He exits the station, briefcase in one hand, phone in the other. The force of the oncoming commuters scaling the escalators propels him forward, and he huffs and puffs as only a seasoned veteran of the morning grind can. The Metro slips from his person and is quickly trampled, flattened underfoot, Teresa May becoming ever more two-dimensional.

 

From nowhere, a young woman – all hot-pink fingerless gloves, woolly hat shaped like an owl, and a smile designed to be well-meaning. Their eyes connect, which he curses himself for allowing, but she’s caught him off guard. She matches his speed, then adeptly sidesteps into his path, pushing a leaflet forwards. It grazes his hand.

 

‘Good morning! Sorry, excuse me, sir, sorry, but if I could just take a moment of your time to talk about – ’

 

‘Look, ’ – he stops momentarily, hovering, scanning for a name and finding one on the lanyard dangling from her neck – ‘Kirsty.  It’s Monday morning for Christ’s sake. So just leave me alone.’

 

Kirsty stops smiling.  ‘Don’t you care about the plight of the Bengal tiger?’ she tries again, eyes pooling with renewed hope. He shudders at his intimate observation of the goofy optimism of youth.

 

‘To be honest,’ he sighs, shouldering past her. ‘I couldn’t give less of a fuck.’

 

And then he joins the mob about to cross the street and divide into the buildings there, ready to shoot up and down and roundabout in elevators and stairwells and corridors and doors behind doors to offices where they’ll spend the rest of the day. Behind him he feels Kirsty flipping the bird.

 

 

Next day: a young man – stupid haircut, impractical coat, leggings pretending to be jeans. He has a bright red clipboard, and is immensely proud of it.

 

‘Excuse me, sir,’ the young man says, surprising him as he comes out of Starbucks, reaching out and grabbing his arm. He shrugs it away, nearly spilling his own Frappuccino. 

 

‘Do you have a minute to sign up for our mailing list? For children, living with abuse?’

 

He fixes the young man in his sights, squinting through the haze of one-too-many G&Ts the night before, trying to find a good – got it –

 

‘Look,’ he says, and the young man is expectant. ‘Why don’t you fuck off and find a real job and stop me being late to mine?’

 

Then he barges past, knocking the young man’s clipboard with an elbow as he does, sending a Biro flying into the crowds. The young man disappears after it, to be crushed, hopefully, in the stampede.

 

 

The day after, another woman – older but no wiser. A grey-haired eco-warrior with too many badges pinned to her and a ridiculous beret. Spouting some nonsense about melting icecaps and polar bear cubs drowning as their mothers watched on.

 

She was jangling a bucket at him, he was trying to scroll through BBC Sport to check final scores. ‘Any spare change?’

 

He shakes his head no.

 

‘Dig deep – every little helps,’ she chimes, and he makes to pass. She’s a tough one though, and blocks him.

 

‘There must be something in those pockets, sir,’ her voice is singsong. Patronising, he thinks. He considers tearing off that ridiculous beret and using it as a gag.  ‘Sir..?’

 

He fingers his pockets, looking for coppers or something, and finds the perfect donation. Wonderful, he thinks, and he curls it into a fist, withdraws it from his jacket, and brings it to her outstretched hand. ‘That’s the spirit,’ she’s saying.

 

He opens the fist, dropping a button that popped off his coat that morning into her palm. ‘For the polar bears,’ he says.

 

‘Is this a joke?’ she asks.

 

‘No,’ he replies. ‘But you most certainly are.’

 

Later that evening, over red wine and Newsnight, he chuckles at the length of his spontaneous creativity and wit.

 

 

The next day, as he leaves the Tube and mounts the escalators, he wonders what waste-of-oxygen do-gooder will accost him at the top. He ripples with fury at the thought of spending another whole day at work to pay his taxes and earn his keep so that they might sponge from his state, so that they could potter around his train stations and his high streets armed with glossy leaflets and colourful clipboards and shiny agendas and big ideas, ready to guilt and steal yet more money from those who actually had it. Individuals who would dare to tell him about the plight of a world they hadn’t the first fucking clue about!

 

[somewhere deep within his gut, indigestion begins to bubble]

 

What would it be today? A penny for some obscure animal in a faraway jungle whose time had come to pass into history? A pound for a child with no hope, no prospects, no future, no point? A blow to his bank account once a month to cure diseases he’d never heard of and never would?

 

This was his money, made with his time. He’d had his troubles – his sick days, his sad days, his days feeling like he’d be better off extinct – but he’d fought through. He had survived. He had earned his place on this escalator, and in Life.

 

Maybe, he thought, as the world above curved into view and the morning air cooled his face, more people should figure out how to fight before they just gave up.

 

[over lunch he planned to explain this theory to his friends. How, with an ethos like his, if he ran the country, it wouldn’t be in the pig shit it was now]

 

He stepped from the escalator, and was rushed into the crowds. Through the bobbing heads and flurry of coats he saw the out-of-place people with their leaflets, clipboards and buckets of change milling about, being avoided, projected into non-spaces by force fields of apathy, ignored when they tried to make contact. He smiled, as he changed his route to make a wide berth of any one of them.  

 

Not today, he thought. Not me. And not today.

 

He did not see the newspaper beneath his feet. Trodden, sodden. A slipping hazard, quite unseen. His shoe glided across it with purpose and speed, shocking him. His weight shifted before he could right it.

 

He heard his ankle pop, and one leg became jelly as the other went stiff and skated away from him. The seat of his trousers tore open with a rip of air; his coffee flew from his hand. A woman shrieked as it stained her trouser-suit a dark frothy brown. He landed flat on his face – no time to soften the impact - and the hard ground was unforgiving as it crumpled his nose and burst his lip. His phone skittered away from him, the screen cracking while the innards crunched.

 

In his mouth he tasted blood, coppery and hot.

 

A few feet away someone stepped on his briefcase without noticing. The leather collapsed like pastry, inviting a nearby puddle to rush inside.

 

Around him people stopped and stared, waiting for someone else to offer help. Waiting for him to ask for it.

 

Amongst them: a woman with leaflets on the Bengal tigers, a young man with a bright red clipboard, and someone with a bucket wearing a beret.

 

And they turned away.   

​

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Inspired by two young volunteers from the British Heart Foundation being shunted and ignored outside of Waitrose. It doesn't cost very much to be charitable, and it costs nothing to be polite.