The clacking soles of patent leather shoes echoed down the cobbled lane. Grey stone shops and fliers for obscure bands passed by in a blur as he scrambled through the tangled nest of bicycles and made the turn to the final hill.

The pink haired girl hadn't lost a step. She was still right on his heels. For a moment, he was sure he'd lost her at the bakery. Now she was breathing down his neck, her sneakers eerily quiet as she pursued him. His chest tightened, ribs pulled tight as he gulped frozen air into burning lungs. The morning air was so cold the sweat gushing out of his temples turned to rime on his forehead. In the final seconds, his legs threatened to give out, but he wouldn't let them fail him. From here on, it was all about mental strength.

The crowd thickened in front of the station, a knotty mass of bodies that hooked his satchel and cut in front of him without warning, the mindless swarm oblivious to his urgency. Under the navy suit and the starched shirt, he felt a river of sweat build momentum as it ran down his spine. The joints of his knees stung from the shock of the concrete. He elbowed forward between two anoraks, glancing over his shoulder.

No sign of her.

One of the anoraks yelled angrily. Performing a half turn in the air, he shouted an apology, though he didn't stop, volplaning down a flight of stairs and through the ticket gates. Heaving for air, he glanced around him. He was safely on the platform. Still no sign of the girl. Not that it mattered anymore. The train would arrive in - he checked the display - six minutes. He could have easily walked the last street and still have squeezed through the door before the whistle shrilled.

From his bag, he took out a handkerchief and mopped the sweat from his forehead. In the warmth of the bodies pressed around him, he felt the slippery film of sweat between his body and his clothes. Audibly, his pulse pounded in his ears, the only other sound the tinny echo of some teenager's earphones. The world was tinged green by the adrenalin rushing to his brain, the colour casting a sickly pall over the passengers.

Still got it. James Richards smiled as he pulled out the Sudoku puzzle from his satchel.

Of course, the whole thing was ridiculous; stupid male pride. She had started running first. That was when he realised he must be late. The two of them caught the same train every morning, not that they'd ever spoken. There were a lot of girls in their twenties, all with the same plastic pass-cards around their necks or dangling from bags. He'd long ago theorized there must be a call-centre at the end of the road. As soon as she broke into a jog, he'd felt like he'd better run, too. He'd taken off at a sprint, passing her in the first fifty meters, only to realise the terrible problem he now faced. If he stopped, she'd think he was out of shape, that he'd been showing off when he overtook her. He'd started a weird competition. The further he ran, and the more persistently she kept pace behind him, the more certain he became she knew what he was thinking.

He let out a short chuckle at his own stupidity and the yawning chasm of awkwardness he was going to suffer every morning after this.

The train thundered in the distance, the screech of steel on steel echoing from the dark. He edged into position, weaving his way through the aroma of coffee and sweet pastries, years of practice telling him exactly where on the platform the doors of his preferred carriage would stop. Over the heads of the crowd he saw the pink hair and the black knitted cardigan. She'd made it. Well, good for her. For a moment, their gazes met. Her face lit up, smizing at him with impish eyes.

He turned away flustered. His wedding band seemed to grow heavy on his finger. He shook his head, but still couldn't resist looking back. That was when he witnessed it for the first time.

A middle-aged business woman in a smart gabardine coat and silk cravat was shuffling through the crowd, earphones in, her gaze locked on the screen of her smartphone. Her face was slack and expressionless as she walked towards the edge of the platform.

The rivets of the rails began to tremble. Tiny clouds of dust rose into the air. A scrap of newspaper was blown forward by the wind from the approaching train.

The girl with the pink hair noticed something. Her expression changed. She surged forward, elbowing people aside. Then she tried to snatch the mobile phone, but the woman wouldn't let her, screaming something incoherent as she elbowed the girl away.

"Hey!" His voice was surprisingly loud, but it paled against the clattering roar of the approaching train. They were too close to the edge. "Watch out!"

