I fumbled in my satchel, pulled out the traffic warden’s hat, smearing its surface with my bloody fingertips. “Miss Ngwenya?”
A flicker on her face. Her head half-turned, her eyes half-opened, distant, but still there, looking at me, even if she didn’t entirely see.
I held up the hat. “Penny Ngwenya?”
Her eyes went to the hat in my blood-covered hands. Her fingers twitched, her mouth opened to let out a little, sliding breath.
I reached out with one shaking hand, took her hand in mine, pressed the hat into her fingers, closed them, unresisting, over the black fabric. “I brought you back your hat,” I said.
A moment.
A pause.
She didn’t seem to understand.
Her eyes fell slowly down to thing in her hand. “My . . . hat?”
“Yes. I heard you lost it. I brought it back.”
“Do I know you?” she asked, turning it over in her fingers, looking at the yellow “Penny” written inside.
“No,” I replied. “My name’s Matthew.”
“You . . . you look . . .” she began, voice a million miles away, eyes fixed on the hat.
“I happened to be passing,” I said carefully. “No trouble.”
“We . . . haven’t met, have we?”
“No,” I replied. “Just strangers.” And then, because up seemed to be wanting to give down a try, and down was feeling flexible enough just this once to let up have its way, I slid down against the side of the bridge, burying my fingers into the cold concrete in case sideways wanted to try the same trick on me. I saw the edges of my vision start to cave.
“Jesus!” exclaimed Penny, dropping down with me, trying to hold me up. “You’ve . . . you’ve been . . .”
“It’s fine,” I muttered. “It’s fine, just fine, it’ll be . . . I had to bring you back your hat, you see?”
“You’ve been fucking shot!”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“Don’t move, OK? You’ll just make it worse, I’ll . . . I’ll call an ambulance.”
Her attention had for a moment been taken from the hat, but as she reached into her pocket for her mobile phone, her eyes skated across the fabric again and she froze, mouth slightly open, staring at the little, old-fashioned, ugly black dome.
“Where did you . . .?” she stumbled.
“I heard it was important to you. I thought, since I was in the area, I could bring it back.”
“Why would you do that?”
“It’s your hat. It seemed the least I could do.”
“But . . .”
She had the hat in one hand, was fumbling for the phone with her other.
A voice said, “Get away from him.”
She looked up.
So did I.
A thing that might have once been Mr Pinner stood in the middle of the road. His suit was a raggedy painted thing of badly torn paper trailing down from the thin, uneven ripples of his flesh. His neck was bent in and then sharply out again, like a crumpled old Christmas cracker, his trousers were wrapped up tight in old receipts and bits of soggy newspaper. A thousand cuts had been torn in his flesh, from which dribbled little pieces of paper falling away into the street. One eye had been slashed straight through and was now oozing blue biro ink down his cheek. When he spoke, his voice was a distorted, lumpy thing.
He said again, “Get away from him. Penny. You can’t trust him.”
She stuttered, “Who are you? I don’t know you.”
“I’m Mr Pinner,” he replied. “I’m here to help you. I’m a friend. He’s out to use you, Penny. He wants to hurt you.”
“But . . . he gave me back my hat . . .”
“Don’t you wonder how he got it? A little prick on a bicycle stole your hat!” Mr Pinner was shouting; I had never seen that before. “A little arrogant cocksure prick stole your hat and pedalled away laughing and you really think some random stranger would go to any effort at all to bring it back, that he cares, that it matters anything to him? There’s no reason for him to help you: just another fucker in the street, another guy you can’t trust, another harmless man who at the slightest word is going to hit, or stab, or shout, or spit, or do all the things these pricks do because they can, because they’re fucking strangers and you can’t trust them! Get away from him!”
Penny looked down uncertainly at me.
Mr Pinner blurted, “You think he just found your hat, Penny? There