Mariam lived alone and anomalous life in a otherwise empty tower block in Endland. The place was a debatable sub-rental what fell to her more or less by accident in a card game and was given on a promise of someone she hardly knew at all, who said their brother’s friend’s sister had given them the keys.

The building she lived in was tall. It stood right in the mist of a mostly mank area what had a bad reputation for trolls, troubles, speed dating, bad dreams, drama and instances of knife crime. In more recent times tho the hole area got caught or bought up in the inexorable forces of Gentrifaction – remodelled/rebranded in places to look a bit like the kind of desirable destination that people had probably herd about in adverts for another town. Many of the buildings were washed down of urine and graffiti, clad in cheap plastic shells using redecorated ‘color schemzes’, rebooted and also partly rewired as pseudo fibreoptic. It was cynical investment driven change but despite drawbacks Mariam loved the place, esp when she first moved in, finding in the solitary confine of that dead hearted building some small piece of security at least in a world that was otherwise unstable.

Property market in that part of Endland was terminal slow tho and the paving slabs leading to that tower block did not ring very often with the sound of human feet, or thrill to the shriek of kids playing any games of yore.

Seen from the windows of Mariam’s place the hood remained pretty much a dead zone, a vortex of social and economical inertia. Month after month and year after years the flats did not sell and all around her building what the cops of the area called The Wildlife continued to flourish in the shadow of its alien presence. The Wildlife were men and women that rumour said had more in common with the night than they ever did have with the day, a tribe they said whose very pockets were addicted to poverty, whose eyes people said were more drugged to vacancy than ever bright with hope, whose skin was shades of discontinued white, or the colour of bruised tarmac and rotting peaches, or the overall hue of something living that has never seen natural light. If you believed what the headlines of the horror minded journos said anyway, The Wildlife were somehow deep down less than human, thwarted creatures what love could not save and a Taser could not stop, but in strict reality that was not even close to fucking true.