The ranting drunk welcomed everyone aboard. ‘The more the merrier,’ he said. ‘Let’s have the whole fucking world in here – why not?’
The smell of the white boy with dreads intensified, adding urine and excrement – I wondered when he’d last changed his fake combat trousers.
Less than a minute out of Camden Town, the train lurched to a stop. An almost subliminal groan rose from the passengers, especially when the lights dimmed as well. I heard someone chuckling at the other end of the carriage.
There had to be something else behind Henry Pyke, I thought, something much worse than a bitter failed actor.
‘Of course there is,’ shouted the ranting drunk. ‘That would be me.’
I craned my neck to spot the drunk, but my view was blocked by the white boy with dreads whose face now had an expression of dumb satisfaction. The smell of shit got worse, and I realised the boy had just relieved himself in his pants. He caught my eye and gave me a big smile of contentment.
‘Who are you?’ I shouted. I tried to get out of my corner but the woman in the halter top thrust herself backwards and pinned me to the wall. The lights dimmed further, and this time the groan from the passengers was anything but subliminal.
‘I’m the demon drink,’ shouted the ranting drunk. ‘I’m gin lane and your local crack house. I’m a follower of Captain Swing, Watt Tyler and Oswald Mosley. I’m the grinning face in the window of the hansom cab; I made Dickens long for the countryside and I’m what your Masters are afraid of.’
I pushed at the woman in the halter top but my arms felt heavy, useless as if in a nightmare. She started to rub herself against me. The carriage was getting hotter and I began to sweat. A hand suddenly grabbed hold of my backside and squeezed tight – it was the man in the blue blazer. I was so shocked that I froze up. I looked at his face but he was staring straight forward with the typically bored, abstracted expression of a seasoned traveller. The bleed from his iPod was louder and more irritating than it had been.
I gagged on the smell of shit and shoved the woman in the halter top enough to get a view down the carriage. I saw my ranting drunk – he had the face of Mr Punch.
The man in the blazer let go of my arse and tried to stick his hand down the back of my jeans. The woman in the halter top ground her hips into my crotch.
‘Is this,’ shouted Mr Punch, ‘any way for a young man to live?’
The white boy with dreads leaned towards me and with great deliberation poked me in the face with his index finger. ‘Poke,’ he said, and giggled. Then he did it again.
There’s a point where a human being will lose it, just lash out at everything around them. Some people spend their lives on the edge of that – most of them end up doing time in prison. Some, a lot of them women, get ground down to that point over years, until one day it’s hello, burning bed and a legal defence of extreme provocation.
I was at that point, and I could feel the righteous anger. How wonderful it would be just to fuck the consequences and let rip. Because sometimes you just want the fucking universe to take some notice – is that too fucking much to ask for?
Then I realised that was what it was all about.
Mr Punch – the spirit of riot and rebellion – does what it says on the tin. This was him, the guy behind Henry Pyke, and he was fucking with my mind.
‘I get it,’ I said. ‘Henry Pyke, Coopertown, that cycle courier, lots of frustration – but that’s everyone in the big city, ain’t it, Mr Punch? And what percentage actually let you in? I bet you’ve got a piss-poor success rate – so you can just fuck off out of it – I’m going home to bed.’
At that point I realised that the train was moving again, the lights were up and the man in the blue blazer didn’t have his hand down my trousers. The ranting drunk was silent. Everybody in the carriage was studiously not looking at me.
I bailed at Kentish Town, the very next stop. Fortunately it was where I wanted to go.
From September 1944 to March 1945, that lovable Nazi scamp Wernher Von Braun aimed his V2 rockets at the stars and yet, in the words of the song, somehow hit London instead. When my dad was growing up, the city was dotted with bombsites, gaps in the neat rows of houses where homes had been obliterated. In the postwar years these sites were gradually cleared and rebuilt in a series of ghastly architectural mistakes. My dad liked to claim that the mistake where I grew up was built on a V2 impact site, but I suspect it was probably just an ordinary cluster of German high explosives dropped by a conventional bomber.