Dheepthi smooths out her plaits as she hops off the bus and adjusts her skirt before she rounds the corner into school. Her hands come away oily, smelling faintly of amla and coconut. She shakes it from her mind as she crosses the street to avoid a flat with a St George's flag hanging from the top window like an unfurling tongue: the tattered St George's flags hanging limply from the lampposts like pink and white midwife gowns, the bloodied rags of old-timey barbershops from the Victorian era she had been learning about. Like Sweeney Todd, like all of London putting their heads together and murmuring about the latest criminal scare, she thinks, reminding herself with a deep breath that it's World Cup season anyways. There was a bridge on the way in, positioned above the murky brown mirror of the river, in block white graffiti: ITS COMING HOME.

Hopeful last words.

She crosses the road in a quick skip through the red light, and a van whizzes past her, white and unmarked, a ladder laying across the top of it like a great metal coil of rope. The window is open, and the man driving it yells something she can't quite hear. She whips her head around. In the passenger side sits the man's son, thirteen, smirking into the rectangular glowing screen of his phone. Its a tossup in her mind: the Netflix series from months back, accompanied by that British moral panic that follows most media outrage, a simpering message from the now ex Prime Minister, or the justified anger of a thousand men that looked just like the man's father, lynching men that looked like Dheepthi's brother in the name of protecting girls and women who looked exactly like Dheepthi's sister-in-law. Katie had been milking the fear for weeks after the fact: we were too scared to even leave the house, 'we' meaning Akash, and not Katie herself in the slightest.

Her phone lights up, a text from her friend, Laila. Can u pick me up a diet coke? Ill pay u back xx

Dheepthi sighs and ducks into Hounslow News.

Her phone pings again: not hounslow news

Dheepthi rolls her eyes: y?

they refused to serve hailey and her gf the other day. did u not hear?

Dheepthi pushes the door of Hounslow News open again, the sound of the bell and the traffic outside hitting her both at once. Of course.

This country is a fucking ouroboros.