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  Meanwhile, sporting only her bra and trousers, October ran beside Haji on the tracks towards the sound of an oncoming train, towards the spot on the platform she fell from to re-enact her death, because she had to, because Betty whispered she hadn’t gotten it right.

  As the days rolled on, Haji and October chased past injuries, eluding them under faint cracks of light. A slow releasing static sparked in their brains, new internal weather that made them delirious on some instances, despondent on others. Haji was her audience. Sometimes he held the outlines of items from his sister’s death guiltily while October performed hers; the squash racket, his mute Action Man, one roller-skate wheel caked in mud spinning, blotting small versions of death. On those occasions, when October’s fall coincided with him curling and uncurling on the tracks, they’d crawl into each other afterwards, remembering what it was like to be human. And Betty’s mouth would hang open in the blue, misshapen from this routine.

  Each time.

  Why is Pepe Canary Yellow?

  In the Ilford branch of Barclays Bank, Pepe, dressed in a yellow chicken costume, was laughing with a security guard over his outfit. Five minutes earlier, he’d walked in and pretty much everyone had cracked a smile. Must be raising money for charity, they thought. But where’s his bucket? Must be hot in that. His arrival had changed the mundane routine of the bank. What a good sport! was a silent shared thought among all. The security guard wearing a name tag that read Andy patted him on the back and somewhat smugly said, “You’re a braver man than me, not sure my wife would look at me the same way if I went out in that!”

  Pepe threw his head back chortling, then suddenly pulled a gun from the pocket of his costume. He fired two shots in the opposite wall, putting a hole through a large banner that read, We give you value for your money! in the process. Realisation dawned in split seconds. People dived to the floor screaming. When the shots were fired, the security guard instinctively swayed to the left.

  Keeping a firm grip on him, Pepe said, “This has been a very bad week, Andy. Nobody needs to get hurt, so don’t be stupid. Anyone of you cogs in the wheel raises the alarm and I’ll put a bullet in him.” His voice was calm, the cadence musical, as if he was buying presents for his grandmother rather than robbing a bank.

  The tension in the room was palpable. The sound of pens rolling on the countertops was enough an accompaniment to the heavy breathing to jar stillborns crossing over to a separate horizon. The guard felt the warm trickle of piss down his left leg.

  Pepe spotted a slender woman with scraggly, unkempt brown hair, shielding her baby in a pram. Her right arm twitched uncontrollably.

  Pepe nudged the guard forward, gun pressed against his spine in an open-mouthed kiss. “Stay there, Andy, don’t try anything clever,” he ordered. “I just want to make it clear to everybody that I’m not going to hurt anyone. This is about banks fucking us over, not you. I’m one of you. I’m on your side, so please stay calm.” He walked over to the woman, touching her trembling arm lightly. “Look at me,” he ordered. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you or your baby, okay?”

  The woman nodded slowly, taking a deep breath. Pepe noted the absence of a ring. “Sorry about the stress, love.” He stroked the baby’s bewildered face. “He’s got your chin. You a single mother?”

  The woman uncurled her body, took a slow breath. “Yeah, it’s just j-j-just me and Roddy,” she stammered.

  “Salt of the earth, single mothers! My mum was one,” Pepe said conversationally, throwing a warning look at the guard who stared open-mouthed, sweat rings in the armpit areas of his white shirt.

  “She ran a breakfast club for mothers,” Pepe continued. “You should join one or set one up. Who helps you with him?”

  “My mother does now and again,” The woman offered shakily. “But she’s got a bad knee. I feel guilty leaving him with her sometimes.”

  Pepe chuckled. “Nah, I’m sure she loves being a grandmother, probably enjoys having the company! Bet you like visiting your grandmother, don’t you, little man?” Pepe offered the baby his finger. The boy grabbed it, giving a toothy smile in return. His face lit up as he laughed.

  “Haha! See?” Pepe said. “He’s got this sussed. You’re a little diamond, mate.”

