Goldsmiths - University of London

Karen has taken to travelling with a novel tucked under her arm, or like today, into her waistband, a form of distraction and therefore protection. In the doctor's consulting room, which she has just left, she placed the novel, The Child In Time, on the desk between herself and her GP before she sat down, hoping the cover might somehow speak for her. As her GP read a letter from Karen's consultant, she waited silently, her eyes drawn to the collection of plastic figurines that sat on shelves above the doctor's head. Karen cleared her throat against the unwanted taste of Happy Meals and sugary breakfast cereals, before she accepted a prescription, a collection of kind words, and left to return to the rain.

Outside, she walks in the heavy shade cast by mansion blocks and sixties low rises. For as long as she can remember there has been talk of regeneration, but poverty is stuck to the area like chewing gum on bus seats. Business is utilitarian, shaped by the needs of the local immigrant communities, reluctant mascots who arrive with each new conflict Britain blunders into. Here, commerce flourishes in the form of bookies, Chinese takeaways and fluorescent internet booths.

Karen has no need of gambling, fast food or hired computers, but favours the convenience store on the corner of Merrow Street for her cigarettes. Her parents ran a corner shop in Bradford in the seventies, where she earned pocket money weighing boiled sweets and pricing baked beans, before they sold it on as a going concern to a well-fed man named Khan. They stayed in the neighbourhood and diligently offered the new man their custom, but rued the arrival of dubious videos available for rental as a sideline in the eighties. When the titty mags appeared on the top shelf in the nineties, she had already left for London, and the Wildes moved away.

She enters the store on Merrow Street, the smell of salt fish and incense heavier from the rain. She is careful to avoid contact with the young Asian man who stands, arms folded in the doorway, before passing down a narrow alley of tinned vegetables and Polish beers, six for five pounds stencilled on Day-Glo stars. She stops at the counter to pull down her hood. The man seated behind the till is perhaps forty. He is eating something greasy on a plate, eyes fixed upwards, watching cricket on a screen. She takes a wallet from her jacket pocket and waits for the man to swallow. Another forkful is slipped into the gully, another ball hooked and fielded, before she speaks.

'A packet of Golden Virginia please.'

The man puts down his food without moving his gaze from the game, reaches behind himself, and then places the tobacco on the counter.

'Two sixty-five.' He takes her note and opens the till. 'Your magazine arrived. You want it?'

The subscription had been ordered in more optimistic times, a remote place she no longer inhabits. She wants to say no, but somehow it seems easier to move to the rack, and feign interest in searching though the covers. She hovers around cars and computers, knowing she will not find what she's looking for here.

'It's on the middle shelf, next to the women's magazines.'

She reaches out her hand and takes the plastic-wrapped copy of Brain Child back to the counter. She places the magazine face down in front of her and counts the change from her wallet.

'Thank you.' She recovers her hood and leaves. Outside, she drops the magazine into the first bin she finds.

At the junction with Villa Street, she hears a door slam. Further down, she passes the tatty shrine of forecourt bouquets that has been wilting, despite the rain, for the past month. She stops to right a cylindered candle, whose last two inches have loosened from the base and now float in dirty rainwater. The handwritten eulogies have long since been washed away, but their testimony is lodged in her thoughts and she will remember them.

First, thesis. 'Paul 'Jimmy' Dean. Tragically taken from us on June 2nd, 2007. Rest peacefully, Mum, Dad and Phil.'

Then, antithesis. 'We will NOT forget you bruv. Marky, Ashley, Ding, Trev and the Aylesbury Crew.'

Finally, synthesis. 'WE ARE ALL VICTIMS OF KNIFE CRIME! STOP THE VIOLENSE!!!'

Round the corner, on the noticeboard in Karen's kitchen, these words are recorded in the article she wrote for The Guardian three weeks ago, a vox pop piece on the upsurge in teen murders in London that were blighting, she had argued, the prospects of a whole generation of young boys. It was Evie who had carefully scissored round the article and tacked it to the corkboard. Karen's pride in the piece had been muted, despite the debate that led the letters page for four days. She had tried and failed to place a similar piece a month earlier, after the deaths of three boys in Peckham who had been stabbed within a hundred yards of their school gates. Three black boys. The commission from the features editor didn't come until a white boy was killed, Colombian style, by two boys on a scooter, and opinion was galvanised around the conviction that something had to be done. There were speeches in the House, and much hand-wringing by the Junior Minister, but little agreement over who or what was to blame. Absent fathers, violent video games, a failing education system. For Karen, these were mere tributaries to a sea of neglect.

The Toyota Previa is parked beyond the glow of an early street light six yards from the entrance to Ruskin House, the kind of down-market utility vehicle favoured by local minicab drivers. From thirty feet away, Karen notices a low gleam from the Previa's parking lights. A flat battery, an offer of jump leads, a push down the road. From twenty feet, she sees the four-inch gap in the passenger window and her good will flounders. Surely this is naiveté, an advertisement—practically an invitation. At ten feet, the baby in the car seat grimaces at her and the landscape changes, this time for ever. The years of waiting, the disappointments, disappear. The remote place is here again, she can see it and touch it.

