She doesn’t want to look at him, but she needs to know where he is. She lifts her eyeline. He hasn’t followed her across the road, thank God. But he’s still staring. And then he shouts, ‘I told you I’d be back, didn’t I?’

Chapter 15

Chapter 15

Mark

It felt good, watching her run away, petrified.

After all, it’s not right that she can just strut down the street without a care in the world, while Jon is in some funeral home stinking of embalming fluid, and he’s freezing his nuts off under a bush on Clapham Common.

He wants to do more, go further, but it’s hard to think straight when he’s hungry and cold most of the time, and constantly knackered. When Mark first started sleeping on the common, he had Jon to look out for him. Veteran rough sleeper with a lion-shaped heart. Without Jon’s protection, it’s not the cold that wakes him up every five minutes, it’s his imagination running riot. Expecting a gang of kids to turn up and give him a kicking, or some psychopath setting him on fire.

At least he’s off the common as of last night, thank God, and back to having four walls to protect him. He’d worried that the chunky new padlocks at the back and front entrances of the squat might prove to be a permanent problem, but then he got lucky. He’d been at the day centre on Thursday and got talking to a guy who turned out to own a set of bolt cutters. In exchange for a quart of vodka and the address of Jon’s dealer (Jon wrote it down for him once, a kind of insurance policy) the guy had offered to lend them to Mark. Mark had waited on the common until two this morning, then walked to the squat and slipped down the adjacent alleyway. He snapped the back door chain on his first attempt. Bingo.

Mark moves a bit further up the hill. Brookhill Road is long and straight, so it’s easy to keep her in his sights. After their exchange, the woman ran off and hid behind some mums pushing buggies. But they soon veered off down one of the side roads so she’s on her own again now, scurrying back in the direction she came. He wonders if his presence means she’s feeling the same insipid dread that has crept over him every night since Jon died; he hopes so.