We opened our eyes. The world was bright blue in our vision; electric fire.
We stepped forward through the swirling remnants of dirt and monster. We opened our arms and let the blue fire spread between our fingers. It was so good, so easy! We thrilled in it.
“Do you wish to fight us?” we yelled towards the advancing men. “Do you think you will live so long?”
They stopped, hesitated, drew back in the middle of the road, and I could have just sat down in the filth of the street, stopped, could have, but that the fire was now burning behind my eyes. Beautiful, brilliant blue fire. “Do you not relish what life you have?” we called, letting the flames burn across our skin. “Do you not live for every breath, dance every moment to the rhythm of your own heartbeat, have you not seen the fire that burns in every sight?”
We tightened our fingers, ever so slightly, pulling them into the shape of a fist. Above us, the neon lights of the street lamps exploded, the burglar alarms on the sides of the shops popped, spraying metal, the water in the gutter bubbled, twisted, turned, like it was being sucked down into a vortex. “If all you see in life is its end,” we called, “then join us!”
It was so easy, now we were willing to try, the power felt so good, that brilliant, sacred word we hadn’t dared to whisper since I had first reopened my eyes, the magic of the streets,
Lights started turning on; there were voices in the houses; car alarms started to wail in the street. I didn’t want to be caught, I so badly didn’t want that to deal with on top of everything else now, please not now. I wanted to sleep. We wanted them gone.
Neither, it seemed, were they prepared to stay. They started backing away; then turned and ran, scuttling into their car, and firing the engine. We let the power slip from our fingers, although I knew, so easily, I knew that just a thought could burst their brakes or shatter their windows or twist their pipes or burn their fuel, we knew we still had that strength inside us, so simple, so easy to just…
I let the power go, let the built-up magic between my fingers slip away; and it hurt. There was so much of it, just letting it go without bursting into flame made my head ache and my heart pound. Inside, I knew that we loved it. We loved that fire in our fingers, we loved that victory against the monster, we loved the rain and the rubbish and the night and the noise, and we would never, entirely, let it go.
As the first person started shouting from their window, “What the fuck is…”
… I turned, and walked away, into the night.
That was the first night.
By the end of everything, I missed the calm of those hours in Dulwich.
I had fifty stolen pounds in my pocket. I sat on a bench until dawn, a slippery grey turning from monochrome to colour crawling up from the east. I didn’t have to wait long. Sleeping was out of the question; we wouldn’t let our mind stop, wouldn’t shut our eyes, although I so wanted to sleep.
At sunrise, I took the first bus that came along, to the first tube station I could find. The man behind the counter couldn’t see my bare feet, so didn’t ask; but I knew I still smelled and looked wild because even through the plastic glass that separated us, he recoiled when I approached.
He was, I now realise, the first person I had spoken to in nearly two and a half years. The daily
The date should have appalled me.
But I suppose the night had brought me time to think, to reconcile myself to the worst of all possibilities, and when I read it, I was almost relieved to find it hadn’t been longer since I had last held a newspaper.
The man selling tickets said, “What d’you want?”
“An Oyster card.”
“You OK?”
“OK?”
“Um… yeah. OK?”
“I had a rough night.”
“Oyster card, right?”
“With a travelcard. Monthly, zones one to six.”
He named a price. I was duly appalled – two years had not been kind to inflation. But we weren’t about to care about the cost of travel-cards, not yet, so let it go.
“What can I get with what I’ve got?” I asked, pushing the fifty pounds through the copper-plated hollow between us.
He gave me a weekly travelcard, and not much change. I hoped a week would be long enough.
It would be two more hours before the shops would open. I waddled down to the platform. The escalator felt warm, the slats an unusual sensation between my toes. I curled my feet over their edge as I rode down; and then, since the feeling had seemed so strange, we rode up again, and down one more time, trailing our fingers along the polished metal surface in the middle of the escalator shaft, or leaning against the black rubber handrail as it moved at a slightly different speed from the stair itself, dragging our body faster than the stairway could carry us.
I caught the first train of the morning, almost empty, travelling north beneath the river. I went to Great Portland Street station, and walked along Marylebone Road. Even at this early hour, with the sun reflecting grey- silver-gold across the wet pavement, the road was busy, cars stopping every hundred yards to wait for that elusive green light to ripple from one end of the system to the other. On Marylebone High Street the houses were big, pale stone or red brick, with high windows and large glass doors or shopfronts on their lower floors. The street woke slowly, lorries crawling away from offloading their goods into the small supermarkets just as the one-way system started to feed its first cars of the day south, towards the West End. People avoided me as I walked by. I was a mess; but not threatening enough to justify calling the police. I radiated humility and harmlessness, a good-natured insanity, and they let me be.
I camped out on the pavement like a beggar in front of the shop I’d had in mind until it opened, and was looked at strangely by the young shop assistant – new since I’d last been here – as I wandered in.
It was a charity shop, one of the biggest of its kind. I drifted past second-hand books, old alarm clocks and newly laundered dresses in all the oddest sizes on the scale, to the shoe section. More battered and flattened creatures I had not seen; they were exactly what I wanted.
I tried on a pair of trainers, that had once been bright blue and white and were now faded blue and muddy grey. The padding still fitted snugly, but it was thin enough underfoot for me to feel the texture of whatever surface I walked on. The laces didn’t match, and the trim at the back of one shoe was torn; they were perfect. Buying them, and breakfast, took the last of my change.
Breakfast was crispy bacon, egg swimming in grease, potato waffles containing mostly cardboard-tasting white powder, suspicious sausage, baked beans overboiled, and tea. It was ambrosia on our tongue, an explosion of sense and memory, a delight unlike any we had experienced before. It made me, for a moment, feel as if nothing had changed, and that all could, perhaps, be well.
Fed and finally shod, the question arose of what I should do next. We desperately wanted to go walking, to explore the city and find what two years had done to it, see how it was different in daylight, eat the food, drink the drink, revel in every street and sight like a tourist, seeing it all for the first time outside the hazy mess of my memories.
But our feet were in pain and our safety was uncertain, our clothes stank of litter and urban rain, stained a thin beige-brown. Besides, I had a long list of questions that needed to be asked, and until I knew the answers, I felt that I would not be safe.
For the sake of decency and security, I needed new clothes. I would attract too much attention in my current garb, and if the litterbug had demonstrated anything, it was that there would be people looking for me.
I needed money.
Begging was an option, but I wasn’t sure if I had the time. We certainly did not have the patience, not when there were more … exciting solutions to our problem.
I wandered up Marylebone High Street in my new, blissful shoes, until I found a phone box, bright red, a
