Episode 10

Thomas was trying to relax.

Jamal had given him a single room at the top of the hotel. The street lamps outside were level with his window and filled the tiny little room, as if the sun itself was peering in, preventing him from going straight to sleep. He was certainly exhausted enough.

There was barely enough room to fit the bed in the limited space available. His frame didn't quite fit it and he had to scrunch his body up to get comfortable. A slimline wardrobe was awkwardly squeezed in at the foot of the bed limiting access to the en-suite shower by trapping the door behind it. He was glad he wasn't as big as Jimmy. He'd never get through. The smile faded quickly.

Every time he closed his eyes they filled up with visions from earlier in the evening. He'd come back to the flat he'd shared with his mate Jimmy. He had been away for a few days because of the Brentford Asylum business. As he had entered, closing the door behind him, the atmosphere had been stifling. There was a horrible smell in the air which he couldn't quite place.

The panic set in as he went into the living room. They had worked out a system to let the other know if everything was okay. If Jimmy was fine then it would be on the shelf above the economy heater. It wasn't. If Jimmy had left the house voluntarily he would have had time to put the sacred Madonna figurine on the shelf. They'd agreed on this as they both suffered from paranoia and this eased the worry in case anything happened. The figurine itself was Jimmy's idea of a joke.

Thomas could see into the kitchen as he had come into the flat. The only other place to look was the bathroom.

The lifeless face of his friend would haunt him forever. He was positioned around the base of the toilet. Not the nicest place to be at the best of times in their low rent flat, but it made the scene look even more grim as vomit surrounded the loo. There was a syringe close to hand, its contents look spent.

He saw what had happened straight away. They had tried to make his friend's death look like an overdose. They were onto him. He hoped Jimmy hadn't told them anything about him. No doubt the flat was being watched. It was time to run again.

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Thomas woke up. This surprised him as he couldn't remember going to sleep. Even more surprising was the sense of peace and calm that he had. A dream was fading from his mind. He tried to catch it, but all he could sense was a pair of hands held out in comfort, now slipping back into the dream world.

He lay there trying to recapture the feeling, but all too soon the problems of reality crept back in and the edge returned to his existence.

Breakfast was buried in a room which was probably the servants quarters or kitchen in times past. All feeling of character had been wiped out by cost-efficient redecorating. Any sense of history lost to the subsequent owners who continued the new tradition of modern, functional refitting that had reduced these once grand townhouses to nothing more than was required by minimum health and safety regulation. On a good day.

There was a full english breakfast laid out as a buffet. The rubberised scrambled egg didn't look very appealing. The thought of eating sausages that weren't advertised as meat also put him off. The sauce on the baked beans looked too thick and was only a pale imitation of orange. This left him with a selection of overcooked bacon, the random choice of whether the fried eggs would be runny or just soft and the inevitability of the peeled plum tomatoes to give the ensemble a strong disguising flavour should the bacon or egg not taste as they should.

He sat in one of the many corners of this warren-like breakfast room. The table was at a normal height for the average person but Thomas kept knocking his knees on the already wobbly table. On his way over he had grabbed a glass of juice, except he now realised it was just orange squash. He took a sip to greet the day. Weak orange squash.

He was just about to work through the contents of his plate when a girl wandered over and spoke in a thick east european accent. "Coffee? Toast?"

"No coffee please, but I would like some toast, thanks." he replied. He was a coffee snob and he doubted they had his brand here and there's nothing worse than bad coffee. Good coffee was just about bearable, it had its uses. He had sworn off coffee for so long because of human rghts abuses of the workers, but just because now most of it was Fair Trade didn't make it worth drinking. Besides, he was sure that coffee would one day go the way of cigarettes. Toast on the other hand was pretty reliable. No matter where he'd been in the world you couldn't really go wrong with toast in the morning, where it had been available, so long as it had a good helping of...

"Butter?" the girl asked.

"Definitely. Yes please." With the thought of the toast already melting in his mouth he tucked into, what he later decided was, a rather bland breakfast after all.

He made his way up the stairwell, back to his room, having had his fill. As he approached the door his senses started to tingle. He was getting a bad feeling, something was not right. He stood where he was, not wanting to make another sound. Everything was becoming hyper-real.

He scanned the landing around him, but found nothing obviously out of place. He was on edge and as he stared intently at the door to his room it seemed to be jumping out at him, screaming for him to go away before it was too late.

Fear gripped him and made him unable to take another step forward as if a brick wall had suddenly been erected. Above him a door slammed. His body needed no conscious command. Stumbling backwards, he turned as he ran down the stairs towards the reception and out the door, throwing his key at the desk on his way. He had to leave London. Now.



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