‘Well, this is sensible,’ It was cold too. Winter was a few weeks away, but clear days were already chilly and clear nights, like this one, downright nippy. Should have put more clothes on. Come on, get moving.

Sam stepped off into a brisk jog but almost immediately slowed to a walk, feeling conspicuous. Darkened windows all about eyed her accusingly as her footfalls faded away. She reached the corner. The pain was still there, like a hard upward pressure in the middle of her chest. She supposed that was exactly what it was, and indulged in a further moment’s self-chastisement for her daft eating habits, dietary foolishness now compounded by this absurd expedition. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Trees loomed amid the shadowy obscurity blanketing the Common, while on the main road sodium lighting cast a sepia wash over the shuttered tube station and shops, the shadows flat and red. In the pools of cheerless light the smudgy spectrum was brownish and wrong.

She tried to draw some comfort from the fact that she wasn’t alone. There were cars passing, taxis, even a heavy lorry with all its little orange lights, and the doors of its cab painted with gypsy caravan flowers and twirly lettering - ‘Bamshaw’s Haulage’. There was a scattering of pedestrians, singly and in groups, head down and hurrying homeward or pursuing some obscure errand. Regular people anyway, you could suppose. But what about the solo amblers, or that little milling group over there? On a week-night? There’s your lunatic fringe, Sammy. Night People. Run away!

So she ran again, down the hill after ‘Bamshaw’s Haulage’ as it boomed away southwards, not having made any conscious decision but knowing that north, towards the trees, was out of the question. Or was it? Maybe if you get up at three in the morning and run off into the night in your sweat pants and a tee-shirt, the only way to do it really properly is to run into a dark, wooded area. Probably you should tie a lamb-chop to your head and shout ‘come and get me’! She felt her keys slapping against her thigh, already uncomfortable enough to make her fish them out of the pocket and make a fist to hold them. Oh and look, the yale key is pointing out between my fingers. One good punch is probably all the chance I’ll get. Why am I laughing?

The night air filled her lungs and rushed in her ears and maybe, just maybe that pain was shifting.

* * * * *

It had not been a good day, at least had not started out as such. The tube was screwed up because somebody somewhere had jumped off a platform, presumably achieving their desired ending but also earning the curses of a hundred thousand commuters, unpopularity on a scale usually reserved for trades union leaders and terrorists. Still, if you were low enough to top yourself the Underground way you could probably disregard or even appreciate the hatred of the wage-slaves. Sam burnt her lip with her coffee and scuffed her second-favourite kitten-heel Pradas on that projecting step-thing outside the office, which she considered trivial payback for evil thoughts about a squashed person. And anyway, what was so wrong with normal steps, that they had to put up with some architect’s idea of a better design than that which had been in common use for thousands of years?

Later there had followed an appalling meeting with Andy Graves and ‘The Owl’ Phillida, which incorporated into its two hour duration enough tedium to bring on a head-buzzing drowse and then ended, culminated actually, in a most tremendous surprise bollocking. There was apparently something important that Sam had totally omitted to do (she supposed ‘forgotten’ was more accurate). She afterwards reflected that she had not heard the expression ‘blithering idiot’ for several years and was almost grateful to Andy for having included it in his forthright remarks. She began to spot the telltale signs of blithering all about her.

“Can I get you something? We’re going out.” This was Clyde, a bit too well dressed but widely fancied by the lower orders. He affected a studied nonchalance around the office, a cool glamour of sharp tailoring and smoothly gelled hair, which never seemed either to grow or be cut. He was charming enough Sam thought, sociable at any rate, if not as witty as he liked to think. A kind of off-the-peg Bond perhaps, this desk-filled space his workaday Casino. “As in ‘lunch’, the meal that separates the morning from the afternoon,” he went on. It was somehow surprising that the other part of ‘we’ was Daisy Norris. Sam genuinely liked her, took to her beyond being merely office-cordial. She was flapping her way into an elaborately buckled and belted coat behind him. God, you knew it was autumn when those things came out of the cupboard.

