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  As she slowly inches towards the traffic lights at the end of Fairfield Street she concentrates hard on avoiding the stare of the maniac child in the Renault Cleo in front and gazes about the place willy-nilly in (she believes) an effort to save her soul from Hell.

  Studying the town hall that sits alongside the driver’s side seems like a useful distraction. A funny old place, half traditional and beautiful and the other half modern and downright ugly, she’s never had cause to venture inside, but the constant stream of wedding guests that gather outside the Civic Suite has always made her smile…except for the time she’d been wandering by and a lady in the most beautiful sari she’d ever set eyes upon asked her to take a picture of her family. Slightly overwhelmed by the glamour of the occasion Shirley had gone all out to take the best photo she could, ushering the family further and further to the left in order to get the fancy-pants part of the building in the background. Sadly, whilst she was ‘art directing’ children, aunties and elderly relatives like she was the next David Bailey, she was unaware that she was guiding them into a pile of disgusting dog-bottom deposits. An elderly grandfather in his best brogues was the first to notice – by way of his slipping base-over-apex. Eek! The lady with the beautiful sari was the second. As she helped ‘Pops’ up from the floor she smeared the horrible stuff all along the hem edge of her outfit. Crikey it chiffed too. All Shirley could do was blush, apologise and try to wipe it off with a snotty old tissue.

  It didn’t work. This lovely looking woman and the sore-bottomed old boy had to go to the wedding smelling like, well, there’s no other word for it – POO!

  Shirley turns her head back to the evil child; even he is preferable to that embarrassing memory! But the thought soon leaves her brain as the light turns green and she zips onto Wandsworth High Street, out of the eye-line of the devil-child and the dastardly town hall.

  However it seems a kernel of melancholic reminiscence has penetrated her noggin and it isn’t prepared to slip on its coat and leave any time soon. As she inches slowly down the High Street past Wandsworth College, with it’s wonderful ‘middle earth’ style turrets, more thoughts from the past tiptoe into her conscious.

  Back in 2005 Shirley had undertaken a Legal Secretarial course. It was an attempt to haul herself out of the admin team at the distinctly murky solicitors firm at which she worked. However, her attempts at advancing her career, like her attempts at cookery, were decidedly unpalatable. When faced with the inevitable final examinations that one must undertake when attempting something that ends in a certificate, she did precisely zero revision. Not a pip.

  Her lack of revision was not down to laziness, oh no, somewhat queerly, the responsibility lay firmly at the feet of a family of mice. Yes, mice.

  Every third evening Shirley would traipse up the winding wooden staircase with the ornate banister carvings (it always made her feel like she was in a Harry Potter movie) and into the college library. She’d flip open the books with study in mind. However, within minutes she would spot one of these little mice. Sometimes it would be the mother, herding her young sprouts along the side of the bookcase and back to their hole. Other times it’d be the father, briefcase in his tiny paw, bowler hat perched atop his furry head, off for a hard day in the office…

  Ok ok, so perhaps he wasn’t actually wearing a bowler hat or carrying a briefcase. And perhaps he was just performing run-of-the-mill scurrying activity rather than making his commute to work – but it was precisely these sorts of contemplations that occupied Shirley’s mind. A mind that should have been focused upon probate documents and particles of claim but instead it played out a little vermin based soap opera for it’s own amusement, and before she knew it, the library would have closed and all she’d have done was sketch a few mousey pictures in her pad.

  For weeks this continued. She trotted off to study with the best of intentions – and achieved nowt. It’s sad to think that the provision of one or two mousetraps would have seen Shirley take an altogether more professional path. Mind you, a girl who can be distracted by the smallest of mammals and their imaginary lives is perhaps one not best suited to the cut and thrust of the legal business.