  She smoothed down the boy’s woolly blue top with a shaky hand. “I’ve heard of those breakfast clubs but…” She looked into Pepe’s dark eyes. They were warm, twinkling. Something in them made her feel a sense of affinity, she couldn’t explain it. “It’s so hard lately, Roddy’s the only thing that keeps me going. It’s a good idea.”

  “Life will be a little easier. You’ll make friends,” Pepe assured her. “God, the women in my mother’s club were great! Knitting maniacs, we were swimming in knitted items at my house. I even took it up at one point, very therapeutic! You’ll be alright, love.” Pepe squeezed her shoulder, smiling warmly. The people cowering on the floor watched their exchange wide-eyed, as if finding themselves in a play nobody had warned them they would be in. The four tellers seemed stunned as well, witnessing a robber in a ridiculous costume being kind to a lonely mother.

  “You, in the New York beanie hat!” Pepe walked over to a man shaking by the fire extinguisher. “You planning to use that on me, mate?” he joked. The man smiled awkwardly, almost visibly shrinking as Pepe approached him. “You’re alright, mate.” Pepe patted him reassuringly on his back. “I need you to do me a favour. Stand by the entrance and keep an eye out. Don’t let anyone else come in. Can you do that for me?”

  “Yes, yes, I think so,” Beanie hat man offered quickly, running his tongue over his mouth before moving towards the glass door slowly.

  “Good, good! I thought you’d rise to the occasion. We’re off to a flying start. I doubt Andy’s going to be much use for a bit.” Pepe indicated at the security guard who’d turned beet red.

  The mother he’d been speaking to relaxed and her grip on the pram loosened. Slowly, the fear left their bodies. The tellers edged a little closer to their cubicles, peering at Pepe as if hypnotised as he marched towards them, fingers round the gun. Pepe noted the white pay-in slips strewn all over and momentarily he imagined them merging into a paper man that would become his partner, a co-conspirator who would help watch the doors and cover his back.

  Pepe stood before the tellers. “You know what to do. No coins, just cash in one bag,” he instructed. The tellers sprang into action shoving notes into a bag they grabbed from the floor. Once they handed the bag over they stood in a line before him. Pepe looked each one in the eye, two women and two men. They all had a slightly harassed air despite an outwardly professional appearance.

  “I’m a firm believer in making work work for you and not the other way round. You!” he said, pointing at the teller called Brenda, a chubby auburn-haired woman with a red brooch pinned to her jacket. “What do you want out of this role?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, eyeing her colleagues in confusion.

  “Your job. What would you like that you’re not getting?”

  She looked to her colleagues again for guidance, hesitating somewhat. “Erm… a raise and I don’t want to do mortgage appointments anymore,” she said self-consciously.

  “Very good, very good. Write it down.”

  “What?” she asked, looking at Pepe as though he’d sprouted another baby chicken head.

  “Write it down, my love!” he encouraged, he grabbed a few pay in slips, handing them to the tellers.

  At this point, Andy the security guard who’d suffered from asthma as a kid slid to the floor, wheezing in a heap, his black baton lying against his side limply.

  One by one each teller admitted what they desired from their jobs before writing it down. Once they finished, Pepe addressed Brenda, the oldest of the tellers, who’d gone bright red. “I want you to hand those to your manager. Now mind! Warn him, he has to take them seriously otherwise I’ll be back and it’ll be embarrassing for him if I hit this branch twice.”

  Brenda nod
ded, resisting the nervous temptation to fiddle with her brooch. A CCTV camera poised in the right hand corner above the entrance whirled away, having captured the action. Pepe’s gaze flicked over it, not in fear or panic, merely acknowledgement. He grabbed the bag with one hand, pulled a piece of paper from his costume pocket with the other, pinning it to the statement machine with what looked like a stick of gum. He turned to the astonished customers and simply said, “Sorry” while tucking the gun away.

  “If anyone’s interested, that’s my recipe for coconut cake on the statement machine. Good for a day like this I think. One tip though: add some rum to it, but not too much! It really lets the flavour sit in your mouth.”

  He burst through the doors onto the windy street. Curious passersby watched a man dressed in a yellow chicken costume carrying a bin bag run down the road. At that point Andy the security guard stumbled up in the bank clutching his chest and waving his baton. “Call the police; I almost had that fucker earlier!”

