Authors: Tony Ballantyne

Tags: #Fantasy, #Urban, #Fiction

Dream London (6 page)

In the kitchen, Margaret was frying bacon at the Raeburn.

“Soon be ready,” she said. “I’m making more coffee.”

There was a large wooden table in the middle of the room and I sat down at it. Three cookbooks lay on the table, the middle one open at a recipe for a boiled pudding of some description. The photograph of the dish was fading to a woodcut.

“This is all natural food, before you ask,” said Margaret above the sound of frying. There was evidence of natural food everywhere stored around the kitchen, from the two hams that hung from the ceiling to the polished green apples laid out on trays on a side counter, ready to be stored away.

“Don’t worry about me,” I grunted. “I can’t afford to be fussy.”

“You should be. The Cartel is convinced that street food is speeding on the changes.”

She scooped the bacon onto a warming plate, and then cracked two blue eggs into the pan.

“Duck eggs,” she said, looking at me over her shoulder with her big brown eyes. “You always get a nice breakfast living near the Egg Market.”

The sizzle of eggs, the smell of bacon and coffee, it all conspired to make me feel quite homesick. Homesick for the old days, before the changes.

“Can I have some fried bread?” I asked hopefully.

“Of course you may,” she said.

I watched her working, thinking about what she had said.

“Are you part of the Cartel?” I asked.

“Of course not. No women allowed. The changes, don’t you see?”

I looked around the kitchen and noticed a brace of pheasants hanging by the hams: the red-gold cock and the brown hen bound together by their necks.

“What does Alan do to afford this place?” I asked.

“When
we
bought it, it wasn’t just Alan,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Now, of course, he struggles to pay the mortgage.”

“Things are tough all over,” I said, without sympathy. Rents were rising all over the city, families were being forced into the workhouse. It was every man for himself in Dream London, and the women had to hope that some man would look after them.

The eggs joined the bacon on the warming plate. She swiftly cut two slices of white bread and dropped them in the pan.

“It was easier with two salaries,” she said, reflectively. “Of course, when the changes began, I saw the way things were going. I took voluntary redundancy before I was pushed out.”

She dropped the bread onto the plate and brought it to me. I began to eat. Margaret fetched the coffee pot and two fresh cups then sat down opposite me. Her ample bosom spilled over the top of her dress as she leant forward. She smiled at me, clearly a woman of huge appetites.

“You’re a good looking man,” she said. “I can see why Alan is attracted to you.”

“What does Alan do in the City?” I asked, not wanting to go down that road. She held my gaze for a moment or two. Then her eyes slid away.

“Used to be finance. Still is, I suppose. Now they underwrite the ships that set off sailing to the other places. They place bets on what might be brought back down the river.”

“What ships? What other places?”

She sipped her coffee once more.

“Where do you think all the new stuff comes from? You know, it’s just the ships at the moment, sailing down the River Roding. It’s going to get a lot worse soon. Once they open up other paths here.”

“Mmm.” I concentrated on eating. The duck eggs tasted unusual in a breakfast.

“You know the changes began in the City?” said Margaret. “The banks sold a stake in the City to someone they shouldn’t. They let something gain a toehold...”

“I’d heard that,” I said.

“The City keeps it quiet. That shouldn’t surprise you. They were never exactly forthcoming about holding up their hands to mistakes in the past, were they?”

I finished my breakfast, mopped up egg yolk with the last piece of bread. My favourite part of the meal.

Margaret was gazing into the distance now.

“It started in East London. I remember seeing how the buildings there were growing taller as I went to work. Back then I thought it was just my imagination, but no...” She gulped down some more coffee and topped up her mug from the pot. “The houses in Whitechapel began to subside into slums...”

I leant back in my chair and took a deep sigh.

“The first time I became aware was when my flat began to shrink,” I said. “No, that wasn’t it. I went to buy screws to put up shelves, and the shop wasn’t there anymore. I couldn’t even find the street. I walked up and down all afternoon looking for it...”

I drained my cup. Margaret refilled it.

“Have you got a cigarette?” I asked.

She brightened up at that.“I thought you’d never ask.”

She produced a purple pack and a box of yellow matches. She pulled us out an oval turkish cigarette each and lit them, mine first, and then hers.

She brightened even more as she inhaled.

“That’s better,” she said, exhaling blue smoke. “One of the benefits of the changes. Cigarettes coming back into fashion.”

We smoked in companionable silence for a while, sipping at our coffee.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” asked Margaret, suddenly.

I shook my head.

“She bought one of those lists of men,” I said, pausing to take another drag. “She’s searching for her ideal partner.”

“Your name wasn’t on the list, I take it.”

I shrugged.

“I often think about buying one of those lists myself,” said Margaret. “But then I tell myself things could be a lot worse. The way things are going in Dream London being a housewife is about be the best choice for women, don’t you think?”

I didn’t answer. I knew what the career choice was for many of the women of Dream London. Captain Jim Wedderburn earned his twenty per cent looking after them.

Somewhere in the hall a clock chimed the hour.

“Midday!” I said. “I didn’t realise I’d slept in so late!”

“It’ll do you good. You’ll not be getting much sleep in the near future.”

That brought me up short.

“Why not? What exactly do the Cartel want with me?”

She stood up suddenly.

“I think it’s time we had a drink.”

I
T WAS A
gloriously sunny day. The may blossom was burning white on the trees in the garden. The smell of warmth filled the air.

“Anyone who cannot see any good in the changes should be shown the hawthorn trees,” said Margaret. “The may blossom was never so white in the past; the leaves were never so green.”

