{ELEMENTISTS OF WILLOW FOREST BOOK V} The Journey Across Water

London (and Smartphones Part II)

24: London (and Smartphones Part II)

So that was it.  Me and a rucksack of chili and chocolate cookies against the world.

No more Care Homes. No more tutors, or psychologists, or social workers, or care workers, or police officers. No more mother, or grandmother, or aunts, or anyone else attached to my name. No more Lucinda, or Thomas, or Nina. No more being polite doing the washing up through gritted teeth, no more shutting myself in my room all day, and no more trying to be the class clown without a class.

Just me.

I headed for London, because I didn't have anywhere else to go, and I figured it would be big enough to get lost in. There are enough different areas of London, too, from what I'd heard about it, to take your pick, and move around enough to stay hidden.

I could have gone abroad, I suppose. There I'd have a completely fresh start. I could come up with a new name, and use that, starting completely fresh. But planes, I know, are harder to sneak on than ferries. And there was no way, no way, now way that I could stand being on top of such a large amount of flowing, moving, smothering...

I hurried to a station, and snuck on a train.

Trains, of course. London runs on trains. You take the train to there, and you take the train when you are there, and usually you take the train back again. Except I wasn't going back again. Not ever ever ever.

Another thing you learn about London quickly: it's permanently raining. It's also as red and white and navy as the flag: red for the buses, white for the sky, and navy blue for the people. Oh, and grey. For the paving slabs, and the clouds, and the Thames.

And the Fleet, I suppose. I always feel a bit sorry for the River Fleet. Life as a sewer while the Thames takes all the glory must suck.

I like taking all the glory. Usually, I deserve it.

Anyway, the first thing you do when you get to London with nowhere else to go, or rather, nowhere else you want to go is find a base. You need one. Otherwise, you've got nowhere to operate, nowhere to hide, and nowhere you can sit to figure out what to do next.

Mine? Behind this pub called the Black Stallion. Wasn't very glamorous inside, but it must have done fairly well, as there were a few storehouses/sheds out the back, by the bins. One of them, I could tell, was scarcely used, as the door was framed with ivy, and the windows decorated with cobwebs. It had nothing inside, other than a few old tyres and some odd bits of broken furniture. We made a compromise. I shoved the stuff to one end, and let myself take full advantage of the other.

Once I had my base, I had to find water. You can go three weeks without food, you know, but only three days without water. You can keep buying those bottles of water, of course, in supermarkets, but they're really overpriced, taste weird, and, like, damage the ozone layer or something (not that I'm all that bothered about the ozone layer, whatever it is, but it sounds all posh when you put it in a sentence).

I bought one large bottle of water once, then when I'd drained it, kept refilling it up in the loos in the pub, which you could get into by a door by the back nobody ever used. Not sure if it was actually drinking water or not, but I never, like, got cholera or anything, so I reckoned it must be okay.

Next: food. You got to eat to have energy, and you got to have energy to eat.

The cookies didn't last forever. Living behind a pub, you shouldn't have to worry about food. In theory. But rummaging in the bins seemed a bit low, and more like something you'd do if you were a fox, or a racoon (if there were racoons in London, that is). Of course, I could linger around inside the pub, and clean up any tables, but if I did that on a regular basis, in any pub, restaurant or cafe, even in a mixture of different ones, I'd start to be recognised, and I didn't want to be recognised, because it meant I might be caught. So, instead, I stole food. Sandwiches, and the like. From local supermarkets. Which worked, for a while, until all the local supermarkets started to know me. As it wasn't worth taking the train half an hour across the city for a BLT, as incredible as they may be, I adopted a different approach. I would steal other stuff, sell them to the right places, and then buy the food, in a slightly legal manner.