Surrey Quays

On her bicycle, going west, she always stops at the lights by the Surrey Quays station. Partly this is because the odd tangle of road is a catnip for an accident; much safer to let each stream of traffic unfurl until she has a little green signal to beckon her on. And partly, too, because Fiona likes to stare at the progress of the new station entrance being built and, beyond it, at the tall towers working with cranes. Together they erase her memory of uninterrupted sky in real time.

Coming home, east, the stop bothers her more. The greenery of Southwark Park, a verdant portal at her back, makes watching cars take precedence feel like a snub, an aggression. A reminder of how London views her. Today, stopped next to her, is a man on his bike. Electric. His face is smooth and matte, no sheen of sweat like hers, despite the additional layers he has on.

They pedal in parallel through the intersection when the light changes. A perfect pair at twilight, synchronised swimmers along the Cycleway. Then she stops for the next signal and he breezes on, and she’s alone. Stopped. Watching the pedestrians exit the station. Her light turns green, but a woman is still striding, heedless, into the intersection, phone in front of her. It is, simply, her turn.

Fiona pushes off—one pump of the pedal—and the bike moves almost on its own. She brushes so close to the woman that they can lock eyes, close enough that she could stroke her cheek with tenderness if she wanted, but instead Fiona finds her hand grabbing the woman’s phone and then she is pedalling faster than she has ever pedalled before, down, down Lower Road and lengths away before her victim even composes herself enough to shout ‘Hey, what the fuck!’ into the now-empty air.

A quick turn left out of the Cycleway and into traffic, and then another left, and she is facing the docks with their staid, stagnant water, any memory of a working class hub of activity long since gone from even the strongest imagination.

The phone is light in her hand. It has fewer scratches on the screen than her own, in her pocket, but only barely. It is encased in a shell of plastic, the lurid pink of antacid medication. The lock screen photo is of a galaxy, and Fiona can’t tell if it’s their own. She shuts her eyes and tries to remember what the owner of the phone looked like: a harsh blonde bob, pencilled in eyebrows, pussy-bow blouse.

Fiona has long, curly hair, eyebrows that need plucking, but she too is wearing a top with a large strip of fabric tied clumsily into a bow. Didn’t change before her commute home, even though the day is warmer than others have been and she knew that meant washing the blouse instead of getting another wear out of it.

She has never stolen a phone before. But she has stolen. The cast-iron pan from her first flatmate when she moved to London fifteen years ago and thought such living arrangements would be temporary. The occasional mascara after a bad day at the office. Her neighbour’s package the day her last fling texted her to call it off.

She has never stolen a phone before, but she is exhilarated, another valve for fifteen years of bubbling rage. She unties the bow of her shirt and uses the silky fabric to wipe down all sides of the device, placing it on a bench facing the pool of water. A few ducks float by, and she senses them staring at her. Around her, the other humans seem oblivious, and she remounts her bike, turns it away from the river, away from the dock, and pedals the last five minutes home.

Her bike is heavy. She hoists it so it rests on her shoulder, where she now always has a bruise, and carries it up one flight to her flat, wheeling it through to the netted-in balcony. The bike is anonymous-looking, she judges. No brand names on its side. A chipped green paint job, a black seat that has seen better days. Sometimes she struggles to pick it out when it’s been locked amongst a long line of similarly anonymous vessels.

Inside the flat, she stares at her face in a mirror, trying to decide if it, too, is blank and forgettable. When she traded Lewes for London she felt that she had been subsumed completely, could barely pick her own reflection out amongst the other commuters in the glare of the shiny metal panelling on long escalator rides into the depth of tube stations. Now she leans forward until the tip of her nose is touching the mirror and her breath is fogging it, obscuring any identifying features.

She searches the internet for ‘London phone theft bike’ and all there is are pages of unsolved crimes, phones tracked to distant countries or shops and no police who seem fussed about it. The key turns in the lock, but it is only her flatmate, stringing together long sentences of her disappointing happy-hour blind date so rapidly that Fiona’s alert stance and wide eyes go unnoticed.

***

The next morning she dresses carefully. A crisp white button-up, recently ironed. Orange trousers, neatly cuffed. Black double monk-straps that she had to learn where to buy shoe polish from just to keep them from looking scruffy. She pins back her dark locks and repeats the word ‘respectable’ aloud five times, as though the word were a talisman.

