‘Where do you live?’ I woke up from what I was thinking and the man was saying we’d gone too far, he didn’t believe us. He stood up from the wall he’d been leaning on and his hand was shaking. I reached out to hold his sleeve and steady him, but he shook me off, ‘You don’t belong here. Why don’t you just go back to where you came from?’

A bus came and people were walking past, looking. So I left him there and walked home.

I didn’t know why all the tramps were coming to live at the bottom of our street and round by the railway arches. As I turned the corner, some of them were starting to bed down in the doorway of the factory. The Guy was gone and there were just scraps of newspaper and cardboard left on the ground. The man with one leg wasn’t there. He was gone, and lots more had come – red and black and oily and grey, with bruised faces. People said they looked like a pack of dogs, that they could smell people were moving out so they were moving in. But I could see they were just looking for somewhere to sleep. A woman with heavy bags stopped and crossed into the road to go by them. She looked weighed down, her shoulders were hunched – it was Danny’s mum, Mrs Keogh. She stopped her bags again in the road between the cars for a moment and was asking them something. One man shook his head, and Mrs Keogh nodded and walked on. It was all right to talk to them, they belonged in the street. ‘They’re angels in disguise,’ my mum said, you had to be good to them. But my dad said they were like the dead, you had to be careful to give them something if you could.

One of the tramps got up to pee against the wall. His face had gone deep red, he had swollen hands and he was losing his hair. His coat was torn at the back and hanging down, stiff with dirt and trailing like he couldn’t help it any more. I looked at him longer than I should have.

‘What d’you want?’ The old man with the grey beard Mrs Keogh spoke to was picking up cigarette butts over the road. I shook my head because he was drunk, and I shouldn’t talk to strangers. He was stooped over and keeping his eyes down, searching the dirt on the pavement, ‘I’m looking for money,’ he said. His voice was raspy and thick, and he was closed to anything else – he wasn’t seeing me.

I looked away.