when she changed. It’s not clear to me. After all, for the past few months my days have been a blur of whatever I could find in her dead father’s cellar, be it an antique Claret or woody Scotch, juxtaposed with anything else I could get my hands on: half- finished packets of cheap cigarettes that I would smoke with her father’s silver lighter, now useless and parched of fuel. All this was enjoyed with the kind of cider one might see ensconced in a plastic bag, being savoured by a bearded addict on the underground. She drove me to these questionable pursuits. Remember that. A month or so ago, in the suffocating humidity, that icon of London, that scarlet, twin-storied symbol of the capital, was thumped indiscriminately with the heavy hand of terrorism - splintered into a thousand pieces, blackened and jagged, hot and inflamed, before the freezing grip of death chilled the metalwork and turned the bus into a vandalised gravestone. The last crisp, brown flake in the bowl, still holding strong against the inevitable, bobs up and down on the white lake before collapsing and drowning. I look up; “You have an unnerving ability to not talk to me! Personally I don’t mind if I don’t hear you complain about piss on the toilet seat! I could go and piss up the bloody wall and I wouldn’t hear you complain….” Two weeks ago. All our palms radiated heat against the metal that felt like an ice cube. We expected something else to happen. We expected a solitary holdall to tear apart a Starbucks, a set of suitcases in an airport to throw out shrapnel and kill the son, the sister…the daughter…. I saw the target: young, fit, not a Muslim. He was running. I thought I saw him leap the barrier. I thought I saw a rucksack. I shouted something. He looked back and kept on running and he dropped and a cloud of red stained the thick, hefty July air. “What should I have done? What if he had been a terrorist? You
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