I was walking past and she was there in a doorway, an open doorway on to the street. Behind her was another door into the place, a bar I think, or a club maybe. And around her, between the two doorways, was just black, pure matt black. Her clothes were black, so her dark red hair and her pale face and hands were the only places of light.
She looked like she was appearing out of the night, sitting for a painter who’d been dead two hundred years. I’m not joking. There she was, in the rougher end of Camden High Street, looking like she belonged on the wall of the National Gallery.
I kept walking and I held her picture in my head, and I remember thinking, What if I went back and said hello? What if I told her how she looked, and how much I wished I had a camera and some idea of how to use it? I’d scare her, a big bloke like me. She’d think I was a freak. She’d move away and leave her place of perfect darkness and ruin the picture forever.
So I didn’t. I marked her down as one out of the eight hundred mental snapshots I’d taken that minute. It’s what you do in a place so crammed full of things to look at. Blink and keep moving. I’d been here less than one day, and even I’d been in London long enough to know that.
My name is Sam and I’m not from here.
I grew up in a house beneath a mountain, hidden in a dip that filled with snow in the winter, with water in the spring. Night time there was proper darkness, a total absence of light, apart from the stars which were infinite and spread just right to show you the curved shape of the sky.
There aren’t any stars in the city. I used to drag my mattress over to the window and lie on my back looking out at the damp blanket of orange that bounced off every available surface, at the flashing wings of aeroplanes.
The day I left home was like this: high sky, still air, shouting birds. I woke up and it was beautiful, and I hated the sight of it because there was no way I could stay. I forced myself to lie in bed until Dad had gone, staring at the sun through my window for so long that I could see it with my eyes shut.
I was sitting at my desk, dressed and ready to go when Mum banged on my door around eight. Three short raps. She made the distance beween us obvious even in the way she did that.
Afterwards I often wondered how things would have been different if she’d known I was leaving, if she’d have kept those feelings to herself just that once. But you can’t go around treating everyone like you might never see them again, just in case. And anyway, it was way too late by then. I already knew how she felt.
Missing the bus was way easier than catching it. I changed my school sweatshirt in the broken down barn at the end of our lane and stashed it in my bag. And then I hitched into town to catch the train. Aaron Hughes the old farmer picked me up – truck like the inside of a haystack, trousers held up with bailer twine, vicious Jack Russell on the passenger seat; that kind of old. He drove at about ten miles an hour, which is not exactly getaway speed. But he didn’t hear too well and he wasn’t bothered about talking, and I was glad about that. I wondered what he would do if he knew he was helping me escape.
The sky was this intense blue, palest at the bottom, dark around the edges. The surface of the hills shifted with the light, darkened with the shadows of high clouds. I was sick to death of all of it: the same curves, the same trees, the same beauty. But because I knew it was the last time, I stared like I’d never seen it before.
Aaron laughed. He said something about the land being like a woman, stunning when you leave her and grey and ordinary when you don’t.
We were quiet then. I didn’t know what to say to that.
The station was about a twenty minute walk from where he dropped me. People were waiting on the platform, saying goodbye to each other, huddling around cars. I didn’t see anyone I knew, thank God. I bought a ticket, crossed the iron bridge over the railway and sat there in the tunnelling wind on my own.
This is what I remember of the train journey. Identical twins. Women with shining scruffy black hair sleeping against each other two tables away. They were thin and tired, and they kept opening their eyes and not speaking, and then closing them again. Each of them was beautiful because there were two of her, like someone put a mirror down the middle of the train.
A group of kids behind me on their way to a maths marathon. They spoke so everyone could hear, like they were important, like nothing could touch them, like being good at maths was all you’d ever need to make sense of the world. I wanted to set them straight, but I knew they’d find out soon enough without me.
A little boy at the window of another train, crammed in, surrounded by arms, the sleeve of a quilted jacket squashed flat against the glass like someone pulling a face.
I took the sim card out of my phone, dropped it in a half empty paper teacup and gave it a stir. The woman opposite me stared without blinking while I did it and then went back to her magazine. I made sure I still had my money on me. I’d been taking some out of the bank every day. I kept checking it was there, all the time, because it was all I had.
The mountains shrank and the land flattened out, got boxed in and carved up. The view from the window was cramped and ordinary and fascinatingly strange. The twins woke up and looked out at it without saying a word.
I closed my eyes.
The first thing I learned about London was not to smile. I got off the train and looked around. The platform emptied like an organised stampede. I smiled at this man in a suit, darkskinned, middle-aged, clean-shaven. He was walking towards me. The shine on his shoes reflected the sky through the glass roof of the station. I smiled and it didn’t go down so well. He did three things, lightning quick, in less than a second. I watched him. He changed the rhythm of his walk ever so slightly. He looked hard at me, like steel, to make sure he wasn’t seeing things. Then he let his eyes cloud over, so he was still looking, but right through me, never at me. The one thing he definitely didn’t do was smile back. I learned pretty quick that the only people who smile at everyone in London are newcomers and the clinically insane.
Later, in the ticket hall at Paddington, I saw more people in one go than I’d seen in the whole of my life before. Thousands lining up for tickets and funnelling through turnstiles, going up escalators and coming down. I stood dead still at the eye of the storm, just one of me, and stared. I kept looking at this list I’d scribbled on the back of an envelope, like it might help. I couldn’t read my own writing.
Everyone else knew where to go and moved in swift, strong lines that picked me up and took me in the wrong direction, like the river at home after a night of rain.
I thought about Max then. He came back to me in the middle of all that sound and rhythm and colour and fumesmell and movement. He surprised me. I thought about walking behind him in the dappled darkness of the woods. I pictured his permanent frown, his sticking out ears, his chaotic hair. I thought about the nervous flicker of his smile.
It was all I could do to keep breathing.
You know when people say they wish the floor would open up and swallow them whole? Well, it’s pretty easily done, if you really mean it. I came out of Camden Town Station at twenty-nine minutes past four and vanished without a trace. Nobody knew who I was. I couldn’t stop smiling.
The sky was lower than I was used to. I went into a baker’s and bought a sandwich, and I couldn’t understand half of what the girl behind
