Dedication
To John Jarrold
Chapter One
I braked hard and pulled up; but the car in front of me shot through the lights just as they changed. I sat cursing myself as I watched those tail-lights dwindle away into the gathering gloom, and the other endless lanes of traffic come swarming out after them. The idiot in the flash German sport behind me beeped his horn, but I was too irritated with myself to pay any attention to him. There had been time, the half-second or so before the other lights changed; I could have put my foot flat down and raced through. I’d been close enough to the lights to get away with it, but this was a difficult, twisty junction, with lousy visibility on all four sides. All it would need was somebody else as impatient as me … Damn it to hell, I’d done the safe thing! But then that was me all over, wasn’t it? Safe driver; safe car; safe job; safe life …
Then why was I so furious? At work it hadn’t been the sort of day that leaves you snarling; it rarely was. Momentarily, idiotically, I found myself wishing it had been, that I’d had something to snarl at, to tussle with, to put a sharper flavour into the day. I raised my eyes to the skies, and at once forgot all my irritation. The sun had already left the ground in gloom, but it was lighting up a whole new landscape among the lowering clouds, one of those rare fantastic sunset coasts of rolling hills, deep bays, stretches of tidal sands, endless archipelagoes of islands in a calm estuary of molten gold. This one was made even more convincing by the shallow slope of the road; I might have been looking down from some steeper hill onto the real estuary. Except that that was far less picturesque, a flat, grim industrial riverside first laid waste when ships and shipbuilding boomed, then stricken a second time when they collapsed. None of the goods I dealt with passed through the docks here now; they were as dead as that skyscape was alive.
A horrible blaring discord of horns jolted me out of my dream. The lights had changed again, and I was holding up the queue. With a touch of malice I stabbed my foot down and shot across the gap so fast the glittering brute behind me was left standing. But the ring-road opened out into two lanes here, and in seconds he’d overhauled me and gone purring past with ruthless ease. I had a terrible urge to chase him, to dice and duel with him for pride of place, but I refused to give in to it. What was the matter with me? I’d always loathed the kind of moron who played stock-car on overcrowded commuter routes; I still did, come to that. No question of cowardice – it was other people that sort put at risk. Anyway, we were coming back into speed limits again. Another car whined past me, the same make, model, year as mine, the same colour even. I had to look closely to be sure it really wasn’t mine – and swore at myself again. Was I feeling the strain, or something? It had leopard-skin seats, anyway, and a nodding dog on the parcel shelf. At least mine didn’t; but right then it might as well have had, the way I felt about it, and about myself. Christ, I ought to be driving a Porsche too! Or something less crass – a Range Rover, a vintage MG even, something to stir cold blood a bit more than my neat sports saloon. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t afford to. If I was the real high-flyer everyone said I was, the wonder boy, shouldn’t I at least be getting a little more fun out of it – instead of stashing all my cash away in gilt-edge and blue-chip and just a little under-the-counter gold?
I pulled off at the exit – the same, the usual exit, the fastest way home. Home to what? The prospect of my flat loomed up at me, my neat, empty, expensive little designer garret, warming up as the heating came on. The idea of cooking dinner suddenly sickened me, the prospect of eating something heated up from the freezer even more so; I changed gear sharply, signalled only just in time that I was changing lanes. I was going to eat out; and not in any of my usual places. I might regret it in the morning, but I was going to find somewhere more exotic, even if it wasn’t as well-scrubbed. Thinking of the docks had started me on that tack; I remembered there’d been lots of crazy little places there, when I’d last passed through – and lord, how long ago was that? I’d been in my teens; it might have been ten years ago, even. And that was just on a bus, looking out on my way to somewhere else. I’d been a child when last I’d trodden those pavements, the times when my father had taken me down to see the ships unloading. I’d loved the ships; but the docks themselves had always seemed rather sad to me, with weeds growing up between the worn flagstones and the crane rails rusting. Even then they’d been dying. I remembered dimly that there’d been attempts recently to tart up parts of them for tourism, as somewhere picturesque; but how, or with what success, escaped me.
Why had I never been back? There’d been no time, not with the job, not with the social life and the sport, all the other excitements and ambitions. Things that got me somewhere. I hadn’t actually set out to bury my taste for useless mooching about, but I’d had to let it slip away. Like a lot of other things. There was no choice, really, if I wanted to keep on the ball, to get ahead. And yet those trips to the docks, the sight of all those cases and containers with their mysterious foreign labels – they’d sparked off something in me, hadn’t they?
Not exactly steered me into my career; I’d thought that choice out very carefully, back at college. But they’d added something extra, a touch of living colour other likely jobs didn’t quite have. That hadn’t lasted, of course. You wouldn’t expect it to survive the rigours of routine, the dry daily round of forms and bills and credits. I hadn’t missed it much. Other satisfactions had taken its place, more realistic ones. But thinking about the docks just now, when I was feeling a bit adventurous, a bit rebellious, had woken a queer, nagging sort of regret. Maybe that was what had really sparked off this craving to go and eat there – the urge to rediscover the original excitement, the inspiration, of what I was doing. I did feel rather empty without it – hollow, almost.
I frowned. That brought back a less comfortable memory, something Jacquie had thrown at me years ago, in those last sullen rows. Typical; one of those daft images she was always coming up with, something about the delicate Singapore painted eggs on her mantelpiece. How they’d drained the yolk to make the paint … ‘You’d be good at that! You should take it up! Suck out the heart to paint up the shell! All nice an’ bright on the outside, never mind it’s empty inside! Never mind it won’t hatch! Appearances, they’re what you’re so fond of –’
I snorted. I shouldn’t have expected her to see things the way they were. But all the same … The turn-off wasn’t far, just at the bottom of the hill here was – what was it called? I knew the turn, I didn’t need the name, but I saw it on the wall as I turned off the roundabout. Danube Street.
All the street names were like that round here, as far as I remembered. Danube Street; Baltic Street; Norway Street – all the far-off places which had once seemed as familiar as home to the people who lived and worked here, even if they never saw them. It was from them their prosperity came, from them the money that paid for these looming walls of stone, once imposing in light sandstone, now blackened with caked grime. Herring and spices and timber, amber and furs and silks, all manner of strange and exotic stuffs had paid for the cobbles that drummed beneath my tyres now, at a time when the town’s prime street was a rutted wallow of mud and horse-dung. Some of the smaller side-streets had really arcane names – Sereth Street, Penobscot Lane; it was in Tampere Street I stopped finally and parked.