“Er, no. Thanks. I mean I’m… I completely forgot this thing I was supposed to do for Andy, and I’m like, totally…,” she chopped her hands at her screen to indicate focused attention and bashed at the keys for a second. “I’ve got to get it done.”

“So we can get you something, a sandwich say, food items pressed between bread, and you can stay here at your post and doggedly continue working.” He was turning up the wick on his charming irony for her, or probably for Daisy.

“Yes. No. Look, thanks. But I really can’t think about food now, okay?”

“If your blood sugar drops off you’ll grind to a halt.”

“I have confectionary.” She waggled a Bounty at him. A dark one, not the milky version from the machine upstairs. Now go. This little smile is all your reward. Go go go go!

He regarded her for a moment. “Okay. See ya.” He turned away in a faint waft of grooming.

“You sure?” said Daisy, lingering. “Chicken-salad-on-granary? Mayonnaise, but only if I can actually see the Hellman’s jar. Hmm?” Sam favoured her with a glare, immediately regretting the meanness of it. “Argh! Help me Clyde, I’ve been zapped!” And they moved away towards the lifts, pushing and shoving each other like school kids. Gina Guinness, opposite Sam in the nowhere territory next to the copier, waggled her Portuguese eyebrows and ventured a conspiratorial smirk which Sam barely registered.

When they were gone Sam found her concentration in tatters. Why had she done that? It was perfectly possible to eat a sandwich whilst working. Perhaps in some branches of the medical profession there might be a problem, but in a desk-bound office job multi-tasking was almost a Prerequisite For Success. It had been brewing for a while though, this sense of having set her face against the World. She recognized with dull fatalism that the insidious negativity would soak through all her waking hours, just as it so often had before. ‘No’ to this, ‘no’ to that, from the very big to the very trivial, as though surrendering to the idea that nothing good would come of anything and that the better course was to withdraw entirely and bide your time.

Not that I can remotely conceive of what I might be waiting for. Maybe The Big One. Maybe this is it! Maybe I’ll finally get to go off the deep end and get a diagnosis. “Yes Miss Burnes, I’m afraid you’re depressed.” Depressed. Not just a bit self-absorbed then? “No, we can point to actual cognitive patterns that serve to reinforce a distorted self image.” Ah, so I’m a bit bonkers then. A bit adrift from reality. But it’s no reason to be the Queen Bitch.

Poor Daisy. Daisy was a fixture in the office, a dependable, optimistic presence, seldom at a loss for childlike enthusiasm no matter how deadly-dull the project. She seemed never to have fallen into that habit of drabness that afflicts the working world, never to have seen the merit of sensible shoes or muted colours, and her arrival each morning was like the detonation of a small firework, impossible to ignore. One felt that whatever there was to know about Daisy was right there in plain view, and you had to warm to that. One of the happy nutters. Sam was glad that the girl seemed not to have taken offence at her brusqueness. I wonder if the coconut in a Bounty contributes any dietary fibre.

So she got Andy’s pile-cream presentation mostly finished by the end of the afternoon, at least to the point where she knew that it would have to rest overnight so that she could see how crap it was in the morning. The sixth floor vending machine begrudged her a rock-hard, chilly Snickers and clouds began to drift into position for a lurid, hydrocarbon-enhanced sunset. She stood, forehead pressed to the window, and sought out details of the rooftops and eaves beyond the cool glass. She liked to look for texture of the world, the unseen warp and weft of reality that would persist invisibly when she looked away. Slates, unvisited for years by anything but birds, and the tile that had slipped from position, and the patch of lichen on it. She felt momentary dizziness at the endless fractal multiplication of detail. She remembered childhood journeys sitting in the back of Dad’s swoopy Triumph, fighting the queasiness by spotting weeds at the roadside, picking a single plant out of the blur and holding it for a moment before it was wrenched away into the remote distance, gone from her vision yet still set in its place.

The permafrost Snickers effortlessly extracted a filling from a lower molar and offered it up for chewing as a single jarring morsel.

