemen in mustard and gold suits strolled through the wide entrance, escorting ladies in plum and blueberry silks. A line of statues – tall women in robes and tiaras – were arranged at the front of the station, their pedestals inscribed with the various destinations served by the station:
Dream Madrid, Dream Tallinn, Madrid, Dream Mumbai, Munich, Dream Vladivostok, Dream Oldham, Dream Manchester
…

Dream Manchester?

Dream Moscow, Dream Troy, Atlantis, Dream Atlantis
…

We made our way inside and stood in the middle of the vast concourse, Francis with the long wire trailing from his backpack, running out of the station entrance and back down the street to the café and the route back to England. The hurrying French commuters stepped over the wire without seeming to notice it.

There was no clock in the station, I noticed. None was needed, not when the Dream Calais clock could be seen clearly through the glass.

Five robots stood on the concourse, looking lost. A sixth robot came hurrying up.

“Did you get the tickets?” asked one of the waiting robots.

“No. They said they’d never heard of Turing City. They kept asking if I was sure I didn’t mean
Turin
.”

“Come on, Francis,” I said, pulling him away from the little scene. “Look!
Billets.
Tickets.”

We found a little window, a woman sat behind it wearing a green and gold striped blouse.

“
(2)Bonjour, mademoiselle.
”

“Er,
bonjour.
Er…
Je voudrais acheter deux billets à
erm…
Paris aux Reves
?”

“English?” said the woman.

“Yes,” said Anna.

“Your papers, please.”

Francis and I pushed our papers through the little slot in the window. The woman took her time examining them.

“I hope Claude didn’t overcharge you for these,” she murmured. “Two tickets to Dream Paris, you say?”

“
S’il vous plait
. Return, please.”

“You are fortunate. The line to Dream Paris reconnected with this station only yesterday. There hasn’t been a route to that city for weeks.”

Francis opened his mouth to speak. I nudged him in the side.

“First or second class?”

“Er, first?” After all, it wasn’t my money.

“That will be 300 Dream francs, or 2 louis d’ors, 500 livres or 225 euros. I hope you have enough money for your stay in Dream Paris. It costs a lot of money to bribe yourself good treatment in the Bastille.”

I pushed the money across the counter and received two flowery rectangles of cardboard in return. Francis snatched them up and examined them.

“Hey! These returns are guaranteed for one day only!”

“Of course! The lines connect and disconnect. You can’t expect a line to go to the same place two days in a row.”

“Leave it, Francis,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Platform
Bleu
, ten minutes,” said the woman. “And you want to look after that purse. There are a lot of thieves about…”

“It’s okay. I’ve got a bodyguard.”

T
HERE WERE PIERROTS
on Platform
Bleu
. Four of them, dressed in white silken shirts, each carrying a dark leather briefcase, looking for all the world like businessmen and -women just heading off to a meeting.

“What should we do?” asked Francis.

“Ignore them. Pretend you haven’t noticed them.”

We walked down the platform. They were speaking in something like German. None of them so much as glanced at us.

We found a spot to stand further down the platform, near a large family, the women and girls dressed in crinoline, the men and boys in tight serge suits. The children all held little hamster cages in their hands.

“That’s their lunch!” said Francis, elbowing me in the ribs. I stared at him until he muttered a red-faced apology.

“Thank you,” I said.

Our train was approaching, rounding the bend of the platform. A golden brown steam engine hissed by, sparkling with rain drops. It was a foreign-looking engine, too many domes and pieces of machinery attached to it; it sparked and flashed and reciprocated and seemed to be making way too much of the simple job of moving from A to B. The driver leaned out of the cab, his large moustache bristling, resplendent in his striped overalls, clearly proud to be driving the engine. The coaches rolled by, drab olive green with neat little windows and gingham curtains framing brass tables with lamps on them. The train bumped to a halt, and something occurred to me.

“Your pack, Francis! What are we going to do with the wire?”

He’d already thought of that. We waited for the scrum of passengers to board, each pushing the others aside with no regard for anyone else, and then Francis passed his pack through the open window of the door. He climbed on board and pulled the door closed behind us.

“What if the wire garrottes someone?” I said.

“I don’t think it will. It’s barely there.”

“Francis, what
is
that pack? I thought you said it was just missile wire.”

“That’s what it was, back in London. It’s changed.”

“Why do you still carry it?”

“I have my orders.”

He had his orders. Oddly enough, I understood. Dream London changed people, it exaggerated what was there. Francis was a man who followed orders, he carried the pack, no matter how strange that pack became. I understood Francis. And that was a worry. Because if Francis was changing, then what about me? How was the Dream World affecting me?

We walked into a carriage, the seats already filled. Whole families seemed to be travelling together, from grandparents down to little children and babies. They would take over a pair of tables across an aisle, drape them in red-and-white-checked table cloths and then load them up with loaves of bread, bottles of water and wine, earthenware bowls of salad and boiled potatoes, whole roast chickens. They filled in the gaps in between with fruit and little cakes, dishes of olives and pickles and pats of butter, platters of runny cheese and little jars of foie gras. The air in the carriage quickly filled with a delicious smell that sent my stomach rumbling. I’d only had bread and jam…

“I think first class is the next carriage,” said Francis, pushing down the aisle.

I felt a lurch as the train began to move from the station: we were on the way to Dream Paris.

Francis was holding his breath, I noticed, feeling the
whizz, whizz, whizz
as the train picked up speed and the wire spooled out along its indefinite length, trailing back along the carriage and out of the open window. Slowly, he relaxed and I realised I’d been holding my breath, too.

The first class carriage was much less crowded, the seats here were much wider, two pairs on the left of the aisle, one on the right. The four Pierrots we’d seen on the platform sat around one file-strewn table. They paid us no attention. Two old men with immaculate beards and moustaches were deep in discussion, brushed top hats sat on the seats beside them. A tall Sikh had a table to himself, where he wrote furiously on a piece of parchment. A dog sat alone at the table opposite, looking out of the window with a serious expression on its face. It was rather a handsome creature, white fur with foxy red patches. It glanced at me and I noted the wildness in its eyes.

We found seats at a table for four, opposite a woman who appeared to be travelling with her father. The pair were impeccably dressed, the old man in a dark suit and lavender shirt, his white hair and moustaches combed and waxed, the woman in a fuchsia jacket and skirt contrasting with a matched set of ivory gloves, scarf, hat and handbag. She looked me up and down in a manner that left no doubt what she thought of my appearance.

“What’s your problem?” I said.

Francis placed a hand on mine and I glared at him.

“Don’t touch me!”

He snatched his hand away. “Ignore her.”

“Did you see the way she looked at us?”