Mr Toppit by Charles Elton

flush. She turned away from the van and walked down the street as purposefully as she could. She decided to head for Hyde Park, which even she had heard of. It seemed like the kind of thing a proper traveler might do in London. “Heard so much about Hyde Park, first place I went soon as I got there,” she could imagine herself saying to someone. She would ignore the fact that she had already been in London for thirty hours, twenty-nine of which she had spent in bed.
    Laurie walked around the park for some time until she found herself by the side of a big highway coming up to a roundabout, which had a huge arch-like monument in the middle with a statue of galloping horses and a woman on the top. As she squinted up at it the traffic roared past her. She felt she had come to the edge of the ocean. People were going down a flight of concrete stairs and she followed behind them. It was like entering a labyrinth. Under an eerie white light, tunnels spun off in all directions from a central well and people, their facesunnaturally pale, crisscrossed in front of her with a blank air of purpose.
    Once out of the tunnel she walked along a wide street past grand old buildings and expensive shops. The sun shone hot on her face, and gradually she found she was enjoying herself. Recognizing some of the things she passed, like Piccadilly Circus, she felt herself becoming a traveler of some experience, not just a large, middle-aged stranger, wearing the wrong clothes for the time of year, wandering aimlessly through a foreign city.
    She turned into a narrower street filled with cars. The traffic had stopped and must have been there for some time because people were honking their horns and a few had got out of their cars and were trying to see what the holdup was. About twenty yards ahead, on the other side of a crossroads, a big truck with a concrete mixer on the back had stopped in the middle of the street. Silhouetted against the sun, two men were getting out of its cab. The three other narrow streets that met at the crossroads were blocked with cars. There was something curious about the way everyone was standing so still. She could hear people talking, but the words were indistinct and echoey. They all looked like aliens, as if maybe they were the same pale people she had seen in the underground tunnel, meeting here to wait for their spaceship to land. Then she saw something odd: by one of the corners of the crossroads a bundle was lying on the ground a little way off the sidewalk. Laurie moved through the line of people standing in front of the cars and saw that the bundle was not a bundle at all, but a man.
    She began to run, but someone grabbed her and tried to pull her back, squeezing her arm so tightly that she let out a gasp of pain. She turned and pushed the person so hard that theystumbled backwards, and then she was free. She ran across the road to where the man lay. The sun was glaring into her eyes now, and when she squatted, lowering her head, she felt as if she had gone blind. The top half of the man’s body was on its side and his cheek was pressed onto the road. The lower half was at a curious angle, as if it was part of a different body carelessly attached to his by someone who had lost the instructions. His trousers were gray flannel, but they were stained black and shiny with oil. His breathing was shallow and his eyes were open. She moved closer to him, sat on the edge of the pavement and touched him. The tip of her finger grazed his skin and she found herself tracing the bones of his hand. His eyes flickered, but his field of vision was limited by the position of his head on the road. She moved so he could see her face.
    “Are you okay?” she asked shakily.
    He moved his mouth, then stopped. After a moment he tried again, and said, in a surprisingly clear voice, “I’m so uncomfortable. Will they let me get up?”
    She wondered who he meant by “they.” Then she saw that the people standing in front of the cars