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  I watched the scene with other onlookers who appeared from nowhere and were waiting for somebody else to jump into action. The door of the Civic opened and you fell to the ground, hurling yourself up slowly, limping. I assessed you quickly; black male, late twenties, lean, attractive.

  You walked towards me and shouted in my direction, “Hey! Call a fucking ambulance. My boys are in there, two of them aren’t moving.” Your voice was rough, urgent. There was an unapologetic ruggedness about you. Your left arm was bloody. There were shards of glass in your left hand and on your hair like crystals. The heat off your body was palpable.

  “Lady, please call an ambulance!”

  You were getting closer, right in my personal space, which jolted me into action. The bag of oxtail meat dropped. I steered you to a seat that had been left by a stall area. I fished my phone out of my handbag and called 999. I closed the flap of my phone, dropping it inside my bag just as the woman from the phone box stumbled out. Drunk, she had left her heels inside.

  “The ambulance is coming. Good luck,” I said awkwardly, stepping away.

  “Stay with me,” you begged, placing your hand on the small of my back, leaving it there.

  I felt its heat, its quiet anxiety. I was surprised by your gesture, by the intimacy of it.

  Afterwards, I could hardly contain my excitement, my curiosity. Something in me had a chemical reaction to you. I held the scrap of paper with your number in my hand, sullied at the edges from a pen that had leaked in my pocket. I called you two days after the accident. Fuck protocol. I offered to cook you oxtail stew. You laughed, charmed.

  I phoned my cousin Inez several weeks later to tell her I met a man from an accident. I worried something had dislodged in the both of us the night of the crash which I had traced and tried to reinsert into an opening in your skin when your guard was down, when you were breathing against my nipple. I told her I feared that one day you would leave me in search of other accidents that are grave, life threatening, with pretty women on the periphery waiting to mop up blood with their mouths, to carry debris in small handbags they will need later. How could I compete with that?

  I explained we watched footage of car crashes as research for your games design work. Your eyes were inexplicably bright, alert, as if you were nostalgic for the tires screeching and the sound of metal crushing, for a vehicle being tossed in the air. When we were watching, you ran your fingers over my knees, turned the volume up as a crash exploded in our ears. Inez harrumphed at the other end of the line, clearly disapproving. I told her you were traumatised. You were showing initiative and emotional intelligence by confronting your trauma so boldly.

  “What about the guy who works at the council?” Inez replied. “Dave somebody or other, he was nice. What happened to him?”

  “He was nice,” I answered, annoyed at the way she always seems to like the men I date after they’ve left my life. I pictured her bird hands holding the receiver, her elegant neck, her confused expression.

  I put the phone down irritated, regretting the call. I walked to my bedroom closet, found the clothes you were wearing on the night of the accident I had sneaked from your flat; a pair of blue jeans and a black T-shirt. I tried them on in the mirror and sat for a while, listening for a piece of small crushed metal spinning inside me, expanding with every breath. I closed my eyes and saw you coming at me with your teeth bared and arm bloodied. The cars were wrecked behind you, smoke in the air. Caught by surprise, I watched your mouth moving, picturing your internal injuries. I thought, Yes, this is a man who needs me. I became moist remembering this scene. I pulled my panties down, masturbating on the bedroom floor in the glare of afternoon sunlight.

  After dinner, we walk along the Southbank hand in hand. Ripples of the murky water call to lost objects. We build a boat from a swiped menu and let it sail in the city, listing the number of things it will crash into.

  Several days later, you cut your hand with the sword. Worried, I rush over. Your flat has a rustic charm that always relaxes me, all wooden floors and earth-toned furnishings. While you tell me about the latest video game you’re designing, I lick the blood slipping into your palm lines. You’ve just cut your hair in a style from the nineties and could be an extra member of a Tribe Called Quest. We make love in your rumpled bed with the damaged, purple headboard that rattles. I watch the angle of your arm leaning against the wall, a half-bow in my intoxicated gaze. Your mouth opens over the pulse in my neck as if it will run away. I kiss your shoulder, tasting a corner of promise.

