L'homme à l'autographe

Mountjoy is slowly going by, with its squat suburban palaces and pruned trees. This is where they live, and this traffic is testament to the fact that on a Saturday, at the first opportunity, anyone who lives in Mountjoy is looking for a way out. They are exercising their rights as homeowners. They have not forgotten that ambitious young man with the thin mustache and acrylic tie who led them through their future property, talking of reduced flight schedules and dado rails and original features and promising that fantastic — perfectly fictional, as it turned out — thirty-minute car journey to the City. Nobody honks their horns. Anyone who expected anything different of Mountjoy, who possessed any illusions about the one-way system of Mountjoy, well, such a person would not live in Mountjoy. The people of Mountjoy have based their lives on the principle of compromise, and each night they quietly embrace the earplugs and migraines and stress-related muscular discomfort they receive in exchange for cheap houses sitting directly in the flight path of an international airport. This is not the Promised Land. This is an affordable, fifties-built, central-heating/locking-as-standard, schools-included commuter village on the northernmost tip of the city of London.

Boot, who had grown up in the countryside, had an instinctive, inherited fear of the Chinese in any other situation than food delivery.