Read How the Dead Live (Factory 3) for Free Online Page A

homeless, made invisible in their misery by the frozen night, were folk that in my work I knew much too well; the ruins of their youth framed theirshrieks. They screamed and robbed each other for any money or drug that would release them from their rags and bed of cement, sang, droned and wandered through these lost parts of the city for as long as hell lasted for them, and the embarrassed or absent eyes of passers-by seemed to me far worse than any well-bred laughter or liberal music heard from the snow and rain behind elegant ground-floor blinds.
    What maddened me sometimes with my work at A14 was that I could not get any justice for these people until they were dead. These university drop-outs, these mad barefoot beauties that had been turned away from home, who staggered down the streets with plastic bags filled with old newspapers against the cold – wrongo’s, druggo’s, folk of every age, colour and past, they all had that despair in common that made them gabble out their raging dreams in any shelter they could find. They screamed at each other in Battersea, moaned over their empty cider bottles in Vauxhall, not having the loot for a night in Rowton House, their faces the colour of rotten-stucco under the glare of the white lights at Waterloo Bridge and wreathed in the diesel fumes of the forty-ton fruit trucks that pounded up from Kent to Nine Elms all night long. In the day you could see them, white, faded and stained after such nights in winter; I saw them at the morning round-up at the Factory, waiting in various moods to be taken for sentencing at Great Marlborough Street – the thin, crazy faces, strange noses, eyes, hands rendered noble by madness and hunger, the rusty punctures in their arms, their whiplash tongues and then, later, the flat, sullen grief of their meaningless statements to the magistrate. And still the politicians blag serenely on, as though poverty, since they have no policy for it, didn’t exist.
    Yet no murder is worse to find than a body dead of cold against a door.

5
     
    It was a long time since I had been in any villages or small towns; London hasn’t spared its own. Not that it made any difference. Where I drove into Thornhill it looked just like London. There were the same council estates, sprayed-on graffiti, closed-down factories and padlocked gates; there was also the same collection of boasting Rastas and white youths with Mohican trims leaning against dark walls, furtively drawing on anything that could be smoked behind a cupped hand. The pubs had emptied, their contents draining noisily away towards the Quikchik at the corner; I might as well have been in Tooting, except that there wasn’t the city beyond and all round me that I was used to, only the empty country. I continued to drive down what was left of a seventeenth-century main street, and noticed many charming old seventeenth-century phenomena occurring around me. Five whites were chasing an Asian under the amused gaze of a pub sign called the Jolly Sailor, and a group of Angels whipped past me on seven-fifties, each with a dotty little bat in pink jeans up behind him – yes, it was almost like home.
    I got to two hotels, Quayntewayes and the Saxon Arms, both built of brand-new brick, whatever the gold Elizabethan lettering said over their front doors; each stared their brightly lit windows into the other’s plate-glass eyes from across the street. Fat men in their fifties, dressed as farmers only without a speck of mud on them, backed carefully out of five-door Mercedes estate cars. They wore tweed hats, pheasant feathers in the bands and all – Christ, I thought, it’ll be gaiters, a pair of Holland and Holland guns and shooting-sticks next. I heard them all roaring with laughter and they looked well pissed. I slowed and watched them elbowing their way through folk on the pavement. They’re thekind of people I love to watch through narrowed eyes – no class, too much money and too much noise. Red as beef in