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in and build over it. Or maybe just above it, instead, leaving it to solidify beneath: mythic and forgotten.
    That night, as always, there were a few shapes beneath thepillars of the freeway, sheltering. A dozen ghosts of Tom Joad, slumped around fires flickering in gigantic, rusted drums, casting hunched shadows over graffiti and fractured rock. The skin of the concrete was coming away in places, like the wallpaper in an abandoned house, revealing layers of older graffiti underneath. Beneath the surface of the city, like so many of the people who lived and worked there, everything was shabby and untended. After the comfort of the police station, it felt like coming home – but maybe that was just wishful thinking. Everybody likes to feel like an outsider at heart, and you can feel that way pretty fucking easily walking along under a road-bridge, but it’s an illusion. They can still hook you up whenever they want to, and then drop you back when they’re done. You’re still their fish, in their pond. It’s all a matter of social physics.
    It was a twenty minute walk back along the canal, but I did it in forty. I was thinking about a lot of things – although not in any focused way: rather, I was letting my emotions and feelings wash over me, wave after wave. Sometimes, it’s difficult to separate out the threads that have led to you feeling a certain way, and all you can do is wallow in it: the same way that you can often only taste the end meal, never the individual ingredients. So that’s what I did now, and my life tasted black to me: as ruined and tatty as the underside of the freeway; and as dankly unpleasant as the water beside me. A while ago, there was Claire, and the fact of my affair with her soured my search for Amy, which I’d pretty much dedicated my life to ever since she went missing. That was four months ago.
    I’ve always been big on the grand, meaningless gesture, and so at one point I stopped on the edge of the canal and took everything in like a deep breath. The flecked, golden M of the moon’s reflection in the water, spotted and shattered by rainfall. The glow at the horizon, and the black, starlessexpanse of the city to one side, and then Uptown above it. The slight rush of air. The sound of the rain on the water, and on the path, and on me. And I whispered
I love you, Amy
so quietly that I hardly said it at all.
    A meaningless gesture, though. They always seemed to work that much better in the movies, with soaring music and audience identification, but never so well in real life. I listened to the same sounds afterwards, looked at the same things, and nothing had changed. And it didn’t make me feel any better, either, because with everything that had happened tonight it felt like a lie.
    The rain was getting in my eyes by the time I arrived back at my house, pooling there. Stinging slightly. Clouds sponsored by Domestos and Imperial Leather; air sponsored by FreeZee. Even moving my body made me feel cold, and I was shivering as I got my keys out of my pocket. For all my stoic bullshit, I was only human. I wanted to feel independent and tough, of course, but also – a little bit more than that – I wanted a towel.
    The house seemed quiet as I closed the door. Quiet and contained. Nothing, as it turned out, could have been further from the truth.
    ‘Don’t move.’
    It was a man’s voice. I heard the sound of a safety being clicked off.
    I stopped immediately, and then started shivering.
    ‘“Freeze” might be more appropriate,’ I said.
    A towel was flung at me from the living room.
    ‘Here. Dry yourself off.’
    ‘Thanks.’
    The guy stepped out as I was doing so, pointing a gun at me rather casually. He was dressed too neatly to be a burglar: I could see a nice, black suit underneath his beige overcoat,which was spotted darker brown in places with rain that had yet to dry. He looked like Dick Tracy without the hat, except his face was pock-marked and his hair receded to behind