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quiet. Waiting for the morning, for this night to be done and for it all to begin again.
    I stood to go and that’s when I saw the other light. Far away, up on the mountain. Just a lamp probably,hung on a tree, but strong. A low star speaking to those candles at my feet, like a beacon. I knew right away it was him. Up there for the night with his new followers. And I knew, too, that the lamp was only that – a lamp, to help them cook, wash, see. But as I walked away, because of everything else that had happened that day I knew it wasn’t just a lamp either, was it? It was like those candles, that light up there – a memory, a not-forgotten, a sign that somewhere at least things were still burning.
    I slept like a log that night. Slept like I’d never slept before, body sunk right through the mattress type of sleep. So first I knew about the new day was my phone kicking off somewhere under my clothes on the floor. Fumbling around, I found it and looked at its screen. It was my buttie Johnny over on Llewellyn street. I was late for band practice, that’s what he said. ‘Band Practice’. I had to laugh, we weren’t no band, at least not yet, not then. Johnny’d bought some drum kit up the valleys the week before, fifty quid for a mint set, never been used, ‘kept in towels the whole time butt,’ Johnny said. Anyway, as far as hewas concerned, that was enough. We’d be a band. Him, me and little Evs Bach. Fair dos, he’d had worse ideas, so I’d said I was up for it. He was still dead keen about the idea and I didn’t want to let him down so I climbed out of bed, threw on my clothes and made my way over to Llewellyn Street.
    At least, that’s where I’d thought I was going. To the same old Llewellyn Street I’d always known – one row of pebbledash, flat-face terraces facing up to the pillars of the Passover. But I wasn’t, was I? The way there might have been the same – same pavements, same streets, same alleyways and underpasses. But the destination, well, that both was and wasn’t the same, like the whole place had been pushed through the looking glass.
    I saw the cricket game first. They were playing it in the street, but slow, like their bones were made of lead. Young lads, a few girls and some older men too, bowling and batting right there on the tarmac. Then, as if that wasn’t surprise enough, I saw the other side of the street, the side that, ever since the Passover was built, hasn’t been a side for years. And that, well, thatstopped me in my tracks alright. To be honest, I thought I was having a flashback from a bad tab, until I realised that other people could see it too. And what could they see? Well, like I said, the other side of the street, there again, as if the concrete, bulldozers, cranes and trucks of the Passover had never been here at all. All of it was there, but ghosted. No walls as such, or roofs or windows, but the outlines of the houses were still there, along with their families inside them, watching telly, washing up, playing on the floors of their living rooms.
    Imagine if you’d taken an x-ray of a whole street, then coloured it in with bright washing on lines, people’s faces, rugs, carpets and radios. Well, that’s what it was like. A demolished street brought back to life, not with the bricks that had built it, but with the families who’d lived inside them, back home at last.
    I was still staring at that ghosted side of the street when I heard Johnny running up behind me, all panting and blathering.
    ‘It was Alfie, no lie now. It was him who done it. I swear it. You’ve gotta believe me butt.’
    I put my hands out, trying to calm him. ‘Alright, Johnny, alright. Easy now. Now, what you sayin’ ’bout Alfie?’
    ‘It was him. As made the other side of the street.’
    I looked back at the slow cricket game, a woman laying a table for dinner beside one of the fat pillars of the Passover, an old bloke reading his paper beside a fireplace, a kid building an Airfix