Signal to Noise (35 page)
“Want to see the Northern Lights this weekend?” she asked.
“Sure. It’s about time.”
Mexico City, 1984
A
GIRL SITS
outside her apartment building, headphones on, listening to her music. She has a bag of potato chips, a bottle of soda and her idle thoughts. She’ll do her homework later. For now, as the sun rolls down, she simply taps her foot to the rhythm of the music and listens to one of her dad’s tapes. It’s Boston singing More Than a Feeling. She sips her soda.
A man walks a dog. The seller of
camotes
pushes his cart. Kids kick a soccer ball down the street.
The girl scratches her leg. She’s awkward and dressed in clothes a size too large. Her hair falls loose below her shoulders.
A boy walks on the other side of the street and glances at her. Something clicks in her brain and she thinks this is the new kid. The weirdo who lugs all those books around. She saw him with a book called
Tales of Mystery & Imagination
and she wants to ask him how it connects with Alan Parsons Project because she doesn’t understand that album.
A
BOY DRAGS
the market bag with him trying to remember the things he’s supposed to get. A kilo of tortillas. On the way back, two litres of milk and a box of detergent. He repeats them in his head as he walks—Tortillas. Milk. Detergent.
He shuffles his feet. He’s a tall kid. He’s skinny and dark, his long fingers curling around the plastic handle of the bag.
There’s a girl his age sitting on the bottom step of an apartment building, listening to music.
The boy keeps to himself and walks with his head down, but he raises his eyes to look at her because she looks kind of funny with those big headphones on her ears.
She stares right at him. The look is like having a pin inserted into his chest. He stumbles, shifts, switches the bag from one hand to the other.
“Hey, horse-face!” she yells.
He blinks.
She takes off her headphones and points at him.
“Yeah, you. Do you like music?”
“No, sorry,” he says, shrugging.
“That’s too bad.”
He should have said ‘yes’. Maybe she would have played with him if he did. He can’t make friends. He always botches it.
“Do you like potato chips?”
“I like chips,” he says.
“What ya’ doing over there then?”
He crosses the street and sits next to her, setting his bag on the ground. He forgets he had to run errands for his mother.
S
HE OFFERS HIM
her chips and he takes a few.
“I’m Sebastian,” he says.
“I’m Meche.”
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
He grins at her with ease even though things like this—smiling, chatting, being friendly—are never easy for him. It feels easy now.
She smiles back. It’s not her usual drill. She’s a scowler. Even though she’s just about to hit puberty she can already tell being a teenager is going to be a load of crap. She smiles brightly for him because she feels bright, like someone just lit a match.
T
HEY SIT TOGETHER
and watch the world go by.
Deep down they know one fine morning they’ll run away together to a place where the sun shines at midnight.
Flamboyant Matthew Cannonbridge was touched by genius, the most influential mind of the 19th century, a novelist, playwright, the poet of his generation. The only problem is, he should never have existed, and recently divorced 21st century don Toby Judd is the only person to realise something is wrong with history.
Cannonbridge was everywhere: he was by Lake Geneva when talk between Byron, Shelley and Mary Godwin turned to the supernatural; he was friend to the young Dickens as he laboured in the blacking factory; he was the only man of note to visit Wilde in prison. His extraordinary life spanned a century. But as the world prepares to toast the bicentenary of Cannonbridge’s most celebrated work, Judd’s discovery leads him on a breakneck chase across the English canon and countryside, to the realisation that the spectre of Matthew Cannonbridge, planted so seamlessly into the heart of the 19th century, might not be so dead and buried after all...
‘Old school entertainment in the penny-dreadful tradition that almost succeeds in being as sublime as it is ridiculous.’
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Captain Jim Wedderburn has looks, style and courage. He’s adored by women, respected by men and feared by his enemies. He’s the man to fi nd out who has twisted London into this strange new world.
But in Dream London the city changes a little every night and the people change a little every day. The towers are growing taller, the parks have hidden themselves away and the streets form themselves into strange new patterns.
There are people sailing in from new lands down the river, new criminals emerging in the East End and a path spiraling down to another world.
Everyone is changing, no one is who they seem to be.
‘A real feat of the imagination, this is a really exceptional book, unlike anything I’ve ever read before.’
Chris Beckett
