It was very hot, a windless and humid heat that left the exhausted streets hazed with dust and clogged with litter. The leaves turned brown and drooped from motionless branches. Their sticky exudations coated the cars and attracted a further coating of dirt, so the fuming traffic seemed composed of endless furred metallic segments, like some great worm dug out of the earth, and left exposed and stewing under the white sun. The traffic was worse than I had ever known it. The transport strikes had become so frequent that they ran into one another, and no one ever knew whether it was worth plunging into the suffocating Underground to try for a tube, or if it was better to stand outside in the heat, gazing down the lines of gridlocked cars in the hope that a bus might materialise in the grimy distance. The shortest car journeys became voyages of endurance that might extend to an hour or longer, and if you tried to walk anywhere the soles of your shoes stuck to the smeared pavements and the sun fried the top of your head.

The heat didn’t engender any sense of lassitude, though. Instead, the whole city seemed to simmer with rage and aggression. As I sat in the car, trying to get to or from the Works, I listened to the radio news reports of street violence breaking out in Brixton and Homerton and Goldhawk Road. Whenever I set out on foot, even if I was only going as far as the high street, people pushed and jostled each other on the pavements as if they would shove the next person to cross their path straight into the gutter. Crowds of shiny, heat-reddened faces surged past, and there was a mingled smell of sweat and desperation in the air. Anger seemed to gather in clouds in the doorways and to seep from the very cracks in the brickwork until a miasma of threat hung everywhere.

Down by the canal, all along the towpath, there were gangs of kids circling on bikes and dully taunting one another, and sleeping dossers stretched out like corpses in the rank weeds. There were even jams of boats, waiting their turn for the locks, loaded with sun-scorched people who had come out in search of tranquil water and were enraged to find only more confusion. Boomboxes competed to send up the loudest, most distorted snatches of music.

I hurried along beside the oil-slicked water, head down to avoid making eye-contact with anyone, stepping over empty cans and spilled fast-food cartons. Under the bridges, in the brief bands of shade where dripping water echoed, there was an illusion of coolness before the sun struck me full in the face again.

For the first time in my life I felt afraid of London, of my own place.

Jack started spending more and more of his days at Audrey’s.