Dream Paris (16 page)

The scenery slowly changed. We wound through chalk hills, cut through vineyards, followed river valleys down which great ships sailed, the decks decorated with bunting. We passed over a flat plain, running close to a wide grey city, the skies above it crowded with airships.

The train slowed to a stop at a station on the outskirts of the city, and I saw the four business Pierrots alight.

“Look,” said Francis.

I saw it, over the rooftops of the surrounding city. An Eiffel Tower wrapped in olive green bandages.

Night fell and we slept fitfully, occasionally waking to find ourselves lit by the bright lights of a station, the motion of the train briefly stilled. I opened my eyes at one point to see a black train rolling by outside, keeping pace with us. Or maybe that was just a dream.

And then morning rose and we were passing through corrugated dirt fields, rolling on and on to the horizon. The passengers were getting bored now. I had a sense that the journey was drawing to an end. People always get irritable at the end. There’s no point in losing your temper when there are hours to go, only when the end to the torment is in sight. I too was fed up with the shaking, the smell of stale food and sweat, of the toilets and the bundled nappies of the children.

Francis was sleeping opposite me, cuddling his backpack like a child holding onto a teddy bear. He seemed to feel my gaze; his eyes flickered open and he smiled at me.

“Wakey, wakey,” I said.

He smiled at me, and then looked confused.

“Did you do this?” he said.

“Do what?”

“Put the pack in my arms.”

We both stared at the pack. It suddenly seemed quite sinister, the way it nestled close to him.

“No. Why should I do that?”

He frowned, puzzled. Then he shrugged.

“I’m hungry,” he said.

So was I.

“There’ll be a trolley along soon,” said Erich, from his cage. “Would (5)you be so good as to buy me(5) something to eat? Anything that will fit through the bars will be fine.”

W
E RODE ACROSS
a wide plain for most of the day. I glimpsed far off towns on distant hilltops, lines of crops, neatly kept woods and forests. The sun rose up the Dream sky and slowly descended. We passed through the evening… and then, as if on signal, the passengers arose from their torpor and began to gather together their things. Blankets were rolled up, packages collected, coats were put on, papers were found and put in order.

I had a cold, hollow feeling. This was it. Soon there would be no going back. But of course, there had been no going back for some time now…

I pressed my face to the window, hoping to see Dream Paris approaching. Nothing. Nothing but darkness. And then, suddenly, an eye looking at me. A flash of white, and a splash, and I realised I was looking out over water.

“A river!” I said.

“The Seine!” said Erich. “That will be the Seine. We must be approaching the gate! Oh, I(5) wish I(5) could see!”

“The gate?”

“The gate in the wall around Dream Paris.”

The Dolls’ Dream London had a wall around it to, I remembered. But there was no time to think about that now, because I saw it, the long grey wall that stretched out across the plain, surrounding Dream Paris. We plunged towards it, the wall growing bigger and bigger. I thought I saw vines growing on the outside, tearing at the bricks, but then we were through the gate, travelling through darkness… Light exploded around us.

I reeled back from the window, my eyes adjusting to the sudden glare. The dark band of the river, still running alongside us, crossed by bridges, golden light reflecting in trails on the water. I saw buildings, bright lights; a searchlight, cutting across the sky. A jingle-jangle of sensation. The river turned away from us and another train curved in to take its place, pulling alongside us. Through the lighted windows I could see the passengers, men and women in brightly coloured clothes, reading little books or staring morosely into space. Dream Parisians. A golden china doll sat in a seat, staring at nothing. The other train began to pull away and I realised that we were slowing. The passengers rose and began to move towards the doors, and I realised that we couldn’t stay on the train forever. This little haven of safety was now gone the way of all the others.

Francis stood up. He pulled on his backpack, the wire still unbelievably playing out behind it.

And suddenly there was daylight. No, not daylight; we were in a station! A huge station. The train stopped.

We had arrived in Dream Paris.

JEAN-MICHEL PONGE

W
HAT WAS IT
like to step into Dream Paris?

What’s it like to step into any foreign city for the first time? Daunting? Exciting? Exhilarating? That sense of being out of your depth, of being in a place where everyone knows what to do and you find yourself standing hesitant at the edge, isolated, and very, very visible?

Imagine that feeling, then add the fact that you are a spy and everyone knows it (apart from you), that you’re searching for your parents, one of whom has told you she doesn’t want to be found, that you are in a place coveted by a powerful enemy, a place under the control of a gang of revolutionaries…

Not only that, you’re in the Dream World. So, how do you think I felt? I’ll tell you. I felt like crying.

But I didn’t. Crying is a choice.

Let me tell you what Dream Paris looked like.

Everything had the wrong proportions. I mean everything. The longer you were there, the more you noticed it. Everything was too big or too small. Or too tall or too narrow, or too fat or too slender. Or too loud or too colourful, too plain or too restrained, too patterned or exuberant or dignified or illustrated or crenellated or striated or stellated or reticulated or arpeggiated. It was glissando when it should have been staccato, it was plain when it should have been milk.

The cups for the coffee: too small. (And the coffee too strong. I don’t mean like strong like espresso is at home, I mean so strong that you could sense it before you put it in your mouth. Mere proximity was enough for you to taste it.)

The tables in the cafés: too small. Barely big enough for one person, never mind the usual four or five who tried to squeeze around at the same time.

