by Molly Flatt
East Road was uncomfortably hot, even at 2 a.m. The faint breeze did nothing but waft a sour cocktail of tar and night-bus fumes across Alex’s face, but she didn’t care. She was full to the brim, electric with connection. The manhole cover ringwormed with gum, the gutter frotted with ash, the peroxide wig nesting beneath the stunted sapling: they all served to make her night even more magical, because they were proof that it was real.
She hooked her bag over her shoulder, clenched the sleeve of her laptop under the same arm and swiped her phone to life with her thumb, unveiling a glitter of alerts. Flicking across the screen, only dimly aware of the blisters on the balls of her feet, she slid into autopilot. Right into Chart Street, the lights of the council-flat balconies sputtering in the corner of her eye. Round the silent black rectangle of Aske Gardens basketball court. Left onto Pitfield Street. North, towards the canal.
Of the many new habits that Alex had developed over the past few months, the ability to cull digital bumf was one of the best. After years spent wading through the bogs of social media, wasting whole hours rubbernecking disingenuously curated lives, she was now a ruthless ninja at sifting the genuinely useful from the seductively inane. Within minutes she had bulk-accepted fifty-seven LinkedIn invitations, bulk-deleted fourteen Facebook friend requests and archived sixty-one non-urgent emails. Harry aside, she could already feel the success of the evening gushing through her digital tributaries: sparking new alliances, reinforcing the old, leaving a wake of excitement that she knew would continue to froth over the next few days. When her eye caught on some charity-spam for a Sudanese flood – or possibly a Vietnamese drought – her electric sense of connection was so strong she not only texted to donate twenty quid, but filled out the Gift Aid form.
Shouts and the shiver of chain-link rang out from Shoreditch Park. A quick scan confirmed nothing more menacing than bored teenagers throwing cans at the tennis-court fence. Alex turned back to her phone. There was one voicemail from an unknown landline – a landline, ye gods! – and another from Mae.
She pressed to play the landline message, but the moment the Celtic accent came down the line, she realized it was the woman from that academic institute – SOAS, was it? CGAS? – who had been bothering her about some research project all day. She saved it for later, glanced up at the shuttered shops and scaffolding of Whitmore Road, then skipped forward to the message from Mae. Her friend was apologizing – barely audible over the sound of Bo’s screams – that the babysitter had let her down. Poor Mae. But it had probably been for the best. Tech launches weren’t really her scene.
Alex crossed the bridge onto De Beauvoir Road. She was just logging into the back-end of Eudo, to get a head start on tomorrow’s behind-the-scenes party blog, when the man slammed into her.
She flew a good couple of feet before she hit the pavement. As she rolled onto her back, he planted his knees in her stomach, pinning her down. One of his hands splayed over her mouth and his thumb pressed into her eyelid, making the darkness warp and spark. The other wrapped around her neck, the pads of his fingers rough-skinned behind her ears.
He smelled of body odour and fast food, and he was breathing in laboured gasps. A single drop of sweat splashed from his skin onto her lips as she lay beneath him, lungs burning, heart rabbit-drumming in her chest. He shifted his weight and she managed to reach for her right foot, jack-knifed up beneath her left buttock – just as he reared back to reveal an old-fashioned farmer’s shotgun.
In one desperate motion, Alex stabbed five inches of hand-stitched stiletto heel into her attacker’s solar plexus. Finally catching her breath, she screamed. He reeled back with a strangled grunt while she rolled over the kerb and out into the road. Scrabbling against the tarmac, she got onto her hands and knees and screamed again.
‘Oi! OI!’
There were shouts and footsteps, and now another man appeared, a different one. Oh God. A gang. The new man was moving towards her now, ready to take his turn.
‘NO,’ Alex cough-shouted. ‘GET . . . AWAY . . .’
‘Awight, lady, awight.’ The new man took a step backwards into the orange puddle of the street light, pushing back his hoodie, holding up his palms. He was a boy, really: pasty, stubbled, slightly overweight. His face glistened with sweat. ‘Wasn’t me, lady. Wasn’t me. Mi boy just run after him. You awight?’
Alex remained on her knees, staring at him mutely for a second. Then she slumped down onto her heels with a sob. Tried to get up. Sank back down. Unbuckled her remaining shoe, with shaking fingers. Eventually got to her feet.
