Page 16 of The New House

I tap my fingers on the steering wheel in time to Glenn Miller. The fundraiser will be the perfect occasion to get to know her better: a professional event, but one that’s emotional, too. It’s hard to keep your guard up when you’re talking about desperately sick children. And I need Stacey to trust me if I’m to be able to help her.

Those livid bruises on her forearms: I can guess whose violent hands put them there, but she has totellme—

I jump as something slaps against my windscreen.

An empty Styrofoam cup bounces from my car into the road. Someone in the car ahead of me tosses a balled-up fast-food bag from the window. Another plastic cup follows.

As we slow for a red traffic light, I pull into the inside lane and draw level with the vehicle, a gas-guzzling Chelsea tractor. The littering is so blatant I expect to see a harassed mother or French nanny wrestling with a bratty child.

But the environmental vandal is a lone middle-aged woman: glossy, expensively dressed, white. She glances briefly across the car at me, and then shamelessly lobs an empty Perrier bottle out of her window.

AglassPerrier bottle.

It misses a young cyclist by inches, shattering on the road next to him. The boy swerves, too shocked to do more than shout in alarm as he passes the woman’s car. Her response is to give him the middle finger.

Usually I keep my darker angel on a very short tether. We have an accommodation: she holds herself in check and agrees not to set my world on fire, and occasionally, just occasionally, I allow her to have her head.

I neverlosemy temper. But sometimes I choose to unleash it.

As soon as the traffic lights change, I drop back into the lane behind the Mercedes 4x4. The woman drives with all the consideration I’d expect: cutting in front of other cars, failing to signal, swerving between lanes – I see her texting – and driving straight through a pedestrian crossing without stopping. I lose her briefly near Fulham Broadway when she jumps a red light, but she stops at a patisserie and I soon pick her up again.

The woman finally turns off the Fulham Palace Road into the warren of alphabetically named streets that run down to the river. She stops next to a parking space outside a red-bricked terraced house with an immaculate black-and-white tiled path to the front door, and a glorious riot of phlox and lavender and overblown roses lining the low wall separating it from the street. The parking spot is too small for her outsized SUV, but she elbows her way into it anyway, and parks with her offside back wheel almost fully on the pavement. Anyone with a pushchair will have to go into the road to get past it.

I wait till the woman’s gone inside, and then double-park twenty feet away beside an empty motorcycle bay, and walk down the street to her car.

I don’t have a plan. I don’t need one: the devil looks after his own.

The woman’s left her sunroof open.

In the front garden of a nearby property three wheelie bins are neatly lined up behind the wall: rubbish, recycling and compost. They’re all full; they must be due for collection in the next day or two.

I take a full bag from the rubbish bin, return to the woman’s car and shake the entire contents through the sunroof.

Stinking cat litter. Oozing plastic meat packaging, half-consumed ready meals and – oh, joy –used tampons.I go back to the compost bin and add a scoop of coffee grounds and eggshells and rotting tomatoes to the mess.

When people think of angels, they usually picture cute cherubs with wings floating on clouds. Beneficent guardians taking the wheel to make them swerve just as a tree was about to fall and crush them. Kindly messengers leaving white feathers around the house to let them know their loved ones are watching over them.

But that’s not all they do.

Angels are capable of pitiless destruction, and can destroy a city with a mere gesture of the hand. Just ask the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, whose cities were reduced to nothing but charred ash by two angels raining down sulphur and fire. Every firstborn Egyptian male was killed by the Angel of Death when the Pharaoh refused to let the Israelite slaves go. Whenever God needs to do something really awful, She sends an angel.

The litterbug got off more lightly than she’ll ever know.

kyperlife

kyle and harper get ready to party!

1,419,856 views326K1.1K

Hi, Kyper Nation! Welcome back! I hope you’re all enjoying this amazing weather! I’ve been in the garden working on my tan, I think it’s coming along OK? I missed a bit when I put on my sunscreen, look, you can totally see on my shoulder where I couldn’t reach, it’s so annoying!

So, anyway, my loves, you have to help me, because I’ve changed my mind a million times about what I should wear for the party tonight. I love getting glammed-up, don’t you? But it’s sostressful. It’s so much easier for men, isn’t it? They just wear the same old boring black tie and they all look like James Bond.

Anyway, since I can’t decide, I thought I’d let all ofyouchoose for me!

I’ve narrowed it down to these two. There’s this red dress, it’s by Ver – oh, God, I’m going to say this wrong, aren’t I? I’ve never been any good at French – Versatch. Is that right, Kyle?

Versatchee.I knew you’d know, babes.

---