Looking for Mrs Dextrose (12 page)

Suddenly I remembered the map I had stolen from the Shaman and whipped it out of my pocket. “We forgot all about this!” I announced.

“What is it?” asked Quench.

I was only too happy to explain.

It was an A5 street-map, printed on both sides in black-and-white. A furry uneven edge suggested it had been ripped from a book and, judging from its condition, it was pretty
old.

The barkeep picked it up. “I recognise that design,” he said, and hurried back behind the bar. He emerged with a book titled,
Pocket Map of Pretanike
, and began riffling
through its pages. “Gotcha!” he said as he took his seat. “Look!”

A thin jagged line of paper nestling in the spine of the book indicated a page had been ripped out, exposing page numbers 146 and 149. He picked up our piece of the puzzle. On either side were
printed the numbers 147 and 148.

“Where did you get that book?” I asked.

Quench shrugged. “Visitors leave ’em and I collect ’em, case they ever come in ’andy.”

“So how the hell did the Shaman come to have this page?”

“No idea,” he said. Then, wishfully, to Dextrose. “Any idea, ’Arry?”

Dextrose said nothing.

Importos only looked confused, which was ideal.

More to the point, how did the double-sided map solve the puzzle of Dextrose’s crude sketch? I withdrew that from my pocket for reference. Between us, Quench and I pored over the map,
seeking, hoping for something to fit. Its streets were densely packed, Gossips’ lighting was poor, and we were both losing heart when the bar owner snatched up the page, held it close to his
face, and declared, “Got it!”

He slammed it back down on the table and poked a fingertip at the bottom right-hand corner of page 147. “Look! See it?”

No, frankly, I couldn’t.

“Alright, give it a turn,” he said, twisting the page 90 degrees anticlockwise. “Nah put ’Arry’s sketch beside it…”

“See it nah?” He traced an outline with his finger. “See the blob where that Statue of Charlie Partridge is on the map – imagine that’s
’Arry’s cow’s eye. See the shape the road system makes? On the map an’ the drawin’ – same shape!”

Well, maybe. “What about the moon? Where’s that?”

“It’s that rahndabaht fing at City ’All!” he cried excitedly, jabbing repeatedly at the map.

The Shaman had kept this torn out page of map from me, which he had said held the key to Dextrose’s sketch. And the street patterns did look pretty much the same.

“You could be right,” I said.

“Course I’m right! It’s the same shape. Somewhere wivin this road system – that’s where you’ll find your muvver!”

The more I compared the two, the more it seemed to fit. Livingstone Quench had only gone and cracked it.

Importos interrupted our shared triumph. “And my bruzzer?”

Quench slapped him on the back. “Sorry, son, I’ve clean forgot me manners in all this excitement. You must be knackered after runnin’ all that way. ’Ere, let me find you
a guest room then I’ll sort you some nosh. Sound good, yeah?”

“Absolutely,” I concurred.

“What the ’ell’s this all abaht wiv the lanky bugger?” demanded Quench, when he had returned from housing my new friend. “What you ’iding
from ’im?”

He’d even spotted it. Thanks heavens for language barriers, I thought.

I told him as much as he needed to know. How Detritos had accompanied me for much of my journey in Dextrose’s footsteps and had more than once saved my life. How we had ended up on the
crater of a volcano and the dwarf had thrown himself in, believing that in doing so he would be saving the world from destruction.

At that point, he butted in. “
Savin’ the world?
Come again?”

“Well, he was convinced he was.”

“So why didn’t you jus’ tell his bruver that? That ’e killed ’isself, bein’ a bit loopy?”

“I know,” I wailed. “I know. But he caught me unawares. And I might have been able to stop Detritos.”

“Really?”

“Well, probably not. He was pretty single-minded.”

“So there you go!”

“But I can never be 100 per cent certain, and there’s the guilt.”

The back door of the bar opened and a figure stooped inside. “Where is food?” Importos called out gaily.

Quench stood up. “’Old on, son!” And he winked at me.

I loved that guy. He made everything feel better.

While Importos tucked rabidly into a hunk of cold meat and Harrison Dextrose fine-tuned his artless belligerence, Quench and I pored over maps from the bar’s collection
and worked out a route from Gossips to Pretanike. It looked like a hell of a hike, through a vast area of land emptier than the high-slung half of Hitler’s scrotum sac. Indeed, the map showed
but one road, the Nameless Highway, featuring only the odd, brief offshoot, and no more than half a dozen named landmarks in some 1,000 miles – among them Lonely Bush, Flattened Hat and
Call-That-A-Hill?

