“Yes!”
Mathew’s hands move again, fast and faster, and he lays the cards down on the table. “Then find the lady.”
Joshua Joseph grins. His father has tried very, very hard to beat him. He has played a trick so stinkingly dishonest while he was talking that Joe can only read into it the deepest possible respect. He looks his father in the eye.
“It isn’t this one,” he says, and turns over the right-hand card. Mathew smiles. “And it isn’t this one.” He turns over the middle card. His father’s smile twitches up at the side. “And that means it must be this one.” He leaves the last card where it is. The queen, he well knows, is in Mathew’s coat pocket, which is why he has played the monte this way around, revealing losers rather than picking the winner. Turning the con.
Mathew wraps him in a massive hug. “We have a winner,” he says once more, into the top of Joe’s hair. “My son. A real winner.”
And that’s it. It’s really happening.
It is the best day of Joshua Joseph’s young life, ever, at all.
Going to the Night Market!
Harriet Spork fusses with his lapels and the mustard polo-neck jumper one more time, and Mathew watches with a broad grin.
“It’s scratchy,” the infant Spork objects. Mathew Spork nods. He is wearing exactly the same outfit.
“It is, Josh, at first, but after a bit you get used to it and then you miss it when it isn’t there. You want to look a fine figure of a man, don’t you? For the Market?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Well, then.”
Joshua Joseph waits patiently while his mother finishes with his hair—again—and sits quiet in the back of his father’s car, very straight, with his eyes set in what he imagines is an expression of extreme adulthood. Through the streets of London they go, first fast, then slow, then fast again, and the big car leans and rolls as Mathew Spork plays the accelerator and checks that there is no one in his rear-view mirror.
Joshua Joseph manfully feels nauseous and does not say so. Harriet leans against her husband as he takes a right-angle corner at fifty, and the tyres hold the road as if they were clamped to it. Mathew grins at her fiercely, at her flushed skin and ever so slightly open mouth.
After twenty minutes, prim residential houses give way to tall tower blocks. After another ten, the blocks dwindle into business parks and lock-ups, and then they’re driving along next to a wide pastureland. In the moonlight, Joshua Joseph catches a glimpse of an urban fox on a fence.
“All right, Josh, we’re here.”
They get out of the car. Joshua Joseph can smell January frost and the sharp scent of burning wood. All around there are high, empty buildings and the sound of creaking hulks on the river nearby. His shoes squelch in mud, find gravel. His father tells them both to hurry, and they do. Across a courtyard covered in black ice and car tyres, past the brittle corpse of a misplaced winter duck. Mathew Spork opens a strange, oval door and draws them with him.
They step through, and he closes it behind them. They walk down some steps and on along a narrow, arched tunnel. Harriet’s heels clip and tap on polished concrete.
“Where are we?”
“You know where we are, laddie. You found the way!”
“But I mean, what is it?”
“Well, at certain times and in certain seasons, those worthy persons governing great nations may disagree with one another. And in an effort to avoid any physical harm, all the lords and owners of banks and presidents construct underground places in which to take refuge.” He leads the way down a short flight of stairs. “And then there are utilities. You know what that is? Sewers and trains and water and such. This part, now, this part has belonged to Her Majesty’s Post Office since good Queen Victoria’s time. I dare say they’ve no idea they own it, profligate spenders of the public purse that they are. The Post back then was a marvel, Josh, a genuine marvel, and in the capital it must be doubly so, so they made a little railway all their own, and pneumatic pipes of brass, and vacuum pumps driven by steam. Genius. Of course, there are man-size tunnels to care for it all. All closed up now, caved in and vanished, built over, filled in, as far as Lily Law and her friends are concerned, but known to us, Josh, to men of the Market like me and you. Those fellows in Paris, Josh, they think they’ve catacombs, but that’s nothing to what treasure is under London!”
And even as his father says the word, Joshua Joseph can hear music, and there’s a yellow electric gleam on the edge of the tunnel, and a flat smell of smoked sausage and nutmeg, of perfume and the flowers his mother grows on the window ledge in the kitchen.
They turn the corner, and the Night Market spreads out in front of them like the main street of a medieval town, festooned with lanterns and crank-handle generators with meagre bulbs glowing, stalls and handcarts and even shopfronts laid in rows, and up the walls on wooden walkways, so that the whole effect is of being in a great oblong bowl or the hull of a ship, the hundreds of traders and vendors bellowing their prices and offerings and clamouring for attention. And into this sea, his father leads them both, and is greeted and admired by all around.
Red velvet walls and corduroy armchairs; oil paintings, gold coins, Cornish pasties, and tea; pipe smoke and mint jellies and Turkish coffee, yellowed playing cards and chess. The Night Market is all these things, but most of all it is his father and the Uncles, sitting amid cushions and eating baklava and crumpets in the small hours of the night, telling tales and answering the questions of a small, bewildered boy, while his mother smiles and gossips with a dozen Aunts. Everyone here is “Uncle” or “Aunt,” or more unusually a cousin, like the boy and the girl seated on the next cushion along, the wards of Uncle Jonah, who is the only one wearing a suit, but whose crooked smile is like a lighthouse when it falls on the children.
Joshua Joseph asks very politely why no one has a second name. Mathew glances over at the broad-shouldered, very thin man whose barrow this is. He calls himself Tam, and in the daylight world he runs a smart shop where men of the upper classes purchase clothing and equipment for shooting and fishing. These goods, of course, he is happy to deliver by hand to the homes of his customers, so Tam is often very well informed as to the disposition of valuables in expensive houses.
“Men of the Market, Joshua,” Uncle Tam says, his big head nodding over his whisky glass. “Men like you and me, we’re bad with names. Bad with all kinds of recollections, really. We remember what’s important, oh surely, but those other things we sort of forget, so they don’t slip out when they shouldn’t. The Night Market, it’s not called that just because we hold it when the sun goes down. It’s because the whole thing takes place under cover of darkness. Shadows and fog in the mind, so we don’t see what we don’t feel like remembering, if you get my drift.”
Joshua Joseph doesn’t.
“Well, my folk are from Cornwall, right? Wreckers, in days gone by. You know what a wrecker is?”
“A kind of pirate.”
“Hm, well, yes and no. A pirate does a mighty job of work to get his booty, Joshua. He boards a ship and carries the day in battle, and he risks hanging and death in battle and all such. A wrecker is a quieter sort of fellow with an eye to business. He lets the coastline do his work, tricks the taxman—you do know what a taxman is?”
Insofar as the taxman is cursed by everyone he has ever met, a bad fairy who takes from the deserving to stuff the rich coffers of Socialists and Bankers, Joshua Joseph does indeed know, so he nods.