* * * * *

She hadn’t noticed before that the petrol station on the hill was open 24 hours. Well you wouldn’t, would you? You tend to assume that everything’s open all the time these days, which is why it’s so insulting when things turn out to be closed when you arrive. But it seemed wrong now to see the lights on and the little figure of the attendant behind his bulletproof window. Bad planning. Bad planning to need petrol at three in the morning and worse planning to end up taking the money. She remembered going to an all-night petrol station once with an ex’, David, at about this time of night in search of munchable items. A long time ago. She imagined the sound of Granny’s ancient downstairs loo (a proper job, the cistern up at ceiling height for the full clank and whoosh of Victorian sanitation) as she flushed Dave and her silly, younger self back down into the sump of memory.

She passed through the splash of light from the forecourt, recorded by the CCTV as she relaxed into her running. The cadence of her feet on the pavement and the longer rhythm of her breathing began to harmonise, and she felt herself slipping towards the automated, semi-disembodied state in which she knew she could just keep on going and going for ever. Until she got puffed out and had to stop of course, which was the price you paid for not training.

“You’ve got all the talent and none of the application, Sam,” the University coach had said; David Figgis, a harmless enough perv as pervs go, and a good enough coach when he could keep his mind on it. Jenny Boyce had punched him out hadn’t she? That had to have hurt, Jenny being no stranger to the weights room. Figgis had been keen to point out that Sam had advantages in skeletal proportion and musculature that equipped her superbly for running, and backed these remarks up with a simile concerning a ‘magnificent piece of oiled machinery’. Doubtless this was a compliment from his standpoint, but it was also enough to keep her away from the track for weeks thereafter. She now bore ‘The Mark of Figgis’ on her right knee, a roughly star-shaped scar that tanned oddly and was the result of slipping on leaves whilst running in the park, where she wouldn’t have been if the man hadn’t been infesting the training ground. Anyway, raw talent will get you far enough tonight, that and a damn fine pair of trainers.

Past the builders’ merchant that Dad always called Travis Bickle in an attempt to flaunt his film-buff credentials, and the pub across the road that was going through yet another full refurb. More face-lifts than Liza and still the same old clientele, undaunted by the loss of spit and saw-dust in favour of synthetic bog-trotting and, latterly, a tragically inappropriate soho lounge-bar vibe. A shiny Gaggia does not a trendy hangout make.

* * * * *

“I lost a bloody filling.”

“Where?”

“Upstairs.” Sam saw Clyde’s eyes flick to her hairline and braced herself for a blast of his famous wit.

“So now there really is a bit missing,” he said. Weak, but Daisy guffawed obligingly so Sam supposed it would do for his purposes.

“Maybe you don’t pay for yours yet. Is he eighteen yet Daise? He seems to get free dentistry.”

“I’ve never needed a filling. Dental care is all about prevention.”

“No, dental care is about a big ginger man jabbing your mouth with shiny implements and asking you if that was painful as he waits for you to climb down off his head.”

“My dentist wears very short skirts,” he continued. Then, “Were you a cat in a former life, Sam?”

“Don’t go there. I know that Human is a Kharmic promotion over Feline, but given the choice I might well opt for sitting by the fire licking myself, at least over this game of soldiers. And if my dentist wore short skirts at least he would be swiftly unmasked and detained. As it is he eludes detection and passes as a normal ginger person.”

“I’m with Sam on this one.” Daisy had lost interest in the shop window by which they stood, which amazed Sam since it contained shoes. “Dentistry is fascistic, and all dentists are cross-eyed.” There was a moment’s pause while this was assimilated. “It’s true; they do too much close-up work and have to retire when they can’t see to work the X-ray machine. And it’s the x-rays that make them go ginger, with blond eyelashes like Boris Becker.”

Sam caught her eye. “On your home planet Daisy, were you one of the elite few chosen to go forth into the Galaxy? Or was it more like an expulsion?”

“Does your dentist have blond eyelashes, Sam?” Clyde again.

“I’m normally winceing when he gets that close, so I can’t tell you. I imagine that yours does not however. What with the short skirts, I can see a picture forming.”

“Hmm. Long dark lashes.”

“Eyebrows?”

“Two.” Sam waited. “Also dark.”

“You mean black. Hair?”

