She cracks the back of her head getting in the taxi, grimaces slightly and rubs at her scalp. His heart jumps in his throat for he cannot bear ever to see her hurt.
      The cab door clicks shut before he can say all that he has planned to say, and she smiles weakly at him through the window. Her eyes are very beautiful and he can tell she’ll be crying again on the way to the airport.
      There is something she wants to say to him, important, but she can’t figure out how to wind down the window. She mouths it through the glass at him.
      He doesn’t know what it is.
      The bruise-blue street is shining with rain. Crisped leaves gelatinous in puddles, jewelry of parked cars, pavement coated with worms, his reflection in everything.
      The taxi disappears. She disappears. He opens his wallet and takes out a pound.
      “That wis a helluva pretty girl that,” says the doorman.
      He opens his wallet and takes out a pound, gives the doorman two pounds.
      “Yes,” he says.
      “She go and hit hersel’ oan the heid there?”
      “Yes.”
      “You huv tae be careful gitten in they new cabs. She’s awright but?”
      “I don’t know."

      He goes back up to their room and takes a long shower. But it isn’t their room anymore, just his. Climbing out the tub, he sees her little green toothbrush in a paper cup. He starts to cry but makes himself stop by glaring in the mirror and saying ‘Be serious now.’ The water gurgles in the drain and his reflection stares back at him that way reflections do.
      Serious, he tells the desk clerk he has to check out early, will not be staying overnight, a sudden emergency. He is very convincing, voice uninflected, spine straight, and the clerk, nodding amiably, isn’t buying any of it.

      He washed away any lingering trace of her scent but on the platform he can smell her on his skin still. Her perfume was always cloying, unpleasant even, settling thick in his throat, but soon he only wanted more of it, wanted to bathe in it, her. He could never tell where the odors of her body began, all essences mixed, sweat and essential oils merged pooling, dripping on sheets.
      He can still feel the thrill of her legs tight around him, is aroused again.

      11.00 p.m. and there is just the one other commuter this late, a skinny boy in jeans and a dark red hoodie slouching under the arrival board. His new white sneakers glow in the dark like luminous rocks. The boy flips the back pages of the Evening Times but even reading looks menacing, delinquent, a typical ned.
      Their propinquity makes him uneasy and he is relieved when he hears the voice. The man comes down the escalator in an immaculate black suit and red tie, talking business on his cell-phone. His hair, slick center-parted, shines with brylcreem.
      The man in the suit moves very deliberately along the platform and stops beneath the arrival board. He does it fast. First he cuts the newspaper in two and then as the boy looks up, startled, he slashes him across the face with the open razor. The skin rips like paper and through the thin slits in the flesh the red comes bubbling.
      It is as if the man in the black suit is dancing. With one hand he strokes the steel blade back and forth, elegant as you like, artistically precise across the boy’s cheeks, and in the other he still cups the cell-phone. He is still talking into it, and keeps on doing so until he is finished, despite all the screaming, until he leaves the boy contorting wildly on a cold marble stained red as his hooded sweatshirt.
      When he snaps the phone shut at last, it is to lean over his victim and yell, “Whit ah tell you, Charlie? Whit the fuck ah tell you, eh?”
      Folding the wet razor carefully in a clean white handkerchief, he slips it back into his jacket pocket.

4

  

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