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city of saints run by sinners, that’s what the aunts used to say. Maybe they were right about that, he thought. The loading bays of the meat market were deserted. Just him and paper bags swirling in the gathering breeze.
    He wasn’t shocked by the devastation. How could he be? He had witnessed the bombardment of Caen. Waves of bombs had blasted that city until nothing was left and they had marched into the narrow rubble-choked streets, undercover of the dust and smoke, and the air was corrugated by the winds of fire, by the scream of falling masonry, and the pathetic cry of the invisible injured. The dead affected him less as war went on but the decimation of homes choked him. Hundreds of years of brick upon careful brick gone in minutes. And when civilians climbed out blinking and trembling from the cellars, gradually they began to clap and to cheer and it fuckin’ did his head in – was he supposed to take a bow? He hadn’t thought it at the time, of course, but he had afterwards. That was why his hands shook, he was sure of it. Everyone had a limit.
    He picked up his pace now and hurried on down past the hospital, down towards Old Bailey. He didn’t know what he was expecting to see but when he caught sight of the old pub on the corner and the grubby tenement next door, he felt dizzy, seasick almost. Something caught in his throat, something good, he knew it had to be because his eyes were stinging and his nose was snotting. That’s where he had spent his first eleven years, with his mum, of course. Two rooms for two people; it had been enough. And he wished he could have turned back the years on that fast-moving clock and told her that. He heard chatter and laughter inside and he stood by the window and peered in. No Mr and Mrs Betts tending bar, no Mr Toggs playing on the piano, no Iris, no Lilly with their grubby stories of sex and men. Sixteen years had passed and everyone he had known there was long gone. But he knew it wasn’t war that had taken them, simply life because that’s what it does. No, he wouldn’t go in, not that night. He closed his eyes and listened to the familiar sound of a train and a trolleybus rumble by.
    He walked aimlessly through the streets where he’d played as a kid, where he’d waited for the neighbourhood men to return from factories or pubs so he could latch on to them and imagine them as older brothers, and sometimes fathers. They were his lemon drop moments: sweet-sour moments that had made his mouth water, and later, his eyes too. For when light would fade and tea was called, those same men would prise him away like a bur and head inside to the light of their own families. And he would stand and watch through the windows the scene of this drama, sometimes for minutes, sometimes longer, and when time was called and the curtains were drawn, he would turn away gutted, embarrassed even, at the burning realisation of all he didn’t have. Of all he would never have. And those moments buried down into his legs and stopped him working right, for when he should have run he stayed put. And when he should have stayed put, he ran and the running felt good to a fatherless boy.
    Missy was the only person he had ever told about this and she said that moments like that make us stronger. An antigen , that’s what she used to call it, like an inoculation, to protect against the loneliness of the future. Missy said a lot of daft things, except the things she should have said and then she wasn’t there any more, and no one, he realised, had ever invented an antigen to protect him from that.
    He’d last seen her – Jesus, when was it? – autumn of ’39? Could it have been? Just come out of the Savoy, she had, all done up like a movie star with hair so perfectly waved and a waist so small you blinked you missed it. On her arm a man as flashy as a bracelet. When she saw him she beamed and shouted, Freddy! because she was the only one to call him that, and she unpeeled herself from