Then there’re cars. Fucking drivers. Having to chase cars down who’ve driven too close or beeped at me, and bang on their windows at traffic lights and demand an apology. It’s dangerous. Shouting at them on the Kingsland Road, holding up the traffic, reaching into my pockets for my keys to threaten to gouge a chunk out of their paintwork. Not just cars, bikes too. Cyclists who say something, try to hurry me on. Punching one of them once, twice, punching two cyclists once, the last more of a push, a shoulder shove, it was meant to be. Inventing a dead friend. They take your anger more seriously if they think it comes from grief. It jump-starts their deadened imagination.

But I am grieving? Well, maybe.

It was impossible to argue with my dad after he left. He’d just sigh and put the phone down. Impossible not to argue with my mum. About anything. She was always asking questions about him. I didn’t want to even think about him. She’d keep asking. She didn’t have to ask for my loyalty, she knew we were loyal, never asked us to take sides. But because we couldn’t argue with him we argued with her. We all tore into each other. About anything. Literally anything. The reasonable volume of the music I was playing. The corruption of one’s finer being through the endless perusal and discussion of online property listings. The treatment of women. The treatment of people.

The empty skies. The money gone. The going home. The blank account, the bruised fist. The swept glass. The sudden bangs and shouts in the night. The pain of others. The powerlessness to stop their pain. The stopping the starting the stopping. The man beeping his horn behind her. The fucker beeping his horn and thinking you wouldn’t do anything about it. I really feel sometimes like I could hit someone. I really feel sometimes like I could kill someone.

There should be some kind of justice. Don’t you think there should?

‘Take all the time you need,’ you say.

*