Dream Paris (8 page)

Everywhere looked so ordinary. There were no more orchids in the canal, nothing unusual. We walked through windblown litter, we kicked coke cans, we picked our away across sections where the path had been churned to mud. We walked on one side of the canal, then crossed a little bridge and walked on the other. We passed people coming the other way, a man walking a dog, a couple arguing, an old lady…

“Did you see her?” said Francis, the excitement clear in his voice. “She had a
pigeon
on a leash! We must be getting close!”

I thought he was right. We’d walked under several tunnels already, where buildings had been built over the canal. The tunnel ahead, however, seemed different. This one seemed to emit a bluish glow.

I walked into the tunnel entrance, senses alert for any change in my surroundings. Halfway through I realised I was holding my breath. I was still holding it when we walked out into the rain on the other side of the tunnel and saw we were still in London.

“This is ridiculous,” I said.

“The trail vanished when we were in there.” Francis rubbed his nose. “Didn’t you feel it?”

I looked around, thinking, remembering what Therese had said. They’d sold off London to the Dream World. At the end they destroyed the Contract Floor, and all those assets reverted to their original owners. But some of the assets remained unaccounted for… I looked at the canal.

“Who owns the water?”

“What?”

“The trail is in the water. Look, the flotsam is no longer there.”

“We should go back to the other side of the tunnel.”

Now I’d solved the problem he was quick with his suggestions. Men don’t like it when you know more than they do. We turned round and retraced our steps. Now that I was no longer holding my breath I had time to notice the source of the bluish glow. Nothing more than blue lamps, mood lighting for canals.

We emerged from the tunnel once more.

“It’s here,” said Francis, standing right on the edge of the footpath. I felt it, too. A muzzy, dreamy feeling, like the lift you get if you inhale from a glass of wine. Francis began, with some difficulty, to take off his backpack, the great weight defying even his build. He lurched this way and that as he slipped one arm from the loop, staggered as he brought it in front of himself then bent his knees to lay it on the ground. He unfastened a pocket at the top and pulled out a length of wire.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The path back home. They use this wire to guide missiles to their target. I’ve got several kilometres’ worth packed in here. Hopefully we can use it to leave a trail.”

Only several kilometres’ worth? How far away did he think Dream Paris was?

He opened another pocket in the backpack and pulled out a tube of epoxy, then he lay on his stomach, leaned over the edge of the towpath and fixed the wire to the brickwork, just above waterline. Finally, he pulled a little box from his pocket and fixed it to the end of the wire.

He pulled on his backpack again, the wire now trailing behind him like a tail.

“Okay,” he said. “Here we go.”

I realised what he was going to do.

“You’re going to swim up the canal?”

“Wade, I hope. I can’t swim with this pack on. Besides, I’m not a good swimmer. How about you?”

I’m a superb swimmer. I’d represented my school at the backstroke, before the changes. But I didn’t say that.

“I’m okay,” I said.

Now he was sitting on the edge of the towpath, ready to push himself forward and to drop in the water.

“What if it’s too deep?” I shouted.

Too late. Francis dropped into the canal. The water came up to his chest.

“
Fuck!
” he gasped “It’s cold!”

“There’s got to be an easier way…” I muttered, climbing in after him. And then I couldn’t speak for the shock of the cold water. What did we expect? It was winter. For a few moments I could do nothing but gasp whilst I tried to catch my breath. I held my hands above my head, keeping them out of the icy water.

“
Fucking hell!
” shouted Francis. I’d have done the same myself if I could have caught my breath. Gasping, I began to edge forward. The canal bed was slippery beneath my feet. My foot caught a stone and I almost fell over, face first, into the filthy, freezing water.

“Be careful!” said Francis.

“
What a stupid thing to say!
” I snapped. I’d found my voice at last.

“Sorry!”

We walked forward.

“There could be rats in here. We could catch Weil’s disease.”

We passed beneath the entrance into the dim blue light of the tunnel, Francis slightly ahead of me again. He always had to lead the way, always watching out for the little lady.

“Do you feel that?” he said urgently.

“No, I …” And then, I did. “I can feel cobblestones beneath my feet. And I think the water is getting warmer.”

Actually, there was no doubt that the water was getting warmer. The contrast to the freezing cold was as welcome as it was sudden.

“It’s coming,” I said. “It’s coming…”

I felt sick with fear. Francis didn’t know it then, Francis never knew it, but I turned around, I made to walk back down the tunnel, back home. I’d given in to my fear, but the water ran a little harder, the air filled with a spicy scent, the muzzy, dizzy feeling took hold of my body and I was walking, turning around, following Francis once more. Following him through crystal waters, following him up to the mouth of the tunnel, following him to the butterscotch glow of sunlight welcoming me back to the Dream World.

DESOLATION ROW

I
WALKED FROM
the darkness of the tunnel into the brightness of the Dream London day. Blinding loops of light rippled on the crystal waters. The Dream heat pressed against me, and I knew my clothes would be dry in an hour or so, stiff and dry and smelling of smoke and cinnamon. I was staggering, reeling, unable to deal with the sensory overload. The buildings of Dream London were welling up around me, looming out of the glare like an approaching wave…

I saw red brick terraces piled high with extra stories, brickwork bent drunkenly around skewed doorways and misshapen windows. I struggled to focus, my vision overwhelmed by the crooked chimneys teetering on the roof tops, at the grey columns of monuments rising up behind them; crammed together, each crowned with some shape: a statue, a spiked ball, a dodecahedron. And then behind
them
, coming into focus, rising up to touch the sky, I saw the skeletal remains of the great towers, their bodies burned, the vegetation that had clung to them now withered and died. The towers were dead, dark bones on the horizon.

