Kate Griffin: A Madness of Angels

He was, I now realise, the first person I had spoken to in nearly two and a half years. The daily Metro , newly delivered to the newspaper rack inside the station, gave me the date; the man behind the window gave me conversation.

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 hangover from a bygone pre-mobile-phone era, preserved by the local council in the name of heritage and tourism. The interior of the phone box stank of piss and beer, also in keeping with London tradition, and, as the ultimate in old-timey heritage, the back wall of the box was covered with a selection of little cards.

“LOOKING FOR A GOOD TIME?” was the least imaginative and least biologically explicit of the cards on offer, but in keeping with its neighbours it had a picture of a woman with what I could only assume still medically qualified as breasts protruding monumentally from beneath the tag line.

“!!!HOT HOT HOT!!!” proclaimed its neighbour while, below, a number of cards offered services ranging from exotic through to mind-blowing, all with attached telephone numbers for ease of booking your special encounter. At random I picked one that had been stuck up with bits of old chewing gum, all the while with my eyes half-closed. Anything close to taste or discernment in these circumstances made me feel dirtier than I already was. “**SEXY ASIAN BABE**” was its motto, and even as I put it in my pocket we were glancing this way and that in case someone, anyone, was watching us in our moment of shame. I walked with this card to the nearest bank, just opening up for the morning. The security guard watched me from the door to the counter and kept on watching, face dark and eyes narrow, waiting for me to make a move. I picked up one of the counter pens on its little beaded chain, and started to write on the back of the card. I wrote four sets of four numbers, relieved that I could remember them after so long. It was possible that someone in the credit card industry would be watching, studying their computer screens for the sacred numbers that could charm any ATM in any corner of the world to flash across the transaction board, ready to trace their user; but then, that was exactly the point. These digits, which so neatly resembled an account number, could be used anywhere, at any time and, like any black ant on a dark night, their use would get lost in the volume of data, too dense even for the sharpest magician to see.

That at least was my hope, though even as I finished inscribing the card I knew what a risk I was taking.

I left the bank before the security guard could try to arrest me on whatever premise he felt necessary, and kept on walking. Three streets away there was another bank, with an ATM planted firmly in the concrete wall outside. I walked up to it, checked over my shoulder for any passing watchers, pulled my SEXY ASIAN BABE card out of my pocket, and pushed it, careful not to bend the cardboard, into the debit card slot of the machine.

The screen went black. I waited. A single 1 appeared in the top right-hand corner, then quickly expanded into a mad marathon of numbers and figures tumbling over the screen. A warning sign appeared and for a brief moment my fears were realised – someone was watching the banks, looking for the sacred numbers that could access an account – then it was gone again, and the message appeared, PLEASE SELECT THE SERVICE YOU REQUIRE .