Hotel Ambrose

Chapter 3: The City

The Whistlers had taken us to the city twice: once to the museum with the dinosaurs and everything, and the other time to the movies. All I really remembered about it was the station and the big church across the road from it.

This is where we found ourselves when we got off the train and went up the steps to the street. There were taxis lined up next to the station, and lots of drunk people around. A police car sailed by and we hid behind a big column. I knew we couldn't stay here.

"Come on," I said, leading Sophie out into the crowded street.

The people thinned out the further we got from the station. We stopped to rest on the steps of a dark building and I looked across the street at the trunks of the buildings reaching up into space and at the lights far away and the red beacon of a jumbo jet coming down through the clouds. My T-shirt stuck to me. I flapped it to let the air in. I'd taken the baby from Sophie after she got tired, and it was fast asleep now, full of milk, with its thumb in its mouth, and smelling of sleeping baby.

"The Cripple with the Singing Dogs," I said to her, wondering how we were going to find it. Whatever it was.

Sophie shrugged.

"Sounds like a pub," I said.

"Ha!" Sophie said, as if she'd thought of it herself. "I bet that's what it is – a pub!"

Across the road there was a phone box lit up like a rocket ship. "Stay here," I said. I gave the baby back to Sophie and went across the street and took the L to Z phone book out from under the phone and brought it back. I held it at an angle to catch the light from the street. Sophie looked over my shoulder as I thumbed through. Her hair kept getting in my eyes and I told her to cut it out.

She said, "Don't look under The, you dummy."

"I know that," I said. This was a lie, and anyway I had to go back across the road to get the A to K book. I looked for Cripple with the Singing Dogs, The. There was Cripp and Crippen, then Cripps. No Cripple.

Sophie yawned. "We should find somewhere to sleep. There's a park over there."

We went to the park. There were fountains there, all lit up, but they weren't going. We found a big shrub and crawled underneath. We had some clothes in our backpacks and we lay them out to sleep on. We wrapped the baby up in his blanket. You couldn't see anything outside the shrub – you could just hear cars going past and the boom doom of distant music. Sophie cuddled up to me and went to sleep. I didn't mind. I never had anyone cuddle up to me before.

I stayed awake for a while listening to the city and the baby's shallow breathing and Sophie's deeper breathing and the cars going by, and sometimes a jet going through the clouds high up. I heard a police siren far away in the city and a big ship moaning out across the bay.

After a while I fell asleep too.