Judas. It’s a damn sight better than Kevin.’
Angelina offered Judas her hand, which he licked inquisitively.
‘What have you been up to today Angelina Marsh?’ asked Zeus. It seemed odd for him to use her full name, but then again there was little about Zeus that could be considered ordinary. He was clothed exactly as before and had a scruffy dog-end of a cigarette sticking out of the corner of his mouth.
‘Not a lot,’ said Angelina shyly. ‘Just looking around the shops, that’s all.’
‘Really?’ said Zeus taking the butt of the cigarette and extinguishing it on his hand as he had done before, which made Angelina flinch. ‘Is that what you do with your weekends?’
‘Not normally,’ she mumbled. ‘Doesn’t that hurt?’
Zeus looked from the cigarette butt to the palm of his hand and back again.
‘Nah, I’ve had this scar ages and I can’t feel a thing on it.’
He held his hand out for her to take a look at. The scar was circular and right in the centre of his palm. Angelina caught a whiff of booze on it. She felt like asking him what it was like to be homeless and how he got by day after day, where he slept at night and how he afforded to eat, when he obviously smoked and drank a lot. So many questions, but all of them seemed inappropriate, especially when the person in question had such a bright and sunny disposition.
‘Can I have another magazine?’ she asked eventually.
‘You bought this issue yesterday,’ said Zeus with a smile.
‘Yes, but I want another one.’
‘Why?’
‘Well… I can see that you’ve got a family to support,’ said Angelina looking at Judas, who let out a friendly yelp.
‘Oh, he’s well cared for,’ replied Zeus. ‘But if you insist, then thank you.’
‘No, thank you,’ said Angelina giving a little curtsey.
‘Enjoy the rest of the day,’ said Zeus.
‘Yes, you too.’
Zeus raised his eyebrows and Angelina immediately felt guilty for saying it.
‘I mean… I hope that you, I mean I wish… I…’
Zeus gave her a warm and caring smile.
‘God bless you Angelina Marsh,’ he said.
Angelina walked home, again unable to think about anything else. Her heart was filled with compassion for Zeus and she wondered how such a kind and charming man could end up wandering the streets. It seemed a cruel fate, yet Zeus did not appear to harbour any resentment towards other people for it. She thought about her own life and how pathetic all her troubles were in comparison. She was certain that if their positions in life were reversed then she would not be able to keep such a happy outlook.
She managed to laze around the flat until seven o’clock before she finally got fed up with the inane drivel that the TV companies insisted on forcing upon her. Taking a light jacket she left the flat and began walking down Eastbury Road in the direction of the Arches. The Arches lay to the south of Watford centre, forming the meeting point of the local and main line railways. The two lines skirted to the west and east of the large retail park, and then large viaducts carried them over the main roads before they met at Bushey train station (which incidentally was nowhere near Bushey). Beneath the viaducts and through the retail parks wound the road system that connected Watford town centre with the suburbs to the south. At the best of times this meeting of road and rail was a busy hub of activity. At its worst, it was a painful bottleneck that caused endless queues stretching away in all directions. Angelina remembered when the council had dug up the stretch of the Lower High Street that linked the Arches to the retail park the previous year. It had caused chaos on the roads for several days, but at least it had made the walk into town a lot easier.
The layout of Watford’s roads had always struck Angelina as being a little odd. It was a bit like someone had made a jigsaw puzzle of the town as they wanted it, but then couldn’t put it back together again, so had started jamming the pieces together willy-nilly. Despite a complex series of one-way systems and a ring road encircling most of the town centre, the whole thing never flowed quite as well as it promised and situations of complete gridlock were not unheard of. It made walking easily the best method of getting around.
Angelina walked under the branch line bridge and stopped beside a phone box on the corner, which for some reason always had its privacy glass smashed. An express train rumbled over the main viaduct and Angelina turned to follow its progress as the little lights in the carriages illuminated the occupants on their way back from central London. As the train disappeared out of sight her gaze was drawn to the hulking mass of the bridge. The council had spent a lot of time the previous year ‘pigeon-proofing’ the area in order to clean up the mess that accumulated beneath it. It had been a moderately successful venture, but when they had finished it, they had then done something rather odd. They had filled in the main arch that straddled the roundabout.
