I didn’t blame them. I was gaunt and red-eyed from sleeplessness, wearing a battered black leather jacket and even more battered steel-tipped Tony Lamas, with a barely healed scar on one cheek and another scar, star shaped, beside my eye. Forty years ago, you might have thought I was a rock star after a bad night. Now I looked like what I was: an aging punk jonesing for a drink and a handful of black beauties.

Outside the station, the people around me didn’t look much better. Shuffling hordes of black-clad commuters; a displaced army of homeless people dressed in black plastic trash bags that served as makeshift rain gear. Once, I might have seen the bleak light leaking from their eyes and photographed it. Now, the thought of my camera made me clutch the satchel that no longer held it.

Despair overwhelmed me like a fever. My old Konica, a seventeenth-birthday gift from my father, was gone, along with most of the stash of Tri-X film I’d carried like a talisman for years. I’d ditched camera and film impulsively the night before, back in rural Cornwall. Now in the broken-glass light of a London morning, the enormity of what I’d done made me sick.

I hurried down the street and into Paddington Underground, grabbed a free copy of the Metro from a guy bundled up like a refugee from the Shackleton voyage. His breath misted the air as he bellowed, “Terror suspect still at large! Secret neo-Nazi rally! New China virus named.” Just in case I couldn’t read the headlines on the placard beside him.

I scanned the paper as I waited for the train. The virus was long-running news by now, source of a constant simmering dread slow to abate. There was still only speculation about whoever had rammed the van into the crowd. The main articles were about a white supremacist gathering in East London and the even more dire situation back in the U.S., where two shooters wearing MAGA caps had burst into a sanctuary-city meeting in Portland, Maine, and killed two city council members along with representatives of the refugee community.

I barely skimmed the piece. I’m like one of those artificial ecosystems that creates its own bad weather: I don’t need to read about the rest of the world’s.

On page 5, I finally found the headline I was looking for: CROUCH END TRIPLE MURDERER STILL ON THE LOOSE. The killings were thought to be drug and perhaps gang related. No mention of me or any other suspects, so I made my way to King’s Cross.

I wandered through the construction zone surrounding the station, until I found a side street where nondescript row houses had been converted into cheap tourist hotels with names like Hail Britannia and Windsor Arms. I settled on the Royal Garden, which was neither but cost only sixty-five quid a night.