‘You awight?’ The boy was keeping his distance.
‘Fuck,’ Alex said. ‘Fuck!’
‘You get a look at him?’
‘He had a gun. A massive, fucking’ – her voice wobbled – ‘shotgun, like Mr fucking McGregor.’
The boy, looking worried, squinted beyond Alex into the dark. ‘Din know he was packing. We only saw his back. Came running when we heard you shout.’
He indicated over his shoulder to a paved courtyard in front of a council block. Beyond this, Alex knew, was a bollard-lined strip of grass where the De Beauvoir kids liked to hang out. Walking on the canal path below, she had more than once clocked the skulking hoodies with their lurching Staffies and expensive phones.
The boy’s expression brightened. ‘S’awight. Here he is.’
Alex turned to see a lean boy in a white vest jogging towards them. He gathered up her bag, laptop, phone and shoe as he approached and held them out to her at arm’s length.
‘Couldn’t get him,’ he said. His cornrows were bleeding sweat and his hands, when she brushed them to take back her stuff, were slippery. ‘Weren’t big, but he were fucking fast. You awight, lady?’
‘Yes,’ Alex replied, clasping the laptop to her chest like a shield. Instantly sober, she could feel the chill of shock on its way, the delayed seeping-in of the pain. ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’
‘He had a gat,’ the white boy said to the black boy.
‘Fuck.’ The black boy dragged up his vest to reveal a skinny, hairless chest. He wiped the vest over his forehead. ‘Good thing he were fast, then.’ He nodded at Alex. ‘Should call the feds.’
‘Yes. Yes, I will.’
‘Din even get yer lappy, did he? Wanker.’
She called the police, shivering, and spoke to a woman who said a car was on its way. The boys waited with her until headlights flashed over the speed bump at the end of the road, before jogging off, the podgy one giving her an awkward gun-salute wave.
The police took a statement. They were sympathetic but circumspect about the chances of an arrest.
‘You’d be surprised, the number of guns circulating around here,’ said the policeman, a tired-looking guy in a Sikh turban. ‘Rare to see one, five years ago. I blame The Wire.’
‘You’re sure you don’t need to go to hospital?’ asked his partner, a girl who looked about fifteen.
‘No, really, I’m fine. I’d rather get home.’
‘Is there anyone who can come and stay with you?’
‘I’ll call my fiancé. My flat’s just over there.’
Thankfully her bag had been zipped, so her wallet and keys were still inside. They walked her to her door, and the girl handed her a leaflet with the details of a trauma helpline.
‘Nice,’ she said, holding up the evidence bag containing Alex’s right shoe.
‘Thanks.’ Alex gave her a weak smile. ‘It was a magical evening. Until this.’
‘Get inside. Have some tea, plenty of sugar. Call your fiancé. We’ll be in touch.’
Standing in the lift, Alex felt her throat begin to thicken and her sinuses sting. A dozen memories of other lonely, tearful moments spent in the lift over the years crowded in. The vertigo rushed up again, her stomach lurched and she felt the bright patina of the evening shiver and slide. Beneath it, she sensed the void, lurking. Felt how easy it would be to let it crack open, let herself tumble in.
Alex took a deep
breath, cleared her throat and swiped at her eyes. She reminded herself of all the good things that had happened that evening, of all the lovely things people had said. She forced herself to recall how she had felt up on that crate, after the initial wobble had passed: powerful, admired, fully alive. Extraordinary. Bulletproof. She had wondered whether she should tell someone about her little episodes, as she had come to call them. Perhaps Mae. Or Chloe. Wasn’t she paying Chloe to coach her through exactly this sort of psychological self-sabotage? But she’d read all about founder burnout. She knew they’d simply tell her to slack off. And she certainly wasn’t about to do that, just as her fledgling new career reached its first real tipping point. She simply had to stay focused on the present. She wasn’t the kind of woman who did tears, or irrational fears.
Not any more.