She leaves her bike on the balcony and is down the stairs and out the door into another day of winnowing and weakening sunshine. It is early. Half seven when she arrives at the station and down the narrow staircase onto the platform. She picks a bench closest to the bottom of the staircase so she can watch the people dribble in slowly. Their bodies all seem languid. Dread-filled. Resisting the motion that will carry them onto the rest of their day.

She digs her fingernails into her palms, wishing she didn’t pick at them so they’d be sharp enough to draw blood. Thinks about the kind of confrontation they could have if she were recognisable, memorable enough.

At a quarter past nine she gives up, and takes the train. She tells colleagues she had a flat tyre and had to go home as an excuse for her lateness, but no one asks her where she was and the explanation tumbles into the nothingness of the space around the desks.

***

The day after she walks to the station again, but with just enough time she needs for the commute. Passes the community orchard on the fringe of Deptford Park, the leaves starting to warm in colour. Passes the good Mexican restaurant that sells the most overpriced soda. Passes the vape shops, their proliferation across her neighbourhood as rapid as bedbugs.

On the train she sits across from a woman carrying the same tote bag. Fiona offers a small smile to this stranger who has been fed the same targeted ads as her. The woman is fifteen years older than her, she’d guess. A band of solid grey at the temple gives away the time lapse between dye jobs. Fiona has been finding the odd silver strand herself for a year now, the occasional wiry hair pushing out through her chin.

The woman gives her a tentative smile back, but then pulls a slim novel from her bag and begins to pointedly not make eye contact. Fiona slumps back, fingers her dark black hair. Wishes it was tawny instead of a cracked obsidian. More and more people board the train and she doesn’t clock when the woman disembarks.

After work she is meant to meet a friend to catch a play, but the other woman makes an excuse and she is alone. She sits in the uppermost stalls and when the lights of the theatre go dark, the audience members below all move to silence their phones and the dribs of light are like a swimmer going through a bioluminescent lake. When the show ends she begins to string together the different modes of transport that will carry her home. The outside streets feel empty in comparison to the communion of the theatre. She retraces her steps from the morning. Vape shops still open. Mexican restaurant slowed down. The park is gated and locked.

It isn’t the first time her friend has stood her up. Nor is it the first time with other women. She is constantly re-spinning a web in an attempt to ensnare proper friends, the ones she sees in films who rush to each other’s aid and plan beach weekends. Somehow all the promising women she meets have other friends with beach weekend plans they’re already committed to, and after a few months will come a flurry of excuses, then a fade. Fiona takes out her phone, thinks about deleting the number pre-emptively, then puts it away, contact untouched. She tries not to cry from frustration.

In front of her at a perpendicular angle is a large rental e-bike, parked to block the entirety of the pavement. Even in the soft dark, pockmarked with streetlights, it is garish. A stream of cars goes past, and then there is silence, no motors or footfall or even the soft padding of a fox’s footsteps.

The e-bike is heavy; it takes some effort to move it off the kickstand, but with a grunt she succeeds and then she wheels it into the middle of the road. Same perpendicular angle.

She begins walking quickly, wondering if she should have wiped down the frame of the bike too. Reckons it would draw more attention to turn around now. She is not used to the idea of witnesses for the aftermath of her misdemeanours.

The honking begins shortly. An angry driver pulls sharp to a stop, and relief floods Fiona’s body that there hasn’t been a crash. She tries to ignore the tinge of disappointment that has crept into her body alongside it.

But she turns right into the estate complex where she lives before she can determine how long it will take for the driver to get out of the car and move the bike themselves. Maybe it will be the car behind them. When she gets up to her flat she opens the balcony door despite the crispness in the air but can’t tell any sounds apart from the normal road noise.

After a few minutes she steps in from the balcony, feeling hemmed in by her bike and the flower plants with dead vegetation and bare soil, cracked terracotta as evidence of that summer’s failures. She thought this flat would be temporary, but she has long since stopped looking in the windows of estate agents, the idea of a deposit in her savings account remains an intangible goal. There has instead been a string of strangers, acquaintances, who have lived with her. She has stopped attempting to bond, to fuse their transient lives into jointly building a home.

She crosses to the kitchen and fills the kettle from the tap. It desperately needs to be descaled. Bits of thin grey sheets drift from the walls into the water. She sets it to boil anyway. Picks out her mug, and takes one of her flatmate’s herbal tea bags.

When she is done she takes great care to hide the used teabag, pretty with its mesh and yellow balls of camomile, towards the bottom of the bin. Her own tea bags are blended, all the bits of leaves and petals and anything else chopped into such fine bits that they are identifiable only by their smell, or taste. Not their looks.