  Later, I hold the samurai sword. It’s heavier than I expected, with a long blade and a dragon’s mouth on the black handle.

  I notice the change slowly. Over the following weeks, you become obsessed with samurai films; Goyokin, Chushingura, Ghost Dog, Way of the Samurai, Throne of Blood, 13 Assassins, Yojimbo, Harakiri, Seven Samurai, the same way you were addicted to watching car crashes. You watch these films entranced. We sit through a couple together. I move restlessly, picking at threads I don’t quite understand. You begin to train in your basement, surrounded by the clutter of ordinary things; boxing gloves, old B-movie posters acting as a happy audience, a broken record player with a needle scratching the sky. Copper pipes in the ceiling hiss as you practice, darting and lunging at an invisible sparring partner that becomes an enemy in commencing days. Once or twice at lunch, you use the sword to carve roast beef as though it’s perfectly normal. On one such occasion, I notice the gleam in your eye becoming a tiny silhouette. Cut, cut, cut.

  You are laughing about a comedy sketch you saw on Channel 4, rubbing the sword against a large kitchen utensil, sharpening your instrument. The smell of oxtail gravy makes my mouth water. And the rattling in my head begins.

  In early April, while we’re curled up on the sofa one evening, you tell me you’ve been fired from your job. You don’t explain the circumstances fully, except to say you dangled one of the directors out of the window for insulting you. You are defiant, dismissive even. “Luna, fuck them! I worked there for seven years and that’s how I get treated? All the directors are on cocaine anyway. I’ll start my own company.”

  The concern on my face stops you in your stride. You place your hand gently on my back, steadying the anxiety gathering.

  “Baby, don’t look so scared. This is what happens when the time comes.”

  I grab your hands, holding onto their warmth. “When what time comes, Cosmo?”

  “There are wars looming, enemies hovering. People take their level of comfort for granted in this country, nobody’s prepared.”

  I shake my head slowly. “You’re talking in riddles, I don’t understand.”

  We continue watching TV. An early episode of Twin Peaks is on. Setting your half-drunk can of Guinness down, you uncurl like a snake ready to dispatch poison. “You understand, I know you do.” I can feel the intensity of your gaze when you add, “I need you to be on my side, for both our sakes.”

  I’m vaguely aware of the door opening, your footsteps towards the kitchen and the samurai sword next to the bowl of fruit there. I’m wrestling with the idea of telling you that lately, I am thirsty all the time, so parched I could drain a whole house of half its water supply.

  At that point, I notice the paper ship we built from the restaurant menu in the doorway. It’s worn, dirty around the edges from its travels. The words of the menu have changed. It nudges its way in, on a path of murky water.

  We’re looking through photos of our trip to Venice last year when you tell me about the hospital. The paper ship loiters in the background, attempting to gain entrance into the images. A dog barks in the distance, pizza boxes are piled on the floor next to the bed and the scent of pepperoni is still strong.

  You were standing outside the hospital, blown onto the steps by a whistle that became a wind. Cold, you peered into people’s faces to identify their sickness, wanting to cross the busy reception and take the lift up to the wards. Only, it didn’t feel like it could be a mere few minutes’ walk. It
felt like a journey, in which you imagined losing your hands to confectionary machines that dispatch stolen hands for 70p, £1.50, £2.30. You saw yourself confronting increasingly docile versions of your face when the lift doors open at each floor. People on the steps began to whistle. A nurse standing by a window knocked on the glass looking straight at you. But you walked away trembling, grabbing roots in your pockets to steady yourself.

  I don’t know what to say to this story. I go over several responses in my mind but none of them feels right.

  Jesus, that’s a strange tale.

  Why would you go to the hospital?

  Do you think there was some sort of epidemic being transferred by compulsive urges to whistle?

  I stop myself because I’d be accommodating whatever this was, whatever we aren’t identifying by saying any of those things.