She was right, too. The blossom seemed to shine with its own light, and it made the ragged leaves glow greener.

We left the drive of Alan’s house and made our way down the sun-dappled street, shaded by the horse chestnuts. Their candlestick blossoms were dying back now, but their leaves seemed freshly minted in green. I saw the golden shapes of tamarind monkeys, making hand signals to each other in the branches.

I felt quite jaunty, wearing a red and white candy striped blazer and a pair of linen trousers that Margaret had supplied. Even accounting for seasonal variation, Dream London gets warmer every month; I felt pleasantly cool in the midday sun. I felt as if I should have on a straw boater; certainly Margaret was wearing a wide-brimmed hat.

“Is it far?” I asked.

“No. We’re going to meet Bill Dickenson.”

“Who’s he?”

“I’ll leave it to Bill to explain that.”

L
ONDON HAD ALWAYS
mixed its rich and poor close together. In Dream London the effect was exaggerated. Stepping from the moneyed calm of Hayling Street into Egg Market reminded me of how it used to be, stepping off an aeroplane into another country. One moment there is air conditioning, the voices of the other passengers, their familiar clothes and accents; the next there is the heat, the noise, the strange smells, the realisation that you are somewhere else.

It was like that stepping into the High Road, Egg Market. I could hear flutes and drums, the shouts of street vendors, the sizzling of frying. Someone was singing nearby, the sort of self-indulgent introspection that is so valued in Dream London. Someone thrust a yellow and red striped root into my face.

“Fresh in!” he said. “Peel it, slice it, fry it, serve it to your kids. This’ll make them behave themselves!”

“No thank you!” said Margaret with a shudder, pulling me on my way.

“I don’t remember this place from last night,” I said, looking around. The little shops beyond the market stalls had thrown open their doors, the light not penetrating their dim interiors. I saw tin pans and clocks and fur coats, and collections of coloured bottles of alcohol and ether and methanol and much worse things.

“It looks different in the dark,” said Margaret. Across the way I recognised the white tiled shape of the Egg Market itself, the building from which the area gets its name.

The Egg Market looks like a cross between an old fashioned cinema and a mosque. Four domes stand at its corners, the walls are covered in clean white tiles from Chinatown. People travel from all over Dream London to the Egg Market. I had visited the place myself, wandered the stalls inside its tiled halls. I had seen the wicker baskets filled with brown and white hens’ eggs; goose eggs; speckled plovers’ eggs like little stones. I had seen wrens’ eggs carefully wrapped in brown paper twists, and ostrich eggs tied around with string, a little loop in the top for carrying. And then there was the chilled hall, where the stalls were filled with ice on which stood bowls of fish roe and caviar. Through them were the more esoteric halls where you could buy leathery crocodile and alligator eggs, mixed bowls of snake eggs, fertilised and unfertilised. And then there was the amphibian room with its pools of frog spawn and then on to the tiny stands selling ant eggs and fly eggs and the eggs of all manner of insects. There was even the hall where only the women went, where jars full of menstrual blood and unfertilised eggs were arranged in lines on tables.

London is very different to how it used to be.

“Here we are.”

We were standing outside a pub: the Laughing Dog
.
A Dalmatian wearing half moon spectacles and a serious expression looked down from the sign.

“Take this,” said Margaret, pushing a leather purse into my hand. I could feel the weight of the coins inside. “It looks better if the man buys the drinks.”

I followed her into the pub, looked around the dim, grubby interior.

“This place is a dump,” I said.

“I’ll have a port and lemon,” said Margaret. She placed a hand on my arm. “I’ll be sitting over there.”

She pointed to a set of wooden booths. Most of them were already occupied by women, sitting alone for the most part, and I had an inkling of what sort of place this was. Now that I came to think of it, I’d been here before, on business.

“Pint of lager and a port and lemon,” I said to the unshaven barman.

“No lager,” he said, looking at me with contempt. “Bitter or mild.”

“Bitter, then.”

He poured me a flat pint and a glass of sticky port. I carried them across to the booth that Margaret had indicated and slid into the seat.

“Is that for me lover? Cheers!”

The woman sitting opposite was not Margaret. Red headed, she had one of the prettiest faces I had ever seen. She drained the drink and grimaced.

“Strewth!” she said. “That was deadly!”

What was wrong with her accent? It sounded like she had learned cockney from Dick Van Dyke.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was looking for my friend...”

“I’ll be your friend, lover!”

Again, that accent. It sounded so wrong. I rose from my seat, pint in hand.

“I’m sorry, I’ll just...”

She took hold of my wrist, jarring it. Thin beer slopped over my hand, onto the table.

“Don’t be like that,” she said. “Come on, come with me upstairs...”

Even in the confusion I noticed what a lovely hand she had, what clear eyes. Not at all like the whores of my usual acquaintance.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Really, there’s been a mistake.”

At that she leant close to me, and for a moment I thought she was going to kiss me, but instead she whispered in my ear.

“Don’t be a fool. It’s me, Bill Dickenson.”

What made me pause was not the name, but her accent. It was an accent that used to be so common, but was now rarely heard in Dream London.

“You’re an American,” I said.

“Shut up!” she hissed

“I’m sorry...”

She straightened up.

Then she called out in that faux cockney accent, “Like them, do you? Want to see more?”

She led me by the hand to the back of the pub and up the stairs, conscious of the amused, resentful and just plain bored stares of the other customers.

I wondered if I should play along, put my hands around her, but something made even Captain Jim Wedderburn pause.

I recognised that Bill Dickenson was not to be trifled with.