Chase the Morning

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.