Broken Homes

area and toilets attached. They’re usually as charmless and as welcoming as a Job Centre, but I have some good memories of the one at my parents’ estate. Particularly my thirteenth birthday when I managed my first proper snog with Samantha Peel who was a year above me and strangely keen. Who knows where it might have gone if my mum hadn’t descended like the wrath of god and broken it up. Not long after her throw down with my most recent girlfriend, my mum pointedly informed me that Samantha was now a qualified dental nurse, married with two kids and living in a terrace in Palmers Green. I’m not sure what she expected me to do with that information.
    The Skygarden TRA meeting was about as exciting as you’d imagine, although much better attended than I expected. At least twenty to thirty people sat on the formed plastic chairs in a big ragged circle. Betsy and Kevin were there, which surprised me, and Jake Phillips was chair, which didn’t. He was a good chair too, working briskly through the agenda. We were introduced as new tenants and were welcomed and stared at curiously – especially Lesley. A nervous Somali man reported that Southwark Housing Services had promised faithfully that the lift repair contractors would look at the broken lift in the next week. There were groans and catcalls from the audience.
    ‘Remember it’s important to log all these problems,’ said Jake. ‘That way you can give them chapter and verse when they try to stall you.’
    A few people nodded – this was obviously familiar advice. There were some reports on rubbish collection but nothing on the central issue of preserving the tower itself. Me and Lesley listened intently and made notes of names and faces, the better to have them sent for reeducation later. During the planning phase of this operation, or more precisely what we discussed after dinner at the Folly, we had considered the possibility that the Faceless Man might have his own agents planted in the tower.
    ‘It’s not like me and Lesley are inconspicuous,’ I’d said.
    Nightingale had winced, as he always does, at my incorrect use of the accusative pronoun but I think I’m beginning to wear him down.
    ‘We’re not really the ones hiding anything,’ Lesley had said. ‘If they spot us and react, then we have a better chance of spotting them back. If they don’t panic they’re still going to have to alter their plans on the fly, and that’ll also make them easier to spot. Meanwhile, we’ll be poking around in their business and they won’t be able to do anything about it.’
    I couldn’t help thinking of Patrick Mulkern cooking from the inside as his bones caught fire.
    ‘And if they come after us?’ I’d asked.
    ‘Then Frank and I will deal with them,’ Nightingale had said.
    If the Faceless Man did have people in place, then I figured they’d have to attend the TRA meetings in case the residents threatened to accidentally disrupt their plans. But they wouldn’t want to be obvious. So I concentrated my attention on people who’d managed to stay awake during the meeting but hadn’t made a contribution themselves.
    I mentally earmarked several candidates, but top of my list were a pale young man with a floppy haircut who looked like an off-duty Goth and a second white guy, middle aged with short brown hair, who wore a tweed jacket with leather trim and looked like he collected stamps or built cathedrals out of matchsticks. I thought it unlikely that the off-duty Goth would attend without an ulterior motive, and that the stamp collector would sit through the meeting without giving his opinion.
    The last item on the agenda was a resolution to see if we, that’s the TRA, could drum up some media interest in the fact that the Council was paying County Gard more to secure the empty flats than it would cost to refurbish them for new tenants.
    This was carried unanimously and the meeting broke up.
    Because we only had the one bit of comfy furniture, we both ended up on the sofa drinking Special Brew and watching TV. Well, I say TV. Actually it was our laptop propped up on a kitchen chair playing the BBC iPlayer, and it worked pretty well apart from the frequent stops for buffering caused by the fact that we were pirating WiFi from someone who’d failed to stick a password on their router and the signal was weak.
    ‘I may be from a small town,’ said Lesley. ‘But didn’t that seem just a little bit too sociable for the inner city?’
    I knew