Monday, October 26
Three days pass in which I focus on nothing but myself. Three days of pushing Mister Tender away, of communication with no one. I switch hotels, trading Gladstone Park for Regent’s Park, spending my days walking the hectic streets of London, pretending, just for a time, that perhaps I’m someone else. A tourist, seeing the sites. The last two days, I worked out in a local boxing gym, finding joy in throwing fists and feet at a well-worn heavy bag for nearly an hour. The expulsion of sweat and energy left me deliciously drained, and for three nights, I’ve actually slept well. Okay, not well. But not terribly.
But today I leave, heading back home to a world of uncertainty. I have several hours before I catch the Heathrow Express train from Paddington Station to the airport, and after an intentionally long lunch, I take a taxi to Southwark. I give my driver the address, which I only know because I Googled it. He takes me over Blackfriars Bridge, and I get a chill just looking at the cold, gray waters of the Thames. Dirty whitecaps. In the distance, I see Tower Bridge, both majestic and imposing, and think back to school tours of the Tower of London as a little girl. It was the first time someone pointed out to me the exact spot where a person had died.
I remember the tall and burly Beefeater commanding the attention of my entire fourth-grade class as he pointed to Tower Green—a lush stretch of impossibly green grass with a small square of granite in the center—and told us that was where the scaffolds once stood. He explained how only the privileged had the honor of being executed in the privacy of the Green, away from the screaming and gawking commoners, and that at least seven people lost their heads at that exact location. How thirty-year-old Anne Boleyn, blindfolded and kneeling, received just a single blow from the executioner’s blade. The strike—delivered by an expert swordsman imported from France for the occasion—was swift and precise, and the queen’s head fell cleanly from her torso.
Had I known how my own family’s relationship with sharp objects would unfold, I might have taken more cautionary interest in the field trip that day. Instead, I stood there and simply pictured heads on the Green, eyes wide open, gazes fixed far beyond the gunmetal clouds cloaking the two-thousand-year-old city.
Across the bridge, left on Southwark Street, another left on Hopton, around a bend that approaches the Tate Modern. The taxi slows.
“36 Hopton,” the driver says.
I look out the window. The building is completely unremarkable. The street quiet for a late-morning weekday.
“This right?” he asks when I only stare at the building.
“Yes,” I say. “I think so.”
I pay him and get out, and as he drives off, I suddenly wish I hadn’t come.
Standing on the sidewalk with my backpack and my one piece of luggage, I’m unsure what to do next. I have been avoiding this moment for three days, trying to ignore the last thing Mr. Interested wrote to me. But now I’m here, because maybe there’s something to learn. There must be a reason he told me to come here.
The building at 36 Hopton Street is residential, with street-floor retail and office space. There’s a coffee shop I eye with interest, simply because it seems to be independent. Not many of those left, especially in the large cities. Good for them, I think. Next to it is a grocery store about the size of my basement back home.
Next to that is Unit C.
Currently occupied by Thomas & Evans, Solicitors.
Formerly occupied by Harding Publications.
This is where my father worked until his death, which occurred, as best as I can tell from the articles I’ve read, about where I’m standing on the sidewalk. He was stabbed to death soon after the publication of his satirical drawings of Mohammed. The blade pierced him four times: twice in the chest, once in the stomach, and the fatal blow to the neck.
An Islamic extremist was the presumed attacker, but no suspect was ever caught, and no group took credit for the killing.
I stare deeply into the grains of the sidewalk, grimly looking for any sign of faded bloodstains. My stomach clenches at the memory of the police photos, which I regret ever having seen, for they provided me the last memories of my father. His body slumped on this sidewalk, his face pressed to the ground and the ocean of blood pooling around him. I wonder how much pain he felt. If it was at all like my attack, there wouldn’t have been much, because shock would have rapidly quelled it. There would only have been an intensely cold feeling at the entry wounds, a shattering sense of vulnerability, and then finally darkness. Deep, deep darkness, a night of forever sleep.
