Thicker Than Water

‘Which block is Weston?’

Most of the boys seemed happy to stare me out, but one of them pointed. ‘Fourth along,’ he said, flicking his flax-blond hair out of his eyes with his thumb. He was as skinny as a whippet - a whippet that’s been on a low-fat diet for a while - and the nervous gesture made me notice that he had a grubby bandage wrapped around his hand. One around each hand, in fact. He was so pale that his skin looked like paper. His orange tee-shirt bore the enigmatic legend URBAN FREESTYLE.

I nodded, said thanks and turned to leave.

‘Eighth floor,’ the boy added, to my departing back.

I stopped and looked at him again.

‘What?’ I inquired.

The boy hesitated, looking confused and a little hunted. ‘The - place you wanted,’ he said. ‘Number 137. It’s on the eighth floor, right next door to where I . . .’ He trailed off into silence, frowning as he tried to remember what I’d actually said.

Some of the other lads glared at him. They clearly felt that giving information to casual strangers was a bad idea on general principle.

I couldn’t fault their thinking on that one. ‘Your turn, Bic,’ one of them said pointedly. He threw the ball hard at the blond kid, who just got his hands up in time to catch it. The conversation was over, and there was no point in pushing the point. I walked on across the pastel-coloured pavement, heading for the tower that he’d indicated.

When I looked back, twenty seconds or so later, the boys still hadn’t resumed their game: they were watching me out of sight, except for the blond boy who was staring down at the ball as he rubbed his bandaged hand against its surface.

He still looked unhappy about what had just happened. He’d clearly heard the number 137: I just hadn’t said it.

The miasma stabbed against the inside of my temples, suddenly agonisingly acute, then faded again just as abruptly into the background rasp that it had now become.

Up close, Weston Block was an impressive if unlovely structure, its coat of duck-egg green doing nothing to bring it into harmony with its surroundings.

There was a broad stairwell going up its side, leading to the first of the walkways a few storeys above my head. There were also double doors leading into a foyer with three lifts side by side, marked like the outer walls with many overlays of spray-painted graffiti. As it turned out, none of the lifts worked. There were interior stairs too, but they smelled heavily of mildew cut through with the sharper stink of urine.