“You’ve been standing here a while and you look soaked through. You got some place to sleep tonight?”
I nod.
“A dry someplace?” She sounds worried.
I don’t know why she’d worry about me, though. “Yeah.”
“Okay, good.” Her breath freezes in the air as she speaks, and she stamps her feet trying to keep warm.
I’ve given up on keeping warm tonight. I’ll just remain hunched over, holding myself in tight.
Donna’s coat hardly covers her tiny dress, and the coat zip is broken. I don’t know how to fix zips. I wish I did. I want to fix everything.
The smell of the pasty is driving me crazy. I wonder if she’d mind if I started eating it. She probably doesn’t want to watch me eat, though. It’d feel kind of awkward to have her watch me eat.
“Listen, if you ever want to talk… or not talk… I’m around most nights, either here or down towards the river…. I miss him too.”
I glance at her face.
She doesn’t wear as much makeup as some of the girls—she looks older than a lot of them too—but still her lips are redder than red, her eyes outlined with black and maybe a little blue. Her dark hair is cut boyishly short, but she doesn’t look like a boy. She reminds me of a poster of Liza Minnelli in
Cabaret
that I once saw pasted across the window of a closed-down shop in Waterloo.
The wind gusts around us, sending cans and bits of paper spiraling along the pavement. Donna tucks her hands in the sleeves of her coat and shivers. She looks tired and cold. If she lives where I think she does, she has a bit of a trek home from here.
“I’ll see you around, then?” she says.
I nod and watch her walk away.
When she’s gone, I look back across the road. The girls beneath the tree have gone too.
The boy is sitting on the curb, his head resting on his knees. He’s tired. The kind of tiredness that’s stored in every muscle of your body, in every breath you take of the freezing night air. I know tiredness like that. When you’re tired of everything, tired enough to want to make it all stop. I stare at him, wondering if someone once stared at me this way.
Then I look up. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as if some force is passing over me.
A man in a dark coat is walking along the pavement toward him.
Just the sight of the man sends another electric shiver up my spine. I have a bad feeling, but I can’t work out why.
It could just be some guy walking home after work or a night out. Of course it could. And if it’s a punter swimming these stretches, then that’s probably what the boy’s been waiting for. The boy looks like he’s been waiting to be picked up for the past hour at least.
It must be loneliness that makes me want to do crazy things. Really crazy things. I can think of no other explanation.
I take a quick bite of the pasty as I hurry across the road. It’s almost hot, and it tastes so good, it almost cancels out how cold I am. I fold the top of the bag over to keep it warm. Hardly any cars are on the road now, just the occasional taxi or sports car ignoring the speed limits.
The bad feeling I have increases as I get closer to the boy. I don’t know why, because I can’t even see the man walking toward him properly, but I’m scared the guy is a shark. He walks with careful, measured steps, and even though the rain on my eyelashes makes the wet ground sparkle and everything become indistinct, I get the impression that the guy is smiling.
I reach the other side of the road. The boy tilts his head. He hasn’t noticed the man walking toward him the other way. Instead he watches me. He looks wary, but wary is good—if he didn’t care anymore, he wouldn’t last long out here.
I hold his gaze and push my hair back, making myself hold eye contact longer than I usually do for anyone—just a few seconds, just to make it seem that we have some connection, anything that will put the man off if he’s going to approach. It feels weird holding eye contact for this long. I don’t like it.
As I get closer, I can see the boy’s eyes are a light color, maybe green or blue. He wears no makeup to hide them, and his skin is clear under the streetlight, as fresh as water. He looks young. Really young.
I keep looking at the boy as I sit down next to him on the curb. Not too close—I don’t want to scare him away. There’s about half a meter of pavement between us.
The man is only a few meters away. When his footsteps falter, I know without a doubt he was making an approach. I don’t look at him. I pretend I haven’t noticed him, that I haven’t taken hurried notes in my head about his description. Notes I need to write down quickly, before they become too jumbled up.
The man keeps walking. He passes behind us. I turn my head to watch him walk away. Maybe he was just a fish. Maybe….
