“Hang on!” she shouted.

The foreigner kept on walking. Tracy stumbled to her feet and pushed past the people between them.

“Move!” she said.

When she reached him she grabbed his bag, but quickly lost her grip on it. He looked back at her, his deep-set eyes like a rabbit’s in the headlights. He quickened his pace.

Tracy quickened hers.

“You’ve got money in there!” she said. “That bag’s full of it. How much you got in there? Hey, I’m talking to you.”

She made a grab for his bag again. He shot her another look, waved a hand in front of his face and gabbled something in another language. Then he started walking even faster.

“Where’d you get it?” she called. “Hey, you’re not one of those thieving asylum seekers, are you?”

They reached a pedestrian crossing. The lights were green, but the foreigner ran across the road.

“Thief!” Tracy shouted.

Some people looked. She pointed.

When he reached the other side of the road, the foreigner kept running. Tracy ran out into the road after him. One car blared its horn angrily at her. She flipped the driver off.

“Thief! Stop him!”

She staggered to a halt before another car and wove in front of it. The driver thumped his horn.

“Fuck off!”

Tracy reached the pavement and began shoving through the crowds again. She couldn’t see the foreigner.

“Thief! He stole my bag! He stole my money!”

But she’d lost him.

Dejected, Tracy stuck a finger in the cup and stirred the beggings around. Thanks to the coon on the train, she now had enough, she realised.

She walked back toward the station.

“Get out of my way!” she snapped. If she leered about drunkenly, people got out of her way faster.

For the time being, she had to put it on.

The off-licence was beside the station and it was run by Asians, but their Scotch cost seventy pence less than it did in the Tesco Metro, so Tracy didn’t care.

That girl was behind the counter again. She looked at Tracy when she came in, and when Tracy smiled, the girl looked away again.

Tracy picked out her bottle and joined the queue. Soon she was at the front. She smirked.

“Hello, dear,” she said.

The girl read the barcode on the side of the bottle under the scanner. The price flashed up on the till. “£12.29 please.”

One by one, Tracy began to count out the coins from her cup, and the queue started to grow behind her.

NOTES:
I was thinking of having Liep caught by someone who gives him a hiding, and have Tracy run off with the bag of his money, but I wanted to leave Liep's story open, so at least there's hope he and Marzia make it. The original version of this had Tracy a lot more explicitly racist, referring to the people in the off-licence as 'monkeys', but as I typed it up that turned her into too much of a caricatured nasty piece of work, so I toned it down.