The scream

You’ve been straining for too long. The wind is lashing rain into your face now, coming down in leather straps across you. You can’t hold it in. You unleash the scream.
Drenched shoppers, already bewildered and straining to see under their hats and hoods spin round deliriously to locate the source of the sound.
Their dread faces pale when they see you, all tousled hair and see-through clothes. A child weeps, but he was crying before the tumult.
The scream, a success. Not so powerful, because you were already out of breath from your struggle with the elements, but impressive all the same. It got you what you crave more than anything else. Attention.
You flop down now, at the corner of a department store, where the rain falls in bitter torrents. The noise it made as it hit the pavement in one continual tubular splosh was heavy handed, powerful, so the excitement builds as you put your head under it. The water knocks at your skull, trepanning a hole into your soul.
You sit down for a moment, wondering how long you can take it. Your vision fades momentarily. Maybe this is the end? Ah, but someone is shouting something at you. Come on, wake up, get up, clear off.
You’re scaring people. You. You’re the scary one. And as you are kicked to your feet and moved along, your wretched vision returns and you catch your reflection in the store window, standing aghast, between two perfectly tailored shop dummies.
You really are a wretched thing, making yourself so sick. You realise now the error you made. You were inside, you were sheltered and safe, before the rains came. But you couldn’t stay in. You’re sick of in. In is the old out.
So you took the only clothes you have in the world and you paraded them across the half-empty streets where you live. Sassing through soggy gutters and tangoing down gushing alleys, you sang a song to the blind twins who threw flowers at you from their open window. It all seemed so magical back then.
You’re shivering now and you can’t feel your feet. You’re shunting disgusted people, heading for underground trains and early evening assignations. They probably hate you more than you hate yourself.
You figure you’ve got a window of opportunity of maybe twenty minutes. Twenty minutes to somehow sneak onto the underground and then get back to the room and get naked. Get undressed before you pass out somewhere, an action which will bring with it the unfortunate consequence of almost certain death.
At the barrier you hesitate for a moment. Your mind wanders. Do you really want to jump the gate and run for a train? Do you really want to go back to that room and save yourself for another night? Do you really want to see what the sky looks like in the morning?
Only you know the answers to those questions. But, whatever they were, however you tossed them around in your mind, you’ve hopped the barrier, you’re running and you’re feeling warmer already. The train has stopped and its doors are slowly sliding open for you.
This instinct, this will to survive. It’s still so strong.

The downpour

The rain hammered down. Thick droplets of water drooped lustily from James’ hood and splashed onto his prominent nose. He hurried towards sanctuary.
As he approached the bus terminus the light from the assembled street lamps thickened and reflected off brown puddles in the road. He jogged across the doughnut-like slip road, used by buses to drop off their special cargos and then turn around, and saw the bus shelter ahead. James usually avoided walking through the bus shelter itself and tended to try and go round the side. He told himself it was to avoid people, avoid brushing against anyone in there, but he avoided it all the same when empty.
Today a local drunk leaned against the railing and blocked his usual route through to the high street. Seeing James, the bum held up a can of Tennent’s lager and purred. James stepped to the side and into the shelter.
Once inside, the rain thudded heavily onto the plastic roof of the shelter. Water ran off inelegantly into a street drain. In the empty high street a rat scampered northwards, towards the river.
Now temporarily dry, James surveyed his options. Make a dash for the covered and well-lit railway bridge and then into the station to buy a ticket for tomorrow morning (meaning an extra five minutes in bed), or just plough on into the deluge and get home. He could see his house from the bus shelter. It looked, from where he stood, like he’d left an upstairs light on.
A bang on the Perspex of the shelter. James turned in fright to see the drenched and leering face of a mad tramp pressed against the shelter. It was inches from his face, yet it was on the other side of strong casing, like a cobra in a zoo.
Still, this cobra had the option of attacking from two unprotected sides so James made a dash for it. He hurried toward the protection of the railway bridge, which was only 50 yards away. He turned in horror to see the crazed hobo floundering after him. A swift change in direction and a nice turn of pace saw James sprinting right and then left, over the road bridge, before making a sharp left into his street.
Heart pounding and rain filling his eyes he dropped his keys in his front garden and scrabbled in the flowerbeds to find them. Click, open, slam, in.
James paused for breath on the good side of the door. Then he made the journey upstairs, to his study. Here he found the light was indeed on, and the blinds were not drawn. He must have been lit up like a flash-filled portrait, for anyone outside who wanted to see.
Lurching forward to close the blinds he couldn’t resist glancing at the outside world to check the whereabouts of his pursuer.
Backlit under the spotlights from the railway station, clambering, kneeling, now staggering, was the silhouette of a man standing on top of the railway bridge. The outline of his body seemed to face the light of the window (though he could easily have been facing away from it). Blood pumped and throbbed in James’s temples as his eyes charged with available light. A slip, a correction, a slide, a drop from the stage.
James shut the blind. In the morning the trains ran on time. A half-empty can of Tennent’s Super stood at the side of the bus shelter and wasn‘t removed for three days.