“I’m going to kill her, absolutely kill her”
He’s shouting indecipherably and in despair at someone in his world. In my world he’s shouting straight at the top of the no. 59 bus stop. Suddenly, he karate-kicks his foot up above his head several times in rapid succession.
I scuttle past this unnerving psychotic endeavour with my daughter, eyes to pavement.
“What’s wrong with him?” my daughter asks, more titillated than perturbed.
He has the look of someone who’s come off his Haloperidol against medical advice, and lost his mind, home, wife, job, life.
“He’s not well in the head, love,” I say, “keep walking — and stop looking back.”
“He’s still doing it,” she says, looking back.
I walk her on through the grimy brickwork of South London. We pass a yard, set back from the road in which there are lots of cars, and two men up in each other’s faces. Unaccountably, they’re screaming “bitch” and “tramp” at each other. It’s hard to know if this face-off will erupt into something else.
“Did you see that?” my daughter says. I’m walking at a snap now but my daughter’s not. I take her arm and steer her onto a broad road flanked by tall, dappling trees on either side. Palace Road — a patchy pocket of gentrification, in which the smell of hot pavement mixes with the fragrance of orange blossom, where solid Victorian houses with front gardens offer solid comforts.
Turning into the drive of my friend V’s house, I fumble around with the seven colour-coded keys it takes to enter it.
“I’m going for a walk,” my daughter announces. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
I swing round from the door. I realise suddenly how very, very badly I don’t want my daughter to take her slender 16-year-old charms and country bloom onto the streets of Brixton alone.
“Where do you plan on walking?”
“To the shops.”
“I don’t want you walking on your own in Brixton.”
“You went to school at ten on your own in London. On the Tube.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“I’ve got London in my bones. I’ve got the city in me,” I say, “you haven’t. You’ve got the country.”
“If I get lost I’ll ask someone the way.”
“What kind of someone?”
“Him,” she says, pointing to a tall man on the opposite side of the street. He has a Sainsbury’s plastic bag, long face and predatory stoop. I look again. He’s in late middle age, and wearing creased trousers of indeterminate colour. Paedophile pants, I decide.
“You better be joking.”
“Oh for god’s sake,” she says, “what do you think he’s going to do to me in broad daylight?”
“Drag you by the hair, stick you with a syringe full of sedative and throw you down a well in his basement. He’ll lower a bucket to you — up and down on a string, like in Silence of the Lambs and then kill you.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” she says.
“You need to be toughened up to London before you’re safe in it,” I say, “hardened-off, like sweet peas to the cold.”
“I’m not a flipping sweet…”
“This is the deal,” I say. “Take your phone out now and hold it. Walk straight up, take a right, then straight back in 15 minutes. No sitting on walls — it’s asking for trouble.”
“You’re being…”
“No argument.”
She takes off, turns right out of sight.
Ten minutes pass. I think, right now, my daughter’s running the gauntlet of unknown opposition and unexpected assault in London.
Twelve minutes: I think of men with long faces and predatory stoops.
Fifteen: I feel sick.
Seventeen: I’m going to kill her, absolutely kill her.
Nineteen: syringes of sedative, buckets and wells.
At twenty minutes past, she rounds the corner.
Twenty-one: sod this idea. Sod sweet peas and hardening-off. Sod it.
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