Thicker Than Water

A little unfair to Pen, though, whose legs, although in perfect proportion to the rest of her, are a good bit shorter than mine.

‘You don’t know either?’ Pen asked.

‘I know what the words mean,’ I muttered. ‘I’m just not sure who was saying them.’

‘Fix, am I going to have to drag this out of you one syllable at a time? Either tell me or—’

‘Wilkinson’s Sword,’ I said, ‘is a well-known and popular brand of razor blade, second only to Gillette in UK market share.’

Pen digested this in silence for a moment or two.

‘The boy who died,’ she mused.

‘Mark. He was a self-harmer. So is Kenny.’

‘The bully who beat you up when you were a kid? Are you sure?’

‘Reasonably sure, yeah. He’s kept his dead kid’s hurt-kit and there’s so much scar tissue on his wrists he’d have a hard time putting his hands in his pockets.’

‘Is there a connection?’

I shrugged irritably. Having to tell Jean Daniels that I’d blown the gig had left me in a sour mood. I’d promised to come back and try again, but for the time being all I’d managed to do was calm Bic down a little and leave him in a light, seemingly normal sleep.

It was some considerable way short of a command performance. Whatever this thing was, it had stopped me cold. But then again, I’d gone in half-cocked, so I had nobody but myself to blame.

Which was about as much of a consolation as it ever is.

We were on the outskirts of Peckham by this time, and Pen’s excitement was becoming a palpable thing. Short legs and all, she was outstripping me now: but then, I was only going to have a chat with a demon - a process that always carries the risk of agonising death - while she was going to meet her lover.

On balance, her jubilant horniness took some of the edge off my unease.

And there’s a darker side to Peckham, too, once you get in deep: a side I like a lot more, because I identify with the past and prefer even worm-eaten wood to wipe-clean plastic. If you set your back against the kitsch-Bauhaus folly that is Peckham library and walk half a mile south towards the common, you’ll eventually find yourself walking through streets that the property developers haven’t found their way to yet: streets where endless curved terraces of turn-of-the-century three-storey town houses, like the tiers of some city-sized amph kityreeitheatre, have been left to fall in on themselves at their leisure.

There’s a hectic tubercular beauty to them."

"The two of us threaded this maze, thinking our own separate thoughts.