So much visual information at once, crowding in on me. Green gaslamps and pink posters and scarlet signposts. All that colour and light was almost too much after the greyness of London. I’d grown so used to the regularity of the mundane world. Here, there wasn’t a straight line to be seen, the edges of the buildings and the roads and the canal were cut out with pinking shears. I closed my eyes, I rubbed my face with the warm water of the canal.

Everything looked at once familiar and wrong: whatever power humans had held in Dream London had long been overthrown here. The towers might be dead, but the rest of Dream London was alive. The plants and flowers were running wild, they burst from the windows of the houses in riotous profusion, long green vines trailing scarlet flowers, their scent heavy on the air. The very countryside itself had encroached on the city in luxurious tongues of grass, in rounded hillocks that shouldered aside the buildings, cracking and crumbling the brickwork of the red terraces.

There was a chattering noise above me. I’d emerged into this remnant of Dream London beneath the arch of a white bridge. I waded forward a little, turned to look back at the marble spans, watched how they ran left and right into the overgrown mass of buildings that pushed amongst the green banks around us. Something was moving up there, peering out between the verdigrised models of octopuses that decorated the bridge…

“… sus fucking Chr…”

Francis waded up beside me. He seemed far more affected by the scene than I, but I suppose he’d only experienced Dream London for a short time, and that with a battle to fight. Rushing from one place to the next, watching out for enemies, he would never have had the opportunity to fully appreciate the strangeness. And now, here he stood, waist deep in water, wearing a backpack that trailed a wire back into the tunnel behind us, watching the group of blue monkeys gathered on the bank of the canal before us. They grinned and chattered and made obscene gestures. More of them looked down on us from the bridge above.

“Are they safe?” asked Francis.

I have to admit I was impressed by that. There was no false bravado with Francis: he didn’t need to act hard. He
was
hard. He knew that he could stand up in a fight, he’d done it. You don’t have to act when you know who you are.

“They’re nasty,” I murmured. “They used to torture cats.”

The monkeys pointed to us with pale blue hands. They were planning something.

“Stand still,” said Francis. He walked forward, wire jumping and jerking in the water behind him, scattering crystal drops. There was something odd about that wire. The monkeys on the bank observed his approach. Some of them retreated. One or two of the braver ones came forward, retreated, came forward. They were chattering and hooting. Challenging him. Still Francis walked on, coming to the edge of the canal. He looked at the crowd of monkeys, picked one of them out. Monkey and man faced-off.

“Get out of my way,” growled Francis. The monkey flinched, then slowly turned around and patted away, hands and feet, as if it was bored, as if it had better things to do.

Francis began to try to climb from the canal, but the heavy pack dragged him backwards. I waded forward and helped to push him onto the sweet grass of the bank, the wire sharp on my face. I examined it for a moment: the wire looked different somehow, here in the Dream World. But I was getting wet, and so I climbed out and joined Francis at the focus of the semicircle of monkeys, lurking just out of range.

“You just have to identify the alpha male,” said Francis, with some satisfaction. “Best him, and the others will retreat.”

We walked forwards, and the monkeys parted to allow us to pass. Francis wore a smug expression, like I should be grateful. Like it took a man to sort out the problem. In his eyes, it took an alpha male to deal with another alpha male. Typical alpha thinking, in other words. None of them ever stop to wonder what things would be like if there were
no
alpha males.

We descended the bank onto a derelict Dream London street.

“Look,” I said pointing to a line of bullet holes punctuating the brickwork of the nearest houses, the jagged teeth of shattered windows sharp in the daylight. The ground was scattered with ash and rubble.

“That’s regular artillery,” said Francis, thoughtfully, examining the bullet holes. I wasn’t really listening, my attention had been caught by a view down the long alley between two houses. There, framed against the butterscotch sky, was something I did not expect to see in Dream London…

It looked like someone had taken the Eiffel Tower and covered it with canvas, then set fire to it. The skeleton of twisted and blackened iron girders emerged from the burned skin. The tower had died in agony, the top of it twisted around and down so that it almost touched the elongated tiled rooftops of the surrounding houses. It almost seemed to be looking at us.

“Are we in Dream Paris already?” wondered Francis.

“No, look.”

I pointed to a half-burned news kiosk. The rain sodden papers and magazines that had survived were definitely written in English.
The Illustrated Dream London News
,
Arse and Titbits
,
Aardvark Fancier.

Francis had crossed the road, the wire dancing behind him. He rubbed the ash from a street sign.

“Barking Road.” He looked at me. “Which way do we go, Anna? Should we take a closer look at the burnt-out Eiffel Tower?”

I shivered at the thought.

“I don’t think so. You can get lost in Dream London streets. I suppose if we follow the canal we’ll be heading towards the sea…”

We walked down the road, more of the oddly changed wire trailing behind Francis. The backpack whirred with each step that he took, dispensing another length of the trail back home. I kept turning to look at the wire, observing how it ran up the green bank, seeing where it vanished over the top. How long before I returned this way, perhaps with my parents, heading for home? What was it that was so strange about the wire now? I reached out to touch it, but Francis interrupted my thoughts.

“There’s been a battle fought here,” he said, thoughtfully, stirring a brass rifle cartridge with his toe. It rolled across the pavement, fell clinking from the kerb. “And recently.”

I looked around. “Where are the people who lived here?”

“Most of them will have fled. There will be people still hiding, though. Scavengers, snipers, people with battle shock, people who simply don’t know where to go.”