A flat, long girl drifted, snivelling into her hanky, out of a jeweller’s shop, and slowly pulled the steel shutters down with a hooked pole. She looked, in the grey rain, as though she were crying from top to toe.

A silent man and woman, dressed in black, carried the wreaths away from the front of their flower shop into the scented deadly darkness behind the window lights. Then the lights went out.

A man with a balloon tied to his cap pushed a shrouded barrow up a dead end.

A baby with an ancient face sat in its pram outside the wine vaults, quiet, very wet, peering cautiously all round it.

It was the saddest evening I had ever known.

A young man, with his arm round his girl, passed by me, laughing; and she laughed back, right into his handsome, nasty face. That made the evening sadder still.

I met Leslie at the corner of Crimea Street. We were both about the same age: too young and too old. Leslie carried a rolled umbrella, which he never used, though sometimes he pressed doorbells with it. He was trying to grow a moustache. I wore a check ratting cap at a Saturday angle. We greeted each other formally:

“Good evening, old man.”

“Evening, Leslie.”

“Right on the dot, boy.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Right on the dot.”

A plump blonde girl, smelling of wet rabbits, self-conscious even in that dirty night, minced past on high-heeled shoes. The heels clicked, the soles squelched.

Leslie whistled after her, low and admiring.

“Business first,” I said.

“Oh, boy!” Leslie said.

“And she’s too fat as well.”

“I like them corpulent,” Leslie said. “Remember Penelope Bogan? a Mrs. too.”

“Oh, come on. That old bird of Paradise Alley! How’s the exchequer, Les?”

“One and a penny. How you fixed?”

“Tanner.”

“What’ll it be, then? The Compasses?”

“Free cheese at the Marlborough.”

We walked towards the Marlborough, dodging umbrella spokes, smacked by our windy macs, stained by steaming lamplight, seeing the sodden, blown scourings and street-wash of the town, papers, rags, dregs, rinds, fag-ends, balls of fur, flap, float, and cringe along the gutters, hearing the sneeze and rattle of the bony trams and a ship hoot like a fog-ditched owl in the bay, and Leslie said:

“What’ll we do after?”

“We’ll follow someone,” I said.

“Remember following that old girl up Kitchener Street? The one who dropped her handbag?”

“You should have given it back.”

“There wasn’t anything in it, only a piece of bread-and-jam.”

“Here we are,” I said.

The Marlborough saloon was cold and empty. There were notices on the damp walls: No Singing. No Dancing. No Gambling. No Peddlers.

“You sing,” I said to Leslie, “and I’ll dance, then we’ll have a game of nap and I’ll peddle my braces.”