The Pure

 
1
    Uzi – that was his name now, Uzi – had been living quietly in London for three months. He had no strong feelings about it. It was just a place. As grimy, as vicious, as glittering as any other city. The main thing was, it wasn’t Israel. It wasn’t home. That was why he came. His old self – the man who was part of a band of brothers – had become nothing but a distant memory. And he could barely even remember the man who had once had a wife, a child. Now he was alone, renting a dive in a poor part of North London. An ugly flat – he felt he deserved ugliness. And it was a good place for business.
    It was Saturday night, and he needed to forget everything. The voice in his head, for once, didn’t complain. He got on a bus, and as it fumed through the traffic, the sun began to die. The evening was humid, gripping the passengers with suffocating fingers. He didn’t get a seat, didn’t want one. Automatically he became invisible, became alert, turning his back to the staircase, watching the other passengers. There: three teenagers, stoned, on the back seat. A man standing three paces away, carrying a backpack, with callouses on the knuckles of his right hand – a fighter. Behind him a pair of pickpockets, though tonight they weren’t on the job. All these things he saw, he couldn’t ignore them. And there was more. He could tell you the make and model of the mobile devices that everyone on the bus was carrying. He could tell you which passengers were suffering from ill health, and what their complaints might be. He could tell you their nationalities, their temperaments, their heights and weights; he could tell you which ones had noticed him. He could tell you which of these people, under pressure, would buckle, and who would hold out till the end. None of this was psychic. It was his training.
    Darkness fell, and the crawling traffic groaned. When he arrived in Camden, hunger was making him light-headed and he couldn’t stop thinking about sex. He didn’t want to eat in a proper restaurant. There was a stall he knew that sold falafel, but he didn’t want a falafel. He wanted something English. He had studied English culture – and American culture, Canadian culture, Persian culture, Russian culture, and the rest – he knew what people ate. He remembered a café that looked pretty cheap. A greasy spoon. He ate bacon and eggs, with chips and a slice of bread. £2.99 all in. He went back into the street and lit a cigarette.
    He hung around for a while, smoking, feeling like some sort of ghost. He regularly went to clubs round here, ones filled with teenagers, places where he, as a forty-year-old man, would never fit in. Somehow it was easier around young people; at least he had a reason to be an outsider. On the streets, it was more complicated.
    He moved to check his weapon, but there was no gun there. Just an empty space. Of course. He smiled bitterly to himself; he just couldn’t get used to this. He shrugged, flicked his cigarette into the gutter. Then he entered the Underworld.
    The music was loud, it lodged itself in the ribcage. He pushed his way to the bar. The place was busy, groups of teenagers – children, really. Back home, everything would be shrouded in a thick fug, like teargas. He liked it that way, felt less exposed. But in England smoking had been banned.
    At the bar he quickly drank two beers and a shot of vodka. Then, grabbing a bottle of Heineken by the neck, he pushed his way into the crowd. He needed a release. A group of teenagers were in the middle of the dance floor, grinding. In the corner, the pushers. Nearer at hand some older revellers, professionals who, he thought, worked in the finance sector, their hands describing arabesques in the air. And several feet away was a large group of people of all nationalities, foreign students perhaps, bopping around self-consciously. He had a sudden sense of dread, as if something terrible was about to happen. What could he do? He danced.
    Someone jostled him from behind, but he could tell from the nature of the contact that it was accidental. A new song started playing, with a repetitive high-pitched shriek. There – six paces away – a girl he recognised. Short and slim, with a dead-straight fringe that brushed her eyelashes. Hungarian, he thought. They had spoken drunkenly a few nights ago, but he couldn’t remember her name. She had thrown herself at him then, and he had rejected her. But tonight, in the whirling coloured