Inside the flat she double-locked the door, dumped her stuff on the floor and pulled up Harry’s number on her mobile. Then she paused, her thumb hovering over the screen. Harry would get a cab straight over, he would love the chance to fuss, and that was the last thing she wanted: victimhood, cosseting. It would seem like proof that evenings this good weren’t allowed. That months – that lives – this good weren’t allowed. That, more to the point, as a woman alone, she wasn’t strong enough to handle the flipside. It would be tantamount to letting that crackhead win.
Throwing her phone onto the pile, Alex veered into the bathroom and inspected the damage as she peeled off her jeans and vest. There was a long scrape on her right arm, a cut on her knee, bits of gravel and glass embedded in her palms. She’d probably have a lot of bruises in the morning – well, later in the morning. But other than surface scratches she was, as she had told her unlikely saviours, unhurt. She got into the shower and stood under lukewarm water for almost half an hour until the shaking stopped. She rubbed her hair dry, applied cream and plasters, and pulled on Harry’s Durham Uni T-shirt. In the kitchen-lounge-diner she made herself a cup of builder’s with three sugars. Then she went through to her bedroom and twisted the blinds shut.
Six months ago this would have crippled her. She would have stayed at home for days, let Harry wrap her in cotton wool, made some stupid phone call to Ahmed and Dale. Crumbled. Fucked it up. But not now. She was a very different Alex from the one she had been six months ago.
Alex climbed gingerly onto her bed. She reached into her beside cabinet and fished out a couple of paracetamol, feeling her limbs already starting to stiffen and her head ache.
What sort of shit retro mugger used a shotgun, anyway?
2
Walking the Kingsland stretch of Regent’s Canal at commuter o’clock was like playing a late-nineties computer game. Emerging from a tunnel with her neck cricked sideways, Alex had to hop over a jumble of empty cans, swerve as a grizzled man loomed up at her from a bench, then veer back into the weeds as the ping-ping-ping of a bike bell rang out.
She had spent most of her youth gaming on the old Gateway in her parents’ attic, while her father laboured over paper and ink in his study across the corridor, trying to coax his next novel to life. She wasn’t entirely sure, now, why she’d spent so many hours glued to the pixellated screen in that chilly, cobwebbed room. She’d hated fight scenes, so her career as a gamer had mainly involved wandering around sparsely populated fantasy scapes, tumbling aimlessly over the walls of ruined temples and breaststroking jerkily through underwater caves. Looking back from her current perspective, her teenage self seemed like a prehistoric ancestor, her actions inexplicable and her motivations mysterious. Just thinking about her, in fact, was starting to bring on the dizziness that heralded an episode.
Alex quickly shut down the memory. What did it matter if her past self had been pathetically directionless? Today she had so many micro-goals to hit she could barely afford the time it took to cover half a mile of towpath. But when it had come to leaving the flat, she couldn’t quite face taking her usual route to work. Despite her resolution to forget the . . . the random and meaningless incident.
Alex knew that the best way to outscore last night’s mugger was to ignore him. She would launch her own modest war on terror by diving straight back into work. She’d armed herself with a long-sleeved black tee to hide the scrapes, and a pair of box-fresh white trainers to cushion her sore soles. And it soon became obvious, as she switched between tabs and apps on her phone, that the party had been a hit. The bloggers and super-members they’d invited had uploaded reams of content. There was already a thick grassroots layer of buzz.
She had been a little worried, as her mother had hinted, that the whole thing might have seemed presumptuous or profligate for such a young brand. But Gemma had nailed the tone: wholesome, unpretentious, playful. Eudo was all about mixing the high with the low, the healthy with the indulgent. Their hero message was that you could pursue personal development whilst also giving back, and the early comments suggested they’d hit just the right note. One of the Pinterest gurus had even created a graphic based around Eudo’s tagline – a collage of sepia photos from the evening set behind a hand-drawn exhortation to Be Your Best Self in various shades of red. Squashing herself against an overflowing bin to let a man in Lycra huff past, Alex fired off an email to Gemma asking her to bike the girl some branded meditation beads. As she pressed Send, a small hit of oxytocin sent a soothing ripple through her body. It was like Chloe said: when you finally opened yourself fully to life, your energy resonated through the universe.
