Thomas searches for her, afraid he will find her, afraid he will not. The streets all seem to smell of her, peaches and Smoke; he sees her face in every girl who rushes past on her business. At dusk he returns to the church steps. Livia is already there, sitting on the topmost step, her arms wrapped around her knees, exhaustion, shame marking her wan features. She scrubbed them raw to rid them of his Soot. Spasms of Smoke keep darting out of her mouth, sudden retchings of black, each abrupt and violent, shaking her frame from head to toe. He climbs past her and sits upwind, his skin bumpy with fresh squalls of fever. A cold drizzle is falling, taunting them with the kind of proximity they resorted to during the night, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh. They ignore it and sit yards apart. Even so he is conscious of her Smoke; feels it reach across the gap and tug at his very bones. It is as though he were built to drink her sin.

London is a place where people touch.

Before, he had not understood the implications of this simple truth.

They sit and wait. Thomas’s fever has returned, makes a home within his joints; knuckles and knees tender with its ache. Down on the square, the market vendors are slowly packing up their wares, all but a dentist who remains at his stall, bent low over a lock-jawed patient, his tools a bucket and pliers scabby with old rust and paint. The tooth finally gives amongst an eruption of black savoured by both dentist and patient. Then blood is spat into the bucket and the dentist paid; the tooth thrown to a pack of passing dogs who fight over it with bristling furs.

ф

Half an hour later, Charlie’s angel reappears. It is very nearly dark. The man acts on Thomas like a magnet, drawing his anger, his confusion, his hope. He enters from the far side and walks the length of the market square. The last of the light catches him from the front and right, his shadow thrown behind and tilted at the top, where his chin dips to his shoulder. The longer Thomas watches him, the less he is certain that there is anything special about the man. He is as dirt- and Soot-stained as any other; more downtrodden than most. No halo illuminates his bluff and common features. Only: once again the man avoids all groups and conflagrations, walks solitary, never swayed by any cluster of people nor any cloud of drifting Smoke.