Life Drain

Special thanks to KillerMuffin for her editing assistance

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The first time I saw Laura, she was standing in the middle of the road. Silent. The only movement was a slight tremble from the tears rolling down her cheeks. I walked straight past her, assuming the classic "Oh, I didn't just notice you" expression that London people are somehow innately born with for such tricky situations. Surprisingly though, for the few seconds that I had seen her, I was able to form an almost perfect picture of her that I still have deeply ingrained in my memory to this day.

I remember that she was wearing a fairly simple, and quite frankly, passe white dress adorned with what I believe were flowers of some kind. The flowers were blue and of the sort of decorative species that only really exist on curtains and simple passe white dresses. The next detail to strike me were her feet, or to be exact, her toes. Mud was firmly encrusted between each one of them and was smeared the length of her feet. Amidst the dirt, it was just possible to distinguish a pair of tattered red sandals. My first alarming thought had been blood, but I decided to settle with red sandals - blood, after all would be slightly harder to ignore.

Her legs appeared to have undergone some travesty also. Her white skin was speckled with grazes and cuts, one of which had left a thin dark trail running along the contour of her ankle. Her other ankle was decorated with a small gold chain desperate to separate itself from its troubled host.

Her face was unremarkable. Her nose was small and slightly bent, offering her eyes a slightly disjointed expression. Underneath her tears, the eyes were just there. They offered no window to her soul, no clue to her person. No feeling. I think they were what struck me most and were certainly the part of her image that has woken me in a cold sweat every night since.

The last detail I noticed was a beautiful cross hanging from a chain around her neck. The cross was sparkling proudly on her breast apparently oblivious to the horror surrounding it. Combined of both silver and gold it was quite possibly the most beautiful object I had ever seen.

Apparently I was not the only person to ignore her. Crowds of City workers were vacating their offices in droves and seemed to be walking straight through her. Women dressed in back, authoritative dresses brushed past her without a single bit of recognition, while groups of men with loosened ties and drink on their minds didn't even bother to cast a watchful eye at her ample cleavage.

As I walked on I supposed I was also part of this homogenous mass, private within my own collective, hurrying along as if some urgent matter needed to be attended to. The only urgency for me at 5:30 though, was the couch in my living room and the bottle of whiskey in my kitchen.

As I descended into the depths of the underground, I looked around me as if for the first time at my surroundings. The people milling around me in their dull grey suits patiently waited in queues, waiting to be led through turnstiles leading to the trains. There they all stood, expressionless, allowing eye contact with no-one, being filed out of the City like cattle.

As I took my five square inch gap on the bustling train, I was overcome with a powerful urge to shout and and scream at my fellow passengers. I desperately wanted to warn them of the life drain they were inhabiting, of the need for freedom. Didn't they realise they were dead men walking?! Quite unexpectantly, I found myself addressing a middle-aged man crouching in a space next to me.

"Don't you just love these trains, eh?" I asked with somewhat excessive zest.

The gentleman looked at me with a suspicious eye before returning to the evening paper he was reading.

I continued my stare with frustration until suddenly I saw Laura for the second and final time.

On the front page of the Evening Standard was a picture of a pretty young woman called Laura Barnet. She was slightly younger and significantly prettier in the picture and her eyes sparkled like sunlight shining through a rich canopy of trees.

Laura was smiling in her photograph and the gold and silver cross sat proudly on her chest.

Underneath was depicted the story of a freak coach accident in New Zealand that very morning in which all the passengers had fallen to their doom, when the vehicle carrying them had veered off the road and down a 300 foot cliff.

It took a while for the headline to sink in. I must have read it a hundred times before the truth finally dawned on me:

"TRAGIC LOSS OF YOUNG BRITISH TOURIST IN NEW ZEALAND"