At the sound of his voice, the girl with the pink hair seemed to return to herself. Raising her hands she stepped back away from the woman.

Two lights blazed in the tunnel, turning the people on the platform into a wall of shadows. Without a trace of reaction the middle aged woman took two steps backwards and plunged over the edge of the platform. The fall happened in a dreadful instant, a shadow passing in front of the lights.

The train thundered into the space. James stood dumbstruck as he struggled to accept what he'd seen.

Instantly a semicircle formed around the scene of death.

"Oh my god." A whisper.

"Quick, get help."

"What the hell happened?"

"She just walked off."

James scanned the crowd, finding the pink hair vanishing up the south stairwell. Still trying to soothe the shock, he wriggled through the crowd, a lone ant travelling against an oceanic tide of onlookers drawn to the spectacle of a private tragedy. His legs brought him to the foot of the now empty stairs. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he clamped his eyes shut. He felt wired and shaky.

Pink had gone.

He stopped and tried to think rationally. There was no use staying here. He couldn't do anything to help that woman. No one could. And there was no way there was going to be another train for at least a couple of hours. Catching a bus was the only option at this point. Routine normality reasserted itself. He didn't have to think about the route. His job often involved overtime on Sundays, when the trains didn't run until ten o'clock. Habit guided him to the bus stop on autopilot.

Pink wasn't the kind of girl who snatched mobile phones.

That woman had been dumb-walking. She'd been so involved in her smartphone she hadn't realised she was walking too close to the platform edge. It wouldn't be the first time someone had caused an accident because they were engrossed in Facebook or Tinder or whatever it was people looked at these days. Pink had been trying to save her. That was the only logical explanation for what he'd witnessed. She'd seen the danger the woman was in, and tried to help, but it had backfired and the woman had fallen off the edge in the struggle. It was an accident.

The smell of cigarette smoke brought him back to himself. A teenager with undercut hair and a camouflage coat was smoking something he very much doubted was tobacco, the dense brownish cloud permeating the bus stop. James edged away, conscious the smell would be seeping into his suit.

"Excuse me." James made eye contact. "Do you mind not?"

As the guy glared at him, James felt his hands shaking. Everyone at the bus stop, including James was shocked he'd said anything. The whole crowd was staring at them, the tension palpable. He knew they were all wondering why the hell he'd spoken out. It was the same question he was asking himself.

"Whatever mate," the teenager said, flicking the remnants of the spliff into the traffic. It sat there, still smoking, right in the middle of the lane where the passing cars wouldn't extinguish it by driving over the butt.

"Thanks," James muttered weakly, avoiding further eye-contact, grateful he hadn't been stabbed for his trouble.

The bus journey took an age, leaving James staring blankly out of the window at the endless sea of brake lights and unmoving scenery. Something wasn't right, and deep down he knew what was troubling him; she'd tried to snatch the phone.

If Pink had been trying to stop the woman walking off the platform, why hadn't she simply taken her elbow. That was what any normal person would have done. The lightest of physical contact would have been enough to get her attention, and then she could have warned the woman of the danger. But that wasn't what had happened.

The fear he'd seen on Pink's face was still etched in his memory. Of course, he'd yelled out and everyone had seen the scuffle. That was the simple explanation. He'd exposed a thief in the station, and she'd panicked. He rubbed a finger across his chin. It still didn't sit right in his gut. Pink wasn't like that. He didn't want to believe she was like that. Thinking back, Pink had looked terrified before he shouted at her. Her expression had changed the instant she'd seen the woman in the crowd, even before she was near the edge of the platform. And there was no mistaking that expression.

He'd only seen fear like that once before. It was one of those childhood memories that stuck. The room in the corner of the attic was technically a spare room, but it had slowly been taken over by clutter: The oriental fans from their trip to china, the old vacuum cleaner his father had promised to take to the charity shop, the surfboard that had been rashly purchased for his elder brother before he discovered he didn't like the sport, a heap of books his mother insisted didn't quite fit on the bookshelves in the living room. Normally, no one went in the spare room.

