There has been a bomb at Victoria. Not inside the station, but planted in a cab in the taxi rank. No one has claimed responsibility, but a fundamentalist Christian group is suspected. Someone painted on the side of the taxi, ‘NOT MAD, JUST ANGRY’. Dear God, thinks Logan, are these people idiots? Do they really think they can influence the outcome of April’s trial, or public opinion, through sending innocent travellers to what they call Heaven? If anything, they are simply self-destructing.
He would normally take a cab, but something in his stomach says no. Nor does he fancy jamming himself into the underground’s hurtling coffins. Instead, Logan taps the Temple Court Hotel into his phone’s navigation app and sets off on foot, guided by the dot.
Waterloo Bridge is unpleasantly busy, overflowing with extra pedestrians thanks to the security alert. Londoners are ruder than usual when anxious, he notes, as he catches an elbow and is almost pushed into the road. The Thames below them is teeming too, with several police launches buzzing up and down the river. One pulls, slowing, beneath the bridge he is traversing. It doesn’t emerge on the other side. Are they checking the undersides of bridges? At any moment, he supposes, he and his fellow travellers could be mashed into body parts. No wonder people needed to invent a deity and an afterlife, when this one falls so short of paradise.
Twenty-five minutes later, he is relieved to see the trumpeting elephant of the Temple Court Hotel. Tomorrow, he will deliver his testimony: April is insane. The girl will be hospitalized rather than imprisoned, and the move to have religious fundamentalism classified as a form of mental illness will be one step closer to becoming law.
It takes the efforts of dozens of people to put a religious nutcase behind bars. It takes only two signatures for a person to be sectioned. Those who, tonight, have triggered the denizens of London into a collective panic attack will, in the future, be stripped of their freedoms in advance. The words to begin this process are folded up in his pocket.
Remembered
On Thursday evening, he is back on the train home while another flattened, high definition version of himself is interviewed briefly on the national news. On Friday afternoon, he blindfolds his wife and drives her sixty miles east to a small crop of coastal villas. At the ten mile mark, she says This is way past Carluccio’s. She is compliant and chatty. Logan is hopeful. But at a fuel stop, when he is queuing to pay, he glances across the forecourt to see she has lifted her blindfold a fraction to look down at her lap. As he approaches the car he is sure she is texting someone. He opens the door and her body twitches, but there is nothing in her hands.
On we go! she says in her jolliest Girl’s Own Adventure voice.