It’s five thirty in the morning and I’m drinking my tea in the kitchen. Summer is still far off and I open the window, trying to guess the sky. The cold air makes me shiver slightly. Suddenly, there’s noise below and I peer down to see what the sound comes from.
“Sorry… Do you know where number 14 is?” It’s a woman’s voice. “I’m looking for my son!” She’s standing beside the wheelie bin with a stretched neck and the wide open eyes are looking, anxiously yet hopefully, straight at me. She might not be completely sober.
I hesitate; there’s a woman outside my door, five thirty in the morning, looking for her son.
“Number 14! Where is it?” she asks again, more urgent now.
“Oh… I’m not sure… Maybe down there?” My hand gestures in a random direction.
“That… That’s his dad’s car!” she points at a huge beast of a vehicle, excited to have found a lead.
I’ve seen such cars before, driven by bad boys in the Middle East’s Sinai and Negev desert, by wheel clamping cowboys on night shifts around Walthamstow, East London and by Irish travellers who once settled down beside our happy home education family group on a camp site in Essex, challenging our liberal values. Monsters on wheels, designed to intimidate.
“Oh, that big one?” I say. “He’s not that big,” she quips with a crooked smile.
And now I’d had such car outside my window for a while. It belongs to a dad who’s moved in close by. A no-nonsense man who seems to take good care of his lad, a skinny little thing with thick glasses and squeaky voice.
“Oh, that big one?” I say.
“He’s not that big,” she quips with a crooked smile.
“Oh.”
“This is his teddy!” she whisks out a little cuddly toy of her bag, holding it up for me to see.
“Oh,” I say again and then we look at each other for a while, teddy and I, while the woman goes into a rant, bizarrely partially about the price of her house. Eventually, I say; “Well, he usually walks down that way,” pointing to a path leading away behind my house and before I know it, she’s gone.
I put the tea cup down by the sink and head to the kids bed room. Dogs sleeping like logs. You’ve got another hour, kids, before you need to wake up and take each other to school.
And then I’m out, towards to the tube. Flat number 14 must be close by, because I can hear the familiar sounds of once lovers spitting out hate and disgust. Hearts broken by crushed hope from life that, briefly, seemed to promise so much more.
“Keep sleeping,” I mumble to the skinny lad in the thick glasses as the morning light spreads over Finchley’s leafy streets. “Your time is not yet.”
Short and powerful!