I see no trace of blood. There is, in fact, nothing abnormal about this location at all, no sign that anything horrific ever happened here. They simply took his body away, washed off the pavement, and the world kept spinning. The publisher closed, these solicitors moved in, and if my father’s ghost is here, he simply joins the millions of others in a city long accustomed to death.
I look up, my attention grabbed by a flyer taped to the solicitor’s window. I noticed it briefly when I first walked over but now stare at it intently, suddenly knowing it holds more significance than I first realized. With small, cautious steps, I walk up to the window. To anyone but me, the flyer appears nothing more than an advertisement for a band or some kind of performer. Exquisite hand-lettering shouts off the top of the page:
One Night Only.
Directly below is a hand-drawn image, and I immediately know the artist. This image was penned by the same hand that drew the panels of me, the scenes from Manchester, the moments of my stark aloneness. And here I am again, drawn neatly on this flyer, the familiar strokes and inking that mimic but don’t quite duplicate the telltale works of my father. Here is a single panel depicting me on a street, leaning into a window, staring at a flyer—this same flyer. In fact, the image is this very scene occurring right this moment, and though my outfit is different, everything is captured exactly as it is happening right now, so accurately that when I step back away from it in shock, I almost expect the Alice in the drawing to do the same.
Below the image, more lettering.
Alice, Looking Through the Glass
October 31
Mister Tender’s Pub
What is happening here?
I look up and see a man staring down at me through the second-story window of the solicitor’s. He’s very nicely put together and wears a very British look of tight concern on his face. I don’t get any immediate sense he’s part of this, which is perhaps naive of me, but that feeling is reinforced with the words he mouths to me.
Are you all right?
I nod, which he accepts after a few seconds and then disappears inside the office space, his duty done.
But I’m not all right. Not nearly at all.
And then I see someone else.
Another man. Not inside the office space, but outside. In fact, at this moment, he’s the only other person aside from me standing on this narrow side street.
He’s fifty feet away and not moving. He’s just standing, staring at me, his muscled arms hanging by his sides.
I assess him as quickly as I can, as my defenses have taught me. If you view everyone as a threat, you can never err on the wrong side of caution.
He’s perhaps my age, give or take a few years. Too young to be Mr. Interested, based on Freddy Starks’s description, but there’s something not right about him. He wears a long-sleeved, tight brown T-shirt tucked into the darkest of blue denim. Brown work boots, the kind used for actual work and not fashion. He wears a long, wiry beard, the kind that in America suggests hipster bartender, but on him, it appears anything but. It’s more like he’s trying to cover as much of his identity as possible, an idea further confirmed by a gray wool cap pulled over his forehead and gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses with coal-black lenses. This man is in shape, but not gym shape. He’s in real-world, I-can-be-a-problem shape.
And he just keeps staring at me.
The familiar swell of panic fills my chest, and I battle it by taking a step forward. Toward him. I can be the aggressor as well.
Normally I might look at this kind of person with curious caution, a potential threat easily avoided by dodging into the coffee shop or the office space.
But not today. Not here on the sidewalk where my father was slaughtered. Not with this man staring me down in a brazenly predatory fashion.
And not after Mr. Interested told me to come here.
This man might not be Mr. Interested, but I’m certain he’s a part of everything. Maybe one of the message board minions, another pervert obsessed with daily updates about me. A groupie, under the direction of Mr. Interested. Maybe he’s the one who taped the flyer on the window.
I’m struck with an immediate blaze of fury. White-hot, almost blinding. There’s no sense to it, but it’s the most powerful, freeing, releasing sensation I’ve ever known. A fucking rage orgasm. With no thought, I do what I’ve been meaning to do for fourteen years.
I attack.
I release my backpack and luggage and sprint toward this man at full speed, closing the gap in seconds. He doesn’t react fast enough, and as I lunge in the final feet before reaching him, his eyebrows arch high above the rims of his shades, his disbelief total.
There is no thinking now. There is just training.
Impact.
I take him down easily despite his size, not hoping to hurt him yet, just to get him off balance. We both fall to the ground, but I roll and bounce to my feet, and I have him exactly how I want. Slowly getting to his feet.
