Dream London Read Online Free

poet,” I replied.
    “You should be. Better than what you are now.” He tapped a manicured finger on the table. “Fought in Baghdad and Helmand province. Even been into Burma. Resigned from the army. If only you could have made that a dishonourable discharge you’d be truly irresistible.”
    “What do you know about my resignation? ” I asked, but he ignored me.
    “Only twenty-six years old,” he said. “Who knows what you might have achieved, if only you could have kept to the straight and narrow. But men like you and me always have trouble keeping it in our trousers, eh Jim?”
    I thought of Christine, speaking to me in the street outside my room.
    “I was set up,” I said. “They didn’t have any evidence and they knew it.”
    “Fraternising with the enemy?”
    “We were friendly with the local women.”
    “And you never made any money out of them...”
    Alan gazed at me, and for a moment the foppish air was gone. Then he waved his hand in the air in an affected manner.
    “Still, that’s all in the past. You’re a lucky man, I think, Jim Wedderburn.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “You’ve done well out of Dream London. I wonder how you would have fared if the changes hadn’t happened?”
    He waved a hand around the room. We both saw the occupants of the table in the far corner struggling with the seafood salad. Green tentacles batted their forks away as they tried to spear their dinner.
    “I’d have got by,” I said.
    “Maybe so,” said Alan. He tuned to look back at the unsuccessful seafood eaters. “You know, they should squirt that octopus with lemon and chilli. That will calm it down.” He turned his attention back to me and beamed.
    “I just can’t help thinking that in the old city you’d have been just another out of work soldier. Instead, you were lucky enough to return here as a rogue.” He winked. “And the ladies love a rogue.”
    Before I could answer him, Mother Clap appeared with the champagne. A maid shuffled the ice bucket into place.
    “Allow me,” said Alan, opening the bottle. “Not with a pop,” he said, “but with the sigh of a contented lover.”
    He poured the champagne, golden bubbles in a golden room. I took a sip and felt immediately light headed: champagne on poison and an empty stomach.
    “What do you want, Alan?”
    Alan wasn’t listening, he was too busy enjoying his champagne.
    “Lovely,” he said, smacking his lips. “You know, you should write your memoirs, Jim. There’s good money to be had. After that, set yourself up as a poet. You wouldn’t have to be any good at it, you know. It wouldn’t matter what you wrote, with an image like yours!”
    “I’m not interested in being a poet.”
    “And why should you be? Jim Wedderburn, a gentleman and rogue, or so they say!”
    I opened my mouth to deny it, but Alan was still speaking.
    “... but then, this is a romantic age, and people love a villain as much as a hero, don’t they? And neither really exists...”
    Alan sat back and gazed at me, and once more I saw the shrewdness there. I hadn’t doubted he was playing a part when I met him. Now I began to suspect there was something substantial behind the act.
    Alan sipped his champagne.
    “Have you ever considered leaving Dream London, Jim?”
    I laughed.
    “Who hasn’t? This place is like a lobster pot. Easy to enter, impossible to leave. You get lost on the trains trying to escape, find yourself missing connections or standing on the wrong platform. Before you know it you’re riding back into Angel Station once more.”
    “True. But if there were a way, would you take it?”
    “If you know of a way, I’d love to hear of it.”
    “What? You’d leave all this?”
    “Like a shot. Is there a way?”
    “Not that I know of.”
    The oysters arrived, split open and laid out on ice. My stomach was rumbling again, so loudly that I was sure the gentleman on the next table heard it. He was looking across at me now. I flipped him the finger.