Hilarity is contagious. At a dinner in London, I listened as a woman described her friend’s experience. He’d nipped to his Notting Hill supermarket to get some organic oat milk. As he shopped, a masked gang with knives burst in and began robbing the place. Then a fight broke out among the robbers, and soon the masked gang were stabbing each other in the aisles. Her friend stood there in his cashmere sweater, clutching his oat milk, knives and blood flying around him, and it was like, “Oh my god …”
The rendition of this was so comic, the whole table was in hysterics. In the midst of successive heatwaves, London is a city pulsing with mad hilarity. Crime is everywhere. At the same dinner, two people reported having their phones snatched by thieves on e-bikes while they were texting in the street.
An open phone is a portal: one had his bank accounts accessed within minutes, thousands of pounds extracted, and his laptop wiped. The other closed the portal quicker, but his phone is now located in Guangdong and he’s still receiving sinister messages.
Just before the dinner, as I strolled on the South Bank, boys were riding their bikes directly at women walking alone. They rode at me, then surrounded me in a fence of bikes. I levelled the nearest boy with my most savage and reptilian stare and asked him if he really wanted to get into this. With me. (A human velociraptor.)
He looked wary and drew his bike back, opening a gap. But then an angelic little chap with blond hair and freckles piped up, and everything changed.
He looked about 13 years old, and he was shouting that as he was riding past on his bike, I had hit him.
“You can’t hit children,” a woman told me. She had stopped, this strident busy-body, when she heard the commotion the angelic freckled boy had set up on the riverbank. “She smacked him in the face! Her! That woman!” They jostled and crowded and shouted. Watching the blond boy, I said to the woman, “Look at his expression. Every time he accuses me of hitting him, he laughs.” It was true. He couldn’t keep a straight face. He really was a merry little Dickensian fellow, even if his behaviour was satanically all business.
To be falsely accused of assaulting a child is so horrifying it throws you off-balance. No doubt that was the intention. “Of course I didn’t hit this child,” I said. “There will be footage. Let’s call the police and get the CCTV.”
The blond boy’s face was a picture, it was so animated. He looked sensitive and intelligent; he should have been on the stage. His eyes turned calculating, then he decided to run with it. He shouted, “Yeah. Let’s get the footage!” They began yelling, “We want the footage!”
I almost pulled out my phone. If I’d got it out, trembling with nerves and indignation, to call the police or a lawyer, I probably would have lost it. It would have been snatched, electronically plundered, perhaps sold offshore. The Dickensian boys would have sped off in all directions.
The woman now said to me, “I did see his little lips twitch.” “Exactly,” I said. I pointed at him and said, “Nice performance. You should audition for something. But don’t tell lies about people.” I edged through the gap in the bikes and walked away.
Across a mile of city I expected the worst, either the police, arresting me for a crime I hadn’t committed, or my freckled accuser peddling in hot pursuit, with his gang of little highwaymen, his wickedness, his devilish charisma.
Charlotte Grimshaw is an Auckland author and critic.
