His cheeks puff out into a laugh and the wrinkles have a field day. ‘Billy Ben-Hur.’

‘Bloody hell, you’ve got a cheek.’ I’m quite surprised when I laugh as well.

‘What were you doing before? Before you tipped over.’

‘What?’ I don’t know, I don’t know. Don’t ask me that. Nothing. Everything. Saving my mother. Saving myself. ‘Nothing.’

‘I saw you. What were you doing? You on drugs?’

‘Of course not, I’m fifteen, mate. And I’m not stupid.’

I feel a bit bad then, because the guy clearly isn’t just high on life himself, and that big old bottle of whatever-it-is is right there in his hand.

‘I saw you.’

‘Yeah? Well, I can see you too, mate. What are you doing? What’s your story?’

And that’s just asking for it really, bloke like that.

So Billy Ben-Hur takes the load off on a patch of river grass and tells me his story. Real name William Bonheur, but forty years ago at university, when he makes it on to the wrestling team someone says his last name sounds like Ben-Hur. It’s not much of a stretch to the nickname that sees him through four years and ninety-one unbeaten bouts of university wrestling. Fast-forward thirty years later and, when he winds up on the street, the name makes a comeback.

‘To remind me of the fight,’ he says, and takes a long, slow swig from the bottle. ‘You win some, you lose some, but you always gotta roll the dice and stay in the fight.’ I don’t know what to say to that so I say nothing.

‘You got it made, girl, name like yours. Wolves are survivors.’ He puts the bottle between his feet and leans back against the pylon. ‘But they need their pack.’

He picks up the bottle again almost straight away and points to a moss-covered wall underneath the lowest part of the bridge. ‘See that wall over there? That’s my house, my car, my job, my marriage, everything. Took me close on ten years, but I got there. Pissed it all right up against that very wall.’ I lean forward and peer across to the wall, trying to see what he’s talking about. Looks like moss to me.

‘And you know what? I’d roll the dice and do it all again if you gave me half a chance.’ He takes another deep swig from the bottle then wipes his mouth. ‘That’s my story, little wolf. That’s who I am.’

The footsteps above our heads have subsided and the faint drumming feels a long, long way away. It makes the other sounds of the river louder now. The buzz of dragonflies, the sudden shout of a kid on the towpath, the words of a man I just met who I feel I’ve known for a million years. My own voice.

‘My mother tried to kill herself.’

45

Danny

The thing about spirals and ever-decreasing circles is that if you follow the rules, at some point you get to the middle. In our case, thanks to Jaz’s enlarged hippocampus and detailed record-keeping (and the fact that we’d passed three of my former workplaces in fifteen minutes), it became pretty clear we’d begun the approach to our middle. With no sign of Wolfie, that also meant we were approaching the failure of the plan, which, the soberer I became, seemed more and more inevitable.