No one appeared to know why. There didn’t seem to be any good reason for them to do so, other than to provide the local youths with a fresh canvas to fill with graffiti. This was certainly not the artful work that one might occasionally see in a large city. ‘Dan 4 Jenny’ and ‘Ben iz gay’ were about as sophisticated as it got. There were also a number of illegible tags from serial offenders as well as several crude images of people performing sexual acts. When viewed in isolation some of it was quite funny, but as far as creating a pleasant urban environment went, it did very little.
The one additional curiosity was a small green door right in the centre of the new wall. The paint was already getting tatty, mostly due to the use of sharp instruments to scratch further obscenities into it. Predictably, someone had seen fit to include it as the nether regions on a large image of a naked woman. Comical, perhaps, yet still a mystery.
Angelina leant back against the only side of the phone box that still had glass in it and sighed. Behind her the lights of the Mercedes showroom cast their sterile glow on to the scene.
‘There’s got to be more to life than this place,’ she thought.
Watford was the only town she had ever lived in. She had been fortunate enough to go abroad on a couple of occasions when she had been a bit younger, but she had not been old enough to appreciate anything of the different cultures. Half the adverts on TV nowadays showed images of pristine white beaches and enticing azure waters, which were a world away from the concrete and brick jungle she was used to. No one would ever have thought to call Watford a pretty town. True, it had a number of small areas of parkland, but nothing to make it stand out like the centre of London, or Oxford, or York. It did mean that there was a distinct lack of tourists in the area, which allowed the locals to go about their business unhindered, doing what they did best; shopping and drinking.
Angelina had only been into the town centre on a handful of weekend evenings. These had been special occasions when she and her parents had eaten out. She remembered vividly walking out into the High Street at half past ten to see crowds of girls dolled up in microscopic skirts and six inch heels. Groups young of men walked in broad lines chanting football songs and shouting crude and suggestive remarks at the girls. It had shocked her at the time, but she now knew that it was the norm and accepted that she too would probably be the same when she reached their age.
‘There’s got to be more to life.’
This time she said it out loud. Almost as soon as the words had left her lips something caught her attention. Someone had crossed over from the far side of the road and was walking across the roundabout, heading for the green door. The person stopped on the threshold and gave a shrill whistle. A second later the dark shape of a dog shot past her and across the road to the person’s heel. Then the door was opened and the cool light from within cast the unmistakable silhouette of Zeus into sharp relief. Angelina opened her mouth to call out, but the door was closed before she uttered a sound. The scene was exactly as it had been a few moments before.
Angelina rubbed her eyes. Surely she must
be seeing things. She had been thinking about Zeus a lot, but was her imagination finally getting the best of her? She stood for several minutes waiting for something to happen, but nothing did save a few cars passing by and another train clattering overhead, this time on the branch line. Eventually, curiosity got the better of her and she ventured onto the roundabout herself.
It felt strange, alien even, to be standing there, where few people ever thought to tread. Inside the ring of kerbstones the ground was soft, bare earth. The dark walls of the arches reared up from its midst, painting a dark silhouette against the evening sky. Suddenly, the bright lights of a taxi picked her out as it passed by and Angelina instinctively flattened her body against the wall in a vain attempt to conceal herself.
‘Stupid,’ she thought as soon as it was gone. She was not doing anything wrong. She just felt a little silly standing on a roundabout in clear view of anyone who happened to pass by. She slapped herself mentally and told herself to get a grip. Then she turned her attention to the door. Everything had happened so quickly that she wanted confirmation that she had not imagined it.
The ground close by was covered in footprints of different sizes, but leading away from the door in particular was a well-trodden path of sorts. Nothing strange in that perhaps. It would be sensible to expect