That day there was something else in the room. Something no one had put there; a pulsating beige mound, larger than James or his sister. It occupied almost the entire guest bed. Neither of them understood what the thing was at first. It was only after he'd reached out and touched the clay-like husk and felt the vibrating swarm within it, fear turned to horror. That was the moment he realised the truth.

Wasp nest.

His sister's face had been stony with terror. A single wasp was enough to make her scream. But this time she was silent. He ushered her out of the room, always keeping himself between her and the mound.

The nightmares lasted for years. In his dreams, the wasps would build a nest around him as he slept. They'd crawl in his mouth and out through his eyes. And he'd wake screaming, cocooned in the nest where he slept, trapped in the writhing swarm.

He knew that facial expression because he'd seen it before on his sister's face. It wasn't concern he'd seen on the face of the pink haired girl. It was horror. For some reason she was absolutely terrified of that phone.

James reached into his bag and pulled out his Nokia 5110. His mobile phone must have been twenty years old. He'd had it since sixth form. It weighed about half a kilo and the screen was green and black. The thing was so old it had acquired a sort of retro cool. His friends joked he'd got there before the hipsters. He'd never really thought about it much, but he didn't like mobile phones. Of all his friends, he'd been the last to cave into the pressure to buy one. As a basic principle, when he went out, he liked to be out - as in out of reach of work, and insurance salesmen, and ex-girlfriends, and his mother complaining he never visited.

And he didn't upgrade. It certainly wasn't entirely displeasing to watch his friends suffer every time a new Apple iOS came out and took six hours to install. He struggled not to laugh when popular apps got hacked full of malware and stole people's credit card details, or their toddler fed their expensive mobile to the toilet bowl. And all the time his trusty Nokia did what he thought phones should do; make and receive calls. It certainly didn't lead people to walk in front of trains. He jokingly wondered if that was an app, or if it came pre-installed in the hardware.

Thinking about it, he realised he'd never seen a phone like that one before. It was an ugly thing, sort of rounded with a tiled skin - maybe an alligator skin carry case. Still, he wasn't likely to know what model it was. He didn't really pay much attention to the endless slew of slightly different models his friends insisted on demoing for him. Increasingly they seemed to be made somewhere in the Far East, with brand names he'd never heard of, by companies involved in endless patent disputes.

Alighting the bus near Holborn, the air felt doubly cold. The older buses vented engine heat directly around the passengers legs, adding the stench of diesel to what rapidly felt like a sauna. The shock of the change in temperature was brutal. Before he could break free of the throng and slip down the invariably empty ginnel which formed a short-cut to his office, a balding man sneezed furiously, pebble-dashing the back of James' neck with what he figured was probably SARS. Or maybe Ebola.

Cursing he rooted through his satchel and extracted the small bottle of antibacterial gel. He had to take off his wedding ring before applying some. There was a twinge of guilt as he slipped the ring into his pocket. Taking his ring off for a moment didn't mean anything. He'd only smiled at Pink. He was so preoccupied with his thoughts he didn't notice the thing as he boarded the lift. It was only when the elevator was half way between third and fourth he saw it.

He froze.

It was a smartphone in a black scaled case with small spikes. It was like the thing had followed him, sitting there like some kind of oversized slug that had oozed its way onto human skin. The finance-bro holding it was wired for sound, and James could hear the heavy bass of some trance, or techno or whatever they called that shit you had to be on drugs to enjoy.

Trying to be casual, James peeked over at the screen, trying to spot the logo of the brand, but he couldn't see anything. The cover was open, but the screen was a smooth black void. Abruptly, he realised Finance-bro was glaring at him.

"Nice phone," he coughed. Finance-bro blanked him. James wasn't sure that he could even hear with that music blaring. "I was thinking of getting one of those. What model is that?"

"Fuck off." There was no intonation. The whole delivery was deadpan. And hostile.

