Thicker Than Water

London rules the roost and runs the show not because there’s something aristocratic and splendid in the Cockney g–s nene pool but because the Thames flood plain provided the geographical trifecta of rich, fertile soil, a navigable river and a billion acres of forest to make ships out of. Spread your sails and sell your surplus to the world, then come home and throw together the mother of parliaments on your days off. Before long you’re not only ahead of the game, you’re making the bloody rules.

Taking the Richard Branson Express from Kings Cross up to Liverpool, you go out through a whole string of towns that were never in with a chance of becoming the capital of England because they could never get over the accidents of birth: inland, becalmed, bucolic, they surrendered their produce and then their souls to the great maw of London: went straight from farming communities to dormitory suburbs without a protest or a qualm. Now they’re trying to bottle nostalgia and sell it to the tourist trade, but it seems like fewer and fewer people are buying.

Stands the church clock at ten to three? Well, that’s bloody British workmanship for you.

Then again, maybe I was just feeling jaundiced because the pain in my ribs wouldn’t go away even though I was popping ibuprofen like Smarties. And because the guy sitting just down the carriage from me was a werewolf.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean he was making a big thing about it.

He wasn’t hairy and slavering and going for my throat. In fact, he was just a young guy in an FCUK tee-shirt with a spiked haircut that was black at the roots and blond at the tips. He didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary, apart from the impressive upper-body musculature rising out of a dancer’s waist. But my death-sense spiked into jangling chords whenever he looked at me, which was often, and having to run for the train had left a faint film of sweat on his forehead, so he wasn’t a zombie. That meant he was either carrying a passenger of his own, like Rafi, or else he was a loup-garou. Odds favoured the latter.

He’d boarded the train at Bedford, along with a very striking young woman in salwar kameez who got out her laptop straight away and never once looked up from it, two gloomy, overweight guys in painters’ overalls, a half-dozen suit-and-tie grunts and a couple of amorous teenagers.