Midnight Lamp Read Free Page A

not-bad guitarist, horrendously in debt.
    This needs thought.
    Make a list : One pack flour tortillas (NB, not the brand that tastes of soap). Maize meal for Fiorinda’s excellent stove-top corn bread; eggs. Veg, whatever they have fresh. Tinned fruit, any kind but pineapple which we all hate, the cinammon buns she likes. Little elastic bands to mend the Nevada kids’ stunt kite. What’s the Spanish for that?
    I wonder exactly how much a boat like the Lorien would cost?
    Fuck it. We won’t starve. We can live on clams and steal the cows’ tomatoes.
    It dawned on him that he’d started to think in terms of never going back to England. What, just vanish from the screen…? He turned his head, to avoid getting choked by dust as a blue off-roader Compact rumbled by, and looked after it; idly curious. US plates, surfie stickers in the rear window, longboards on the roof. There aren’t any waves, he thought.
    New campers? They better fit in with the ambience.
    The driver of the Compact pulled up at the entrance to the fishing camp, and got out. Above the gateway, which possessed no gates, a marlin leapt in blue and white mosaic: leprous with deleted pixels, flanked by red and yellow butterflies. A hand-painted sign advertised cabins, RV hook-ups, cocktails, firewood, surf-fishing, dry suit hire and Horse rides. Beyond the gateway a row of battered talapas, straw thatched beach umbrellas, stood outside a flat-roofed, pastel building; possibly a bar. Nothing stirred when he peered into the dark interior.
    ‘Anyone home?’
    No answer, only the sound of the ocean.
    Cautiously, he explored. The scurvy RV camp was noontide silent. There were dish-aerials, most of them big enough to be illegal; a recycling plant beside a midden of scrap plastic and metals. Stacks of dessicated clam shells, pyramids of beer bottles, a skeletal thing made of thousands of old pens: ballpoints, felt-tips, gel-tips, rollerballs. A large grey iguana stared him out, sideways, from under one of the trailers; everything had an air of post-futuristic dereliction and outlawry. Two of the dogs in the biggest compound, (command post?) stood up, rattling their chains: a German Shepherd and something like an Irish Setter, but bigger, and having deeply malevolent yellow eyes. He retreated.
    Beyond a giant mutant tamarisk hedge, festooned with sun-drained rainbow pennants, he found a row of cabins. The first had a shiny jeep and a boat trailer outside. The rest were padlocked and clearly unoccupied, except for the one at the end. He listened, glanced around, and moved closer. A towel hanging from a line, a dishpan of murky water, full of submerged underwear. A sketchpad, held down by a slab of plastic-cased hardware, lay on a trailer-park sunbed that had seen better days.
    Doubt assailed him. Why would they be living like this?
    He bent over the pad, careful to touch nothing. On the top leaf he saw an unfinished portrait, male, half profile…and the hardware was a portable videographics desk, of alien but hi-spec design.
    Oh yes. What do the English say?
    Gotcha .
    Out on the beach, beyond the gap in the dunes, there were figures in the landscape. Kids ran around, local people were digging clams. He tipped his straw hat to the back of his head and strolled. A tall, very slender white guy was playing a ball game, with a young woman whose ragged red hair whipped to and fro like the pennants on the tamarisk hedge. She wore a body glove and knee length denims. The man wore a loose white shirt and pants that accentuated his willowy height and languid movements. His hair was cropped yellow curls, eyes invisible behind aviator shades. They each wore a ring on the third finger of the left hand: but he couldn’t get a good look. He watched the game.
    They ignored him, but not in an unfriendly way.
    ‘D’you mind if I ask a question?’
    The young woman turned on him a mask of beaten gold, pierced by a pair of eyes like clear grey stones, so like the cover image on her