Plume by Will Wiles

Author:Will Wiles [Will Wiles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

Pierce’s flat was three minutes away. That was one of the sympathetic details in Night Traffic: that the attack had happened so close to where he lived, in a neighbourhood he thought he knew. Again, that pang of rage at the calculation that had gone into the deception. We walked back together. Pierce had already summoned an Uber driver, but he would be half an hour. It was peak time for cabs: the pubs and parties emptying out, people on the move – peak time for muggers, too, perhaps.

Three brown bottles of cold Czech lager reclined in Pierce’s fridge. It was, I suspected, the same beer that had been there the previous day, and I marvelled at people who could do that, who could keep beer in the fridge without touching it, without even thinking about it, for days.

When I first lived with Elise, I could toss four cans or six bottles into my shopping basket, and one or two of them would still be there two or three nights later. Wine, too. We’d have wine with dinner, like grown-ups, and there’d be some in the bottle the next morning, the next evening. We could get home from the pub and find there was nothing in the fridge or no bottle on the side, and wouldn’t give it a second thought. There must have been tiny firsts, too insignificant to have noticed at the time, too insignificant to remember now. The first time I felt the drop of fear in my gut upon discovering there was nothing in the house. The first time I went, ‘just nipping out’, to the corner shop to get a can or two to cover that hole. Or four cans. The first time I stopped by the corner shop on the way back, just in case there was nothing in the fridge. Nothing special, no deliberation. No fanfare. No awkward questions, no guilt, doing nothing wrong.

And then, later, the first time I got the tilt of the head from Elise. The first time I got the ‘Really?’

Curious to know if Pierce’s instincts about south London were reasonable, I took out my phone and opened Tamesis. Best place to get mugged, I asked it. The Bunk logo spun as Quin’s servers pondered the question.

Did you mean: Best places to buy mugs. Best places to get mugs printed. Best places to get mugshots.

Where in London has the worst street crime? I asked, trying to tailor my question into something the algorithm was equipped to answer. The screen took breath and began to fill with colour and information. Street crime offences by ward, 2010–2015. Data source: Metropolitan Police. I tweaked the screen, zooming out. The familiar matrix of streets twitched and resolved. The river scooped up the neighbourhood. The broader shape of London cohered, the parks, the Thames’s turns. But the data overlay was confusing, a marbled mash. My own borough, Westminster, stood out as being particularly bad, which puzzled me until I remembered the West End, all those drunks and tourists.

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