Staying Alive

I look up. It isn’t Luke or Pa Walton. The studded girl is in front of me.

‘It doesn’t matter—it’s only some change,’ I mumble.

‘Let me,’ she says and she thrusts her hand where no girl has been since…I was going to say Megan, but, actually, Doctor Morrissey was fumbling around my groin only eight days ago. Her hand, though, wasn’t decorated with weeping scabs and a tattoo of what looks like a cod.

Moments later it re-emerges from my pocket clutching nine or ten one pound coins, a fifty-pence piece, two tens and assorted coppers. ‘If you were gonna get a coffee with this, don’t bother,’ she says. ‘It tastes like a rat pissed it out.’

‘As long as it’s hot I don’t care too much.’

I reach out for the money.

‘It’s OK, I’ll get it. Milk? Sugar?’

2.56 a.m.

She’s eighteen. She has ambitions. She wants to be a tattooist. Or a psychiatric nurse. Or an environmental terrorist. Or a model. Or a contestant on Big Brother. Or a bus driver. Or—truly fanciful, this one—a long-haul flight attendant (‘ Chicken or Beef? Nah, don’t bother, mate—they both taste like a rat shat it out.’) But she’s between jobs at the moment. She loves dogs but not cats, ecstasy but not acid and The Matrix though not the sequels. And she stinks. BO, KFC, Bamp;H, Woodpecker and—ever so faintly—piss all jostle for my nose’s attention. She smells because she hasn’t had a bath or, I suspect, a change of clothes for some time. This is because she lives in a squat in a condemned tower block on the Cathall estate in Leytonstone.

I study her as she talks—and she hasn’t stopped for over half an hour. A thin film of dirt lies over the skin on her face, and her pores are clogged with enough black grease to lubricate the drive shaft on a sixteen-wheeler. Her teeth are chipped and stained the colour of the ‘before’ set of dentures in a Denclens ad. She has a cold sore on her top lip—roughly the shape of Cuba, though obviously not as big. She’s wearing the world’s baggiest jeans so I can’t tell, but I’ll bet she hasn’t waxed lately. I wonder what she’d look like if she scrubbed up, but not for long—she’s way past scrubbing up.

‘What are you doing here?’ I say, getting a word in edgeways at last. I’ve been curious because she has no discernible signs of injury or illness. Perhaps she’s come about the cold sore—but at nearly three in the morning?

‘It’s the only place round here you can get a coffee this late,’ she explains. ‘And it’s quiet—tonight it is, anyway. These three Dutch guys moved into the squat and they play trance all night.’

‘I hate trance,’ I murmur sympathetically.

‘Trance is the bollocks, man—but the arseholes’ve only got one CD.’

Like you can tell one from another, I don’t say on account of the fact that it would be exactly what my mum would say.

She doesn’t need to ask why I’m here—though, curiously, she hasn’t expressed any interest in why my hand resembles a clumsily butchered chicken quarter that I’ve found in a dustbin and stuffed up my sleeve for a rag-week-type jape.

A voice calls out, ‘Mr Colin?’ I look up to see a tired-looking doctor scanning the reception. I rise from the bench, but before I follow him I turn to the girl. ‘Thanks for getting me the coffee…And for the company.’

‘No problem. Take care of yourself, yeah?’ she replies with apparent sincerity.

‘Thanks—you too. What’s your name, by the way?’

‘Fish.’

That would explain the cod.

‘ Fish…That’s really…Er…I’m Murray.’ And then, because I haven’t been able to shake the feeling, ‘You look familiar, you know.’

‘Shouldn’t think so. Unless you’re the twat from Tesco who keeps moving us on from their ATMs.’

‘No, that wouldn’t be me…Bye, then.’

‘Yeah…See you ’round, man.’

I almost ask for my change—the coffee was only 50p—but I stop myself. My life is at a fairly low ebb, but I still think she needs the money more than I do.

Maybe she’ll use it to buy soap.

But I doubt it.

7.21 a.m.

It seems like an hour since I last checked the time, but it was only two mintues ago. I’ve been sitting on the wall outside my flat for just over forty-five minutes. I walked here from Saint Matthew’s. After the doctor had finished I looked for Fish—I was going to ask her for a pound for the bus fare—but she’d left. Now my body is even colder than it was when I arrived at the hospital, which I didn’t think would have been possible. There is an upside, though—my right hand is so numb that I can’t feel any pain for the first time since I punched the car. A bandage covers the four stitches in my knuckles. My ring and little fingers are strapped and splinted. Seems I was wrong about my body’s lack of criminal bones. I have at least two, both of them fractured.

My peripheral vision catches something and I quickly look round to see movement through the window of the groundfloor flat.

At last.

I shake my legs to check that they’re still capable of movement before slipping off the wall, climbing the steps and ringing the bell to flat A. I see a hand part two slats in the venetian blind of the bay window, and my neighbour’s eyes peer at me through the gap. I hope they belong to Paula and not to her slightly scary girlfriend, whose name I can never remember. After a moment the intercom gives a farty buzz and I lean my shoulder into the door. Inside, a yawning, crusty-eyed Paula is standing in her doorway. She’s wearing a long, baggy T-shirt printed with a picture of, surprisingly, Sigourney Weaver (skin-head Alien 3 model). Surprising because Paula goes to great lengths to avoid the shaved head and swagger of stereotypical dyke-ness—obviously all the effort goes out of the window when she goes to bed.

‘Bloody hell, Murray, what happened to you?’ she asks.

I guess I don’t look my best, then.

‘Oh, nothing much. I fell…outside the office. Spent all night in casualty—it was like Piccadilly Circus,’ I say. I didn’t want to lie, but there was no way I was going to tell her the truth. ‘Look, I’m sorry to bother you, but I left my jacket at work and my keys were in it. Can I nick my spare set back?’

‘Yeah, of course.’ She disappears into her flat.

Aminute later she’s back with a key ring.

‘Are you really OK?’ she asks.

‘Yes, really. Thanks for these,’ I say, jangling the key ring.

‘Murray,’ she says, ‘do you mind if I ask you something?’

Here we go. You want to know how I’ve been coping since Megan dropped me for a barrister with a highly developed social conscience, TV charisma…

‘I hope you don’t take this the wrong way—’

…a million-pound house close to several cabinet ministers…

‘—I’d hate you to be upset—’

…and an impregnable (to idiots, at least) Bentley.

‘—but would you mind having your TV on a bit quieter? We could hear everything the other night and Apollonia—’

Apollonia! How could I forget?

‘—is a really light sleeper.’

Fine—so you really couldn’t give a damn that I’m a miserable, lovelorn wreck—one, by the way, coping manfully with a potentially cancerous tumour—and that my one and only comfort is to watch repeats of Seinfeld on Paramount with the volume right up to drown out my sobs as I cry at all the bits that Megan used to laugh at hysterically. Well, fuck you too.