At the far end of the Nameless Highway, the sprawling city of Pretanike appeared, nestling on a jagged coastline. And somewhere within that ostentatious conurbation, hopefully, was my mother.
More than once I sought out Sir Charles Partridge on the map cutting. I imagined a tiny speck lunching at the statue’s base, wearing a headscarf and sunglasses, the image lifted directly from
her husband’s one treasured snap. In my mind she had bright red lipstick and a faraway look in her eyes, as if she were consciously waiting for someone. Waiting for me.

Importos joined us, his hunger sated. “You are to look map, I see,” he said. “I to be your guide. In zis way I to help, for my bruzzer.”

Well, if he were to join us – and I doubted he would be dissuaded, having jogged 200 miles to get here – then he might as well be of some use. I showed him our route along the
Nameless Highway.

“No. Have not to been zis place,” he said, then to Quench: “Is zere pudding?”

With the others distracted elsewhere, I took the opportunity for a one-to-one with Dextrose. He had to come with me, no question. Only he would be able to recognise Mrs
Dextrose, to grasp a sense of
déjà vu
as we hunted around Pretanike’s back-streets. He had to do the right thing.

I chanced the direct approach. “We’re leaving soon,” I said, fixing him with my hardest stare.

“Good!” he said, which surprised me, until I realised from his tone he hadn’t included himself in the ‘we’ bit.

I tried again. “No,
Dad
. I meant you and I are leaving soon. To find Mum.”

He forced a little finger into his right ear, wiggled it and inspected the tip on extraction. Then he harrumphed, looked away pointedly and swigged beer in profile. Side-on, his head resembled a
frog’s in a hippie wig.

“I mean it,” I persisted. “You have to come with me.”

Another swig.

“Does Mrs Dextrose mean nothing to you?”

That got his attention. He actually stood up, as he did so hauling up the waistband of his pink velour tracksuit bottoms – in which the elastic had no doubt perished decades hence. Upright
and yet to become completely arseholed, he cast a figure of some authority; for the first time since meeting him I felt that I could see past the grime and degradation to the explorer of yore, to
the man I had once respected.

“Son,” began Dextrose. “And I mean that in a patronising ‘young boy’ sense, not the minking family one. Son, what dear Mrs Dextrose means to me is between Mrs
Dextrose and me-minking-self. The great Harrison Dextrose hasn’t spent 39 years wedded to the walking megaphone without knowing full well what she means to him, because she told him every
minking day he was with her. So don’t you dare come the concern with me, you little mink.” He shook his head. “Don’t you minking dare.”

The way he had spoken to me – the condescension, the spite – it reminded me of Father. Though I surely had every right to express my concern, my conviction had vanished. I sat there,
mute, while Dextrose guzzled his remaining booze in one, hand shaking.

Then he was off, on a drinker’s ramble. “Do you remember our wedding day? Cos I does. Eighteen, she were, eyes like emeralds, hair spun from gold and mammaries a gent could snorkel
between. I weren’t Mrs Dextrose’s only suitor, mark me words, but she only ever had eyes for young Harrison. Twenty-third of October. I may have forgotten most other dates, but I shall
never forget that one. The bride wore white, her mother wore black.” He clenched and unclenched his fists. “Don’t start me on that minking sow’s bedpan!”

Dextrose caught himself, ceased his reminiscing. “Anyway, what’s all this to you?”

“Mrs Dextrose is my mother. You’re my Dad,” I pointed out.

He blinked furiously. “I thought that’s what yer said earlier, but imagined I’d misheard yer. So I’m yer
Pa
, yer say?” The spite had gone from his voice, the
frustration and ire had seeped away. He sounded almost… vulnerable.

It was now or never. “Yes, I’m your son, Pilsbury. Remember the photos?”

As I scrabbled in my pockets for my snapshot, I caught Quench and Importos in my peripheral vision, arriving with fresh beers.

While Dextrose was muttering to himself – “Yer know, that does ring a minking bell” – a fresh glint inhabiting his eyes, and I was pleading, “Don’t give him
more beer”, in slow motion the bar owner plonked down four green bottles, frothing at their tops. My father reached for his as I tried to swipe it away, but it was out of reach, and he lifted
the bottle to his lips, he glugged and he glugged, and that glint in his eyes flickered and was extinguished.

Dextrose shook himself, glared at me and growled, “As I were saying, what the mink is it to you?”