  It’s true, the failure of her career did nibble away at her happy bone (in a manner not dissimilar to those naughty little mice nibbling away at a delicious cheese supper) but Shirley, ever of the philosophical view (and easily distracted bonce) shrugs the memory off with ease as she puts the car into 2nd gear and moves steadily forward, crossing the Garrett Lane junction, before once more coming to a halt. This time next to that legendary Wandsworth Town eatery, the Diana Fish Bar. Ho, what a place! She’s seen a few things in there…or at least she thinks she has. Shirley has never actually set foot in the place without having first downed a significant skinful, so it’s fair to say that the sights and sounds of which she believes to have experienced may have been nothing more than ‘gin on the wind’. Not that it is a place only suitable for drunken fools, ye gods no. The fish/chicken/burger/kebab selection is of the widest and finest quality a human being in possession of a mouth and a tummy can wish for. It just so happens that she has only ever frequented the premises late-night and drunken – more often than not with Becky – a fellow Wandsonite with a straw-like barnet but a cracking pair of norks.

  The waft of vinegar and kebab meat drifts through the car window and plays around the inner edges of Shirley’s nostrils, firing off neurons in the brain that tickle the memory bank in such a way that Becky’s 30th birthday comes flooding to the fore…

  ‘Sausages,’ blathered Shirley as the clock tinkled 2am and they weaved their merry way across the bridge towards Diana’s after several hours spent throwing alcohol at their faces. ‘Large and battered,’ Becky confirmed.

  These plonkers arrived on wobbly pins at Wandsworth’s battered sausage Mecca, gazed through crossed-eyes at those significantly more sober purveyors of fine meat goods and ordered no less than 16 battered sausages. Yep. That’s right. Ten. Plus. Six.

  Six.

  Teen.

  The reasoning? They had never eaten 16 battered sausages before, and all women of 30 full years should have their ‘16 battered sausages’ badge. Apparently.

  ‘Not good reasoning,’ Shirley acknowledges, these two years on, but reasoning all the same.

  They paid for the requested goods and began to weave their way home along Wandsworth Plain, passing the small sack of steaming pork delights betwixt them and guessing at what went on in the big buildings housed behind the iron railings that lined the road.

  Neither saw the small hound that had snuck up on tippy-toes behind them. A furry chap, with the traditional wet snout and wagging tail combination, he’d not had a sniff of food since breakfast and sausages just happened to be his most loved of all the world’s foods. The scent had passed across his little snoz a good way back and he’d been creeping up on the sozzled idiots for some 30 yards.

  His pounce at the grease stained bag was an inevitable maneuver. The girls, however, did not consider it inevitable, nor even a possibility, given they hadn’t caught wind of the be-pawed fellow at all. And so, when he leapt from behind, his jaws drooling with sausagey desire, Becky made her own leap, three feet into the upwards and flung the bag out of reach, up into the air… only to watch it land on the other side of some iron railings. Zoiks.

  The dog saw that there was no way he’d get his chops around those meaty little treats now and began to howl.

  Becky and Shirley joined in. However, never one to sit about howling for long Becky decided action must be taken. ‘Rub the rest of that sausage on my arm Shirl, I’ll have our battered friends back here soon enough.’ Shirley had a mere two inches remaining of the one she’d been noshing at the time of the incident, and she obliged Becky without question, smearing the fatty beast up and down the fleshy forearm of poor inebriated Becky until the grease glistened proudly in the moonlight. With angry determination Becky shoved her arm through the irons bars right up to the tonsils and made swift
purchase upon the bag they so desired. Shirley let out a ‘whoop!’

  Of course it was only when Becky tried to pull back her arm that they registered the real situation. She was stuck and stuck fast.

  Shirley grabbed hold of Becky’s trunk and gave it a tug, but predictably the alcohol prevented any significant success, and so after 20 minutes of pulling Shirley had to leave Becky sitting on the path, all alone save for the damned dog, one arm lodged between the bars and the rest of her glutinous body spread out on concrete, while she pegged it to the fire station on West Hill and roused those handsome chaps with the enviably large hoses to ask for their help.

