past the closest of them. He didn’t need to see any more stuff like that, not so up-close anyway. They walked past Shepherd’s Bush Green, over the large roundabout, which was normally surrounded by a moat of stationary cars, vans and trucks beeping, honking, getting nowhere fast, but was now just an isolated island of grass with a large, pointless, blue thermometer sculpture in the middle. On the top of it, a row of crows patiently sat and watched them.
Where did all the pigeons go?
She wondered whether the bird world mirrored the human world. The crows were the gangs, and the pigeons were nervously hiding away somewhere else.
‘I’m scared,’ muttered Jacob.
‘Don’t be, we’ve got this now,’ she replied calmly, lifting her shirt an inch or two to reveal the gun stuffed into the waist of her jeans.
‘Can I fire it?’
‘No.’
‘You had a go,’ he complained.
‘It went off when I picked it up,’ she lied, feeling the slightest unpleasant twinge; the thin end of something she knew was going to inhabit her dreams for years to come.
‘Can I hold it then?’
‘No.’
They walked over the roundabout towards Holland Park where the homes came with an extra zero to their price tag, and looked a good deal grander than their humble terraced house. Here, she noticed, there had been less rioting and looting. The road, although still cluttered with some debris, was a lot clearer than it was back over the roundabout in Shepherd’s Bush. Leona guessed the people there had so much less need to loot. There’d be well-stocked larders in every home, and the chavs and hoodies who normally populated the corners round here, were probably up in those grand three-storey town houses helping mother and father work their way through the wine collection.
‘I’m sure we’ll find something to drink and eat round here,’ she said. ‘It looks much less messed up than back home.’
‘This is where the really rich people live,’ he said.
She nodded, ‘Yeah, and they always seem to do all right when there’s a problem.’
Five minutes later they spotted a small convenience store tucked down a cul-de-sac, lined with hanging baskets of flowers; very villagey, very pretty and largely untouched by the last week’s chaos. Metal roller-shutters had come down, probably at the first sign of trouble, and apart from a couple of dents in them where someone had tried their luck smashing through, and one of the large windows behind had been cracked but not shattered, it looked like the store had yet to be looted.
‘Is there food in there?’ asked Jacob.
Leona nodded. ‘I think as much as we need. Stand back.’
She aimed the pistol at a sturdy looking padlock at the bottom of the shutter, and grimaced as she slowly squeezed the trigger.
Jacob yelped with excitement, hopping up and down as the gun cracked loudly. The padlock fragmented into several jagged parts and the glass door behind the shutter shattered.
‘Yeah!’ shouted Jacob, as the smoke cleared and the glass finished falling. ‘Wicked!’
‘Stay out here,’ she said.
She pushed the shutter up and stepped inside the shop, holding the gun up in front of her, shakily panning it around the gloomy interior.
‘Okay,’ she called out to Jacob. ‘Looks clear.’
He joined her inside.
It was a small convenience store, a baker’s and delicatessen. The meat was spoiled, she could smell that and a few blue spots of mould had blossomed on most of the bread. There was, however, a heartening array of tinned produce on the shelves, and two large fridges full of bottles and cans, all of them of course warm, but that didn’t matter.
She pulled out a bottle of water and gulped it, then handed it to Jacob. He shook his head.
‘Not thirsty?’
‘Yeah, but I want Coke,’ he replied, reaching into the fridge on tiptoes and pulling out a litre bottle.
‘Mum would have a fit if she saw you drinking that. It’s just sugar and chemicals.’
Jacob shrugged as he twisted the cap off and slurped from the bottle.
‘I can’t believe this,’ she said, with a big grin spreading across her face. ‘We’ve struck a gold-mine.’
‘No more pilchards,’ added Jacob, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and belching.
Leona looked back at the open shutter. ‘Let’s grab what we need quickly. Other people may have heard the bang.’
They found a tartan wheelie bag nearby, one of those shabby things that only old blue-rinsed ladies seem to favour, and filled it with as many tins and bottles of drink as they could squeeze in. Leona found some wire