Dream London by Tony Ballantyne Read Free Book Online Page A

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