are eight million people in this city! You are tiny, you are nothing to them, an infinitely small part of a great machine too big to ever be understood; people don’t care! You can walk down the same street a million times and never see the same faces, never be recognised, never be appreciated, smiled at, laughed with, loved, known, because you’re just a nothing to them, another person who happens to live in the city, getting in their fucking way, so why should he bother? Why would anyone ever fucking bother with you?
“You’ve seen it, Penny Ngwenya, stood on the edge of the hill and looked down on the city and known you can just lift up your toes and fall for ever, tumble for ever into the void and no one will ever notice, no one will ever even know! Cretin! Maggot! Scum! Stupid kids in their fucking hoods, stupid fuckers pissing in the street! He’s part of it! He’s come here tonight to hurt you! He’s part of the fall, one of the men who laugh when your back is turned, part of the insanity!
“Give me the hat, Penny. Give it to me, and we can end this. Just like you wanted to, we can end this tonight, just give me the hat . . .”
Penny half-rose, turned towards Mr Pinner. I grabbed her hand as she stood, pulled her back towards me; she jolted at our touch, as if surprised to find us still there.
“There’s no such things as strangers, Penny Ngwenya. Not in the city. Just other Londoners. Not strangers at all.”
She looked at me with a pair of perfect oval eyes in a perfect oval face.
She smiled, and carefully pried her fingers away from mine, wiping the blood off casually on her trousers as she rose.
She stood up, straightened, and turned towards Mr Pinner, who held out his arms towards her, paper frame twitching and shuddering as if short of breath.
She raised the hat in her hands, turned it, dome up towards the sky.
Mr Pinner smiled.
She lifted the hat towards him, and then past him, up in a long, careful arc, and without a word, put it down on her head, twisting it into a familiar, comfortable position.
She let out a sigh, closed her eyes, seemed to relax over every inch of her body.
Mr Pinner made a little sound. It was somewhere between a choke and the rustle of old crumpled paper.
Penny looked up, stared Mr Pinner straight in the eye and smiled.
She said, “You weirdo psychopath. Fuck right off out of here before I call the fucking police, I mean Jesus.”
Mr Pinner whimpered. He staggered away from her a few paces, his arms falling limp to his sides. “But I . . . I . . .” he stammered.
“Seriously, I’m not shitting around. I mean, where do you get off with this crap?”
“I meant . . . I meant it for . . . I only wanted to . . .” he gabbled. Paper drifted from the tears in his arm, popped out of his left ear, dribbled down his right nostril in thin pale strands.
“Look, I’m calling the police, seriously,” she said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a mobile phone. “You can do all the shouting and spitting you fucking want; I’ve got community support officer training and I’ve had it up to here with weirdo psychopaths thinking they can get away with it. I mean, look at you! You wanna go to jail, arsehole? You wanna? Because I swear that this is the last time some testicle of a male mouths off at me! Look! Dialling!”
She dialled 999, held the phone to her ear.
Mr Pinner held out his hands imploringly. His thumb started to unravel, long white sheets spilling down from his fingers like a mummy’s bandages. “Please,” he whimpered, “I only wanted to help, I was . . . I was . . .”
Paper tumbled down from underneath his tattered trouser, spun in the river breeze.
“Yeah, police and ambulance please. Yeah? Yes, that’s the number. Penny Ngwenya. Yes.”
Mr Pinner’s eyes fell on me, blue biro ink dribbling out of the tear glands. “I’ll . . . I’m . . . I’ll . . .” he croaked, but his mouth was filling with fat reams of paper, choking on it. His jacket had come undone to let out files and sheets that tumbled from his thinning chest like it was skin shaven from a corpse.