Lifting the Lid(20)

The tout reached for the cash but stopped when Sandra quickly withdrew it from his grasp.

‘Ticket first, I think,’ she said, raising a menacing eyebrow.

He mumbled something under his breath and pulled a ticket from a bundle of about a dozen. Sandra snatched it from him and examined it closely before giving him the money.

Placing the ticket in her pocket alongside her purse, she began to walk in the direction of the main entrance and then suddenly turned.

‘Don’t forget,’ she called out and mimed the action of opening and closing a pair of garden shears.



* * *



Trevor’s senses were being battered from every direction as he walked towards the bright yellow marquee. There was the pounding rock music from the main outdoor stage, which morphed into the thundering rhythms of a group of Japanese drummers he glimpsed through the open sides of the marquee as he passed.

There were the vivid and clashing colours, not just of the clothes the people were wearing as they scurried this way and that, but of the numerous stalls selling all kinds of goods ranging from garishly painted wooden toys to outrageously flamboyant hats and plastic angel wings.

Beyond the marquee, his nose was bombarded with a bizarre blend of cooking smells emanating from the impressive range of mobile kitchens arranged on three sides of a large square. Each scent vied with the other to attract his attention but merely succeeded in creating a distinctly unappetising stink involving curry, hot dogs, garlic, roasting chicken, candyfloss, chip fat, onions, barbecued sweetcorn, frying bacon and other odours which were impossible to identify from the mix.

Ravenous though he still was from having eaten nothing but a handful of biscuits since yesterday lunchtime, Trevor found it surprisingly easy to resist temptation. Milly, on the other hand, was evidently much more impressed with the aroma, particularly when she discovered the drool-inducing assortment of half-eaten food which had been dropped on the ground.

‘Come on, Milly,’ Trevor shouted when he turned to see his dog enthusiastically devouring what appeared to be a polystyrene tray of tapeworms but which, in reality, were probably some kind of noodles.

Now it was Milly’s turn to pretend to be deaf. Only when she had finished her meal did she canter jauntily over to him, scooping up half a sausage as she went without even breaking stride.

Glad to leave the nauseating stench of the food stalls behind him, Trevor spotted the locker area, which was surrounded by a temporary but sturdy-looking steel fence. Fixed to this was a large metal sign bearing the words “Safe and Sound” in black letters on a pale green background. Approaching the open gate in the centre of the front section of fencing, he noticed that a CCTV camera was mounted high up on each of the compound’s four corner posts and pointing inwards. He hesitated for a second and pulled up the hood of his fleece jacket to cover his head. He wasn’t entirely sure why except that he knew he was probably doing something he ought not to be doing and thought it would be wise not to have his identity recorded on film while he was doing it.

He walked over to where an attractive young woman and a slightly older man with Too Many Pies Syndrome sat behind a small trestle table immediately to the right of the gate. Each wore a tight-fitting T-shirt printed with the same words and in the same colours as the sign.

‘Hello,’ said the woman, beaming up at Trevor and displaying an impossibly white and immaculately proportioned set of front teeth.

‘Um, I need to get to my locker,’ he said and reached into his jacket pocket.

‘Certainly, sir. Which number?’

Trevor pulled out the brown paper envelope and extracted one of the two index cards. It was the one with the Bristol address printed on it.

‘Sorry. Wrong one.’ He smiled weakly at her and took out the second card.

The male attendant, who had been staring at Trevor without any trace of expression from the moment he had arrived, seemed suddenly distracted.

‘That your dog?’

Oh not again, thought Trevor. ‘Pardon?’

‘The dog. Is it yours?’

He followed the nod of the attendant’s head and saw Milly sauntering through the open gate and into the compound.

‘Ah. Yes, she’s a hearing dog.’

‘Good for her,’ said the man and proceeded to clean the dirt from under his fingernails with the plastic fork from an empty takeaway container.

Realising the attendant neither knew nor cared what a hearing dog was, Trevor turned his attention back to his female colleague, relieved that he didn’t have to reprise the deaf act. ‘C nine,’ he read out from the index card.

‘C nine,’ she repeated and began riffling through the pages of a large plastic-covered folder. ‘Here we are. C nine. I’ll just have to ask you a couple of security questions if that’s okay, sir.’