The crowd splintered madly as the word went around:

‘Bomb.’

‘Bomb!’

‘Bomb!’

The goth was pinned to the ground. Crowds broke onto the street in a panic – the station was cordoned. He picked up on the talk as he went with the crowd along the High Street. A guitar case the goth kid had carried was isolated for bomb disposal.

Manus.

That he was a match for the profile in the giddiness went unnoticed. He walked the length of the High Street again. He went along the canal, west, until he found a quiet spot beneath a bridge there. He hung the case over the rail but he could not let go of it. A wino sprawled on the far side of the canal called to him in an Irish accent:

‘They’re a hoor to learn, the guitars.’

He went back the pathway and he found an unseen moment among the Sunday crowd and he sneaked the case behind a bookstall on the Lock.

He was only ten minutes late for their meeting and she looked as good in daylight. Camden was giving him a headache, he said, would they not get on a bus? She laughed, and she was taken with him, he could see that. They went to Hampstead to the repertory cinema there. They waited in the coffee shop for Wings of Desire to be screened. Other young people in black waited also.

‘Ah yeah,’ he said. ‘Wim Wenders.’

‘Vim,’ she said.

‘Hah?’

‘You say it Vim Venders.’

‘Right so.’

They watched angels over Berlin and he was transfixed. Afterwards, they walked, and he asked were there squats in Berlin? She said yes, there were many.

WISTFUL ENGLAND

HE SAW HER every day as she moved through Stratford station. She came towards him on the concourse and the illusion held for just a moment. But as she came closer again her features would erase and re-form into someone else’s – a stranger’s. Still, he would search for her among the crush, each morning and evening, though she lived in another country, and he was not even romantic by nature.

His work involved threading fibre optic cables through office buildings. He tried not to stare too hard at the office girls, for she was among them, too – there were many who were slender and dark in that way. His heart was broken by them as he passed through the photocopier rooms. Most days he was rational, but he worried about the depth of his obsession, and he wondered, distantly, if it might turn to something darker.

Leytonstone had the air of just the kind of place a dark turn might occur. He shared a house off the High Road there with three peaceful alcoholics. He would drink with them for as long as he was able to at night and then pass out to dream the jagged, scratchy dreams that left him gaunt in the mornings. To be gaunt at twenty-five was a sombre accomplishment. He was putting money away but had no purpose in mind for it – he would not go back to Ireland. The weekends were the hardest.