of the stairs stood the station manager, flanked by one of his assistants, radio in hand. He raised his hand as we approached, and said, “May I have a word?”
Oda waved her ticket at him. I waved mine.
We pushed past, tapped out through the barrier, and walked away before he could recover from his surprise.
A witty man once announced in that very special 1950s English accent
that today can only be used in parody:
‘Balham: Gateway to the South!’
Balham - last chance to turn back, last chance to escape and get back into the city. Last place where the Underground meets the overland, last chance at least to pretend you live in the centre of town.
Balham. A place where all good Woolworths go to die; suburbia that just wishes it was something more.
I was bleeding.
As we staggered out of Balham station I turned to Oda and said, “My stitches have torn.”
She looked at me, and for a moment, I was scared again. Then she took me firmly by the wrist and dragged me like a child across the street to the nearest chemist. She bought a thick pile of bandaging and a first-aid kit, and hurried me into the nearest passport photo booth.
It wasn’t a unit designed for two, but I wasn’t about to complain. She said, “Coat!”
I pulled off my coat.
“T-shirt!”
I pulled off my shirt. “What a mess,” she tutted, and started mopping. After a few minutes, a security guard pulled back the curtain to enquire what we were doing. Oda told him to call the police, or an ambulance, or both, and to get stuffed. Paralysed by the wide range of choices available, he just hovered, and when the bandages had been applied and my Jesus T-shirt pulled back on, he hustled us out as quickly as possible and snuck away to call the police.
Oda propped me against the glass window of a supermarket and ran across the road to a charity shop. A minute later she came back with a black T-shirt in a paper bag. It said, “GARAMOND IS THE WORLD’S GREATEST FONT”.
I said, “Please. No.”
She said, “Shut up and put it on.”
This time we used a coffee shop. She bought two strong coffees that turned out to be brown hot water in a cardboard cup; but I appreciated the gesture. It was something to wash the painkillers down. I changed in the toilets. By the time we emerged, cups in hand, the sirens were starting nearby. She said: “Can he follow us?”
“Who?”
“Mr Pinner.”
“I don’t know. Let’s keep moving.”
We took a mainline train to Clapham Junction, sitting in silence by the window. I couldn’t face the Tube; just couldn’t face it.
From Clapham, we took the mainline train to Waterloo.
She didn’t look me in the eye, just stared out of the window in silence and dug at the dirt under her nails. It was black and red from dry blood. She still didn’t look at me.
At Waterloo she said, “Do we need to find you a doctor?”
“Eventually,” I said. “I want to see the river.”
Down into the subways that ran beneath the roundabout before Waterloo Bridge; a loop past the Imax and then north. I could smell the river, taste its old magics on the air, they cooled down the burning in my skin, eased some of the weight from my legs. The rain had stopped, the pavement gleaming with clean washed darkness, the tide low, with soft, perfectly smooth sand peeping out from beneath the high walls of the embankment. I slid gratefully down on a bench in front of the National Theatre, beneath the leafless branches of the fairy-light-hung trees. The wooden bench was still damp from the rain, the city a faded grey behind a monotone haze. It was quiet and beautiful. Somewhere behind all the walls a million people were doing whatever it was people did after their lunch break in offices like these. And I didn’t need to know about a single one of them, but could sit at the centre of the universe and listen to the river, flowing just for me, just mine.
Oda stood behind me.
Bang, I thought.
Bang, three to the chest, two to the head.
Bang; bang bang.
Public place - cameras, CCTV, always CCTV, eyes in the windows of the cafés of the theatre, buying tickets, reading books, walking by the river, tourists with little kiddies holding balloons.
I slipped my fingers beneath my “GARAMOND IS THE WORLD’S GREATEST FONT” T-shirt and felt the sticky seeping of blood through the bandage Oda had