Everything You Need: Short Stories Read Online Free Page B

holding well-secured examples of the newspapers and magazines for sale inside. At the bottom of this, sitting on the pavement, was something Spike hadn’t seen that morning. A large cardboard box, containing a few rough cords of wood suitable for putting on an open fire.
    ‘Firewood,’ a handwritten sign said.
    Spike stared at it. Had it been there earlier? He didn’t think so. Did people even have old-fashioned wood fires in houses in the middle of London any more? Were they allowed to throw up that kind of pollution?
    He went back a couple of paces to take a closer look. The sections of wood were raggedly sawn into one-foot lengths, and had then evidently split with an axe. It looked like silver birch. The papery bark seemed fresh. There was, at least under the streetlights, a slight sparkle to it. There was no price indicated.
    Troubled in a way he couldn’t put his finger on, Spike walked quickly home. He wanted to be inside so much that he didn’t even bother to swing by the alleyway to check the doorway there was still locked.
    He’d come to fear, perhaps, that it always would be.

     
    N ext morning he set off in a different direction. He spent much of the day walking up and down the embankment by the Thames. It was chilly and he needed regular coffees to keep him warm, but after the previous evening’s earnings he didn’t mind the expense too much.
    He was still down by the river as darkness came at the end of the afternoon. His bones were cold and damp from a long day close to the slack grey river, and he felt tired and out of sorts. He considered simply going home, shutting the door, and climbing into bed with a book. Taking the evening off. Starting the next day fresh.
    He knew himself well enough to know this was a bad idea, however. It was this kind of impulse that had gotten him here in the first place, a tendency to grow tired of one kind of life, of its hierarchies and constraints and rituals, and to think he could flip tracks. It didn’t work. It hadn’t worked because he was the same person over here as he’d been over there. Changing position doesn’t change you: it may simply reveal you in a harsher light. Sometimes when Spike spent afternoons killing time in bookstores he wanted to go up and tap the shoulders of the people earnestly browsing the Self Help section and tell them this fact, that they should give up on the idea of change and try to make friends with who they were before they did something dumb and fucked up what they had. Sure, you can leave your boyfriend or job or move house or go work for the disadvantaged in some hellhole or go on a freaky diet... but then what? Then nothing. It’ll all be the same, except you can’t go back. The door to the way things used to be will be locked.
    Everything you do is a one-way street.
    And so he wearily decided not to go home, but instead to go straight to work — and that’s where he made his penultimate mistake.

     
    H e ended up working the same area he’d been in the previous night, something he’d always avoided doing before. It was right there on his route home from the embankment, though, just south of an oddly-named road called The Strand, and what with it being a Friday night he reasoned that people in the pubs there were even more likely to be drunk and relaxed than the night before, and so his job should be easier. He at least had the sense to reverse the order, starting with the last pub he’d worked the previous night. Pubs have their schedules and routines and migratory patterns. Hopefully this way he’d encounter a different shift of punters than he had the night before.
    This first was called the Star of Brunswick, a nice old place with lots of panelling and wooden benches. It wasn’t too crowded yet, which was good. Having people on all sides made it impossible to play the angles. The same two barmaids were on the duty. They recognized him. No surprise. Spike was good-looking and had The Thing. One big, dumb error