Different things, I supposed, the small mysteries of failure. The thousand ways you can descend. The bonds of love that glued people in place – the mother, the father, the brother, the sister, the lover, the friends – had melted away from them, or maybe they had dissolved those ties themselves: soaked them in drink, or drugs or disappointments until finally there wasn’t even a thread left to hang on to. And then life becomes painful but simpler. You have nothing, you need everything, you have to work all day for the little something that will vanish again overnight.

Your feet hurt, you’re cold and your crumbling teeth are aching, and you have to think about that. You can sometimes blot it out, and the deeper stuff too, with a portable anaesthetic of your choice. There is more and less to manage at the same time, and all your negotiations are with strangers, which at some blurred point in the past became less wounding than the ones with friends.

Every day I walked past the same man on the way to the bus that took me home from work, and – with a tiny jab of nameless guilt, which I usually ignored – shrugged off his hopeless muttered lie of ‘spare some change, mate, for a cup of tea’. Funny how they always named the need for tea, as though it was the one confident English right no passer-by could decently deny.

But today I stopped and briefly took him in as he stood in the dingy doorway: the watery, expectant, pale blue eyes, the matted hair, the stubble and the loosely belted trousers. The grime-seamed, panhandling palm. He must only have been about thirty. I didn’t want to give him cash. It would hasten his wreckage. I nodded towards the fluorescent light of the convenience store.

‘Can I get you something from in there?’

‘I’d rather just have the money, mate.’

‘No, but I’ll get you something to eat from in there.’

He looked at me with a lurking truculence. Something was better than nothing.

‘Sandwich then, mate.’

Under the strip-lighting of the shop, I tried to assemble a package for him: a chicken sandwich, satsumas, a chocolate bar, some toothpaste and a toothbrush.

I handed him the thin plastic bag swaying with the weight of its contents. He peered into it with mild interest.

‘Thanks, mate,’ he said dully, like a child with a dud Christmas stocking. His eyes slid away. He would have preferred the cash, which could have bought him some crackle and pop and forgetting, rather than all this dreary nourishment and fluoridated dental care. Fair enough.