A petrol station where behind the counter a man with two dangling hollows in the lobes of his ears where the dress code didn’t allow him to wear his jewellery met them behind the air pump and pressed key’s into Corn’s hand and whispered, “Blessed is her name, let the bars be broken let the journey end.”
Corn squeezed his hand tight, and the man nodded, and scampered back to the shop before his supervisor could catch him skiving.
They found the next car parked two streets away from the garage. It smelled of dog and a tiny bit of dog vomit, but they wound the windows down and wrapped themselves in coat and glove, and headed south.
London grew at the bottom of the hill. Strange to think that the city had boundaries, strange to think that there was a place where it stopped that you could stand on this line and your left foot would be in mud and your right on concrete and to the south the grey towers reached up to prick the clouds and to the north the mud squelched on into the damp, stripped hills and…
Strange to think that this was how he was coming home.
Huddled in the back of the car with a couple of patties, a hat on his head and a scarf around his neck to hide his face from the CCTV, because they’d be watching, Bea said, they’d be watching.
They left the car in a car park in Archway, and walked down the steep slope of the hill. Houses of red and black, stained-glass windows above the shut front doors, little front patios not quite big enough to be gardens but too big just to be for the bins, no one seemed to know what to do with them, you could maybe fit in a rose bush but that was all but anything less and the space seemed bare.
Theo found this troubling. There didn’t seem any logic in it.
He pulled his chin to his chest, his hands in his pockets, and followed Bea and Corn down the hill.
They stayed in a house with four bedrooms and nine residents. Three of the inhabitants of the largest room moved into the beds of the others to give Corn, Bea and Theo a little privacy in a space not much larger than the double bed that inhabited it. The air smelled of stale cigarette smoke and spilt beer. The kitchen floor crunched underfoot when Theo walked on it. On his second night he found a needle in the toilet. The residents were all from the patty line. A girl with pale yellow freckles beneath her eyes caught his revulsion when he opened the door to the kitchen to find a month of dirty dishes, caked in tomato gloop, piled up to the walls. She looked away, ashamed, and her shame made him feel ashamed, and she looked back and saw he was embarrassed and she smiled and said:
“It’s hard. You clean it sometimes, but it just gets worse again. And when you’ve got nothing else, what’s the point of doing the dishes I mean what’s the point of…”
The next day he went into the kitchen, and it was spotless.
“It’s great you’ve come,” whispered the girl as they squeezed by each other in the tight, carpet-torn corridor. “It’s really good to have something to work for.”
Some of the people in the house wanted to scream, but this was London, and screamers weren’t welcome in this part of town, they vanished, disappeared at the slightest sound of trouble, emotionally assaulting the neighbours was the charge, causing distress. So they buried their heads into their pillows and howled until they were half-suffocated, and that appeased them a little bit, for a while.
At 4 a.m. a man staggered in, his face coated with black, his hands coated with black, the smell of ash and the Underground on his boots, and he went into the bathroom and locked the door and fell asleep inside, and when they woke him with knocking in the morning his face was still black, but he’d got as far as washing his hands and didn’t seem to notice anything else.
The next day Theo discovered that the original owner of the house was still there, living in the attic. “I used to be a banker,” he whispered when Theo brought him tea. “I made four twenty a year, before bonus. But one day I went to the patty line, an investment opportunity, and I looked. I looked. And once I’d looked I couldn’t forget, I couldn’t look away, I tried to look away and it was like it was burned. It was burned. I don’t like to go outside now. The guys downstairs look after me. They look after me. They look… everyone can see it. We can all see it. So now I’m here.”
On the fourth day Theo caught the bus into the centre of town, pressed in with the old women and the children, the greasy-armed men in sweaty T-shirts, the travellers with bags too big for the luggage space who were glared at and who glared defiantly in return. He stood away from the one cracked security camera, head down, hood up, and did not watch the streets, and listened for his stop, which came fifty-five minutes later, just outside King’s Cross.
He walked, unsure if this world was real, let alone familiar, a familiar place that he had known, up towards the canal, through the new buildings of silver steel and green glass, towers framed in skeletal shells, spined like porcupines; up to the restored old warehouses that now housed arts and dramas, music and penthouse flats. He sat by a fountain that spat bursts of white foam in busy, regimented rhythm, following a programme of surges and falls, and decided that it was all the same and only he had changed.
A gym was on the other side of the water. Above the front door a picture of a woman with bad technique and a huge grin punched towards the camera. As the door opened, it revealed a counter where a bored man in red sold protein shakes, dumb-bells, yoga mats and memberships. Gym memberships were good for an extra £2000 on the cost of an indemnity, if you got murdered with one. Showed that you were really trying to look after your health.
Theo waited.
The sun set, and he waited.
At 8.25 p.m. Mala Choudhary emerged, her dark hair swept back, bright pink trainers on her feet, legs sculpted in black leggings, a bag slung across one shoulder, chin high and skin hot from exertion. She walked towards King’s Cross. Theo followed until she caught a cab and vanished into the traffic.
The next day he waited outside the gym for Mala to go inside, then followed Bea around to the service door. Bea knocked four times, then waited, head down, fingers tucked into her sleeves against the cold, a penitent monk in a tracksuit.
The door opened. A woman with a plastic stud through her nose, scar on her chin, dressed in burgundy T-shirt and white shorts, stood on the other side.
“Blessed are her hands,” whispered Bea. “Blessed are those who weave and those who break.”
The woman nodded once, without smiling, and let Bea inside.
Theo waited.
Ten minutes later Bea emerged. She had a data card in her pocket, a copy of Mala Choudhary’s phone cloned onto it. She had photos of Mala’s credit cards, including the lovely Company platinum card for wining and dining high-value-indemnity clients—the mass murderers, arms and drugs dealers—in all the nicest places. The juicy crimes always paid the best. “It’s nice in there,” she mused as they walked away, the patty-line cleaner closing the door quietly behind them. “They have really nice hand lotion in the ladies’ lav, and the towels are fluffy.”