Suncatcher of the White Transit

Chapter 1

Eris

Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me

'Til then, I walk alone

― Green Day, Boulevard of Broken Dreams

She was fucked.

It was the ground rule, the one useful lesson father had taught her: ‘Never bite the hand that feeds you.’

And she’d broken it.

She would have never been so reckless if she hadn’t been so desperate for cash. And the phone had been right there, begging to be picked up.

That section of the warehouse had never had security cameras, save for the one pointing to the emergency exit. It covered less than fifty square feet, the rest of the area one huge blind spot.

Or it had been.

There was nothing valuable there: only crushed boxes and the persistent stench of weed. With hindsight, the weed dealing was likely the reason why the extra cameras had been installed, unbeknownst to her.

That was how she’d been caught pocketing her manager’s phone.

And that was how she had lost her job.

A job that paid shit and was physically draining, but which had been her first stable employment since running away from home.

As lousy as it’d been, it had allowed her to keep a roof over her head for the last two years.

It would be a matter of days now before she lost the shithole she called home.

The lack of sympathy her flatmates had shown her hadn’t been a surprise. She discerned their rancour.

When Claudia, Pilar, and Wen had seen her come home too early that afternoon, they had immediately smelled trouble.

Eris had pushed past them, ignoring the umpteenth reminder that she was three weeks late with her part of the rent.

The phone could’ve covered it, she had contacts who could sell it for a fair price.

Now she had even bigger fish to fry.

She was smart enough not to tell them about the firing, but that would only buy her so much time: they all knew she didn’t have a single penny in her pocket. Claudia hadn’t hesitated to stress that if she failed to pay what was due by next week, they were going to kick her out.

Fair, Eris had thought. She wouldn’t have been willing to cover someone else’s part, either.

That had left her with no other choice but to resort to stealing.

Not her usual kind, food and bare necessities, but the only currency that could at least buy her some time: plain cash.

In London there was one very accessible source of that: tourists’ pockets.

She’d learned the fine art of pickpocketing from her father and had always abided by his philosophy: ‘If their wallet is fat, they can afford to lose it.’

With the contents of five wallets in her pocket, she was three-hundred quid closer to her goal, and yet still nowhere near paying off her debt by tomorrow. She trusted that tomorrow would be more fruitful.

Frustrated, she plopped down on a bench and exhaled a heavy sigh she’d been holding for way too long. The quiet of the park was ruined by a group of teens and their asinine howls. Eris did her best to block it out.

Exhausted, she propped her elbows on her knee. Her head bowed helplessly. A shroud of dark hair slipped over her hunching shoulders. She’s been growing it for years, a wall between her and the world.

A dull tiredness was creeping into her bones. There was nothing she wanted more than to go home and lock herself up in her room, but she felt sick knowing what kind of looks she was going to get when she gave the money to Claudia.

They’d never liked each other, too different to really get along, or maybe too similar in all the wrong ways.

They had adjacent rooms; Eris could hear Claudia cry herself to sleep every other night.

It must be hard to be clever and ambitious with no financial safety net.

It was the one thing all four of them had in common: they were skint.

Eris sighed, her forefinger picking at the nail of the thumb.

It was too late to cry over spilt milk. The damage was done and there was no repairing it.

At least she’d been able to gather something.

Saturday night was always the best night for pickpocketing in the city: chaos everywhere, people drinking and chatting loudly, too distracted by their own enjoyment to pay attention to their surroundings.

She’d almost snatched a watch, too, but the guy had noticed and she’d had to pretend to be drunk to sneak away.

Away from the noise and the chaos and the people who caused them.

She wasn’t wired to be around humans.

Stepping out into the world always took a toll on her.

The biggest perk of working at the warehouse had been how peaceful it was: working mostly solo, minimum human interaction, and the silence, the comforting repetitiveness of the same old shit every day…

She might not get so lucky with her next job, provided she found one. Not many employers were willing to overlook her criminal record.

She shrugged off her backpack. It was heavy, laden with everything she’d been able to pilfer from the chock-a-block Tesco Express in Piccadilly.