“Golden.”

“Blonde. Is she recently qualified?”

“Very well qualified I’m sure. Natalya is from Prague.”

“I bet she is. Go for many check-ups do you? Lots of prevention?” Sam didn’t know why she was being like this, but Clyde’s ever-present eye-twinkle seemed to ask for it. There was a kind of dizzy adrenalin feeling behind her eyes, a wobbly pressure, and a weird pause stretched between them; Daisy, circling behind them, broke it.

“Clyde likes collars and cuffs to match, don’t you?” Sam watched as Daisy stepped a crucial half pace between them, taking Clyde’s eye contact for herself. It was well done, the movement and the old joke delivered together with irresistible, almost musical precision. She perceived in herself a sudden affection for this almost-friend and un-chosen work-mate, an absurd person who could do…that. Sam felt maladroit and humble. And she saw how Daisy now turned, moving directly between them, catching Clyde with her left arm and propelling him past and away, pointing him down the street, but still able to scoop her other arm around Sam’s waist and bring her on too, with amazing strength. “Where is this place Clyde?” Daisy asked. “We’re already fucking late.” And as they now walked Sam could still see, a retinal after-image, the blinding grin that Daisy had somehow flashed into her head in that sudden moment of authority.

There had been a kind of half-plan for a night out floating around the office for a couple of weeks, but Sam had been surprised to find that it had actually crystalised fully and that tonight was the night. Daisy had given it capital letters, ‘Tonight’s the Night!’, and added a sway of the hips for emphasis. Such plans were usually left on the drawing board, where they belonged in Sam’s estimation, or were realized only as a desultory hour of so in the nearest pub before a mass exodus to home and hearth. Where the momentum behind this one had been gathered from was anybody’s guess.

But a venue had been chosen by somebody, whom it was later impossible to identify, and a disparate mob of would-be revelers signed up; Clyde and Daisy had corralled Sam in the lift to persuade her that a bit of a drinkup would sort out her bitchy demeanor. She had striven to suppress rising annoyance at the odd couple’s new crusade to brighten up her life and had gone along with the idea as a kind of mental sleight of hand; maybe if she complied with their wishes this time they would lose interest in the challenge. Trouble was, if she wasn’t cheered up she didn’t think she could fake it.

Of course they were not late really, but rather among the first to arrive in the obscure basement room that the appointed place turned out to be. Somebody had decided that tan suedette and red velvet would create an intimate and stylish effect if subtly lit with directional ultra-violet spots. This illumination was inadequate for the inspection of damage to shins whacked on low tables lurking in the gloom, but caused white shirts and gin and tonics to fluoresce cheerily in compensation. The bar tariff was truly a thing of majesty.

“What is it?” Sam eyed Daisy’s drink dubiously.

“I don’t know exactly, but I think it’s clotting.” A swizzle-stick projected vertically from the frothy surface, its lower end, Sam reflected, probably dissolving in the heavier layers at the bottom of the glass. Or vase, more accurately. She tuned into one of the nearby conversations, pulling the words out of the wash of over-amplified music.

“So have you got a turbo on that then?” Bloke-talk, the crucial minutiae of specification and performance.

“Yeah but its smooth though, doesn’t come in with a bang. More like a steady surge.”

“Goes a bit?”

“Like a sheep off an aqueduct, mate.”
A flush of company cars had spread through the finance department, causing acute suspicion among the rest of the staff. The Finance Director himself was said to have two, one of which crouched so low to the ground that he could barely insert his swollen form behind the wheel. Sam saw that one of the two finance Dawns was involved with the car talk and was now having the great male mystery of ‘torque’ explained to her. Rather like the off-side rule in football, an understanding of torque seemed to be a requirement for admission to certain tiers of the male hierarchy, if not for ascent to the apex of the pyramid. The true Alpha male apparently needed no such technical knowledge to enhance his charisma; David Slater was at the bar, occupying a serendipitous little pool of golden light.

“I know, I’ve seen him,” Sam answered Daisy’s kick in the shin. A faint nausea rose into her throat.

“What, do you want to go? I thought you got away with it.”

