The Tottenham Outrage by M.H. Baylis

Author:M.H. Baylis [M. H. Baylis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908699688
Publisher: Old Street Publishing
Published: 2014-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

The next morning, Rex took an overground train – a new, strange, wide, orange-liveried thing with concertina sections between the carriages. It was mostly empty, the commuters who packed it out during the week being all tucked up in bed. Rex pictured them, this alien tribe, having languid, hungover weekend sex and consuming tea and biscuits under their duvets in their gadget-filled flats. There were times when he envied them: the people with the straight jobs and the other-halves, the eat-in kitchens and the holiday plans. He’d almost joined them, once.

The overground line was high up, and he looked out onto attics and top floors, mobile phone masts and advertising hoardings. It was no uglier than his own patch of North-East London. But it wasn’t his, and nowhere seemed less his, less familiar or capable of sustaining life, than the place that lay across the Thames but was, incredibly, still called London.

This attitude, he remembered, had been a point of contention with his wife, who, at various points during their truncated marriage, had suggested moving out of their Camden flat to something bigger in the south, where she had lived for years in the dense yet strangely barren areas of Rotherhithe and Bermondsey. Rex had stubbornly resisted, without being able to provide a single solid reason for it. He just didn’t like south London. Something bad happened to him, he said, every time he went over the water.

‘Bad like getting into bed with me?’

It was what she always said in response to this argument, half-joking, sometimes following it up with a pinch of the soft flesh under his ribs. Suddenly he remembered it all, their life together: that quip, her incongruously rough, physical way of showing tenderness, the night they’d first fallen into her hard, lumpy, pine-smelling bed. It all came back, sharply, painfully, as the tannoy said ‘change here for Bermondsey’. He got up and moved seats to take his mind somewhere else, away from what he’d lost forever.

He tried to concentrate on the Goldsmiths campus map he’d printed up last night. He’d established that the library and the history faculty building were open on Saturdays, but of course that was no guarantee of the person called GoldVlad being there. Even if he was, confronting him might be a very bad idea. But Rex knew that if they put their findings to the under-resourced, overworked and increasingly short-tempered D.S. Brenard, nothing might happen for days, or even weeks. It had to be worth a try.

In the event of something bad happening on this particular trip across the river, there was a pre-written text, addressed both to Lawrence and Terry’s phones, ready to go at one push. That had been Lawrence’s idea. Since leaving the hospital, Terry had adopted a numb, blank look, speaking only to say that he was fine, that he felt fine, and that he didn’t want another cup of tea.

At the North Middlesex hospital, they saw too much self-harm. Too much to be able to do more than patch up those for whom it was still an option, and send them home.

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