The main road down there was called Upton Street and its shops faced each other across a tram route. Seymour had no money, but he walked along the nearest side carefully inspecting each shop in turn, as though he could buy anything he chose and had all day to think about it. There was a fruit shop, its counters piled high with golden oranges and soft dark grapes. Seymour looked at them with longing, swallowed hard and passed on. Next to it was a second-hand shop where he hesitated and then went in, because there were plenty of people in there and you could hide yourself easily enough in crowds. In a corner he found an old barber-shop chair, and added it to the private list of desirable things he’d one day have in his own room, if the situation of never quite knowing just where he’d be living ever resolved itself. He was always discovering things for that idealised room of his—cheerful bedspreads, desks with maps painted on them, carved teak chests. There was a chest in this particular shop, an old battered metal one with a rusty clasp. He knelt and tried to open the lid, visualising the whole thing enamelled in bright gloss with new brass hinges…

‘Don’t fiddle around with the lock, dear, unless you’re planning to buy that trunk,’ someone said, and although he hadn’t really been doing anything, he shot up, red-faced, and retreated to the door, stumbling over his feet. Anyone who spoke to him with authority tended to have that effect. He scooted over the Victoria Road intersection, then calmed down enough to stop and look into a sports-shop window at chrome and gleaming new leather. He pressed his palms sadly against the glass with pointless longing. How he’d love a new bike, not like that old battered second-hand thing which had been lost on one of their moves.

One time, before his mother had become so vindictive and bitter about such visits, he’d been staying with his father and came by a job cleaning out a butcher shop after school. He’d saved twenty-five dollars in a little tin box under his mattress. The flat box with embossed bells on the lid was a treasure trove, found on a rubbish dump. The butcher’s wife had told him that tins like that were used to send gift slices of wedding cake to guests who couldn’t attend. So the tin with its pattern of bells had seemed fortunate, a symbol of perhaps managing to save enough money to buy a new bicycle. It hadn’t fulfilled its promise, though. His dad had found the hidden money and spent it down at the pub.