  You turn to me suddenly, taking a deep drag of your cigarette. “Don’t you ever want to be reborn? Don’t you want to know what it feels like?”

  The cigarette’s amber tip brightens then simmers. I can hear the leaking shower in the bathroom dripping, filling my eardrums. “Sometimes, Cosmo,” I say. “I think we have common grounds because of our mutual self-loathing.”

  You fold me into your arms then. “Luna, Luna, Luna.” You chant my name softly, as though an open window has taken a breath. Your mouth hovers over my eye lovingly at first and then as if contemplating swallowing my vision.

  Several days later, while looking for some aspirin, I find your work dismissal letter tucked away in the sock drawer, dated six months earlier than the date you gave me.

  One blustery evening, we’re lounging around the flat. We smoke weed, drink shots of rum. Sade croons on the CD player. I leaf through a copy of Time magazine. You’re playing some Playstation game intensely as I doze off on the sofa.

  When I come round, you’re standing over me naked, holding the samurai sword covered in blood. Your hands are trembling; you’re breathing heavily, your penis is flaccid.

  I stumble up in awkward movements, pat myself down for injuries, brain scrambling, but it’s not my blood.

  “Cosmo, what’s going on? What have you done?” I ask, voice a whisper. Touching my shoulder, you edge forward gingerly as if I’m a mirage. Your eyes are wild. “In the game, baby, I had to kill the man at the bridge to get the keys, see? He wouldn’t let me have keys to the kingdom otherwise.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” I yell. “Oh my God! Tell me what’s going on, Cosmo, what have you done?”

  My head spins. The wooden floor is covered in blood. Panic inside me rises.

  “You’re such a bitch! Why can’t you ever be on my side?” you scream. You start to babble about the stupid game, about being a general in Japan during a past incarnation, about members of your army waiting to meet you, ready to overthrow the British government. You continue rambling while I’m darting around the flat, checking the bedroom, the kitchen and the bathroom. But there is no body and the paper ship is battered, covered in blood. I hear the front door click. You are gone, out in the night, naked and waving your samurai sword.

  I throw my trainers on, bolting after you. Only in a vest and bottoms, the air is cool on my skin. You’re too quick, already rounding the corner and heading into the high street.

  “Cosmo, wait!” My voice is strangled. You don’t turn around. I take deep breaths. The high street is busy. I pass a Seven Eleven feeling parched, its neon glow seeps into the whites of my eyes. My throat becomes a small dessert. I could drink half that store, I think. It’s urgent, pressing. I notice a woman pushing a baby in a pram holding a bottle. I snatch the bottle from the baby’s hands.

  “Hey!” the woman barks. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  I ignore her, unscrewing the cap and gulping warm milk down. It spills on my chin as I try to keep you in my sights. You are weaving through the road, people stop to stare, car horns blare. We are pressed against dark corners shaped like pockets. Sirens screaming in my ears look for other entry points into our bodies. The gulf between us grows, cracked and dry. I attempt to moisten it with my milky tongue. I think of our timelines being caught in bicycle wheels, of our love being born from an accident, of you being drawn back to the traffic, spilling crumbs into your laugh. I remember my snapper meal from the restaurant months back then. Like you, it snapped at the end of a line before landing into stillness forever.

  My legs begin to burn. Smoke in my nostrils gathers as if I’ve set myself alight internally. I can see you holding the sword up, talking to a God growing in your peripheral vision. I keep going for our sake, but we are changing beneath flickering city lights, a malleable sky. The tip of the sword is our compass. We are breakable things running. And I am waiting to trip, fall and catch some semblance of you I recognise.

  Jody

  I’m standing in the cash point queue on Deptford High Street when the guy at the machine turns to me and says, “I hate finding out my balance, don’t you? In fact, I don’t want to know today.” He presses the screen option for cash without balance and throws me a warm, ruddy-faced smile over his shoulder.

