Soho lit my way, the neon script of clubs and the cloudy lightbulbs behind restaurant signs, the pavement dark brown and smelly with rain, the dull crack of my heels stomping on it the echo rang bang-bang, ricocheting from one side of the street to the other. I took care to walk with a modest confidence. The mist plastered thinning anorexic hairs to my scalp, I pushed my two bare, rake-like legs for miles, I could not stop until I got there, I could not ask anyone for anything unless I was laying like a rat between the gutter and the asphalt.
Can't I help you on your way home. Sexy lady. You know where the Tube is? Come here, baby. I hate Soho. Where's the Red Line? Get out of my way--you have acid breath.
My friends had ditched me at a sticky, grubby club called Moonlighting, they were all bleary-face pregame drunk and I was not--I was supposed to be the babysitter. I had no passport and therefore no entry, who knew someone could risk his own safety with a driver's license. I was in a foreign country, my mother's mother's mother country, England, the land of the not so proper not so biscuit-eating not so insensitive Brits. Yes, the food is bad there. I had a cell phone and my friends said the bouncers wouldn't let them out, a bunch of lies I thought but what could I do about it? There was now someone following me, close behind me, asking if he could help; I half-turned around and he looked sweet enough so I asked him where I could find the Tube. He pointed left then front then right and I got there in about five minutes. On the train was someone with a gritty beard, half-dead, embalmed with grease in a tan canvas coat, surrounded by a small flock of bags filled with homeware. I looked at him and he was looking back at me with glassy blue eyes like chips of ice. I got home and cried under a cold shower and went to bed.
