It was an apocalyptic spring evening in London. The wind blew harsh cold air in everyone’s faces outside. Barney dropped his wallet on the way out the electronic gates of his City building. Ruby dropped her keys as she struggled to unlock the rusty chain of her bike, locked up outside a chain restaurant. Faces looked grey, not all of them of course. Barney and Ruby both knew that their mental state tainted the outer world they witnessed. The knowledge made it look no less frightening, though, when a healthy-looking homeless man with blood down his front came to beg for food money in the train carriage.
Ruby offered him a full pack of cigarettes; she was trying to quit, she said. The man made an off-colour joke about it not helping him to eat! She immediately regretted choosing him as the beneficiary of this actually quite expensive gift. Twenty-packs cost something like 20 quid nowadays, and he gave her barely a thank you. He’d probably beaten the last guy up for his last hit of whatever it was. She returned her face into her book, and Barney averted his eyes as the threatening young man passed him by.
The trained wizzed past green and yellow fields rendered grey and blue by the English evening light. People stared emptily into their phone screens, proverbial “do not disturb” signs plastered over their faces, many of which would have been beautiful to look at.
Barney was particularly drawn to the look of a sporty young woman with long hair pulled back in a half-pony and an outrageous fake tan. He was initially disappointed with the usual British habit of hiding one’s beauty under millimetres of fakery, but her hands were so dainty, the pink fingernails so gently pointed as she scratched her nose, that he lost himself staring. She was watching mindless videos on her screen with the little wireless earbuds feeding noise into her delicate young ears. He wondered what the depths of her soul would have to say about the vapid filler she was feeding it, both through the phone and through the syringes which had ever-so-subtly enhanced her lips.
Though she had the lithe body of a mare, she removed a can of Pepsi from her bag and nearly dropped it. Barney thought of Sigmund Freud and the way he attributed minor errors to the very intentional reign of the subconscious. Something inside her knew this was not a good habit, but she absent-mindedly proceeded to open the bottle and glug its contents, one eye following the insignificant events on the screen.
Ruby meanwhile had been observing a young mulatto in a black hoodie and tracksuit bottoms. He had very white trainers. His face looked exactly like something out of a nineties children’s cartoon she had loved. He was so endearing, and he was least of all absorbed in his screen. Such people were a minority in these times. She rested her eyes on his childish yet angular face, his one-inch afro, his big black eyes and his lanky figure. He never once returned the look, though Ruby was not bad to look at herself.
Men who returned women’s looks were a minority by then, too.
She wondered what he had on his mind that kept him so disinterested in the world of his phone. It seemed serious, or maybe he was just a zen guy. Was that such an impossibility, Ruby? Why don’t you get off your damned phone?
Barney had returned his gaze to the hole in his sleeve which had opened up throughout the work day, as he had picked at it in a state of stress. He had had to issue two corrections, one of which was his. Usually a genial chatty type, he had cursed at his screen for hours, having to stay behind after everyone else had gone. Ruby had tried to engage him in conversation but only managed to awkwardly say the wrong thing, so she had gingerly moved on and whispered a goodbye to the empty office.
They did not know they were on the same train, but Barney lived a couple stops before Ruby, in a fancier part of the suburbs. Ruby was on her way to the same place the hoodie guy was getting out at. London had been apocalyptic: Ruby’s house was already in purgatory.
She stepped out the train to quiet minority onlookers and was pleasantly surprised to see a few healthy young faces in the station. It was always a double-take when London seemed to crop up so far out in the Styx; a young hippie with hip-length hair and dreamy doe eyes? A sprightly couple deep in conversation at the station entrance? These must be passers-through. She rolled along to the main road, greeted by the more characteristic alcoholics cursing the rain from underneath the parking roof. This is the ___ I know, thought Ruby.
Barney meanwhile had already made his way through the elegant rows of Victorian houses, not a tossed-out bin in sight (Ruby had had to walk through a pile of used nappies to park up her bike) and came in through the front door of his own. His wife had made dinner and she was upstairs taking a bath. All was well and nobody needed know of his day at work which had affected him so much but somehow all stayed inside that little box in his bag, He shook himself off, hung up the day’s gear and shuffled to the bath with his wife Barbie.
“Daddy!!” screamed one of his small children. This he had not seen coming: they were supposed to be at their grandmother’s.
