Later, Enzo walked around to cross the stream and head back over Church Street, back home. He passed the aviary as he crossed the bridge by the side of the house, and another lady jogger came pounding toward him, her blond hair wound up tight on her head. Enzo didn’t even look at her, but the birds started shrieking in their cage. Enzo smiled. The birds knew that he was close to them. They knew what was about to come.
A tree had blown down. It had fallen over from the churchyard at the back of the park, bringing with it a section of the cemetery wall. Enzo stopped for a moment and looked down at the top of the tree, the leaves and shoots and buds. He felt like only a god could, seeing the tree like that, he felt like a giant. One day, he knew, it wouldn’t be the storm that would blow down the trees. Enzo would tear through the city like a wolf, a great creature the size of a storm. Trees and houses would fall in front of him, and all the people would scream, a great noise rising toward him like a choir. And they would feel his breath upon them, and it would burn with the heat of the red, it would stink with the heat of the white.
Trouble is a lonesome town
by Cathi Unsworth
King’s Cross
Dougie arrived at the concourse opposite the station just half an hour after it had all gone off. He’d had the cab driver drop him down the end of Gray’s Inn Road, outside a pub on the corner there, where he’d made a quick dive into the gents to remove the red hood he’d been wearing over the black one, pulled on a Burberry cap he’d had in his bag so that the visor was down over his eyes. That done, he’d worked his way through the mass of drinkers, ducked out another door, and walked the rest of the way to King’s Cross.
The Adidas bag he gripped in his right hand held at least twenty grand in cash. Dougie kind of wished it was handcuffed to him, so paranoid was he about letting go of it even for a second that he’d had trouble just putting it on the floor of the taxi between his feet. He’d wanted it to be on his knee, in his arms, more precious than a baby. But Dougie knew that above all else now, he had to look calm, unperturbed. Not like a man who’d just ripped off a clip joint and left a man for dead on a Soho pavement.
That’s why he’d had the idea of making the rendezvous at the Scottish restaurant across the road from the station. He’d just blend in with the other travelers waiting for their train back up north, toting their heavy bags, staring at the TV with blank, gormless expressions as they pushed stringy fries smothered in luminous ketchup into their constantly moving mouths. The way he was dressed now, like some hood rat, council estate born and bred, he’d have no trouble passing amongst them.
He ordered his quarter-pounder and large fries, with a supersize chocolate lard shake to wash it all down, eyes wandering around the harshly lit room as he waited for it all to land on his red plastic tray. All the stereotypes were present and correct. The fat family (minus dad, natch) sitting by the window, mother and two daughters virtually indistinguishable under the layers of flab and identical black-and-white hairstyles by Chavettes of Tyneside to match the colors of their footie team. The solitary male, a lad of maybe ten years and fifteen stone, staring sullenly out the window through pinhole eyes, sucking on the straw of a soft drink that was only giving him back rattling ice cubes. On the back of his shirt read his dreams: 9 SHEARER. But he was already closer to football than footballer.
Then there was the pimp and his crack whore; a thin black man sat opposite an even thinner white woman with bruises on her legs and worn-down heels on her boots. Her head bowed like she was on the nod, while he, all angles and elbows and knees protruding from his slack jeans and oversize Chicago Bulls shirt, kept up a steady monologue of abuse directed at her curly head. The man’s eyes where as rheumy as a seventy-year-old’s, and he sprayed fragments of his masticated fries out as he kept on his litany of insults. Sadly for Iceberg Slim, it looked like the motherfuckingbitchhocuntcocksucker he was railing at had already given up the ghost.
Oblivious to the psychodrama, the Toon Army had half of the room to themselves, singing and punching the air, reliving moment-by-moment the two goals they’d scored over Spurs — well thank fuck they had, wouldn’t like to see this lot disappointed. They were vile enough in victory, hugging and clasping at each other with tears in their eyes, stupid joker’s hats askew over their gleaming red faces, they might as well have been bumming each other, which was obviously what they all wanted.
Yeah, Dougie liked to get down among the filth every now and again, have a good wallow. In picking over the faults of others, he could forget about the million and one he had of his own.
Handing over a fiver to the ashen bloke behind the counter, who had come over here thinking nothing could be worse than Romania, Dougie collected his change and parked himself inconspicuously in the corner. Someone had left a copy of the Scum on his table. It was a bit grubby and he really would have preferred to use surgical gloves to touch it, but it went so perfectly with his disguise and the general ambience of the joint that he forced himself. Not before he had the bag firmly wedged between his feet, however, one of the handles round his ankle so if anyone even dared to try...
Dougie shook his head and busied himself instead by arranging the food on his plastic tray in a manner he found pleasing: the fries tipped out of their cardboard wallet into the half of the Styrofoam container that didn’t have his burger in it. He opened the ketchup so that he could dip them in two at a time, between mouthfuls of burger and sips of chocolate shake. He liked to do everything methodically.
Under the headline “STITCHED UP,” the front page of the Scum was tirelessly defending the good character of the latest batch of rapist footballers who’d all fucked one girl between the entire team and any of their mates who fancied it. Just so they could all check out each other’s dicks while they did it, Dougie reckoned. That sort of shit turned his stomach almost as much as the paper it was printed on, so he quickly flipped the linen over, turned to the racing pages at the back. That would keep his mind from wandering, reading all those odds, totting them up in his head, remembering what names went with what weights and whose colors. All he had to do now was sit tight and wait. Wait for Lola.
Lola.
Just thinking about her name got his fingertips moist, got little beads of sweat breaking out on the back of his neck. Got a stirring in his baggy sweatpants so that he had to look up sharply and fill his eyes with a fat daughter chewing fries with her mouth open to get it back down again.
Women didn’t often have this effect on Dougie. Only two, so far, in his life. And he’d gone further down the road with this one than anyone else before.
He could still remember the shock he felt when he first saw her, when she sat herself down next to him at the bar with a tired sigh and asked for a whiskey and soda. He caught the slight inflection in her accent, as if English wasn’t her first language, but her face was turned away from him. A mass of golden-brown curls bobbed on top of her shoulders, she had on a cropped leopardskin jacket and hipster jeans, a pair of pointy heels protruding from the bottom, wound around the stem of the bar stool. The skin on her feet was golden-brown too; mixed-race she must have been, and for a minute Dougie thought he knew what she would look like before she turned her head, somewhere between Scary Spice and that bird off Holby City. An open face, pretty and a bit petulant. Maybe some freckles over the bridge of her nose.