Page 43 of 59 Minutes

CARRIE

Carrie’s on Kennington Road now. A bus lies on its side that wasn’t there earlier, felled like big game.

Some people scramble out of it but others lie motionless inside.

Ahead, she can see another roadblock. Blue lights pulse from askew police cars but she can’t see any officers now.

Are they taking cover? She imagines them, uniformed and severe, inside nearby houses. Tigers who came to tea.

As she heads towards the roadblock, a car judders out of a side road and then, nosing into pockets of space between abandoned vehicles, drives directly at the police cars. Gunshots crack. The car swerves, then crashes into a nearby abandoned van. No one gets out.

‘How long do we have?’ she shouts to a man running towards her wearing a navy suit and shiny brown brogues, a flap of blond hair over his strong-jawed face. A Disney prince.

‘Eighteen,’ he shouts, without slowing.

‘Thank you,’ she calls. ‘And good luck.’ He ignores her.

Two helicopters zip noisily overhead, not the usual controlled machines that slide along invisible traffic lines from EC1 to Battersea. These judder and swing over rooftops as if joyriders are behind the controls. Maybe they are.

Ahead of her, the huge spike of the Highpoint apartment block rises up from Elephant and Castle.

There are forty-six floors, she knows because she googled it while walking past a few weeks ago.

Until today, that’s what her phone was, in the main.

A mobile search engine for any whim. A meme-distribution device.

But now she needs it for the basics. Time. Calls. And it’s no good for anything.

Carrie nearly tips over as she skids into St Mary’s Walk, which curls back on itself like a mistake.

The houses have two storeys above ground but lower ground floors too, some of them are separate flats, others – those belonging to well-off families – used as playrooms and home gyms. As she runs, scores of eyes peer up at her from these subterranean spaces, watching expressionless as she thunders past.

Electric cables criss-cross overhead, their buzzing taking her back, briefly, to the tube rails, the suicide pit, the feeling that she might be going in the wrong direction, screwing herself into the embankment.

At least she’s out of there and heading for home.

And Grace, lovely Grace, is back where she belongs.

Towards the end of the road, the houses on the right peel away and the road forks, a little communal garden nestling in the V-shape.

A woman sits on the bench there, ramrod straight. In her lap she has a white plastic bag from which she’s tugging hunks of bread, tearing them into pieces and throwing them for pigeons.

‘Madam,’ Carrie shouts, always unsure how to address the elderly.

‘Leave me be,’ the woman shouts back primly, without looking over.

‘But don’t you know there’s—’

‘I know very well. Now fuck off.’