“What are you doing here Celia?” he asked, bewildered.
“Daddy! Mummy says you need to eat yesterday’s leftovers, the food is for grandmummy!!” Celia informed him.
How utterly rude, he thought. He opened the bathroom door only to get it sharply in the nose: both the door and the smell from inside. Barbie was not bathing, but defecating. He apologised and headed to the kitchen with Celia tailing him closely.
“You can heat up the chicken and the rice but you can’t touch the rabbit stew, daddy!” she was thrilled to announce, knowing it was his favourite.
“Why on earth not, Celia darling?” he said bemusedly.
“It’s for grandmummy! She’s gotten ill,” Celia explained.
“Oh dear.”
He felt serene and ready to comfort his wife for the rest of that evening. She always fretted so for her mother, though he had never quite seen the person behind the wrinkles. It seemed to him that ever since he’d first met her all those decades ago, she had been just a skinny lump of wrinkles. Like a Swiss cheese, somehow more air than substance. But Barbie adored her, and Barbie was spoiling her with her best recipe and far be it from Barney to impede on that decision.
Celia ran back upstairs as he lobbed the leftovers on a plate and into the microwave. It was not all bad. He was home.
---
Ruby meanwhile had been dragged into a conversation with one of her local ruffians. She’d tried to give him her other pack of cigarettes, and this had had quite the opposite effect. He took it extremely seriously, for he knew the value of this gift was more than two days’ work for him. He thanked her so much that it had attracted the attention of all his friends nearby and they, unlike the youth in the train, were not afraid to look a handsome woman in the face.
“It’s OK, really, I’m trying to cut it out,” she was saying.
“You’re lovely, you know that?”
“Think she meant it?”
“I’d give her a bit if she asked.”
“Not every day you see one up close.”
“Nice one, that,” they gossiped like Tuscan nonnas.
The one who had been lucky enough to receive her offering was following her, much to her chagrin. This meant she would need to operate a detour, remaining in peril’s way for longer but keeping him ignorant to her place of residence; the more effective long-term choice.
She politely said she hoped he would share it with his mates back there, to which he expectorated, “those cunts? Not a fucking chance! Who’m I, mother Theresa? Fuck.”
This was a frightening outburst for a girl alone in the street with a grateful but angry homeless man. She did her utmost to hide the fear, but like dogs they could smell it.
“You’re a lovely girl.”
“You’re following me.”
“What you mean?”
“I would like to be alone, please,” she explained.
“I’m going that way, too,” he said lamely. “But you’re beautiful, you know that.”
“I do know, thank you.”
“You ever go out with a bloke like me?”
“I’m very happy where I am now, thank you.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“No, I haven’t.”
They were still walking in tandem, he a half-step behind her.
“There’s more to us street rats than meets the eye, you know.”
“I’ve no doubt about that.”
“Why don’t you give it a try, lovely?”
“Because I’m very happy where I am now and do not seek to change my life.”
“Well darling. I’m quite keen to change mine, and didn’t you mention stopping smoking? That’s a change.”
She had been lying about that. She had actually picked up a cheap ten-pack from an airport on her way back from holiday a few months prior and wanted to get rid of them.
“It’s… not really relevant…”
He took her arm, “I’m joking, darling, don’t panic.”
The touch was the border between calculation and panic, veering sharply towards the latter.
Ruby turned pale and stopped in her tracks. “Are you going to abduct me, sir? For giving you a pack of cigarettes?”
The question stalled him. He did not see himself as an abductor. He was only trying to charm a young woman who must have taken a liking to him, if she was to be so generous.
She continued, “please may I go ahead alone? Can you let me go.”
Ruby knew that tears would either release her from the situation or make it ten times worse, so she fought them back and attempted a straight, detached expression.
“You look like you’re gonna cry,” taunted the jilted lover.
“Give me a cigarette,” said Ruby in a spark of inspiration, “and leave me alone. And if you don’t leave me alone, you are actually hurting the one person who helped you all day, if not all month or year. And I’ll be a victim of your cruelty. And we’ll both have to live with that.”
A cigarette graced her fingers. “Don’t give up what you love, babycakes,” said the alcoholic with a grin. “It’s all I was trying to teach you.” He lit it for her and walked away to his whooping entourage.