Justin shrugged. ‘We have to service the debt. You know the rules when you take a credit card.’ He looked at the screen again. She wondered, did it have a special note to bank staff? This woman has been cast out. Do not give her mercy. Ignore everything she says. Sharkbreath will deal with her. Of course he saw it all on the computer, her history of former solvency and recent fraud. She had been promising she would soon have a job for months. She imagined it looked bad on his side of the screen. Still she pressed on.
‘Yes, but do you think you could possibly reduce the interest on one or the other, or just stop the interest altogether? Or extend my overdraft so I could pay off my credit card? You know, I’ve been with this bank for years, and while I understand the rules, I wondered if you could possibly cut me some slack?’
‘I can’t authorise anything,’ said Justin, who had clearly not been listening to much of what she said. ‘I see that Mr Rivers has been corresponding with you about this. I suggest you talk to him.’ He was friendly enough, but he raised his hands towards his sparsely bearded chin and said, ‘There’s nothing I can do.’
‘I’ve tried to talk to Mr Rivers. He’s simply never here! It’s quite impossible,’ said Rosa. She was gripping the table, holding on as if that would help.
‘Mr Rivers is of course here regularly; he just happens not to be here today. But I can make you an appointment with him,’ said Justin. ‘Perhaps next Monday?’
We can do you a stripping of the self on Tuesday, a moment of epiphany on Wednesday, a spot of time on Thursday, but Monday — Monday we have to see Sharkbreath.
‘Well, fine, next Monday. Fine,’ she said, weakly. ‘Good, count me in for Monday.
Justin rustled through his papers and gave her a piece of card.
‘These are the contact details for our debt management counsellor,’ he said. ‘I suggest you talk to her. Or to Mr Rivers. Try him first thing on Monday.’ He nodded her away, and started typing on his computer as she said goodbye.
She grabbed her coat and a scarf and left the building. When she was on the street she ran along panting like a hound. The bus passed as Rosa ran up to the stop, and she saw the road behind was clogged, so she clenched her fists and carried on. LYLA, said the sign. A STAR REALLY WILL FALL. And soon. THE KILLS were still celebrating the launch of their single. Looking up at the sky, she walked along the street where everything moved too slowly and the cars got wedged in queues, and the buses shambled through it all, creaking and groaning. She was passing a herd of diggers breaking up the road, and a grey house with a view of the shattered street. She was passing the late-night shop and the funeral parlour and the cars were queuing at the lights but now there was a sense of elegy to it all because she knew she was leaving soon. The departure made her mark time. Nearly three months since she had come here. She shook her head. Celestial Stairs. Equal People. Pink and blue houses. Sketchy cab company. Handsome trees. Demoralised fast food restaurant. Crumbling high rise. Factory wasteland. Metal grilles. Pile of rubble. And the billboard and HERE COME THE TEARS. Her head ached, and she wondered why she was going back to Jess’s flat. To do what? she thought. She stopped on the street, uncertain, panic making her guts churn. If she went back, what would she do? Make calls, stare at the street, commit resolutions to paper. It was better to stay outside, she thought. And she thought she should go to see Andreas. No conceivable reason why not, she thought. He told you not to go away. He could be pleased to see you. Go and ask him. She gritted her teeth, clenched her fists. It was of course necessary. A simple question, and then she would earn, she hoped, a reprieve. She was bold and if not resolute then at least she was moving again, cutting away from Ladbroke Grove, turning onto quieter streets. How well she knew these shadow-brushed streets, her refuge in the evenings. She told them off, one by one — Chesterton Road, Oxford Gardens, Cambridge Gardens. On a corner she passed two lovers, kissing and holding hands. Then she saw a woman standing at her front door, waving at a friend who was walking away. A man parked a car, laboriously, tugging it backwards and forwards. It had been raining and there were still puddles on the roads. The cars splashed through them, dispersing water. Rosa said, ‘You’ve really been handling things badly,’ quietly, keeping her face behind her scarf. Then she said, ‘No more fooling around. You have to find a place to stay. You have to get a job. In the short term, you have to get that money from Liam. You don’t want it? Of course you don’t. You don’t want anything! But I insist you go and get it. You’ll have to be very calm and quite purposeful, and there’s no point trying to scuff your shoes like that, dragging them along in such a childish way, because that won’t make any difference at all. You’re just slowing yourself down — of course you want to miss out again! I insist you turn up there, prepared to give it your all. Otherwise, what will you do? Do you have a plan B? There’s no fairy godmother preparing to save you. No one will help you! You have exceeded the proper bounds of debt. That’s the brutal truth of it …’ and now she dropped her voice, because she was passing a woman and some children. They all walked up the steps of a house, and disappeared inside. ‘They won’t help you either,’ she said. ‘No point staring over at them. You understand the situation, don’t you?’ A taxi went past her, and to her left was a large church. Her limbs were heavy. If she could just sit down, if there was just a bench she could sit on, she thought. A quick rest and then she would go and sort everything out. She would do everything she had to, happily, after a pause on a bench. ‘No way,’ she said. ‘Come on, no tricks. It’s too late. Remember?’
She moved slowly, looking everyone up and down. At the corner she saw a preacher with his hands full of papers. But she didn’t want to listen to him and she kept on walking. She turned onto Blagrove Road and walked under the Westway. A STAR IS GOING TO FALL. Of course, the shudder of trains, the rumble of cars. She heard the skaters in their fenced-off compound. A sign said MUGGERS BEWARE. She wondered at that and moved on. Opposite were the yellow bricks of a complex of flats. The skate kids had helmets on, and when they fell they laughed. Where the Westway seemed to curve above her, spinning its sides like a bowl on a potter’s wheel, she crossed the bridge. The underside of the Westway was still eloquent. She saw TEMP and something next to it, something she hadn’t seen before, SOPH. SOPH, marvellous, she thought. She had failed to understand the TEMP and now they had slung her another clue. That made her shiver.SOPH. SOPH. SOPH? Sophisticated. Sophistry. Sophos. It might be wisdom. Of course, she was lacking in it. They all were, wasn’t that the point? TEMP for SOPHOS — it was certainly time for wisdom. Sometime soon, she hoped. She simply couldn’t carry on in this state of foolishness for ever. And now she wondered why she was thinking about these words that some drunken man had scrawled and perhaps fallen to his death before finishing them. Abbreviated, that was all. Perhaps they meant very little in the end.
TEMP and SOPH she thought, moving on. Now a woman passed by holding an umbrella. She heard the clatter of the trains, the staccato thud of wheels on the track. She saw the rusted underbellies of the carriages and watched as they swung past her, moving out of sight. The motion soothed her; she thought of boarding a train and sleeping until she arrived — wherever, at the terminus, somewhere far away, waking to a still sky. As she walked she remembered a journey she had once made on a night train through France, and how she had seen the moon obscured by clouds, and listened to the breath of a stranger in the bunk beneath her, a polite woman who had asked her which bunk she preferred. Through the night the train accelerated and slowed again, the scream of the brakes disturbed the woman below, and her breathing changed. There was a clash of wheels on metal, and a sound of low speech and laughter, and Rosa had thought the voices sounded like people she knew. Some of them were English travellers. She remembered lying on her side so she could stare through the window. Waiting at the stations for the grinding of the wheels to start again. She saw lights in rows whipped backwards as the train moved faster. The train roaring at the oncoming blackness, emitting a low groan as it sank into a tunnel.