Jenny Valentine - The Ant Colony

The mountains shrank and the land flattened out, got boxed in and carved up. The view from the window was cramped and ordinary and fascinatingly strange. The twins woke up and looked out at it without saying a word.

I closed my eyes.

The first thing I learned about London was not to smile. I got off the train and looked around. The platform emptied like an organised stampede. I smiled at this man in a suit, darkskinned, middle-aged, clean-shaven. He was walking towards me. The shine on his shoes reflected the sky through the glass roof of the station. I smiled and it didn’t go down so well. He did three things, lightning quick, in less than a second. I watched him. He changed the rhythm of his walk ever so slightly. He looked hard at me, like steel, to make sure he wasn’t seeing things. Then he let his eyes cloud over, so he was still looking, but right through me, never at me. The one thing he definitely didn’t do was smile back. I learned pretty quick that the only people who smile at everyone in London are newcomers and the clinically insane.

Later, in the ticket hall at Paddington, I saw more people in one go than I’d seen in the whole of my life before. Thousands lining up for tickets and funnelling through turnstiles, going up escalators and coming down. I stood dead still at the eye of the storm, just one of me, and stared. I kept looking at this list I’d scribbled on the back of an envelope, like it might help. I couldn’t read my own writing.

Everyone else knew where to go and moved in swift, strong lines that picked me up and took me in the wrong direction, like the river at home after a night of rain.

I thought about Max then. He came back to me in the middle of all that sound and rhythm and colour and fumesmell and movement. He surprised me. I thought about walking behind him in the dappled darkness of the woods. I pictured his permanent frown, his sticking out ears, his chaotic hair. I thought about the nervous flicker of his smile.

It was all I could do to keep breathing.

You know when people say they wish the floor would open up and swallow them whole? Well, it’s pretty easily done, if you really mean it. I came out of Camden Town Station at twenty-nine minutes past four and vanished without a trace. Nobody knew who I was. I couldn’t stop smiling.

The sky was lower than I was used to. I went into a baker’s and bought a sandwich, and I couldn’t understand half of what the girl behind the counter said to me because she said it all so fast. I took too long counting out the right money and I could hear her foot tapping and she didn’t smile back, in fact she didn’t even look at me. The sandwich tasted of nothing and made me incredibly thirsty. I bought a Coke from a paper shop that you couldn’t fit more than two bodies in at one time. It was so crammed full of things to buy they forgot to leave room for people.

That’s what Camden looked like to me – it was the first thing I noticed. There was stuff for sale everywhere and I wondered who the hell would want to buy any of it.

I sat down on the wall of a bridge over the canal and finished my drink. I opened my bag and looked inside, for no reason at all. It was so loud. Layers of noise crowded and collided in my head, like sheep in a lorry, and made it hard to think. I walked all the way down one side of the street, into the yards, stopping for everything, studying everything, and then all the way back down the other. It was dirty, all greys instead of greens, like everything had a coat of dust on it. I felt like I needed to wash my hands even though I’d hardly touched anything.

I read about the dust on the London Underground once, that there’s tonnes of it every week and it’s mostly human skin. I hadn’t really believed it. But now I wondered if that was what was covering everything – pieces of all the people I’d already seen and all the people I hadn’t.

That’s when I saw the kid in the doorway, when I was walking up and down thinking about the dust. That’s when I filed her away in my memory box of people you don’t ever speak to. I was killing time because I had no idea what should happen next. It’s probably why I noticed her.

I went into a pub and had a pint. The man behind the bar didn’t look at me, didn’t ask how old I was. Nobody looked at me. It was like magic, like finding an invisible cloak.

It was the opposite of home.

It’s what I’d longed for, for weeks and weeks, to be the blind spot in a room, the black hole in the universe, to be absent without trying to at all.

I wanted to stay like that forever.

Later, I stood on the pavement outside the pub and tried to make sense of where I was. I remember pretending the road was a river, fed by other smaller roads like the streams that run off the hills, but thick with cars and bikes and buses instead of water. I remember thinking I’d had too much to drink.

Across the street a black plastic sign with pink writing said The Kyprianos Hotel . There was a fracture in the plastic and a round hole, like someone had thrown a tennis ball in there, or a rock. I had my hand around all the money in my pocket. I could afford it, I knew that, maybe not for long, but I suddenly needed to sleep.

I’d never stayed in a hotel before. It didn’t amount to much, apart from some soap in a box and a plastic shower cap, and a bathroom where you had to practically stand on the loo seat if you wanted to close the door. I didn’t close the door because there was nobody watching. I was completely and utterly on my own.

I almost regretted it then. I very nearly decided I’d done the wrong thing. But I swerved away from it at the last minute and kept my eyes on the road.

If only I’d learned to do that earlier.

I couldn’t sleep because there was too much going on outside the window – a whole orchestra of sirens and yelling and footsteps and door slams and engines. I wondered how anyone ever slept. I stared at a clamshell stain in one corner of the ceiling and thought about becoming someone new with nothing to be ashamed of, no past, just a future.

I thought about how weird it was, to be missing in one place while you’re right there in another.

I was waiting for my mum. That’s what I was doing.

I was pressing patterns into a piece of old chewing gum with the bottom of my shoe. There were more than nineteen pieces of gum on the square of pavement outside the bar. I was counting them.

I wasn’t allowed in cos I’m underage. That’s why I was waiting outside in the black doorway in the freezing cold. She was in there for ages. Mr Thing and her weren’t friends any more, which meant she’d also lost her job and we had to leave the flat. Things happen that way a lot because Mum’s good at putting all of her eggs in one boyfriend.

We went so she could collect her wages and they had one more massive row while I stood outside counting spat out gum, trying not to listen. When she stormed out her mascara had slipped and the end of her nose was red, and she was halfway through a sentence about what a something he was.

When she saw me she rubbed her nose with the back of her hand and cracked a smile. She’s got nice teeth, my mum, all straight and small. Not like my mouth, which is still full of holes and frilly edges, even though I’m ten already. I hope I get teeth like her when I’m finished. I hope I hurry up.

“Let’s go,” Mum’s pretty teeth said. “Let’s spend some of his money, quick.”

She got me by the hand and we walked really fast across the road, and I thought she was saying stuff to me that I couldn’t hear.

“What?” I said, and she turned to me and I saw she had her mobile out already.

We packed before we went to see Mr Thing cos Mum’d been expecting it and she’d helped herself to a few extras out of his house, like towels and wine and stuff. We’d stashed our bags in a pub.