Read Risking It All for Free Online

the odds were Hari would pick up the receiver. I put it down without leaving a message.
     
    This in itself was enough to prevent me spending a good night. General conditions in the garage made doubly sure. I’d left the Calor Gas heater on low and could hear it hissing gently at me in the darkness, but even so, the temperature struggled to rise above freezing. The wind poked icy fingers through the cracks between wall and roof. They prodded at me maliciously if I showed signs of dropping off. The smell of oil and fuel from the ghost of the motor vehicle once kept here seemed stronger. There were scattering noises in the corners which I kept telling myself could not be mice, because Bonnie would’ve taken care of them. She was snoring happily at my feet. Halfway through the night it began to rain, and the noise on the corrugated roof was horrendous. I couldn’t live here much longer. I’d have to try the housing department again. I’d already put word out on the street that I was looking for a squat to share. Response so far had been zilch. It was discouraging in more than one way. Sharing a squat is a skill. You learn it, and if you don’t use it, you get rusty. I feared I’d become used to being on my own, even in the few months I’d had the flat. Heaven help me, even in my present less-than-perfect circumstances, the thought of sharing again worried me.
     
    Around three in the morning, just as I had finally fallen asleep, Bonnie growled and I awoke. I sat up with that sense of panic you get if you’ve not been sleeping well and something disturbs you. Bonnie was making a low, resonant, primitive sound. I’d got to know Bonnie’s growls. There was the one when we played tug-of-war with an old rag which was her make-believe-I’m-fierce growl. There was the tentative one when she wasn’t sure about something. Then there was the danger one, like now. I sat up and put out my hand to communicate with her. She was standing by my folding bed and I could feel the hackles raised on her neck.
     
    Running footsteps sounded in the access road outside the garages. They ran past my unit, then seemed to hesitate before turning and running back again. I could guess what was happening. This little roadway is a dead end, leading only to the garages. Someone was being chased, and had turned into the poorly lit entry only to find he couldn’t get any further and was obliged to run back. He could’ve been running from anything or anyone, a mugger or something quite different. Why he ran didn’t matter. He ran.
     
    If you live on the streets you see people running and you don’t ask why. You just get out of the way. You never see the pursuers. If they pass you within spitting distance, you don’t see them. Life on the streets requires a kind of blindness and deafness which can be switched on and off. It isn’t only street-dwellers who develop this. People who work at night – refuse collectors, street-washers and gully-emptiers, night-shift workers, tarts – they concentrate on what they’re doing, where they’re going, make sure no one is coming after them, and get the hell out of it if trouble blows up. Perhaps this runner had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong moment and realised it. He ran.
     
    He may have left it a fraction too late. I thought I heard voices in the distance, shouting. A car screeched nearby, an engine throbbed, was revved up, and the vehicle made off at speed.
     
    After that I lay there, dozing fitfully, to the sound of London waking up and starting a new day, echoing through the locked main doors. Newspaper delivery vans began to arrive. That meant Ganesh would be up and about. I crawled out of the sack and got dressed, which didn’t take long as I slept in most of my clothes for warmth. I pulled on my jacket, laced up my boots and, with Bonnie at heel, left through the back door and tramped across the yard towards the bright light of the shop.
     
    ‘You’re early,’ said Ganesh,