"Sorry," James muttered. "I didn't mean to bother..." he didn't finish the sentence. His gaze was fixed on something strange. There was a drop of blood on the man's collar. It wasn't much. Probably just a nick from shaving. Or maybe it was splatter from the hobo he'd beaten to death. The guy had a serious Patrick Bateman vibe. The stain stood out against the immaculately starched white. "Just ignore me."

James turned to face the doors, edging a step away. He wasn't scared of this guy, or at least, that wasn't why he turned away. He was beginning to feel queasy. The whole morning had been unsettling. The lift carried on up in silence, only the two of them in the confined space. Sticking to the dice principle – that all passengers in a lift maintain the maximum space between them by forming a pattern like the dots on a dice – he edged into the front corner. He could feel the back of his neck burning. When it finally reached the thirteenth floor, James dived out of the elevator, glancing behind him as he hurried down the corridor.

Ensconced in his cubicle, a soothing cup of Ceylon tea steaming on the desk, he checked the news websites to see if the accident at the train station had made the local section. As expected, the article was only a couple of hundred words long. The authorities were blaming the incident on 'dumb-walking'. The journalist had linked the death to some recently published statistics about the number of road accidents in which mobile phone use was considered a contributory factor, along with a call for greater awareness among the general public of the risks of using mobile phones when on the move. There was no mention of the altercation with the pink-haired girl.

The whole thing didn't sit right with him, but he pushed it out of mind and focused on his work.

****

At precisely six-thirty, he removed the marinated lamb from the refrigerator and browned it in a skillet with the onions. Once this step was complete, he combined it with olives, chickpeas, dried apricots and raisins, along with a mixture of chilli, cumin seeds and cinnamon, before slow cooking in vegetable stock for two hours.

While the stew heated through, he went to his bedroom mantelpiece and lit the incense in front of the picture of his wife. He rang the bell, clapping once before his prayer, and twice after. The ritual was more of a coping mechanism than a religious belief. It was just what he did to get by each day.

He worked out for an hour to fight off the silence of the house, then took a shower, emerging just in time to take the stew off the heat and let the meat rest while he steamed some vegetables.

The nine o'clock news featured a six car pileup on the M25 North. Police were investigating reports the lorry driver responsible had been using a mobile phone while in control of the vehicle. Smart phones, dumb people, he thought, bitterly.

The driver that killed his wife had died in the collision. The police had held the driver criminally responsible, but in the light of his death, nothing had gone to court. The insurance people had paid up based on the police report. It hadn't mentioned anything about a phone. At the back of his mind, James couldn't help but wonder. Not that it made any difference now. Lauren was gone.

He watched a ten o'clock comedy program to kill the emptiness, then rolled into his bed, ready to do it all again from the beginning.

****

The pink haired girl wasn't at the station for the next couple of days. Not that this was unusual. Most mornings they boarded the same train, but the station was crowded and sometimes he didn't see her for a couple of weeks. In all honesty, it was a relief she wasn't there. Things would have been awkward, and he didn't want there to be a thing hanging in the air every time he saw her. It would all blow-over in a couple of weeks, and they'd go back to being two people living parallel lives. There was no need for him to even think about her.

Smartphone spotting became a little way to squash free time. He was determined not to let it become an obsession, but he couldn't help noticing them in a way he'd never done before. What struck him most was the sheer number of phones he saw every day. It was by no means unusual for people to have two. A lot of people had a work mobile and a personal mobile, and kids often had more than one, though he suspected the second ones were old units repurposed as games devices and music players. There was also an immense variety of devices and accessories in the market. Oversized earphones and giant fat-ass screens seemed to be the popular. What he didn't see was any more of was the scaled black phones with the barbed wire headphones. He even Googled for phone catalogues and images to find the brand, yet he couldn't get them anywhere. There were simply too many types of phone. It wasn't so much a needle in a haystack as a phone in an immense stack of phones.

