Henry doesn’t finish work for an hour, so I pass the time inside my duvet darkroom. Not developing film, but scrolling through my phone, watching footage of humans temporarily separated from their sanity. Search for ‘freakout’ and you get one-point-two million hits, ‘road rage’ gives you nine hundred thousand, there are over sixteen million ‘crazy’ women. Mad-faced screamers and frothing ranters. No wonder we say they’ve gone viral. Their rage and humiliation loaded online and shared and shared again. One million views of some hysterical mum gone banshee over a pinched parking space. One hundred thousand likes for some spittle-mouthed pensioner ranting respect at jeering teens. But it doesn’t do to be too amused. It could be you one day.
While the rest of the office went to the pub, I walked down to the travel clinic on Tottenham Court Road for my vaccines – yellow fever, typhoid, and an alphabet’s worth of hepatitis. Maybe they affected my brain; you read funny things about these vaccines.
As I wandered back to the office, I watched a guy in a baseball cap and headphones step off the pavement, causing a car to slam on its brakes.
Next week Alex would have been thirty.
The driver that hit him was fined sixty pounds for driving without due care and attention, and given three points on his licence. My friends hear this with anger and indignation – It’s a disgrace, He should be banned, He should be locked up. But the truth is Alex stepped in front of him. No one is tactless enough to say it explicitly, but the driver didn’t have a chance. He wasn’t speeding, wasn’t talking on his phone, wasn’t drunk. I feel guilty for thinking it, but I feel sorry for him too.
On Tottenham Court Road, the driver hit his horn hard: one, two, three times. The guy in the headphones lifted the peak of his cap and mouthed the words Fuck off, punctuating his gratitude with his middle finger.
Without thinking, I was walking towards the guy, shouting like a woman demented. ‘Look where you’re going! You could have been killed.’ He looked at me and laughed dismissively before walking away. But I followed him along the road. ‘I’m talking to you. Hey, you, don’t ignore me. What’s wrong with you?’
‘Piss off, yeah.’
‘Piss off? Really, you want me to piss off. I could be calling you an ambulance now. You could have been killed, for God’s sake.’
‘Well, I wasn’t, was I? So jog on, yeah.’
‘Jog on?’
‘Yeah,’ said the guy, stopping, and jutting his chin at me. ‘Fuck off.’
I slapped him hard, knocking his cap from his head. For a full second the guy was frozen in shock, and then his face knotted into anger and he took a step forwards.
‘Go on!’ I shouted at him. ‘Go on!’ I screamed.
We had a crowd around us by now, two or maybe three people holding up mobile phones.
‘Fucking psycho,’ said the guy, scooping his cap up from the floor. But he had the good sense to say it while he was backing away.
‘What are you looking at?’ I said to the semicircle of onlookers, a stupid question that should serve as a good punchline if my performance finds a larger audience.
I don’t doubt it’s out there somewhere, but good luck finding this mad cow. The best thing about these online meltdowns is the sheer volume of them. It’s almost enough to make you feel normal.