Before she goes to bed she opens the balcony door once more. The white noise of the city seems at its normal hubbub. Her small bit of chaos has probably been forgotten now by the streets, the e-bike heavy on its side blocking something until it is rented in the morning and ridden to a new destination. The door shuts behind her with a heavy sigh.

***

The sunrises are getting later and later. Her eyes are sensitive, the thin layer of skin closed over them no match for the sun, but it is now the time of the year for her alarm to wake her instead. She takes her bike through the flat and carries it down the flight of stairs. The city is waiting for her to the west, coffee being ground for espresso shots and bus drivers threading the streets. Outside the Square Mile children are being given their rucksacks and reminded of paperwork to give back, and the recently retired are trying to give imagination to how they will spend their days.

Fiona mounts her bike, fastens her helmet under her chin. She pedals onto the Cycleway, a steady stream of fellow commuters whizzing past on their respective bikes. She heads east.

She isn’t alone, pedalling in a pack of commuters. Some head to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, disappearing down its long snail-shell spiral of stairs. She leans on her bike, watching them be enveloped and others emerge. From the dribs and drabs of people exiting, she can tell the lift is broken again.

She could keep going. Closes her eyes and visualises climbing the hill of Charlton, weaving in between the mix of old navy buildings and fancy new flats of Woolwich, and then leaving London until the river became an estuary and she could spot the sea. Wonders if she would be less angry if she lived somewhere that didn’t wash over her as though she were a forgettable pebble, squelched in the mud.

A tourist family is trying to take a selfie, the father of the family repeatedly failing to frame all four of them. He is too tall for the rest of his family, his teenagers gangly but not lanky, his wife repeatedly reminding him to get the Cutty Sark in the background, then another angle, the City skyline. The whole point, the proof of their trip. From the accent she guesses they’re Scottish. Fiona is about to take pity on them, and offer to take their photo.

As she tiptoes towards them, still straddling her cycle, another bike comes between, and she watches a man take the phone out of the father’s hand. The look on the faces of the family is frozen in disbelief—suddenly their expressions are far more in uniform than the awkward attempts at smiles or adolescent surliness moments before.

She takes her feet off the ground, fumbling to place them on the pedals and then pushes, hard, again and again and again, racing after this other thief. The Thames path runs out and she is gaining, and as they both take the tight turn onto Horseferry Place, the man dodges an oncoming cyclist and wobbles; Fiona catches his back tyre and then they are both on the ground, tangled in their chains and wheels, her helmet askew.

The thief stares at her. She stares at him. Their eyes are the exact same shade of brown, freshly turned soil in the garden.

“I’m sorry,” he offers.

“It’s okay,” she says.

She realises he is scared of her, that he’s a teenager, probably looking for some pocket change. Still could be considered a truant, that word degrading any sin to a less severe level. He isn’t simmering with rage, a kettle constantly whistling.

She has at least ten years on him. Maybe fifteen.

He hands over the phone, and she takes it gingerly. Pulls her bike off him. There are passersby asking if they need help, not realising the collision isn’t incidental.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she says. But he is bleeding.

She realises when she handles the phone that it is now slick with his burgundy blood.

“Oh shit, oh shit, are you okay? We can call 999.”

He stands up now, presses his hand to his head, shakes it. He remounts his bike. “No, don’t.”

Then he is gone, and the passersby dissipate and she starts walking her bike and the bloody phone back to see if she can find the tourist family. They are there, the mother on her phone, calling the police, she assumes.

The father takes the phone back, face bewildered.

Fiona says, “Tell the police it’s fine. He was just a kid.”

The mother says, “Okay.” She looks at Fiona with concern, weighs her presence, puts down her phone. “No harm done, I guess.”

Then everyone is thanking her and she is standing there, a hero, looking at the Greenwich Foot Tunnel and the old ship that has been rebuilt so many times it is not really old, and the river, and the planting meant to mimic a meadow, constrained in tiny brick boxes. She realises that some of the blood is hers.

Tomilyn Hannah Rupert (she/her) is an American and British author who lives in SE London. She is fascinated by how cities shape our lives and literature. Her writing has appeared in Porter House Review (shortlisted for the 2025 Editor’s Prize), on Lucy Writer’s Platform, Vernacular Journal, and as part of Deptford Scratch. She is currently revising her first novel, and volunteers as a local reporter with Salamander News. Her bluesky is @tomilyn.bsky.social.