“Kind of. I didn’t know he was back.”

“About a week ago. The San Francisco client was paying a wodge of his salary and asked for a cheaper bod now that the account’s up and running.”

“How do you know all this stuff?”

Daisy just smiled. “You’ve talked to him though, since the…, you know?”

“Since what?” Clyde plumped onto the banquette, treating its other occupants to a little pneumatic jolt as the upholstery exhaled a puff of rubbery air. He set a fresh round of drinks on the table. “Did Sam have run-in with California Dave?”

* * * * *

There was a figure. She just glimpsed it, by the bus-stop halfway down the steep part of the hill. Who are you? Where did you go? Are you lurking? I don’t like lurkers. Or was it her imagination? Where the shadows of the pavement trees and the bus-shelter pooled together she had thought she had seen a tall man, but an instant later she couldn’t be sure. Cross the road? There was another truck now, a great façade ablaze with lights, and then multiple wheels blurring past in a diesely rumble as Sam slowed indecisively, looking at the cars trailing in its wake. To her left were an unkempt grassy expanse and some low-rent brick housing blocks, no kind of refuge, and that bloody shadowy bus shelter dead ahead. Stop or carry on. Where are you, ya booger? She felt a chilly thread of fear and noted the looseness in her limbs as adrenalin came on-line.

Suddenly there was momentum in her running again, and she knew she could easily speed up and be past in a flash, then decide either to make the next left to loop back to the flat or to stay out on the lighter main road. She was closer now, near enough to see right into the shelter, which was clearly empty, but she couldn’t see round the illuminated billboard at the far end. Decision point. Pursing her lips she dug harder into the pavement, getting on the gas to whip past the lighted advert (for running shoes, noted a giggling little section of her mind, although not as fine as hers). And she had always been fast, too fast for billboard lurkers, “Way too fast for you, matey,” she thought as the billboard snapped through her peripheral vision and…

~ discontinuity ~

“Are you okay?”
That’s not very original. Grit. Grit on her tongue and a cool roughness under her cheek.
“Can you hear me?”
Yes. Sam thought she felt her body still ringing with the shock of impact, like a bell, or like a cartoon character whacked with a frying pan. Yosemite Sam.
“Hey, can you hear me?” A gentle voice.
I said yes. Or maybe I didn’t. “Yes, thanks.” She raised her face from the paving and began to lever herself upwards. A swimmy feeling overtook her but once moving it seemed as easy as not just to keep on going, so she stood right up. “Christ. Quite a bump. D’you think I blacked out?” She squinted about to see the gentle-voiced speaker but the giddiness was really coming on so she squeezed her eyes shut again and took some deep breaths.
“Here, let me help. Sit here.” He guided her back, hands softly at her shoulder and elbow, until she felt the low retaining wall of the grassy slope against her legs. She sat. “Let your head clear a bit.”
“What happened? Did you see?” She looked at him again, foggily, as he replied. Her vision swam and eddied, slipping off to the sides in random saccades, colours pulsing like stylized animation. Brake lights flared on the road, sequencing crazily through red, blue and yellow.
“Yes. You tripped. The tree roots have cracked the paving. Don’t worry about that now.” He looked more closely at her, on one knee before her. “How do you feel?”
“Not too well.” Head down again she found a clear image of his face against her closed lids, clear when nothing else had been; unbristled skin, a classic geometry of planes and hollows and pale, deep-set, beautiful eyes. Something familiar. Thunder rose in her ears, other sounds receded. The pavement. “You sure I didn’t crack it?” She felt the chill of the night on her arms and midriff, the air parting to slide around her, but perceived all this from far within, as if observing from a softer, warmer place. Is that bad?
“Everything will be fine, Sam. Give it a moment. Here, take my hand.” From a great distance now she heard another voice, knew of other figures moving in the blur of the world, stooping, kneeling.
“Are you alright? Stay still. I’ll call for help. Keep her still mate, okay?”
“Jesus, did you see her go over?” Sam thought she heard the peeping of a cell phone, the clatter of leaves caught in the whipping breeze, but then knew of very little else beside the warm grip of the stranger.