  By the following fortnight, news of Pepe’s escapades had spread and he’d committed a spate of robberies up and down the country, hitting at least one branch of every major bank, each time dressed glaringly in his signature chicken costume.

  After several robberies, the banking staff on duty started helping him. At the Lloyds branch in St Paul’s, the staff covered the CCTV cameras; at the HSBC in Oxford Circus, two employees tied up the security guard while another kept a look out; in the Co-op in Lea, the employees had secretly been marking a calendar counting the days till he’d make his appearance, refusing to raise their police alarm when the opportunity arose. To the chagrin of the authorities, Pepe fever had begun to infect overworked, underpaid banking staff on the lower rungs and everyday innocent bystanders got caught up in his robberies. Instead of giving the police accurate accounts, witnesses found themselves misinforming the authorities, lying outright. Pepe had a strange effect on the people he came into contact with. The police began to speculate as to whether he used a kind of hypnosis to disarm people. He became a sort of guerrilla agony aunt, doling out advice to the individuals he held up, who sought his opinion on an array of matters.

  “My teenage daughter’s become a monster before my eyes, what do I do about this?”

  “I lost my job, can’t pay rent anymore; the council’s given me my last warning. I’m going to be homeless! What do you suggest?”

  “If you know someone’s done a terrible thing, would you shop them? What if you grew up with this person and you’re like brothers?”

  “I can’t stand my husband anymore, everyday he sits across from me at dinner I think about stabbing him with that fork. What’s wrong with me?”

  Pepe enjoyed these confessionals despite what appeared to be stressful situations for all involved. He knew there was a certain understanding between them. He always left his recipes behind after each one; octopus soup instructions defiantly stuck on the camera lens of the Lloyds in St Paul’s, spiced pumpkin and semi-freddo dessert recipe in the dog charity donations box at HSBC Oxford Circus, a classic Hungarian Goulash recipe stuck to the cue sign at the Co-op branch. Every time after he exited those branches, the customers and staff would rush towards the doors, watching him in wonder and curiosity.

  Outside a Nat West bank in Wood Green, Pepe found himself surrounded. A few police cars screeched to a halt on the high street. Several policemen jumped out, their doors slamming shut. He heard more police sirens ringing down the street, beyond what the eye could see. His body felt overwhelmingly hot, as if a fever pill had spilt in his blood, changing its formation forever. He held the Argos holdall of money tightly, feeling the strain. Sweat from his forehead dribbled into his eyes, stinging them. Pepe sensed a cold hand leave his insides, heard the whoosh of air as it pulled back then dropped. In the space between the pill melting, the bitter taste that flooded his tongue and the policemen screaming unintelligible orders at him as if somebody had pressed the rewind button to control their mouths and the sounds which emerged were scrambled, speedy, meaningless malfunctions, Pepe closed his eyes. He tapped into the feeling of invisibility that had seeped into his system for years. Tiny white specks melted in his blood. Signals in his brain transported frazzled words from the policemen to the wrong parts of his body. He vanished.

  On the way, he temporarily lost his reflection crossing an unnamed planet. He left two twenty pound notes in the hand of a blind woman en route to meet her future self on the Eshima Ohashi bridge in Japan to discuss coping mechanisms for untapped potential, unrealised lives. He sat on a mountain top in Azerbaijan, unable to stop money from the holdall spilling down the side of the mountain towards confused goats jostling among each other at the bottom who wouldn’t know what to do with notes bearing the Queen’s face winging down, except to leap and bleat at them. Eventually, Pepe landed back in his home clinging to the holdall of cash, dizzy.

  From that moment, Pepe was able to keep the police at bay by waiting for them to arrive, standing before them bright, defiant and shining. Embracing the feeling of painful invisibility, the way he had done many times in an unforgiving city, he vanished. His burden became his source of power. His vanishings left policemen stunned, reeling, clutching at nothing and questioning the plausibility of the unknown, the disregarded, the dismissed, forcing them to reach blindly for the realignment in the air. They were furious, as if their breaths and very beings had conspired against them. CCTV footage of Pepe began to appear on the News. Internet forums sprang up sharing his recipes, lauding him as a hero, a modern day Robin Hood who wrestled with the banking system at a grassroots level.