  Oh the shame – not merely of having to explain the situation to the sober and decidedly stern firemen, but of coming back to find Becky slumped against the railings, fast asleep, with her face pressed into the bag of cold sausages. Shame, shame, shame.

  The memory made blood flow generously to her cheeks and the heat brought her sharply back to the present – and not a moment too soon. Her onion being occupied with thoughts of the past almost leads to a shunt up the rear in the here and now, when she fails to notice the traffic shift forward. Yikes! Some idiot in a silver BMW gifts her a right good blast on his horn for not moving quickly enough and as she whacks her foot to the pedal and hares forward he zooms past her and she clocks that it is Michael.

  Ahhh Michael. What a knob. He is pushing pension age, easily, with all the beer-bellied, hairy-eared attributes that so often accompany it, yet he mysteriously has the arrogance of 20-year-old packing a serious trouser-snake. SuperTed alone knows why, but Shirley had made it quite clear she never wanted to discover the answer.

  Michael is one of the ‘gentlemen’ she encountered when fighting against the proposition to build two gynormous tower blocks on the recently flogged off Ram Brewery site. Shirley stuck her oar right into the proceedings when she discovered that this wonderful old patch of Wandsworth, many parts of which were built back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth (well ok, the 1830s) were under threat from bad-guy movie-type villains. These fellows, with scars on their faces and long, black, twiddleable moustaches, planned to redevelop most of the site in a way wonderfully sympathetic to the finest aspects of Wandsworth Town. However, for reasons known only to Mystic Meg herself, they fancied blasting their lovely plans all to cock by plonking down two tower block erections at one end of the site. The disproportionate size of which (at least in Shirley’s mind) were completely bonkers. Good old Wandsworth Town, a place filled with cute terraced streets, independent shops, and an untouched character, needed help. But it needed more than one knight in shining amour, it needed an army of them, and so although Shirley was more accustomed to pink frocks and kitten heels, she’d readily poured herself into said armour and joined the fight.

  Michael had been one of the villains in favour of the dastardly plan. He’d sat in all the public meetings silent and cold, only ever speaking to make comment on the perceived advantage of the bloomin’ things. Never smiling, never laughing. Shirley was consistently distracted by his straight-backed pose and his thin little lips – she could happily imagine a white cat nestling in his lap, pushing it’s furry head up to meet Michael’s boney-fingered strokes. Sometimes he caught her staring. She had to look away quickly. He gave her the heebie-jeebies. Urgh.

  Stony cold and icy as he was, Shirley was fully prepared to respect the opinions of her opponents, after all he lived in Wandsworth Town too. She was not, however, prepared to respect the sort of man who would happily sidle up to her after one particular public meeting and whisper in her shell, ‘I saw you staring at me. I know you want me and I am fully prepared to take you for dinner…as long as you wear something a little lower cut around your knockers. That blouse comes up too high around your neck.’

  An interesting approach, yes, but successful it was not. Unless receiving an elbow to the throat is considered a success… Still, it had put all thoughts of his being scary out of her brain. A sleazy old idiot? Yes. But scary? Pah!

  As he zooms past her in his great big motor vehicle tooting his darned horn she realizes that leaving Wandsworth Town right now may not be the worst thing to happen. If the proposed planning is to go through she’s fairly certain she’d be hotfooting it elsewhere anyway. She isn’t sure where she’d skedaddle to, anywhere that has managed to keep the concrete and glass monstrosities at bay she guesses. It is important to her, to live in a place with character and charm. She doesn’t believe that being in a major city means function has to preside over form. Shirley chose to live in Wandsworth Town for a reason – and it wasn’t just the 24hr access to Monster Munch. She thought it a homely little place, full of community, tradition and beauty. The sort of place families from across the world can come to and feel a part of. A place where women can walk in safety after dark. A place where kids have a good chance of achieving a half decent education – as long as they ignore the mice, that is. So although many other locals may disagree, hoofing great tower blocks just don’t fit into her particular view of Wandsworth Town.

