The Queen is Dead.

It’s funny how it seems like the centre of everything. At least, when people talk about the centre of London, on the weather forecast and such, they talk about Charing Cross. Trafalgar Square. Sure, there’s other important places: Covent Garden down the road, Whitehall the other way, Piccadilly over there. But this is the real centre, isn’t it?

In the centre of the centre stands Mark, hunching painfully in a leather jacket and jeans. Mark has aggression. Everyone he sees around him pisses him off. Mark looks at some European tourist guy, he has shiny black curly girly woman’s hair, he is all tanned - must be Italian, or French or something. That’s no place to take a photo, you prick. That photo ‘aint gonna be a keeper, no chance. Delete. Dangling over the side of the fountain is some kid, she’s stroking the water with her hand. What, Mark thinks, ‘aint she ever seen water before?

Mark walks over there.

‘Oi, kid, ‘aint you ever seen water before?’

The kid doesn’t look at him.

‘Every time I look to see my reflection...’ the girl says. Her voice is stilted. It doesn’t seem comfortable to Mark. ‘...I just see the Queen’s face.’

He has no time for this. It’s kind of funny, the folly of youth and such.

‘That’s a penny, you twerp.’ He laughs.

‘No, it’s no penny. It’s the Queen.’

The kid looks kinda ghostly to Mark, she just keeps on stroking the water. She has a pretty blue dress on and neatly tied red hair. She must be about ten years old or so. Nice looking kid, thinks Mark.

‘Aint you got no parents or nothing? What you doing here alone?’

‘I have, my Mum’s in the Gallery. It bores me, so I’m out here. She’ll be back soon.’

Mark looks around. No sign of a mum, not hers anyway. A little explosion of pigeons takes off. They fly like what they are, little graceless clumsy bags of soot. There’s that statue of that bird with no arms and no legs on the fourth plinth. Mark quite likes that statue. It’s reality isn’t it?

‘You got a phone number for her, love? You shouldn’t be out here alone you know.’

‘I know. I shouldn’t talk to you.’

‘Ha, that’s right love, never talk to strangers!’

‘That’s not what I mean. Look, there she is. The Queen. At the bottom.’

Mark sighs, his aggression dissipating in the presence of this poor girl. She’s clearly got some sort of mental problem, he thinks.

‘Listen, what’s your name?’

‘Anne.’

‘Listen, Anne love, there’s no...’

He looks into the dirty water.

She’s there, lying under the water, eyes closed. Her wrinkles and hair all look strangely two dimensional. She wears a sort of dull shiny green dress, all covered at the shoulders. It looks like it’s velvet, and pockets of it float up to meet the water’s surface. There are no bubbles coming out of her ears, her mouth, her nose, her anywhere. She’s the Queen, the one from Christmas and fivers. She’s in the fountain, and she isn’t breathing.

Mark is stunned for a while, he blinks, rubs his eyes, but she’s definitely there. Christ.

‘You see?’ says Anne.

‘The Queen is dead’ he says.

Nobody hears, except the girl.

‘The Queen is dead’ he says, louder.

‘Great album, man.’ Says a passing teenager, without so much as looking at Mark.

Over and over he repeats these words. To convince others, to convince himself. He keeps checking again, looking back into the water.

‘The Queen is sodding dead! She’s dead and she’s here in the fucking fountain!’ He practically roars.

This time, the curly-girly haired european walks up to him with a wide-eyed look. He holds his camera in his hand.

‘Queen is in fountain?’

Mark is too stunned to remember his hostility towards this bloke. Instead, he just looks at him. Mark has to admit, he’s bloody gorgeous. He’s tanned and taut and muscular and has bloody lovely black eyes. His accent too, it’s so strong and fruity, like a liqueur. Lovely, Mark knows this, he’s lovely. Mark is fleetingly worried this might turn out to be like that party he went to above the pirate bookstore in King’s Cross. The first time he felt like this with a boy, a man. This thought, no matter how strong and confusing to him, only occupies Mark for a moment, because the Queen is dead.

