A London Evening.

He knew from experience that he had to leave the hotel room at five if he wanted to get home at the usual time, but it wasn’t easy. As he shut the door, he caught one last glimpse of Sara, her leg curled around the duvet like a comma in some impossibly erotic sentence, her thumbs glued to the screen of her mobile. She had erased his existence from her young mind as quickly as water closes over a thrown stone. He felt an urgent need to cry, as he so often did these days, but stifled it. The hotel corridor was stale with other people’s bad dreams like all hotel corridors, and his feet made no sound on the carpet as he passed along. Somewhere someone was vacuuming. 

His meeting ended early and he felt like a scrap of paper blown by sunlight as he drifted through the leisure-seeking tourists, into the empty sun-filled carriage and out through tunnels furred with soot. At his stop, the air smelled of cool earth and growing things and lemon-gold sunlight poured evenly over the hanging baskets and peeling white palings, the dandelions in cracks. He walked through the open ticket barriers with a cheerful nod to the woman behind the thick glass window of the ticket booth, who ignored him, and decided to take the short cut over the foot bridge, so eager was he to see his wife and daughter, to make tea and read stories and drink a glass of wine. As he turned the blind corner leading to the old, graffiti-covered foot bridge, however, there wafted back to him the unmistakable pungent stink of skunk. The man paused, then decided to risk it. The kids were waiting for him at the top of the stairs and nothing was said. They blocked his way and his smile was almost apologetic as they encircled him. He didn’t make a sound as they knocked him down and took his wallet, his phone and his expensive trainers, leaving him lying on his side, spitting blood in only his socks.

There’s a dowdy girl in a calf-length pleated skirt and baggy blouse waiting for her date outside the Palace Theatre, her pearl clutch bag clasped under her arm, looking into the crowd of tourists and Londoners giddy to be released from the servitude of the easy chair, the emails, the tea round. Her outfit advertises either her provinciality or her virginity, though she’s around 27 or 28. It also raises the question of whether her date will even show up. The good news is that, five minutes later, he does arrive. The bad news is that he’s clearly gay. Either she’s failed to twig to this, or she’s in denial about it. Whatever the reason, her purpose in being here is romantic, or she wouldn’t have spent so much time on her outfit. Maybe they were friends as kids, back in the country, and she never noticed why he preferred her company to other girls or the boys in his class. Or perhaps he told her, and she comforted him through the pain of being so different while harbouring this secret infatuation, this hope that one day he’d notice her. The wait goes on.

A pair of kids in sit in the corner of an ugly city boozer among the lacquered wood and Toby jugs, not speaking. The bar is lined with the hunched shoulders of grim, monosyllabic Punches, their noses like split teabags. The stuff the kids took here – why here, of all places; what in God’s name were they thinking? – will kick in very soon.

The 23:15 from London to Cambridge. A family fresh from an outing to the theatre get on. Mother and daughter lead the way with a beanstalk patriarch whirled along in their pear-shaped wake. None of them speak as they sit down and the train pulls off. One after the other they each reach into their bags or pockets and get out portable music players. Headphones in, the mother fusses at the tassels on her handbag and mouths lyrics into the moving darkness. The daughter reads her programme and then tries, and fails, to go to sleep on her mother’s shoulder. Dad, meanwhile, scrolls restlessly through his cricketing podcasts. Every so often the mother stares round the carriage through goggly egg-white eyes, defying the men to stare at her precious, portly daughter and reprimanding them if they don’t. The only signifier that they are a family is that they all have the same whitehead on noses that look like spattered toilet roll.

It’s gone midnight and the lads are fucking about with the day’s haul back on the block, counting out the cash, going through the phones, smoking draw like there’s no tomorrow. The first bloke they stepped to, the posh twat, had plenty of cash on him and an iPhone. For a laugh one of them sticks the ‘phone into a speaker jack. Strange hums and washes of sound fill the room. For a moment they all listen, astonished, then someone says, ‘What the fuck is this shit?’ and chucks the phone across the room. Later on, when he’s alone, the boy whose room it is will listen to the strange otherworldly music as he goes to sleep until it mingles with the crumbling leafy feel of the dope in his blood and washes him out to sea.