  And that Wandsworth Town, as it stands now, is, she realises, what she wants to remember. The good times, the funny memories, the happy places. She is certain that sticking around to watch it try to accommodate such disproportionate development will make her chin tremble and her balls leak. So maybe, she reasons, leaving now, on a high, is what it’s all about? Wandsworth Town would become her personal Jim Morrison (always remembered at its best that is, not dead in a bath).

  The last set of lights flash amber and she can see the A3 turn-off winking at her. She smiles, the pang of sadness now all but behind her, and so, finally, is the dastardly one-way system. It’s time to move on. Zipping away she whacks her little beast into forth, cranks the volume, and fires up the vocal cords. ‘Hey hey hey hey…ooohhhh…don’t you, forget about me…’

  LAMBETH

  The Hunt

  Tom Bromley

  The first time I hear the scream, I’m convinced someone is being murdered. High, piercing, inhuman, eerie, it scores the south London night like a scalpel. I wake with a start, and in the silent echo that follows, wonder if I was dreaming. Then the scream is there again – an anxious, anguished, tortured howl. In the second silent echo, my mind starts to race. Someone is being assaulted, mugged, killed. I sit up in bed.

  ‘What?’ Abi’s head hasn’t moved from her pillow, her waterfall of auburn hair cascading down towards the duvet.

  ‘Can’t you hear it?’

  ‘Hear what?’ she murmurs. The screaming, of course, has stopped. There is nothing more than the pulse of night whispering through the window. I looked at the clock radio. Three seventeen.

  ‘There was a scream,’ I say. ‘A nasty one. I think something is going down.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Abi’s head of hair doesn’t move.

  ‘I’m not making it up, Abs.’

  The silence continues. We sit there listening, like a still life painting. No movement, no sound, nothing. Then, just when I think I might have been hearing things after all, I hear the scream again.

  ‘There,’ I whisper. ‘I told – ‘Abi’s hand reaches across to touch me on my side, to tell me to shush. It stays there, holding me, and I can feel the tautness of her arm, the tightness as she is straining to hear, to listen, to identify.

  ‘It’s alright,’ she says, her hand relaxing. ‘It’s just a fox.’

  ‘A fox?’ I feel relieved, surprised, confused. ‘Is it ok?’

  ‘Very ok,’ Abi reassures, with that elegant air of female authority. Her hand is directing me now, gently tugging at my T-shirt to guide me back down into the bed. ‘That’s what the French would call la petite mort.’

  I spoon in behind her, feel the warm ‘S’ of her body against mine. ‘Bloody foxes,’ I say, my initial concern now turning to annoyance. ‘They should go back to the country they came from.’

  ‘Hey,’ Abi chides gently. ‘They’ve got just as much right to be here as you have.’

  �
�I guess,’ I say, a little defensively. ‘Well. If they’re going to move in, they should still be a bit more respectful of the rest of us. We don’t keep them awake when we’re, you know…’

  ‘We could,’ Abi suggests, taking my hand and guiding it down.

  * * *

  The following morning, under the four-sided clock at Waterloo Station, the horses, hounds and huntsmen are beginning to gather. As the morning trains arrive from Windsor and Winchester, Guildford and Goldalming, so the disparate members of the Lambeth Hunt are starting to congregate: the bloodhounds scuttling under the automatic ticket barriers, the huntsmen on horseback vaulting over the top.

  As the dogs scuffle around at the horses’ hooves, panting away like the lapping of waves, the huntsmen, in their central line red jackets and northern line black riding hats, sip from stirrup cups and chat away.

  ‘Is this your first time on an urban hunt? Oh it’s such fun.’

  ‘The rural hunts are so complicated these days, what with having to keep an eye on the regulations. I mean, you can still hunt, but you have to be so careful not to get caught.’

  ‘And then that chappie realised that London was exempt under some ancient bylaw or other. Bloody genius he was.’

  ‘Much more fun in the city. And so many urban foxes waiting to be bagged.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you know the rule about pigeons, do you?’