When the car had gone he felt relieved, as if, like a costume, the heaviness of disguise was lifted from his shoulders. He was home. He hadn’t felt at home when Griff was there. It had been like seeing it through glass. Now it struck him. He walked back to the place where the alley ended, and stood for a while, with the sounds of the streets and planes overhead, and the distant trains, and metal doors, the levels all mixed into the specific soundtrack of his past. Inside the huge brick building somebody banged a snare drum and a fast beat started, then stopped with a kick-boom to the bass. He watched some people going into the basement, to find the vinyl and comic books. He must have spent months of his life down there, sifting through boxes – when he was younger, trying to nick stuff; when he was older, helping out. He felt a helpless, disarmed love, and sadness. He walked out into the sunshine, looking at the scrappy random reality of it, being itself. It was a little breathing space for small endeavours. Of course it would go. Everything went. Like Battersea Power Station before it, a place like that was marked for destruction. If not now, sometime. There would always be someone waiting to take anywhere that had been left behind, and turn it into money. There was no point in being sentimental. He leaned against a wall and watched the people going by, and the girl cooking the curry in the wok. She’d been joined by a friend who had propped up a sign saying ‘vegan’. She smiled at Dan. He didn’t like white girls with braids. It was just a place, like any place; people buying and selling stuff, it wasn’t holy, it wasn’t pure, just shrunken, weaker versions of Griff. Small-time commercialism or big-time, there wasn’t a difference. It was all bullshit. Vegan food. Yoga studios and craft beer. Galleries for local artists who couldn’t get their work shown in the real world. The Bussey had given him that, but it had not been a beginning, just a spotlight on his insignificance. Jesus. Luxury flats were too good for it. Luxury flats and that flagrant market-stall holder’s call: 30 per cent affordable housing! That would never get built, for a start. They’d swap it out to another development, trade it or delay it, or cry poor when it came to building. It didn’t make any difference which side you were on, it was all just bullshit. But he had met Bea there.