‘Yes. Yes, mate. Yes. The Queen’s in there. In the fountain.’

‘Your Queen is in fountain?’

Mark’s no royalist but he feels sad to say it: ‘Yes, her corpse is in the fountain.’

‘Incredible! This is amazing! I will see...’

He makes a motion to the fountain, but then, incredibly, turns back to offer Mark his hand.

‘I am sorry, I am very rude. My name is Gio.’

‘Just look in the fountain.’

‘Yes, yes.’ He says, not the least bit offended by Mark’s tone. He is instead smiling sheepishly, filled with the excitement of a young, lone tourist. No problems with fun. Mark knows he’s Italian now, they never bloody hurry over anything. He watches him a little too closely as he walks over to the edge of the fountain, the stone outlining of its strange, attractive shape. The sky is darkening down on him; the clouds looked like the stuffing of an old sofa. He has drawn some attention to himself. A class of French schoolchildren are watching him while eating sandwiches. The teachers are trying to divert their attention. A friendly looking Japanese couple look at him in what seems to be a mixture of horror and entertainment, as if Mark is a movie character or an edgy street performer. Two floppy-fringed kids with skateboards are filming him on their phone. Wankers, Mark thinks.

‘Wankers’ Mark says. This just makes them laugh more.

Gio, in the mean time, has not moved. He is transfixed with his back to him. The girl Anne is by his side, still stroking the water. Now that’s a keeper, thinks Mark.

‘Oi, Gi, Gio is it?’ Mark briefly registers how nice his name is. ‘Do you see her? Can you see her or what, yeah?’

‘Yes, I see.’ He says. He slowly lifts his camera to his face and takes a picture of the water. That’s no place to take a photo, you prick. Mark has forgotten his aggression, there ‘s too much on his mind now, isn’t there? The Queen is dead, at the bottom of the fountain.

There is a breathless silence, as Gio presumably checks the LCD screen of his camera. That camera’s a big squat black animal, Mark thinks, something you wouldn’t trust in the corner of your bedroom. Anne is still stroking the water. He notices the desolate look in her eyes. Christ, she really does look down. Mark keeps an eye out for her mum. He fucking hates kids, wants nothing to do with them, but even he knows that you aren’t supposed to leave them on their own in the middle of bleeding Trafalgar Square.

‘Look, look this!’ Gio shouts, still with his nice black eyes fixed on his camera. Mark hunches as he close as he dares over his shoulder, looking down at the LCD. Anne shows no interest, just keeps stroking and stroking the water.

The Queen has gone, there’s no Queen in this photo, nothing under the water.

‘What the fuck?’ Says Mark.

‘Queen is gone.’ says Gio, all of his foreign joviality gone from his voice.

‘What the fuck?’ Mark repeats.

A crowd is growing around them now, which Mark quickly becomes aware of. His aggression comes flooding back, screwing his muscles into raw cables. He turns to everyone now, a gossamer spindle of drool flying from his mouth. He knows he looks insane. He’s seen them himself, they come past this way so often in London, the loonies. There’s always a bunch of them queuing up on the strand for some reason. There are more sat on Waterloo bridge, sometimes playing the bongos. Waterloo sunset’s fine for them, eh? Well I know I look crazy, he thinks, but I don’t give a fuck.

‘What? Don’t like my swearing? Eh, don’t like me saying what the fuck, what the fuck? Well you can’t complain, yeah? It’s not, it’s not, it’s not important. Yeah? Yeah? Because guess what, the Queen is Dead! She. Is. Dead. And she’s in that pond. In that fountain I mean, in the fucking fountain!’

At this, a handful of people laugh. The class of French children are lead off by their teachers. A wind is whipping up and Mark feels as if this is someone’s fault, whether theirs or his he’s not sure. Three teenage girls go to the water’s edge, and come away laughing. He begins to doubt himself, and this whips up his anger a little more.