The only sharks I’ve been hunting so far are the ones Dashiel told me about, but maybe it’s time I found one of my own.
The boy follows my gaze, and it’s the strangest thing—when he catches sight of the guy walking away, I see him shiver. He shivers like I did, like he can’t help it.
I take a deep breath. The cold makes me cough it back out.
The boy returns to sitting with his head between his knees as if he’s pretending I’m not there.
I put the paper bag in my lap and take out my pad to scribble down my description of the shark/not-shark. When I’ve done that, I put the pad away and look around, not really sure what it is I’m supposed to do now. I don’t usually approach people. I don’t usually have a reason to. Should I get up and go away?
I open the paper bag and take another bite of the pasty. The boy turns his head, watches me from beneath his arms, his eyes fixing on the food. He’s hungry.
I don’t even think about it—I break the pasty in half and hold the half still in the bag out to him.
His expression is a mixture of too many things. Confusion mostly, I think. Maybe it’s my face that confuses him, but he doesn’t seem disgusted or horrified or shocked, or even particularly curious like some people are, especially kids—and I don’t mind that sort of curiosity anymore, it’s not malicious. It’s just wonder at all the differences in the world, and I am different. Maybe this kid can just tell I’m not a punter and wonders what I want. I don’t know.
He chews his lip, then reaches out a trembling hand to take the bag. Drawing his eyebrows together, he stares at the pasty. Rain drips from his soaking coat sleeve and onto the road. I glance at my own soaking sleeve. Then the boy looks at me again.
“It’ll get cold,” I say quietly, gesturing that he eat it, then swallowing the rest of the half I have in my hand in a single bite.
I watch the rain drip off my fingertips as the boy wolfs the pasty down with muffled grunts and gasps. It takes about three seconds.
I remember being so hungry that I didn’t want to chew food, I just wanted to swallow it down whole. I remember being so cold and wet that I’d go beyond shivering and all my body did was ache. I remember not wanting to care about anything, not wanting to have to keep going. I remember being so
tired
.
I remember a boy with glittering eyeshadow sitting next to me on the steps of some derelict church and not saying a word until I looked at him properly.
Dashiel.
I remember how he held out his hand and I never took it, but I followed him anyway, drawn to him because he was full of light and he walked like he could dance on air.
This boy wipes his mouth with his wet sleeve and says something, but it’s not English. I shrug in response. I don’t know what language he’s speaking. It doesn’t matter.
I have another crazy idea.
Making sure no one else is watching us, I point across the road to the doorway I was standing in a few minutes ago. It’s a little sheltered from the rain, and although the shallow step will still be cold and wet, at least the bitter wind won’t blow through us like we’re ghosts, and anyone who passes by won’t see us and stare.
I get up and gesture for him to follow me. Deep down in my heart, I don’t really expect him to. He probably needs to be out here; he probably needs the money. He was waiting to be picked up, after all.
I feel so light and happy when he stands up and comes after me.
It’s probably a strange thing to do, but I just want to sit with him for a little while. The sharks I’m supposed to be hunting out there can wait. For a moment my wandering the streets for them doesn’t seem as important as sitting in a doorway with this tired and hungry kid.
A little while turns into a
long
while. He
is
just a kid. It’s a horrible night, and I don’t think he has anywhere else to go.
We sit side by side, arms folded around our knees. I watch the rain, feeling too numb with cold to even shiver now. Sometimes I like the rain—but not tonight.
Sitting out here like this is likely to make me sick. It’s likely to make anyone sick. I hate to think how long this kid has been out on the street. One night, two nights, more nights than he can remember?
I don’t realize what he’s doing at first, but every so often he shuffles his hips and his feet a tiny bit, and ends up closer to me. He keeps his head bowed, and I pretend not to notice. A weird sort of tension has weighed my limbs down—it’s as though I’m a statue. I can’t ever remember anyone ever wanting to be closer to me. I can’t even remember hugging Dashiel, except perhaps once, in the beginning.
When the boy’s head touches my shoulder, I have to tell myself to keep breathing. I’m not used to being touched. I can feel his warmth even through his wet coat and my hooded jumper. Even out in this frozen night, he is still so warm.
