‘Hey! Brodie!’ I was distracted from my potential new friends at the shout and I half turned to see where it had come from. A client of mine, known as Wee Elvis, who’d just been released from prison waved at me. How long would it be till I was visiting him at St Leonards again? He motioned to me to join him but I was still waiting for Dr Marshall. The dreadlocked man from the step tapped his chest. ‘I’m Mack and this…this is Lucky,’ he pointed to the dog at his feet. He’d saved the choicest pieces of ham from the soup and the dog was lapping it up from his fingers. ‘We’re Siamese twins,’ he smiled, pointing to the dog. ‘Where I go, he goes–this is the only shelter that gives Lucky house room. That’s why I always slept rough, so we could be together. But at Christmas we woke up and my mate was gone–I think he’s dead–and I couldn’t take a chance with Lucky’s life, so we came here.’

The dog was busy trying to sniff my crotch as his master gave me a potted life history. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted Dr Marshall walk into the dining room. It was him! He was jacketless, his shirtsleeves rolled up, and a stethoscope hung round his neck. My best guess was what I would have thought pretty unlikely, given the arrogance I had thought ran through his blood, but it seemed pretty obvious that he ran an informal clinic here as the last patient trotted along beside him, talking animatedly into his face. Ina came round from the kitchen with a bowl of soup. It was placed before Marshall as if he were royalty, but from the look in Ina’s eyes he was higher up in her estimation even than that.

I sat down across from him and he stopped eating. He didn’t seem at all surprised to see me–it was his innate good manners that had caused the pause. ‘How was your first visit?’ he asked.

‘You spotted me?’ I replied.

‘Long before you got off your bike…that machine makes some racket.’

‘Why didn’t you say something?’ I asked.

‘My work here is important…not just to me. I knew if it was vital you’d hang around, and if you were hanging around Ina was going to make you work. We can always do with an extra pair of hands.’ He smiled at me. ‘Did you enjoy it?’

I looked at the clock on the yellow canteen wall and I smiled. Time had flown. ‘Yes, I did actually,’ I said.