The clown looks up and down the High Road. What a mess, the poor clutching plastic carrier bags, waddling mothers in pursuit of red-faced children, skinny addicts, brown, white, black; rudderless ships crashing into one another, foundering in seas of penury and dependence. He thinks of the crackhead who jumped him at Kilburn High Road station, a small Jamaican hoodlum demanding money on an empty platform at six in the morning, a pointed spike held in his bony fingers, threatening to pop the clown’s eye. The skinny man claimed he had a gun in his pocket, the clown certain it was just a sawn off metal pipe pointing at him through the nylon, grinning back at him. Not that a real gun could have killed him, not that anything can kill him, he’d fallen from enough bridges, swallowed enough pills and hanged from enough trees. He planned what he would do. He would wait for the train to arrive and once the doors opened, push the fool into the carriage so far that he’d fall backwards, cracking his head on the floor. Cracking the head of a crackhead. There was a poetry to it. As the train hurtled out of the tunnel under the A5, a sudden change of plan. He flung himself in front of it, the horror on the driver’s face a picture, the eight carriages clattering past and screeching to a halt, oblivious. The cab door opening and the clown picking himself up and climbing back onto the platform to the open-mouthed terror of his attacker and reaching into his pocket for banknotes.

“How much are you after?”

The Jamaican taking to his heels, not knowing if he was tripping or already dead, up the steps to the streetlight.