The shack looked like a house found in the shadows of a forest in a fairy tale. But instead of gingerbread, it was built of all these wooden pallets hammered together with six-inch nails. A house of scraps. The doorway was a barrier of multicoloured PVC strips. A small, sharp-faced woman with matted dreadlocks stood before it. She briefly lifted her chin, her eyes narrowing as they flicked from me to Edie.

‘Yeah?’

‘We have coats,’ Edie said, and I saw suspicion in the woman’s eyes.

Coats were perfect. Perhaps coats were too perfect.

But the woman lifted her chin again and pulled back the rainbow-coloured PVC strips.

‘See Troy.’

We went inside the shack of wooden pallets. A thick-set black man with short, dirty red dreadlocks was conferring with a man, maybe Afghan or Pakistani, who wore a Union Jack hoodie. They turned to look at us and as he took a step from the shadows I saw that the man with the dreadlocks was not black. His white face was stained black with swirls of tribal tattoos, curved shapes and spiral patterns piled on top of each other until only thin worm-like stretches of white skin were visible.

He stared at me hard, as if daring me to be repulsed by his face.

It looked like the end product of a tattooist who had gone insane.

‘Troy?’ I said.

‘What do you have?’ he said softly.

The accent was rough south-east English grafted on to one of those schools that cost Daddy five grand a term. Every pound-store radical I ever met was downwardly mobile.

‘Coats,’ I said. ‘We thought—’

‘Hanif will help you distribute them,’ Troy said, cutting me off and indicating the man in the Union Jack hoodie. Troy showed none of the suspicion of the woman on the door. But as we turned to go he held out his hand.

‘We ask for a donation to the camp,’ he said.

‘Who’s we?’ Edie said.

I lightly touched her arm.

‘How much?’ I said.

He was staring at Edie.

‘A grand,’ he told me, still not turning his illustrated face from her. You could tell that he was used to his features inspiring horror and fear. And that he liked it. But it didn’t work on Edie Wren. She was still waiting for an answer. I took a breath. I knew the gang in the house of scraps had to be Imagine, although they were not quite the collective of well-meaning hippies and pious anarchists that I had been expecting.

‘I don’t have a grand,’ I said. ‘We’ve just brought some clothes that we thought—’

He finally turned to look at me.

‘You can’t ease your Western conscience with a few handouts,’ he said. ‘These people are desperate. These people want to go to England. These people are not human garbage for you to leave out for capitalism’s bin men.’