This is it, he thinks, this is London, fucking London. It’s awful, and here I am, at the centre of awful. Just because it’s the centre people thought that made it better. He looks around him, with Whitehall nearby the cars are bound to be smarter, they are almost all shiny black. These have to be ambassadors, Mark thought, who dribble their old school fucking bigwig powers down on to us, The Londoners, the people who actually fucking live here. And you, you tourists, in your sightseeing open top buses, yes I am a real Londoner, and no I’m not happy, and I’m not polite, so stop staring. Does this city never stop? Is it so bloody busy belching smoke and light that it doesn’t even notice it’s Queen dead at its heart? That’s right, my aggression is right fucking back, he thinks, I need a fag.

‘Alright sir, we’ve had word of you causing a disturbance.’

A policeman has come up behind Mark. He has a flushed red face, as if he is permanently embarrassed by his own red visage. Funny that, Mark thinks, a vicious cycle in a face. His hair is as red as his cheeks, and he has a scrappy growth of beard under his chin. Next to him is a tall, thin bobby, who has the skin, nails and teeth of a twenty-a-day man.

‘Apparently, you’ve been causing a disturbance, sir’ says the ginger-haired one.

‘What! Yes, oh thank god mate. You’ve got to see. The Queen is dead. At the bottom of the fountain!’

‘I see, sir, this is the problem. She isn’t, is she? I hear you’ve been using strong language?’

‘Course I fucking ‘ave! The Queen’s dead isn’t she? In the Fountain!’

‘There’s that language sir, it offends others you know.’

‘I don’t give a shit! The Queen’s dead in case you ‘aven’t realised!’

‘Sorry sir but I’m going to have to confiscate that, no pictures of the fountain.’ says the tall one to Gio, wrestling the camera off him with one lanky swoop.

‘Eh?’ Says Gio, with gentle bemusement. Quite charming.

‘The fountains are government property, you can’t take photos of them. For all we know you could be a terrorist. We are taking this camera down to the station with this gentleman. You can and make a claim for it once we’ve checked over it.’

‘Eh?’ Says Gio, still confused.

‘Taking who to the station?’ Says Mark, also confused.

‘Ok sir, could you quietly come with me to the car, please.’ The ginger policeman pushes mark on the back pretty hard.

‘Sorry?‘ says Mark. He is distracted, he can see that the taller policeman is right in Anne’s face. He is talking to her loudly and aggressively, spit flying. She looks up at him, scared, tears in her eyes.

‘...you never, ever, talk about that, remember? You know you can’t tell. You remember what we told you? Never tell anyone, because we’re watching, and you know you have to do what we say, if you ever want to see your mum again...’

‘Sorry?’ Mark repeats. ‘Sorry?’ He doesn’t know what he’s saying, he’s tired and weak with confusion. He gives no resistance as the ginger policeman pushes him firmly into the back seat of a hovering car. He gives no thought to the fact that the car has no markings, no lights on top and no siren. He looks out the window, looking at beautiful Gio who is staring at his camera-less hands. He then looks at Anne with the policeman shouting in her face, his yellow teeth brought level, within biting distance of her nose. He looks at everyone, tourists and real Londoners, walking past, not saying or doing anything. He stares and stares. All is movement. It needs a photograph to make it stop. The ginger policeman sits silently in the front seat.

Mark sees a tall middle aged blonde woman with a Foyle’s bag taking a photo of the scene with her blackberry. The policeman in the car has seen her too.

‘That’s no place to take a photo.’ he says.

The unmarked car slips away quietly and vanishes into the arteries, the capillaries of London.

It’s funny how it seems like the centre of everything, at least, when people talk about the centre of London, on the weather forecast, they talk of Charing Cross. Charing Cross’ forecast today is for rain. Sure, there’s other important places: in Green Park, Buckingham palace isn’t flying a flag this morning. On South Bank a human statue, all spray painted in silver is sitting on his block, drinking a black coffee. Down South, a Polish man mans a bread stall outside Clapham Junction. But this is the real centre isn’t it?

At the centre of the centre is a girl stroking the water. She looks sad, she is waiting for people to arrive, for the day to begin.

It is raining. I am watching over London from the top of my column. In this weather, no one can tell that the drops rolling down my cheeks are tears.