Summer Shadows by Joss Stirling

Author:Joss Stirling [Stirling, Joss]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-06-21T23:00:00+00:00

After saying an affectionate goodbye to Javid and Ramesh in Uzbekistan, we emerged from Singapore’s Changi airport twenty-four hours later looking slightly more prepared for international travel than we had on leaving Mazar. Thanks to Victor’s persuasive powers and Javid’s bargaining skills we had purchased replacement clothes in the local Uzbek town to tide us over a few days. I’d gone back to western clothes—skirt and T-shirt—with some relief, though the ‘I Love Yorkshire Beer’ slogan on the top left a lot to be desired. Perhaps a serviceman had sold it on locally while on a tour of duty, otherwise I couldn’t imagine how it got there. Good fake documents weren’t available so we had had to rely on Victor persuading the various officials at airline desks that they had seen our passports and that, yes, everything was in order. He got Yves to send over the details and scans of our original documents so at least the real information tallied with what they were entering on their computers. With the American authorities after us, I’d expected us to be stopped at each connecting flight as we made our way east but so far no one had caught up with us.

‘Victor, I’ve been worrying that the Robinsons will know where we are when we come up on airline computers,’ said Saul as we were waved through the final immigration check and emerged into the super-modern concourse of the arrivals’ hall.

‘They’ll know anyway, Dad, thanks to Scott’s GPS powers. I’ve heard he can attach his gift to a target like a homing beacon so he’ll’ve latched on to my signal when we fled.’ Victor dismissed the first few taxi drivers who came touting for business until he found one whose thoughts he approved. ‘They aren’t the best in the business for no reason. The only chance we have is to keep moving so quickly we are always a step ahead. Take us to the Golden Grove Hotel.’

Passing briefly out into the wet heat of the early afternoon, we piled into the driver’s air-conditioned minibus and headed off into the busy roads of the city. Gazing out of the window, Singapore struck me as an extraordinary country. I already knew it was a city on a peninsula located between Malaysia and the islands of Indonesia, a port and travel hub. Ever since I could remember I’d heard about it in my Chinese great-grandmother’s tales—she lived here all her life—and later I sought out more information from twentieth-century British writers, but the modern city that confronted me through the windows of the taxi was a long way from the literary colonial world that I carried in my head. Now it was all skyscrapers, neat parks with elderly people practising Tai Chi, housing developments of low-rise flats, roads busy with a population drawn from all corners of Asia. Pedestrians were almost all connected to some kind of digital device as we were in London. Afghanistan had been a rare break from technology: only every other person had been on the phone.

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