Free Postcards From No Man's Land by Aidan Chambers Page A

everything to escape. Some will die. They know that.’
    ‘If only we could do something to help,’ I said, when I could speak calmly again.
    Mama looked me steadily in the eyes. ‘We’ve done all we can. I don’t know what more we can do.’
    It was not long before we found out.

POSTCARD
    How long before my death
    is the necessary question.
    John Webster
    BY THE TIME his tram arrived at the railway station the rain had started again, heavily and with no sign of slackening. For a few minutes Jacob sheltered in the crowded bustle of the station concourse but soon began to fret that Daan van Riet might tire of waiting and go out again. But he didn’t want to arrive soaking wet.
    A flower stall occupied one corner of the concourse. His grandmother had dinned in to him that it was a Dutch custom for a guest to take flowers when visiting. He fingered Alma’s guilders in his pocket. But it was not flowers he had in mind.
    ‘Hi,’ he said to the man who was serving.
    ‘Low,’ the man said, without a grin.
    He held out the coins and indicated the flowers. ‘What for four guilders?’
    The man pulled a dubious face, but smiled, surveyed his display with elaborate consideration for this big sale, and selected one modest sunflower.
    ‘And that bag,’ Jacob said, pointing to a large brown plastic bag discarded by some tubs of flowers.
    ‘There goes the profit,’ the man said, wrapping it neatly round the sunflower before handing over the singular bouquet with a mocking flourish. ‘You must really love her to spend like that. Succes ermee! ’
    Outside, Jacob held the flower in his teeth by the stemwhile he tore the bag down one seam, then draped it over his head and shoulders like a hooded cowl. And thus protected set off at a brisk pace in the direction of the landmarks Alma had described.
    Van Riet’s address was not hard to find and looked like an old warehouse. A makeshift stoep , four steps of scuffed and weathered wood, led to an ancient heavy black-painted door. To the left of which Jacob found two insignificant bell buttons with faded nameplates. He pressed the one labelled Wesseling en Van Riet .
    While he waited he surveyed the short street, which looked as if all of it had been ancient warehouses at one time. But now on one side of Van Riet’s was a restaurant and a new-looking hotel, on the other a freshly renovated facade with big warehouse doors on each of its five floors converted into windows. Beside the narrow street ran an equally narrow murky-looking canal, out of the other side of which rose the back of the church, an oppressive bulk of dirty old red brick with arched, grimy and wire-netted windows. To the left of the church, a contrast and a challenge, was the back of a newish building with many regular modern windows: the rooms of a hotel, Jacob assumed. In the fogged greyness of the pouring rain the lowering church and the high flat-fronted buildings, narrowly separated by the sluggish canal and the cobbled street, appeared to him like a forbidden canyon. He shivered in his damp clothes, and tugged his plastic hood well over his face.
    A bolt unlatched, the heavy door swung, surprisingly, outwards, and a tall young man with a shock of black hair, handsome triangular face, pale, with sharp bright blue eyes, long straight nose, wide thin-lipped mouth, and a slim body dressed in grey sweatshirt tucked in to black jeans, bare feet in thonged sandals, said, ‘ Mijn God! Titus!’
    ‘Jacob Todd.’
    ‘Sorry, hoor .’ Sounding like ‘surrey whore’, but couldn’tbe. ‘Daan.’ Like darn. ‘Come in.’
    An ill-lit passage, wooden stairs painted rust red rising steeply at the end, rough bare old brick wall on one side, white-painted partition with a blue door in it on the other. Smell of damp dust and new paper.
    ‘Smart hat.’
    ‘Bit wet.’
    ‘Want to take it off?’
    ‘Thanks.’ He presented the sunflower. ‘For you.’
    ‘Stolen for me. And before we’d even met! How