1

July 2018

Alex’s Diary

“In this life, everyone has a red line of fear. Step over it, and you’ll fall. And watch as your enemy, the brute that you feared, hated and scorned, tramples every last thing that was dear to you.
But that’s not the only possible future. There is victory. Won with honor, or through lies. A feast held before the eyes of your defeated enemy. Expensive wine spilt from an exquisite glass onto a beautiful bosom…
There is only one thing I know for certain. Cross that line, and you reject everything that went before. Forever.”

2

August 2018

Alex

“It’s a robbery!”
How many times had he heard that line in films? How many times had he shouted out those words as he stood in front of the mirror in his flat in Shoreditch?
But now it was for real. No way back. Greg’s vile, savage voice cutting through the air, just a few words that left everything that had passed before, his entire life, locked up in the past.
It had been a daredevil plan and, at first glance, it had been devilishly promising.
They’d spent too long nurturing it, thinking through every tiny detail, trying to get to know one another, and trying to build trust. Alex, tired of his old life, wanted to forget all his failures and disappointments, he wanted to start his life from scratch, and he wanted it all too badly.
He would spend an age recalling those fourteen minutes. How they went into the bank on the grounds of the British Higher School of Design.
Each of them was in place and knew exactly what to do.
Alex cracked the guard over the head with a section of a pipe, putting all of the hate that burned in him into that blow. In that second, all of those pushes and shoves that the “scum” had given him were whirring in his head — the local kids in the gray, eternally damp yard of his building in Ilford, out in the suburbs.
He’d never wanted to move there, his family had never asked his opinion, they’d just ripped him away from his childhood friends when he was fifteen. An age when life was supposed to start smiling on a kid as he matured into a man.
Like a rock hitting a rusting iron wall, a spark flared up in his memory – that sorry autumn evening when he walked Elaine home after a gig. Deep Purple had been playing. A nasty autumn rain was spitting, but neither of them cared. Like all teenagers in love, they were just laughing, carefree, holding hands and singing their favorite band’s evergreen hit – “Smoke on the Water.” And that was when they ran into the “scum.”
A dark flash of shame flared up in his mind. Elaine, his first love, beautiful, delicate Elaine, in tears, running away, covering her head as that rabble humiliated Alex. The local tough guys that he despised and feared.
They stood round in a circle, pushing him round like a ball, a cheap toy that could be dropped in the mud and kicked about. Which is what they did. They threw him down into the dirt and gave him a good kicking, jeering loudly and cursing.
The section of pipe cracked into the back of the guard’s head.
The thirty four years that Alex had lived up until then, his entire life, the ups and downs, his time studying philosophy at the London School of Economics, his first real relationship with Maria that left him scarred for life… searching for himself, those insane experiments with his body and soul and the doubts about his orientation that followed, the tortured jumble of his relations with his mother, all those complexes he’d stored up – this whole toxic, nuclear mess was the devil’s catalyst in his decision to take part in the robbery and to carry out this very simple and, at first glance, devilishly promising plan.
The crack of the section of pipe across the head. And the guard falls to the ground.
“It’s a robbery!”