Warm and shivering and
alive
. Not being used in some alleyway or car park by some creepy guy with a permanent smile. Not being devoured by a shark. He’s here. With me. A complete stranger.
Yet somehow we’re not strangers anymore. We’re two scared souls colliding in the dark. Some broken impulse makes me search for his hand. I scrabble clumsily, brushing my fingers against his sleeve. As soon as he realizes what I’m doing, he pushes his hand out and thrusts it eagerly into mine. Frozen fingers gripping frozen fingers.
My throat feels tight as if I’m full of tears, but I don’t even know what I want to cry for.
I stare out into the night at the rain, grateful when it finally stops.
AN OLD
church clock tolls four, a brief steady heartbeat of sound.
All around us London is paused, like a traffic light on amber, halfway between night and day.
This is the crossover. This is the time just before night workers begin to head home and day workers begin to wake. I’ve not been out in the crossover for so long. Sometimes in summer, when dawn lightens the sky, for a minute, maybe two, London becomes a ghost city—all weirdly silent yet full of light. Dashiel told me he’d seen film crews set up on one of the bridges at 4:00 a.m. one summer. It was for a film where London was to appear deserted after a zombie apocalypse. I forget the name of the film now.
This amber silence used to be my favorite time of day, until I was out here without choice and I couldn’t escape it. I suspect the kid next to me hates it.
His breathing is deep and slow, his head heavy and making my shoulder ache—I think he’s sleeping. I should wake him so we can be at Diana’s when she opens.
A few hours ago, I was just going to draw him a map. But now my responsibility for him feels as warm and weighted as his body resting against my side, as tangled together as our fingers.
Last summer Diana told me about a kid she saw curled up on the pavement outside a shop on Oxford Street, being trampled by shoppers, who just didn’t seem to notice, or care. She took him back to her restaurant with her and called social services. She got him a place to stay, off the streets, somewhere safe. I don’t know how to do that. The best I can do is take this kid to her.
Gently I prize our cold fingers apart and touch the kid’s shoulder. He’s sleeping pretty deeply. I’m kind of touched that he felt safe enough to do that, or maybe he was just exhausted and couldn’t help it. I’ve never trusted anyone enough to fall asleep with them. Not that there ever was anyone. I only saw Dashiel out here on the streets, never at the swimming pool.
As gently as I can, I push the boy’s head off my shoulder to wake him.
When he blinks, I see the panic, the “where the hell am I and who the hell are you” panic. It’s to be expected, but as quick as breathing, the world comes together for him. He figures it out, and he smiles. He’s sweet-looking, with a lot of freckles and a wonky scar on his nose. I didn’t look at him so closely last night. I smile back. He screws his face up and yawns sleepily, all neat off-white teeth and pink tongue, and fuck, he looks so young. Even if the guy wasn’t a shark, I’m really glad this boy wasn’t picked up last night.
MY BODY
is stiff and achy, and we are both so completely soaked and weighed down by our clothes that it takes an age to get to Diana’s restaurant.
The restaurant is in a tiny narrow building squeezed in between two other much larger, taller ones a couple of streets away from the river. A small green-and-yellow sign in the shape of a palm tree hangs in the window.
I peer in through the letterbox, but the place is dark and lifeless.
Although she doesn’t open until around 9:00 a.m., Diana often comes in early to prepare food. I hoped she would be here. I’m exhausted and irritable, and I want to be out of these freezing wet clothes. I want to be in my nest, all warm and sleeping.
The boy must feel that way too.
There’s an old wooden bench across the pavement. I gesture that the boy should sit down, and I pull out my pad and write a few words. I’m not sure if what I’m writing is for him or Diana. But perhaps he’ll give it to her, I don’t know. What I’m really hoping is she takes one look at him and sees he’s too young to be out there on his own. I put the note in his hands and point to the restaurant.
He frowns at the note.
When his hand reaches for mine, I pull away. It’s just a reflex. I’m startled, I don’t mean anything by it. The look on his face makes me hate my stupid reflexes more than I hated the rain last night.