By the third morning he'd put it out of his mind. It was raining, so the train was crammed to Third-World levels with people sitting in the luggage racks, yet clutching his satchel he forced his way down the aisle. He hadn't seen Pink or Finance-bro since the day of the accident. He figured the sociopath in the suit was probably rearranging a freezer full of prostitute heads or drowning kittens in a sack. He didn't care what Finance-bro was doing with himself, but Pink's absence worried him. He didn't need to talk to her about what happened. All he needed to do was see her, and make sure she was okay. For some reason he felt like she was in danger.

Squeezing through the swaying seaweed of people, he moved through the doors and into the next carriage. Still no sign of her. It was possible she was catching an earlier train in an active effort to avoid seeing him. The thought made him feel strangely lonely. The train was silent, most of the passengers buried in their phones, lines of glowing screens casting a pale blue glow on their faces as the train lights flickered in the tunnel. Nearly all of them had a camera on the back, facing out into the carriage. Maybe it was the heat of the train, but he began to feel queasy under the glare of the lenses.

Blue sparks flashed in the darkness and the train shuddered, the carriage briefly falling into darkness as they passed over a set of points. He felt the shift of gravity, the bodies pressed around him abruptly opening into space sending him toppling towards the window. Arm reached high, he braced himself against the luggage rack nearly falling on top of a bleached-blonde schoolgirl with a micro skirt and oversized necktie. Over the rim of her smartphone she glowered at him.

He was about to apologise when he noticed the black alligator skin case. Those phones were creepy. That was the first time he really felt it. The thing sat in her hands like some kind of huge black slug, its tendrils stretching up into her ears. No, he thought, not a slug. A wasp nest.

He tried to swallow with a dry mouth. "Sorry," he attempted a smile.

The girl raised an eyebrow. "It's alright."

"Cool phone," he offered. Suspicion flashed across her face. She probably thought he was a paedophile. "I was thinking of getting one for my daughter's birthday. Do you know where I can get one of those?"

It was a pathetic lie. He could tell she didn't believe him. Palpably, a tiny pulse throbbed in his neck. His shirt collar felt tight. And yet he couldn't take his eyes off the phone. It was almost as if he could feel it staring back at him, the camera lens forming a single eye in the middle of its head.

Then suddenly his blood ran cold.

It blinked.

He staggered back, crashing into a copy of the Financial Times. The paper collapsed on impact, crumpling in on itself as he fell into the lap of a red-faced man.

"Bloody idiot! Look where you're going."

The girl with the phone was glaring at him, her face slack, her eyes dead. From her ear a single drop of dark red blood rolled down into her shirt collar. In his head the image of the wasp nest formed again. He could feel it clamping around his chest, choking him. Jerking to his feet, he pushed his way down the aisle, slowly at first, but then elbowing people out of his way. Oily sweat gushed out of his pores. His stomach was turning over.

Around him, passengers shuffled towards the exit, clearing space. With a flash, the train burst out into the light of the first stop. He was aware of the bodies flowing around him as people maneuvered out onto the platform. Darting after them, he jumped down, parting the crowd of people waiting to board.

Clutching his bag tight against his chest, he leaned against the wall of the platform, then slowly slid down into a ball. He clamped his eyes shut. It wasn't possible. There was no way that was real. His body trembled with a febrile shock. He grasped the satchel ever more tightly, rolling on his heels, trying to soothe the panic.

"Are you okay?" It was a woman's voice.

James blinked open his eyes to see her delicate face framed by her long pink hair, her eyes smiling at him sadly. His brain stalled. The silence between them drowned out the noise of the station. When he finally spoke, his throat was dry and cracked. "That wasn't a phone."

He was sure she'd think he was insane. He'd been living alone for too long. His hand was shaking uncontrollably as he reached his hand out and touched her face. He needed this. She pressed his hand against her cheek.

She shook her head slowly. "They know who you are now."

The End

~~~

Dedicated to @Kuronoshio, writer of this short story