The beer bottles clinked. She was proud of how smoothly she’d bagged those.

This was the moment she’d been looking forward to all day.

A cigarette would have been better, but stealing those wasn’t worth the risk.

On days like today, when she was overwhelmed and tired to the bone, it was either cigarettes and alcohol or a good fist fight.

Nothing soothed her nervous system like a brawl. Not even sex.

She delved in her boot for her knuckle knife and flipped it open to pop the first bottle.

She brought the bottle to her mouth, chugging down half of it in one go.

The bitterness washed down some of the exhaustion, spreading relief through her veins.

It wasn’t the smartest idea to drink on an empty stomach, but the inevitable hangover was going to be morning Eris’ problem.

Right now all she wanted was to kill the maddening echo of all of London’s noises engraved in her skull.

Beer had always been her comfort drink, although now she didn’t drink nearly as much as she used to when she was living with her parents.

Only on really bad days did she still turn to heavier stuff to get drunk faster, and maybe find someone to start a brawl with.

Brawls kept her sane. They were soothing.

Eris could throw some mean punches: years of lifting and moving heavy boxes for a living had made her strong and muscular.

She wasn’t built to be skinny, but, since puberty had shaped her physique, people, especially men, looked at her differently.

Eris didn’t like it. She didn’t like any kind of attention.

She squeezed her breasts into tight sports bras and wore baggy tops that concealed her curves, but sometimes it wasn’t enough.

She licked her lips. The tip of her tongue brushed past the silver ring to linger on the jagged line that cut through her lips. Despite it being a twenty-year-old scar, sometimes she had the impression that it still twinged.

With one big swig, she emptied the first bottle and switched to the next.

Her phone vibrated in her boot. It was just the usual text reminding her that she was running out of credit.

Out of battery, too. Putting the phone away, her attention diverted to the faded blue piece of paper lying beneath the transparent case.

The edges were frayed from all the times she’d taken it out and balled it up, meaning to throw it away.

She’d never found the guts to go through with it.

‘I’ll be back for you. M.’

He had never come back, but she had never stopped waiting.

By midnight, her head felt as blissfully empty as the three bottles lying at her feet. She decided she’d wallowed in self-pity long enough.

A light rain was falling. Autumn was round the corner: the temperature wasn’t so warm when the sun went down, and her oversized hoodie was quick in getting wet.

She slipped the knife into the pocket by her knee instead of tucking it back into the boot, as she always did when she was out alone past a certain time.

She’d never used the blade for self-defence, but the brass knuckles often came in handy.

Pushing herself to her feet, she flinched at how sore her muscles were.

She was used to hard work and heavy lifting, but tailing loiterers all day had injected a whole different kind of exhaustion into her body.

As she lurched out of the park, backpack slung over one shoulder, she clocked a bus stop across the street. It was late, and she was tired… Perhaps hopping on a bus wasn’t such a bad idea. Hopefully she’d end up somewhere with a Tube station.

Among the small crowd waiting there was a trio of ditsy girls who kept whispering to each other and cackling, much to the other bystanders’ annoyance.

A tall guy with a Yankees jersey caught Eris’ attention: he was talking to someone over the phone, a bottle in hand.

He took a distracted sip from time to time while ogling the girls.

The back pocket of his trousers showed a promising swelling.

There might be the next couple of weeks of Eris’ rent in it.

She discreetly approached from behind. The guy was too engrossed in the call and the girls’ miniskirts to notice her.

Eris reached towards his pocket; sliding two fingers in, she touched leather.

Excited, she pinched a corner of it between her fingers and slowly started drawing it out.

The wallet was halfway out when the man shifted from one foot to the other, forcing Eris to still and hold her breath. She was so close…

One the girls took off her coat to use it as an umbrella, exposing a remarkable cleavage. Eris took advantage of the guy’s drooling to whisk the wallet all the way out.

It’d have been one of her cleanest extractions, if the bus hadn’t arrived at that exact moment.