I was back in Auckland Street and I wasn’t in school, I was running away. The leaves were brown on the trees by the flats and on the ground, there was frost in the air and white patches in the shadows. This time it was because I wasn’t feeling well, but I still wasn’t in school. You had to be in school to be safe. I turned away from the main road in case my dad came back from night work and saw me. Going round by the Vauxhall Tavern, I followed the wall of arches under the railway. They echoed when you walked into them, long brick tunnels that felt cold and dark so I only went in when there were lots of us. An ambulance was parked up by the entrance to the second one, with its back doors open and no one there. Its lights were on and I could see the long bed inside, but it wasn’t making a sound, just flashing. As I got nearer, there was a man sitting on the ground under the arch with his back to the wall, groaning in slow bursts that stopped but then went on echoing in the tunnel. The ambulance men were there leaning over a jumble of bags and blankets. I couldn’t see the man because he had his hands over his face. They were black with dirt. A police car was parked inside the tunnel on the other side of the road, but no one was getting out because it was cold and the smoke from the exhaust pipe was misting up in the dark. I watched as one of the men from the ambulance cut up the blankets with some scissors.

At first I thought that’s why the man on the ground was crying, they were cutting up his things. But there was somebody there under the blankets, because the ambulance man was cutting away hair from where it was stuck to the pavement and lifting the head up which flopped back when he let it go. The other ambulance man helped him lift the person up and I saw it was a woman – her head fell back and her long hair came away, leaving a shadow stuck to the ground. She was stiff with cold as they brought her out the tunnel to the ambulance and that’s when two policemen came out their car and walked over to the man who was groaning. There was an icy drip seeping down the brick wall on to the pavement where he was sitting. He was getting wet. The police were helping the man pick up his things and stand, but he groaned and fell over sideways on to the ground, and the policemen were wondering what to do. That’s when they saw me and one of them came over and grabbed me by the arm of my duffel coat.

‘Gotcha!’ he said.

Underneath the Arches