August 21

Coming home from Balham at the weekend, from bunched-up houses and bus-chocked streets, the night creeping in with grey gloom. The train curves through Tooting Common, grinding on its own steely slowness.

On the train a young mother and her son. The mother is a tough looking nineteen year old with slicing hair. She speaks in quick words and phrases that punch the air. Her hard face is punctuated with tiny narrow eyes as if there’s too much light in the world. Her boy is a small, blonde four-year-old with a face like a melting slab of ice cream, bulging like a brick at the bottom. He is playing with a mobile phone.

‘Be careful,’ the mother says slapping her son around the back of the head and snatching the phone. His neck barely noticed; a tiny nod from his head.

‘What am I gonna do, Mum?’ A young, blank voice.

‘What am I? Shut up. Gonna phone.’

The train turned in one big, slow arc around Furzedown, the Sydenham Hill tower just beginning to blink on the other side. The young mother spoke into the mobile phone, words like the rapid dart of fish.

‘Yeah, yeah, fuck yeah, like last week and shit and I never said that was what happened. He was gone, yeah. Better off, better off. I got Sammy to look out for, not that he’s ever grateful and fucking Mum on at me. Yeah, yeah. She’s looking for money, you know. And now the school about this and that. You out tonight? No way….'

At Mitcham Eastfields the woman clapped shut her mobile phone and jabbed an instruction at her son. They got off the train, the boy following with his head down, pulled along by some cursed life-long cord. They disappeared down the long concrete platform strip, sucked into another umbilical night.