The absence of money is disturbing to Hook, but also exhilarating. After all, if he doesn’t have any money, he can’t give it away, spend it, worry about how and where to put it. Everywhere he looks experts say save your money, earn more, spend more... but then, who are these experts?
Under a railway arch Hook trips over a bunch of flowers laid to some fallen soulja. Young people are pricks. They live in the most exciting city in the world and they’re still sore. London, he concludes, is like youth itself: wasted on the young. Watering the flowers with his own steaming tribute Hook zips up his pants and walks away.
On a tube west Hook picks up a freebie but the sea monster has been relegated to page three by the latest celebrity breakdown. They’re now saying the creature might have been twenty miles long; creationists say the discovery’s a prop from an old film or a remnant of the Ark.
Hook watches a teen black girl with one hand on a pram handle, the other holding her Oyster between her fingers as she sucks her thumb. A foreigner makes himself known by wearing a jersey over his shoulders. Where are they all going? Is this the best they can come up with? How many of these people need to get to work, what do they all do that matters so much?
“We’re not going to work, you prick,” snarls a suit, “we’re going home.”
Comments