But you can read a lot from such a small amount of a person. Rightly or wrongly. Or maybe that is wrong to say. It’s not that you read, but you write. You take the tiniest thing you see, and that starts the story of them. The only thing that stops that is to know. For sure. The truths.

I see them clearly. In amongst the shanties and the stalls of the old canal beds. In amongst the shouts and shamming. A defiant little boy with his chest pushed out, trying to be bigger, walking along with the dog at his heels.

And the older brother. Tall and cowed as he is. Not that I have seen him on his feet. A frown I do not think will pass with the fever.

A boy who constantly opens and closes his fists, like he is lifting and letting go over and over again of a responsibility he doesn’t have any choice about.

I cannot think about him any other way than as an orphan . . .

Ah! What a time. The lovely stink of the drained canals. Floors from old pallets. Thrown away carpets we took from the emptied houses. Before they knocked them down to build the higher flats.

How we poured, so many of us, into the space. How we so colourfully flowed.

There is no other place he can come from, this boy.

The sound of vegetables being chopped. A radio in the background.

~

I misremembered. It is not that a child is found in the vegetable garden. It is that a child is taken in payment for the theft of rampion . . .

Or, Rapunzel, as they call it.

The child is taken away.

~

It is dark before my husband comes home.

He looks drawn and tired when he does. For once he is not carrying vegetables.

I did not find him, he says.

Did you think that you would?

I can tell that he did. He is that type of man.

Their dog ran off. They went after it, out of the city. He followed his little brother, I tell him.

He’s talking now? he asks.

When I place my hand on his head, he speaks less wildly, I say. This is what I have learnt.

He fell ill. He woke up. His brother was gone. He tried to keep going after him. And you found him in the garden.

I don’t know what to do, my husband says.

We care for the boy you did find, I say. There is no more.

Did they walk along the riverbed? he asks.

There is mud on his shoes and his clothes. There is nothing else like river mud.

All this way?

The walls thrum slightly as the helicopter passes again, carrying away containers from the abandoned shipping yard. Like a hornet carrying a grub.

They are built out of energy, children, I say. Even when they are ill. They are mainly no more than energy.