He follows me onto the bus, crouches like a Gollum-thing between the gravel-grey suits and makes guttural noises over something that happened in the eighties. It's a Dolby Digital Dream that's stuck on loop. He stoops and grabs the interred urn in the pit of my stomach and polishes. On the nights when I stayed in crying Cava, he would take that porcelain vessel of ash and nurse and rub it endlessly. I might be sober today but he keeps the pot shiny.
He's tail-up-happy the more he hates; the fouler your nightmares, the wetter his dreams. He thinks about a will to let you know that he can survive death. He rules me.
Below, the roads are like a Mediterranean cortège. The random poor shuffle, clutching their poverty to their breasts and sighing into the grit-laced air. Maybe I look like them. I'll never know; all mirrors in my world lie.
We stop at Swiss Cottage; with a husky exhalation of diesel breath, the shoulders of the bus deflate. Somehow we become separated. I loose him to the winter planet of oil puddles and cold. But later, he is waiting at the tube station with his bags of years.
