Far away up in the sky, intermittently blotted by the blazing sun, a passing aeroplane left a white trail of exhaust. There were no clouds, no birds. The noise was continuous: heavy traffic, horns, and the snarl of motorbikes revving off from the pelican lights. The road was busy with people with grim demeanours, their shoulders dragged down by heavy bags or the cares of life. A warm breeze lazily lifted and dropped sweet wrappers and torn sheets of newspaper collecting in the gutters, and brushed hot skin without relief.
A figure was moving in the no-man’s land under the flyover: a young woman running fast, unhampered by the rucksack on her back. She ran without apology, her arms pelting the air for balance and speed, as she jumped over a discarded exhaust pipe and swerved out of the way of broken glass. She was dressed in jeans, blue Converse boots and a grey shirt patterned with skyscrapers against a background of wavy lines. Her clothes betrayed an alternative taste, and ensured that she stood out from those around her. In contrast to her dress her hair was conventional, parted at the side and just touching her shoulders. It was soberly immaculate, though thin strands soaked in sweat stuck to her forehead. She was clearly someone who could toe the line if required to.
She vaulted over the central barrier, and hop-hopped with one foot on the kerb and the other on the camber, waiting for a gap in the traffic; then she dashed across the path of a double-decker bus and leapt on to the opposite pavement. By the time the bus shuddered to a halt at the stop twenty yards further on, the young woman had veered off left under the archway of a block of Victorian flats and disappeared.
Chris was eighteen in 1999 and everyone said what a marvellous age it was. She was so lucky to be in the right place at the right time – the turn of the century – with her life before her. Just now, as she sidestepped a wheelie bin that kids had taken for a walk, and tried to catch her breath without inhaling the sour stench of refuse, this luck seemed a long time coming.
She was late and she had to go to the launderette.
Her Mum would say she should have rung if she was going to be late just as Alice had always called her mother. Other times her Mum talked of how the family didn’t have a phone so she had to get home on time. Chris usually tolerated these inconsistencies, content to listen to her Mum’s bedtime stories of loving relatives, long dead, particularly of the Postman-Dad who let Alice stand on his feet while he took big strides across the living room. As a young child Chris had demanded with gory relish that her Mum tell the tale of the car accident in which her grandparents had died. Alice had been nine. She would say that her life had ended then too. She had only come alive when Chris was born; a point in the story Chris looked forward to. As a young teenager, this tragic incident gave her extra cachet with her friends. No one else had a fatal car crash in their family. During breaks, in response to repeated requests and in a suitably elegiac tone, she would retell her version of the event to a thrilled audience of thirteen-year-olds huddled by the school kitchens.
It had happened outside the Fuller’s brewery on the Chiswick Roundabout. Her Mum told her this was ironic because Fuller’s brewed London Pride, which was her father’s favourite tipple – her mother’s word – so he would have enjoyed the coincidence if he had lived. Chris was hungry to learn more about her grandparents, but much to her frustration, her Mum had lost all the photographs or documents just as she lost or forgot many things. Alice would declare that her parents’ dying had freed her to carve out her own life without being hampered by the past. This was putting a brave face on it; really all it had done was to make her Mum too frightened to step outside and take part in such a cruel world.
Today had proved her Mum right. Chris wouldn’t tell her what had happened; it would only worry her.
Half an hour earlier Chris had squeezed out of a packed tube train at Elephant and Castle. Although it wasn’t yet five o’clock, the rush hour was underway and she had filed at the rate of a shuffle along the subway to the exit. Halfway up the passage she heard shouting. She was wedged between two city-suited men, and could see nothing. They wore identical black-framed spectacles and made her think of Gilbert and George. Chris did not exist as they chatted to one another over her head:
‘It’s some West Indian bloke causing a fracas.’
‘What’s new?’
‘It’s all we need.’
The crowd became more congested as people edged across to the left side of the tunnel. By staying on the right Chris was able to break free of Gilbert and George and soon reached the source of the commotion.
A tall black man, a few years older than her, perhaps in his early twenties, was heading in the same direction as herself. He was dressed in jeans, with a loose silk bomber jacket over his tee-shirt, and wore a red baseball cap pulled low over his forehead. Dogging him a few paces behind was a decrepit old man in a filthy parka, the fur around his hood mangled and greasy and his tracksuit trousers ripped and stained. He shambled after the young man with a drunken swaying that was surprisingly efficient. Chris cupped her hand over her nose. He stank of sweaty, unwashed skin laced with alcohol fumes and rotting teeth. His yellowed hair straggled around a swollen face that was the colour and texture of a ripe strawberry. He intoned an incantation of abuse:
‘I know your sort. What you looking at? Hey nigger, stop while I’m talking to…’
Chris assumed the young man had decided to tough it out because he could have run away. He repeatedly reached up and adjusted his cap, tipping it down over his eyes and then raising it: a giveaway that he wasn’t cool about it. Chris gave a little skip to keep up with him. To her left the crocodile of commuters processed slowly, their eyes firmly elsewhere with the absolute accord of film extras whose role is to be the mute, unseeing crowd.
Chris despised them.
She was trying to come up with the most effective insult, when without warning the black guy whirled around and confronted his chaotic abuser.
The stream of invective and abuse from the depths of the parka ascended to a plaintive whine:
‘You can’t touch me. I’m a blind old man. You filthy…’
Chris was at one with the man, as with a graceful upward sweep of his leg he hefted a kick at the blind man’s chest sending him toppling backwards, his arms raised in clumsy surrender. Chris heard his body thump against the tunnel wall. He slid down to the ground where he sat lifeless, with his head resting against a ripped and peeling poster for the film A Bug’s Life.
The disembodied litany rambled on without pause:
‘Piss off Monkey-man, picking on a defenceless old gentleman minding his own business. Your sort belong in…I said piss off Mo…’
The young man tilted his cap and closed in. He kicked him again, this time hard in the thigh; the impact pushed the tramp a few inches to the right. The voice persisted:
‘I’m blind. Help. I’m blind…’
Chris grabbed the young man by the arm. She took him by surprise and so was able to pull him away.
Behind her commuters tensed, terrified of being forced to intervene in a violent situation because of some girl’s reckless heroics. She could be knifed; she might get them all killed.