Roland showed her photos, images of her taken through a stained window, reclining on cushions and eating grapes, she zipped up her jacket and a backdraft from a departing train filled the platform, and all her reasons for staying backed up in her throat, and she pelted him with a round of sorrys that fell like fist-sized figs, and she hurried to the exit and jogged up the metal-tipped staircase, where commuters marched and the sound of their shoes clicked like knives chopping, and she reached the top of the final escalator, and church bells pealed from the top of St Mary le Bow, lightning flashed and gusts hailed down, it whipped her hair into a vertical monument that dropped in a tangle across her eyes, blinded for a moment, a cack-handed carpenter blundered with a drill, which tumbled through the air and struck her on the cranium, it knocked her off her feet and she landed on the pavement, her red shoes pointed up, her head split like a watermelon.