  “I know what you mean,” I answer, trying not to let the surprise show on my face. People from London don’t talk to each other in cash point queues. The man looks like Will Self, all feral, gleaming blue eyes and striking features, as if he’s just crawled out of moist soil naked, fully-formed, baring his unevenly shaped teeth in daylight, dusted off and thrown on the first pieces of clothing he could get his hands on.

  “Yeah, it’s always less money than you think it is.” My luggage, although not a large amount turns out to be somewhat of a hindrance; a plastic bag full of charity shop items with a broken handle I bunched at the top, a handbag containing way too much shit, a rucksack that keeps slipping off my shoulders.

  It’s market day in Deptford, which means the smell of fish in the air, zigzagging through throngs of people would be more awkward than usual and potentially knocking into the coppery spare parts of stalls. The man stuffs notes in his pocket, moves away from the stunted line. He has an erratic, restless energy that would be jarring in an uprooted white room, a tub full of mauve paint, your mother’s dinner table. On Deptford High Street, he fits right in.

  At the machine, I prop up the plastic bag with my knee, punching in my pin as quickly as my numb fingers will allow. I spot him lingering on the side, leaning into his steps, trying to be more certain of something. He’s almost in the road at this point, almost in the windscreen of the battered Peugeot 406 stuttering round the curve. His blue windbreaker billows. I can’t tell if his corduroys are black or a really dark grey. He’s skinny. His bulbous head of thinning brown hair makes me think of an onion peeling in the cold, his head shedding layers that fall into spaces between silences, shoeprints, mouths of squirrels in the green church grounds, repeatedly eating it as a daily bread.

  “What’s your name? What do you do?” he asks. There’s slow curiosity and wonder in his face, as though he’s looking at me yet seeing something else. Maybe my rainbow-coloured gills are trying to pierce through an inadequate, checked coat, whispering against the lining, craving water, light, thin surfaces. The gills are a little damp under my buttoned black cardigan and I can still taste a slither of salty sea water beneath my tongue.

  “My name’s Opal.” I pull the bank card from the slot, slip it into my handbag. “I do a bit of this and that.”

  “Opal! Beautiful name, old-fashioned somehow. Would you like to come for a drink?” he asks. I can’t quite place his accent but he sounds as if he grew up on a farm somewhere, riding tractors that doubled as sturdy accomplices under moonlight, chasing versions of himself from the pig pen.

  A couple of women in the queue eye us, unable to hide their disdain at his unkempt appearance. His large hands tremble a little, a patch of red crawls up the exposed skin of his throat. My friend wouldn’t be meeting me for a few hours. Between killing time with a stranger or wandering the cold streets in search of som
ewhere to vegetate, time with a stranger seems like the better option. Either he didn’t get the hint earlier that I wanted to be left alone or he didn’t care either way. His lopsided grin looks downright shifty at this point. There’s something about the judgement oozing from the pores of the women in the queue that rankles. My gills begin to whimper. My mouth turns dry. The hopefulness in his expression kills my last reservation.

  “Sure, why not?” I say, grabbing my bag firmly, checking behind to ensure I hadn’t dropped anything.

  We cross the street in a rush of movement, wind and unexpected crackling energy. It’s freezing. I’m so cold, I barely break step when I see a rastaman in a green flannel shirt with his arm around a silver fish almost as big as he is, a charity shop worker pricing his assistant up at £10 in the window, a train set at full steam bursting through the stomach of an inflatable woman by the basket at the pound shop entrance. We’re on the side of the station as translucent scales fall from my eyes. He misses this.

  “What’s your name? Where are you from?” I ask, trying to shake bits of seaweed from my head.

  “I’m Jody with a y,” he answers, catching a breeze in his mouth. “I’m from Shropshire, it’s beautiful. Not like here! I tell you, I’ve been here twelve months and still can’t get used to it. The people need to fucking relax.” He sticks his hand out. I shake it, wondering if he can feel the lines in my palm becoming thin threads. I hoist the rucksack further up my shoulder knowing if it were to fall and spill open, he’d be surprised by its contents, by the things that could be moulded, stuffed and talked into silence.