AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"My father's palace," said Thor, "the Great Hall of Valhalla where we must go."
It was just on the tip of Kate's tongue to say that something about the place was oddly familiar when the sound of horses' hooves pounding through the mud came to them on the wind. At a distance, between where they stood and the Great Hall of Valhalla, a small number of flickering torches could be seen jolting towards them.
Thor once more studied the head of his hammer with interest, brushed it with his forefinger and rubbed it with his thumb. Then slowly he looked up, again he twisted round once, then twice and a third time and then hurled the missile into the sky. This time, however, he continued to hold on to its shaft with his right hand, while with his left he held Kate's waist in his grasp.
25
* * *
Cigarettes clearly intended to make themselves a major problem for Dirk tonight.
For most of the day, except for when he'd woken up, and except for again shortly after he'd woken up, and except for when he had just encountered the revolving head of Geoffrey Anstey, which was understandable, and also except for when he'd been in the pub with Kate, he had had absolutely no cigarettes at all.
Not one. They were out of his life, foresworn utterly. He didn't need them. He could do without them. They merely nagged at him like mad and made his life a living hell, but he decided he could handle that.
Now, however, just when he had suddenly decided, coolly, rationally, as a clear, straightforward decision rather than merely a feeble surrender to craving, that he would, after all, have a cigarette, could he find one? He could not.
The pubs by this stage of the night were well closed. The late night corner shop obviously meant something different by "late night" than Dirk did, and though Dirk was certain that he could convince the proprietor of the rightness of his case through sheer linguistic and syllogistic bravado, the wretched man wasn't there to undergo it.
A mile away there was a 24-hour filling station, but it turned out just to have sustained an armed robbery. The plate glass was shattered and crazed round a tiny hole, police were swarming over the place. The attendant was apparently not badly injured, but he was still losing blood from a wound in his arm, having hysterics and being treated for shock, and no one would sell Dirk any cigarettes. They simply weren't in the mood.
"You could buy cigarettes in the blitz," protested Dirk. "People took a pride in it. Even with the bombs falling and the whole city ablaze you could still get served. Some poor fellow, just lost two daughters and a leg, would still say 'Plain or filter tipped?' if you asked him."
"I expect you would, too," muttered a white-faced young policeman.
"It was the spirit of the age," said Dirk.
"Bug off," said the policeman.
And that, thought Dirk to himself, was the spirit of this. He retreated, miffed, and decided to prowl the streets with his hands in his pockets for a while.
Camden Passage. Antique clocks. Antique clothes. No cigarettes.
Upper Street. Antique buildings being ripped apart. No sign of cigarette shops being put up in their place.
Chapel Market, desolate at night. Wet litter wildly flapping. Cardboard boxes, egg boxes, paper bags and cigarette packets--empty ones.
Pentonville Road. Grim concrete monoliths, eyeing the new spaces in Upper Street where they hoped to spawn their horrid progeny.
King's Cross station. They must have cigarettes, for heaven's sake. Dirk hurried on down towards it.
The old frontage to the station reared up above the area, a great yellow brick wall with a clock tower and two huge arches fronting the two great train sheds behind. In front of this lay the one-storey modern concourse which was already far shabbier than the building, a hundred years its senior, which it obscured and generally messed up. Dirk imagined that when the designs for the modern concourse had been drawn up the architects had explained that it entered into an exciting and challenging dialogue with the older building.
King's Cross is an area where terrible things happen to people, to buildings, to cars, to trains, usually while you wait, and if you weren't careful you could easily end up involved in a piece of exciting and challenging dialogue yourself. You could have a cheap car radio fitted while you waited, and if you turned your back for a couple of minutes, it would be removed while you waited as well. Other things you could have removed while you waited were your wallet, your stomach lining, your mind and your will to live. The muggers and pushers and pimps and hamburger salesmen, in no particular order, could arrange all these things for you.
But could they arrange a packet of cigarettes, thought Dirk, with a mounting sense of tension. He crossed York Way, declined a couple of surprising offers on the grounds that they did not involve cigarettes in any immediately obvious way, hurried past the closed bookshop and in through the main concourse doors, away from the life of the street and into the safer domain of British Rail.
He looked around him.
Here things seemed rather strange and he wondered why, but he only wondered this very briefly because he was also wondering if there was anywhere open selling cigarettes and there wasn't.
He sagged forlornly. It seemed to him that he had been playing catch-up with the world all day. The morning had started in about as disastrous a way as it was possible for a morning to start, and he had never managed to get a proper grip on it since. He felt like somebody trying to ride a bolting horse, with one foot in a stirrup and the other one still bounding along hopefully on the ground behind. And now even as simple a thing as a cigarette was proving to be beyond his ability to get hold of.
He sighed and found himself a seat, or at least, room on a bench.
This was not an immediately easy thing to do. The station was more crowded than he had expected to find it at--what was it? he looked up at the clock--one o'clock in the morning. What in the name of God was he doing on King's Cross station at one o'clock in the morning, with no cigarette and no home that he could reasonably expect to get into without being hacked to death by a homicidal bird?
He decided to feel sorry for himself. That would pass the time. He looked around himself, and after a while the impulse to feel sorry for himselfgradually subsided as he began to take in his surroundings.
What was strange about it was seeing such an immediately familiar place looking so unfamiliar. There was the
ticket office, still open for ticket sales, but looking sombre and beleaguered and wishing it was closed.
There was the W. H. Smith, closed for the night. No one would be needing any further newspapers or magazines tonight, except for purposes of accommodation, and old ones would do just as well for sleeping under.
The pimps and hookers, drug-pushers and hamburger salesmen were all outside in the streets and in the hamburger bars. If you wanted quick sex or a dirty fix or, God help you, a hamburger, that was where you went to get it.
Here were the people that nobody wanted anything from at all. This was where they gathered for shelter until they were periodically shooed out. There was something people wanted from them, in fact--their absence. That was in hot demand, but not easily supplied. Everybody has to be somewhere.
Dirk looked from one to another of the men and women shuffling round or sitting hunched in seats or struggling to try and sleep across benches that were specifically designed to prevent them from doing exactly that.
"Got a fag, mate?"
"What? No, I'm sorry. No, I haven't got one," replied Dirk, awkwardly patting his coat pockets in embarrassment, as if to suggest the making of a search which he knew would be fruitless. He was startled to be summoned out of his reverie like this.
"Here you are, then." The old man offered him a beat-up one from a beat-up packet.
"What? Oh. Oh--thanks. Thank you." Momentarily taken aback by the offer, Dirk nevertheless accepted the cigarette gratefully, and took a light from the tip of the cigarette the old man was smoking himself.
"What you come here for then?" asked the old man--not challenging, just curious.
Dirk tried to look at him without making it seem as if he was looking him up and down. The man was wildly bereft of teeth, had startled and matted hair, and his old clothes were well mulched down around him, but the eyes which sagged out of his face were fairly calm. He wasn't expecting anything worse than he could deal with to happen to him.
"Well, just this in fact," said Dirt, twiddling the cigarette. "Thanks. Couldn't find one anywhere."
