for motorists except to turn around and head back towards the centre. The coast was only a few miles out from the city and the small village of Mote was the only thing that lay between the two. At least once a month someone would scrawl a prefix of “Re” in front of the village’s name on any one of a dozen signposts, and it would be Fender’s task to clean it off. This time he came across slightly more inventive graffiti, though. Someone had changed the “e” to an “o” and added “-rway” as a suffix. Fender assumed it to be a sarcastic complaint about the poor road conditions and set to restoring the sign to its original state. Three other road signs in the area were defaced that day. The first turned the town of Pales into something unreadable and the second the suburb of Cartgate into Cartagena. And that week, as every other, the main sign pointing towards Landsend had been replaced with its more commonly used nickname of Landfill. Fender had never heard of Cartagena before. With his tour completed by early afternoon he decided to use the remaining hours back in the office to find out where it was. What he found made him pine even more for another place. Whether it was the Spanish or the Colombian version made little difference, either would be a substantial improvement on Cartgate, Landsend or indeed the city itself. The heat and the humidity of either were welcome thoughts on their own, but the exoticism of the Caribbean coast and the stories of pirates and privateers, or the history that must lie inside every Roman brick of the Mediterranean ruins added far greater depth. Fender sat back in his chair and thought about living a contented life travelling between the two. The Spanish city was the nearer, but he was slightly more drawn to the Latin American version, even if it was five thousand miles further away. After half an hour someone came in to knock him out of his reverie and, discovering they had walked into the wrong room, promptly left again. Fender got up and headed to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee to wake himself up properly. While he waited for the kettle to boil he looked at the local paper that had been abandoned on the counter top. The front page was mostly taken up with a story about the city being twinned with somewhere called Skopje, in Macedonia apparently. Fender had never heard of that either, but the description of a small landlocked state didn’t really appeal. Why there? Why not pick a partner from somewhere more exciting, somewhere warmer, somewhere that might lend a fresh air to the place, a warm breeze to fend off the chills. The next day he went about his rounds to the east of the city and he fell back to these thoughts, dreaming up places to pair with the suburbs and villages he was travelling through. He put St Petersburg with one, Ven-
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