Nevertheless, Alex had to clutch onto the railings as she climbed the steps up from the canal onto New North Road. There was bruising deep in her muscles, and the overdose of cortisol the night before meant she had woken feeling tired and queasy. It hadn’t been helped by her dreams, in which she had fallen, feeling as if her chest were about to burst, through chasm after chasm of light-spangled dark. Chloe would probably say the dreams had an important meaning. But then Chloe thought everything had an important meaning. Sometimes, Alex reflected, it was best to forget about meaning and get on with your foot-long to-do list.
Her phone vibrated as she ducked into a cafe just past the bridge.
‘Hello?’
She mouthed an order for a triple espresso at the barista and, realizing that she hadn’t eaten since yesterday lunchtime, scanned the counter for the lowest-calorie food. Harry had said, more than once, that he preferred her ‘with softer edges’. But then Ahmed had been spot-on when he’d told her that the Eudomos needed her to be what they hoped to become. And what the Eudomos hoped to become was at least seven pounds below her natural weight.
‘Hi Alex, it’s Jacob?’
‘Sorry, who?’
‘The intern?’
‘Oh, right. Hi.’ Alex studied the label on a pouch of Superfood Breakfast Bites.
‘Are you coming into the office this morning?’
‘I’ll be there in five.’
‘Okay, great; it’s just that there’s a guy from the BBC who says he’s here for an interview?’
Alex put down the packet. She frowned into the phone. ‘The BBC? Are you sure?’
‘Well, there’s nothing in your shared calendar, but I don’t know if you have a separate one or forgot to put it in or something? He seems pretty insistent, though?’
‘Shit!’ Alex waved away the coffee. This had to be one of those contacts Ahmed had promised to tap up. She’d seen a text arrive from him while she was walking, but had assumed it was a well-done on the party. ‘What have you done with him?’
‘Well, he’s just sort of standing here?’
‘Is Lenni in?’
‘Not yet? Should I—’
‘Put him in the meeting pod. Offer him coffee. And pastries – buy some pastries.’ She paused, struck by a terrible thought. ‘Does he have a camera? Like a TV camera?’
‘I don’t think so?’
‘Okay. Good. Tell him I’m on my way.’
Sprinting the rest of the way down East Road was a bad idea. It made every inch of her that wasn’t yet hurting hurt. It al
so meant she then had to spend another five minutes in the loo, trying to fix her sweaty mess of a face. Thank God she’d washed her hair; the sharp new bob (technically, a bronde lob with blunt bangs, according to the hairdresser, who had assured her it made her look like Uma Thurman crossed with a sexy schoolgirl) covered the bruises below her jaw. A quick touch-up of make-up helped to conceal the black eye, but there was nothing she could do about the general puffiness and fatigue. Deciding that distraction was her only hope, Alex slicked on some red lipstick and strode out across the sixth floor.
At least the cleaners had done a good job; the place looked spotless. She swapped banter with the protein-ball people as she walked towards the Eudo meeting pod, her eyes fixed on the dark shape visible behind the frosted glass. Outside it, a mixed-race boy in knee-length denim shorts, presumably Jacob, was attempting to open the door. A tray of baked goods wobbled precariously on his non-existent hip.
‘Hang on, hang on,’ Alex murmured, rushing up. ‘What’s his name?’
Jacob stared at her. ‘Name?’ The tray tipped and a cinnamon bun hit the floor in a nuclear puff of icing sugar.
‘Jesus, forget it!’
Alex slid open the door, Jacob blundered in and the man from the BBC turned to face her.
‘Oh,’ Alex said.
He was young, very young. She had expected some middle-aged dome-head in a suit, but the man-boy before her looked barely older than Jacob. He had a bony face, badly cut ink-black hair and a broad-shouldered, whippet-hipped body. He also looked like he had been styled for an AllSaints ad campaign: grey flannel shirt buttoned up to the neck, tight grey trousers tucked into mid-calf lace-up boots and a battered grey canvas holdall at his feet. He was, undeniably, what Mae would call ugly-hot.
Alex found herself, to her irritation, blushing. It was silly of her to be wrong-footed; no doubt this was exactly the kind of child who now populated the renovated corridors of Broadcasting House. In any case, as his gaze roamed from her crimson lips to her trainers, it became clear that she, too, was far from what he had been expecting. She plugged in her most businesslike smile and extended her hand.