As the clown passes a hair salon next door to the laptop repair shop, he hears a shriek; another lost spirit haunting the lanes of Kilburn and Cricklewood. A face painted red and spitting, a witch; a black woman spooking children with her hoodoo, her clothing red too, a wide-eyed fury, as if Hell just spat her out to terrify a town. He can’t remember when she arrived, or where from; she blew in one day and stayed, spewing her gospel of rage. The woman stops outside the salon window, her headdress adorned with red flowers and feathers dyed red, stepping towards a passing mother and child, hissing at the infant. The mother shouting back and the woman unleashing a tirade of Yoruba and Creole, a cocktail of curses as the girl in the salon walks over to the window for a better view. The clown has no idea what the woman is saying, who damned her, or for how long. An obayifo, living out her days on the same shit filled road he’s walked since it was a track across a river passing through the forest. Maybe she’s eternal. God help her. When they opened the synagogue on Harrow Road at the close of the previous century, he saw a man he recognised. Not his face nor his walk, but like the woman who rages at the passing hordes on this sacred weekend, a lost wayfarer, a shadow, a husk where once a soul had resided. A body going through the motions, alive but unliving, a shape, a geist, a Jew whose eyes looked through him, his coat torn and his hat dishevelled, uttering something which, had he been closer or listened more carefully, he would have heard was cracked and whispered Aramaic. A shoemaker who had been among the crowd in the City of God, jeering at the stricken Christ as he stumbled with his crossbeam along the way of tears that led to Calvary. A zealot who, when the doomed prisoner sank to his knees and Roman guards thrust Simon forward to carry his load, struck him hard in the face.

“Go on quicker Jesus!” he scolded. “Why do you loiter?”

And Christ with blood and dust caked to the sweat on his bruised brow looking him in the eye with weary dispassion,

“I shall rest awhile, but you Cartaphilus, you shall go on until the last day.”

Just another Jew among the Sephards and Ashkenazis celebrating the grand opening of the new temple, stepping away from the crowds and climbing into a hackney carriage driven by a bone thin cabman who whipped his black horse and drove it through the crowds with a “Har! Har!” The wheels sparking off the cobbles, a ringleted ancient criss-crossing the goy globe, forever forsaken, never resting, never dying, the horror, the horror.