The streets: too wide. Shop windows led onto wide pavements lined by trees followed by more pavement leading to the too-wide road, a road wider than you’d need for traffic in Britain and then you’d realise that it was only half a road because the thing you were looking at was the centre divider and on the other side was the same road only for the opposite traffic, then it was pavement-tree-pavement again.

Then there were the other streets, the ones that were way too narrow, with cars parked on either side and no space for other cars to get through which made you wonder how the original cars got there in the first place until you saw scrapes and the missing wing mirrors and you realised that they just forced their way through anyhow.

There was the way that nothing was level. Every road went up or down a slope. And they never met in a nice square. There were always at least five roads meeting, all at sharp angles to each other, and rising up or dropping down or spiralling away.

The clocks were all too big.

The lampposts were all too short.

The newspapers long and narrow, so that people sitting reading them had to have their hands too close together, while the paper trailed between their knees to the floor.

The men’s moustaches (when they wore them): too small or too big. Then there was the stubble, the brushed back greying hair, the scarves knotted carelessly around their necks.

The woman’s skirts that either reached to the ground or stopped just short of the imagination.

The toilets. No two the same, in little rooms with no ventilation and dim lighting. The toilets were never white, not even avocado, but in metallic paint, mosaic or simply psycho vomit.

But all that’s to come…

W
E STOOD ON
the platform, looking at a metal sign styled from green and yellow iron, twisted around itself like a weed.

Gare du Nord-Ouest. Paris L’Illusion

And beneath it, a temporary sign

La Révolution Reste Ouvert Pendant les Travaux

“What does that say?” asked Francis.

“I think it says the Revolution is still open during the works.”

“What works?”

The arched roof of the railway station was way too high above my head, there was so much empty space up there, wasted.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know. Find somewhere to stay. I’m hungry and dirty. I need a shower and a change of clothes. I hope that my meal ticket still works.”

“It will work.”

The crowd was thickening now, clustering at the end of the platform. A man sat at a desk there, flanked by two gendarmes. Passengers patiently formed a line, presenting their papers for inspection.

“Here we go,” said Francis.

I looked at my own papers, clearly marking me as a spy. All too soon we reached the head of the queue.

“
Vos(3) papiers, s’il vous(3) plaît.
”

The man behind the desk’s hair parted sharply down the centre. He examined the papers carelessly.

“
Vous(3) avez suffisamment d’argent pour votre(3) séjour
?”

“Er…”

“
La monnaie
!
Vous(3) avez la monnaie
?”

“He wants to know if we have enough money to support ourselves,” I said.

Francis was already pulling out his wallet and showing the cash to the guard. The man nodded and picked up his stamp. He spread out my papers, ready to approve them, when…

“One moment, please.”

Another man had stepped forward. This man was shorter than me, he was a little bit tubby, his chin was covered in stubble. He wore an apologetic expression as he took my papers.

“English, yes?”

“Yes…”

He examined my papers closely, nodding as he did so.

“A forgery. But a good one. And honest, too. Eh, little spy?”

“I’m not a spy!”

“But you would say that, of course. Still there are spies and spies. So,
bonsoir
! I am Citizen Jean-Michel Ponge. May I ask why you are here, Mademoiselle Sinfield?”

“To find my mother.”

“Does she want you to find her?”

I thought of the message held out by the china doll standing by the road in Dream Kent.

“She’s trapped here,” I said carefully. “She’ll want to go home.”

He smiled.

“I notice that you don’t answer my question. But you must understand, Mademoiselle Sinfield, that there are many people trapped here who want to go home! There are prisoners in the Bastille who would very much like to go home, but we don’t allow them to! There are indentured workers who would like to go home, but until they have worked off their loans, it would not be reasonable,
hein
? Simply saying that your mother wishes to return home does not excuse you spying upon us.”

“But I’m not a spy!”

“So you say! How did your mother come to be in Dream Paris?”

“I don’t know! She was sold off to a workhouse in Dream London and marched into the parks. That’s the last I saw of her.”

“And was she legally sold to the workhouse?”

I could see where this was going.

“The law was for sale to the highest bidder in Dream London,” I said, bitterly.

Jean-Michel shrugged.

“Again, I notice that you haven’t answered my question. And this leads me to point out that if your mother is working in Dream Paris under a legal contract then it would be wrong of you to help her to escape from the contract, no matter how much she dislikes the conditions under which she is being held.”

“The contract wasn’t fair! The banks pulled in all the loans when it suited them. They left my parents destitute!”

“That’s what banks do. There are banks here in Dream Paris…” Did I detect a certain bitterness in his voice? “Despite advice to the contrary, people take out loans every day here in Dream Paris. They cannot expect the Committee for Public Safety to bail them out should they be unable to pay the interest…”

“Doesn’t the Committee for Public Safety care for fairness?”

Jean-Michel shrugged.

“It cares as much as it can.” He rubbed the bristles on his chin. “You know, I wonder about letting you in here, Mademoiselle Sinfield, and yet I wonder if it’s safe to send you away? I’d rather have my spies in Dream Paris where I can see them, rather than outside speaking to the Prussians and the Portuguese.”

“I don’t intend to speak to any of those.”

“I’m sure. And yet if I let you in here you would go looking for your mother, and then I suspect you would do something foolish. Do you follow the law, Anna?”

“When it makes sense.”

He laughed.

“And that, you see, is the problem. There are people who play by the rules. They follow the law. These people want to see others caught and punished, because if they don’t then what’s the point of following the law? You give away a little freedom to be protected, but what happens when people like you don’t follow through on that?”