“Wait,” he says, rising. “Just—”
He’s in perfect position as he tries to get up. His head is just about at my level, and I do what I do best.
I kick.
A beautiful, perfect arc of a roundhouse kick. The kind you can only dream of, the thing of movies. The top of my left foot connects perfectly with the right side of his jaw, the blow crushing. The force begins to spin his body to his left, which is exactly what I want. I pull my left foot down, push forward on my right, and drive my right fist toward the exposed left side of his face. My knuckles smash his jaw, and glorious, blinding pain shoots through the bones in my hand and all the way up my arm. The combination of punches is textbook, exactly how I trained, and something so rare to actually execute. Even if I’ve broken my fingers, I know the damage to him is much worse.
He collapses to the ground in a heap, his head taking one bounce off the pavement before coming to a stop. I kneel, yank off his cap, grab a fistful of hair with my left hand, and pull my right arm back. His glasses have scattered to the ground, revealing deep-brown eyes, wide and full of fear. I cock my arm back more, knowing I could smash his nose into pieces with one punch.
“Wa…wait…” he gasps.
He tries to hold up his arms, but I leap on top of him, pinning his elbows to the ground with my knees. He’s strong, but inexperienced fighters who get punched first spiral quickly out of control. He’s too stunned to react, which puts me in charge.
“He tol’ me to come ’ere and watch for you,” he says, spitting up a thin tendril of blood. “P-p-paid me two hundred quid! Just had to give you a little spook, is all. Fuck!”
“What?”
“Get off me, for Chrissake! I think you knocked my fucking tooth out.”
“Who told you to come here? Who?”
“I dunno,” he says. “I met him online. I do…odd jobs. Security work, that kind of thing. He found me. Said he was havin’ a scare at someone, is all. Just wanted me to stand ’ere and watch you. Nuthin’ more.”
I raise my fist as if to strike, and he closes his eyes. So I place my thumbs over his closed eyelids, applying just enough pressure to let him know I could press hard enough to burst his eyes inside their sockets.
“Did you put that flyer there? Did you tape it to the window?”
“Wha…what flyer? Don’t know about no flyer.”
“How long have you been watching for me?”
“I haven’t been. Got a call just a few minutes ago. Christ, you’re mad.”
Mr. Interested is close. Was watching for me. He put the flyer up himself, probably not too long ago. I look up and see no one, but he could be anywhere.
The man struggles beneath me, testing my weight. He’s bigger than me, and unless I attack him again soon, he’ll push me off. So I push off him voluntarily, get to my feet, and assume a defensive stance a few steps back. Now I have space to work with. He scrambles to his feet and faces me.
“Loon,” he says. Then he spits a wad of blood, and a tooth clinks along the pavement next to his feet. “Bloody fucking hell.”
“Did he tell you anything else?”
“Just told me to stand there and stare at you a bit. Thought it’d be easy money. Was wrong about that. Should make you pay to get my tooth replaced.” He spits again, and this time, the bloody wad lands close to me. “Bitch.”
I take one step toward him, and that’s all it takes. He turns and runs.
“Bitch,” I whisper.
My hand throbs, and I try to ignore the pain. I look around and see three faces in the coffee shop window, all eyes trained on me. No doubt someone has alerted the police by now.
I run back and fetch my backpack and luggage, then wheel down the street and into an even smaller alleyway. I peer each way and look for signs that someone is following me but see nothing unusual.
Back on busier Southwark Street, I find a taxi and ask the driver to take me to Paddington. If he notices my heavy breathing and my sweat-streaked face, he says nothing about it. It takes several minutes to slow my heartbeat, and when I finally do, I have an urge to dive completely back into my world. Back into the hunt, back on the grid. I swap out the local SIM card I purchased for my phone and put my old card back in. If Mr. Interested is truly tracking me through my SIM card’s GPS location, he’ll know my location again. Fine by me. Let him come.
The phone boots. Two texts waiting for me.
The first is from my mother, dated two days ago.
Thomas says you’re in London?? What on earth are you doing there?
And the second one is time-stamped five minutes ago, the number unknown to me.
You are strong. But in the moments you’re weak, I’ll be there to save you.