  It was just after 2pm when Pepe entered the King’s Lion pub at the end of his local high street. Most of the lunch time crowd had gone and there were only a few doddery old geezers who looked as if they lived in those dark wooden seats and unemployed men who’d slunk in from home or the betting shop opposite to languish in the familiar comfort of the pub. The horrendous patterned orange carpet looked about a hundred years old and the barman in the Metallica t-shirt had a copy of Dr Faustus tucked into his back pocket. It smelled of chips, beer and damp.

  Pepe ordered a Guinness before taking a seat at the back where he had a good view of people filing in from the other entrance. He sank into the seat with relief, got comfortable. It was always like this, the normal part of his life, the slump. He was back to being ordinary again. It made him feel depressed but he knew it had to be this way. There was nobody he could tell about what he wanted to do and about what he’d been doing.

  After his fourth pint Pepe saw himself walk into a bank where everything had turned inside out. The staff were on their knees dispensing saliva covered notes and coins from their mouths, the statement and cash machines were in the teller cubicles shattering into pieces while the alarm rang, customers fell through the ceilings wearing badges with problems instead of names; broke, lonely, just divorced, suicidal. The security guard held the door open while Nona floated in on her wheelchair, looking thin and sickly, clutching her knitting sticks feebly. Everything around her spun and she began to deteriorate rapidly in that chair. At each stage her mouth was made from a different object; a drip bag, a drug chart, soft purple wool. She deteriorated until she became a skeleton.

  Pepe blinked and suddenly all the men in the pub were holding a failed kidney, leaking a silvery liquid into their palms. He blinked again. The kidneys vanished.

  He stood abruptly. He needed a piss. He passed his image in the mirror on his way to the Gents. He was ordinary looking; sunken eyes, lean frame, gaunt face and dark shock of hair. He did not see anything special in that mirror; in fact self-loathing had become a part of his psyche, often borrowing his own voice and tongue for bouts of control, the way a virus takes over a laptop.

  You are nothing. What have you ever done?

  Nobody knows who you are, nobody cares about you. Nobody notices you.

  If you were on fire on the street somebody would use you to light their cigarette.

  You couldn’t
stop it, could you? You couldn’t help Nona. You are a loser.

  But when he put on that chicken suit that Nona had made all those years ago for a costume party, he didn’t feel like a loser. And people did notice him. You couldn’t miss him! He sensed himself physically growing once it was on, feeling stronger, braver and tasting the heady anticipation of sticking it to another bank.

  He saw the chicken suit dangling on the silver hanger in his wardrobe, talking silently to the openings it was yet to step into. The chicken head separated from the hanger spinning towards a flooding of light, towards another resurrection, spilling yellow feathers from its mouth, passing Pepe in the mirror. Heat flooded his body; he felt the pill in his blood reconfiguring. A fizzing rang in his ears. The pill melted in his blood, tiny particles shrinking to nothing. A rush of blood hit his head, a swift high and shock followed by a sucking sound like a vacuum opening. He surrendered to the feeling. He recognised it. His image in the mirror blurred, shrouded in a sprinkling of yellow feathers. He closed his eyes. He vanished, fingers touching the vacuum just as the beer in his glass became room temperature.

  Miraculously and to the amusement of some of the general public, the police made no headway in the case. Pepe’s face had never been captured on screen, he never left any fingerprints as he wore gloves and he worked alone. There were no accomplices to trip him up or make the fatal mistake of boasting to others about their escapades. Pepe never kept the money for himself. He sent it anonymously to charities, stuffed rolls in the pockets of the sleeping homeless and left wads on bus seats. It felt good to be able to help people, especially those who really needed it. It felt right to compensate for what had happened, even if Nona would have disapproved of his methods. His intentions were good. And Nona always used to say, “If the intentions are good, certain things are forgivable.”