Later, Karen will not recall if the baby had cried, or if she checked for witnesses before she stretched her arm through the window, lifted the catch, and slipped the cradle free of the seatbelt. She did know it had stopped raining.

It wasn't always like this for Alan. Six months ago, when Ruby was born, he traded in his Integrale Evo for a mid-range people carrier. With four kids to feed, an ex-wife to pay off, and a new one, Kirsty, to stay on the right side of, it was time to get serious and put away the toys. On the one hand, the MPV was ugly, and never made 0 to 60 in less than fourteen seconds. On the other, Kirsty had yet to ladder her tights getting in or out of it, there was enough space to pile in all the kids with an arms-free zone in between, plus he was now earning extra money cabbing between shifts at the Post Office. He kept a tie in the glove compartment for his runs out to Gatwick and used Red Bull, repetitive beats and a wound-down window to stop himself falling asleep at the wheel. He was permanently tired, and missed tooling around in the Evo, but for now, at long last, he was managing to stay in credit with everyone.

Today, he had already worked an early shift in the mail van, before he stopped in at home to give Kirsty an hour off, and then changed into his civvies to deliver four up-for-it nurses to the airport headed for Ibiza. They'd cracked open the beers before they even reached Brixton. At Croydon, Alan had accepted the joint passed from the back seat before sharing stories of his own glory days on the White Isle. Lost mornings on the terrace at Space, flights missed from the narcotic departure lounge of DC-10, returning home to London paler than when he left. The girls had sparked off an Alan of the past, but they were also being marked for a role in his future. Happy customers tipped better, and he needed to nail the booking for the return journey.

By the time he parked up outside his mum's flat in Villa Street, lack of sleep left him sitting with the engine off for a full half minute before he remembered where he was and what he was doing—picking up the spare front door key.

Now, with the key in his pocket, this same exhaustion allows him to sleepwalk through seatbelt, ignition, handbrake, clutch, first gear and off before a sickening clash of memory and observation causes him to slam on the brakes. Snoozing is over and a nightmare has begun. As sure as he knows his own name, that of the Prime Minister, and every Arsenal squad player since 1971, Alan knows that he strapped Ruby into the front seat before driving to his mum's. He opens the car door and stares at the wet asphalt, uncertain if it will take his weight. He steadies himself on the door jamb and pushes out a foot. Then he turns on the car, flings doors wide open, reaches down into footwells and under seats. He left her in here. She must still be here. She cannot have disappeared. He circles the car, hands on head, then darts across the road to the parked cars beside his mum's flat. He peers through windscreens, and pulls door handles. Ruby is six months old and it is unbelievable, almost, to think that she could have left the car by herself, and yet he kneels in puddles, lies flat on the road and inspects exhaust pipes, wheel arches, gutters. He bolts for his mum's door, and hits the intercom. Inside, he takes the steps two at a time, climbing higher and higher until he meets his mum on the second floor. He pushes past her without answering and lurches from room to room.

His voice, when it comes, is quietly frantic. 'Where have you put her? Where is she? Where did you put her down?'

Alma Malcolm, a stick-like woman who lives on Mayfair Lights and Digestives, flicks ash on the landing and follows him inside. 'What's the matter now?' She is used to his forgetfulness, usually a sign that he's been on the weed again. 'You've got the key already. What's that on your trousers?'

He moves through the tiny flat with as much speed as he can find. 'I left her up here. I must have left her up here.'

Alma closes the door and stands in the hallway, a safe distance from her son. 'Ruby? You left her in the car. What are you talking about?'

'She's not in the car Mother. She's not in the fucking car.' Alan stops in the kitchen and shakes his head. 'This can't be happening. I only left her for a minute. I was only gone a minute.'

Alma joins him under the bare lightbulb and flicks the switch on the kettle. Only now does she seem to hear him. There is a hot pause while the electric whirr of the kettle heats the element. Then, carefully, 'What do you mean she's not in the car?'

He leans against the sink, and for a second, covers his eyes with his hand, childlike, hiding from the look on her face. 'I mean I left her in the car for a minute. I came up here, I got the key, I went back down and she's not there. She's not fucking there.'

She shakes her head, and for a moment they stand there, each willing the other to give up now, crack a smile, share the joke. 'She must be in the car.'

'Mum. She's not in the car. She's not there.'

'Oh God, somebody's taken her.' Her mouth drops open. Her hands rise to hide it.

He is crying now, no longer a man in control. 'What am I going to tell Kirsty? What am I going to say?'

'You stupid bastard! I told you not to leave her in the car. Didn't I tell you not to leave her in the car?'

'I'm sorry Mum. I'm sorry. It was only for a minute. I'm sorry.'

Alma has not hit her son for thirty years, but she hits him now, a torrent of blows until they both stand sobbing in the kitchen, unable to stop the downpour.