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“You want somewhere to stay?”
I don’t look at the guy who’s keeping pace with me. I haven’t even left the airport yet.
“I got rooms, cheap. You need a room?”
“I live here,” I say, trying to suppress the anger in my voice as I continue walking while he disappears. Do I look that bad? I’m only just off the plane and this city is getting to me already.
John Lennon said something along the lines that the feeling he got when moving from London to New York was the same as when he moved from Liverpool to London. The reverse is also true. I feel like I have just returned to toy town.
What the fuck have I done?
I get the train from Heathrow Airport back to central London and then the tube south. Sitting on the crowded tube train I close my eyes and think about the woman on the plane.
The woman who had died.
I don’t even know what she died of, but I remember the cabin steward saying, “Well, there’s nothing we can do for her now,” and he left her there, sitting upright in her seat, dead. Dead but continuing her flight back to London. She would arrive in London, dead.
Maybe she got off lucky.
I don’t think I feel much healthier myself.