Broken Homes

most of the people on my estate. Although, that said, mine was a bit smaller than the Skygarden proper.
    ‘This is not a normal estate,’ I said. ‘The council probably offered to rehouse anyone who wanted to leave. These are the people that either liked it here or are too stubborn to change.’
    ‘In America I heard they come round with cake,’ said Lesley.
    ‘I bet they don’t in New York,’ I said.
    A flurry of rain struck the window panes.
    ‘What do you think Jake would say if he knew we were taking down names?’
    ‘He’d love it,’ I said. ‘After all these years the secret police are finally taking an interest.’
    Toby, who seemed to have adapted rapidly to the idea that we weren’t going home, jumped up into the gap between us and made himself comfortable.
    ‘So what do we do tomorrow?’ asked Lesley.
    ‘Tomorrow,’ I said, scratching Toby’s head, ‘we have a good sniff around.’

12
Sky’s Garden
    I woke up early to bright sunshine pouring through the patio doors. I made myself a cup of instant coffee and stepped out onto the balcony to drink it. Our floor was high enough to overlook the blocks and see all the way out across the grey-green smear of southeast London to the green belt beyond Croydon. The balcony really was ridiculously huge, with unnecessarily thick parapets that had mysterious trough-shaped depressions along their tops – built-in window boxes I decided in the end. I was high enough for the air to be as fresh as it can get in London, the traffic was a muted rumble in the distance and somewhere nearby a bird was singing.
    Despite the sun, the wind was too chilly to stand out there in my underwear so I went back inside and wrestled myself in and out of the tiny shower retrofitted into the bathroom. I stuck my head round Lesley’s door to ask if she wanted to go check out the garden with me, but she threw a pillow at my head.
    I told Toby it was time for walkies but he was already waiting by the front door.
    Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It’s not your garden, it’s not a park – it’s a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer’s plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness. It was also, in the case of Skygarden, strangely hard to access.
    Me and Toby first went down to the lower ground floor, where we’d unpacked the van the day before, and did a full circuit of the base of the tower before we realised that there was no access from there. The whole circumference was lined with garages topped with a fence with not even a ladder to get you up to the greenery. Half the garages were sealed with more of the County Gard’s shiny steel doors – Southwark Council’s reluctance to reallocate locked garages to residents had been a major grievance at the TRA meeting.
    I remembered the drive in through the culvert and figured you’d have to walk practically the entire distance back to the Walworth Road before you reached ground level. Rather than slog all the way there, me and Toby jogged up the first flight of stairs to the ground floor and checked the elevated walkways. A third of the way along the one leading to Heygate Road there was a ramp spiralling down into the green. I almost missed it because it was overshadowed by one of the big plane trees. You practically had to duck under a branch to walk down it.
    Toby cautiously stayed close to my heel as we descended. There was a gravel path winding away through the hummocks and random slopes that landscape designers like to litter their designs with. The path was poorly maintained, the gravel scattered and wearing thin. A couple of times I had to step over places where giant roots had rumpled the path out of existence. The sun was well over the top of the housing blocks now, the light tinged with green and falling on secondary growths of tall skinny trees with silver bark and bushy things that I’m sure Nightingale could have identified for me – at length – had he been there.
    But even I can recognise cherry blossom trees when they are white and pink as candyfloss.
    Unless they were peach blossom, of course.
    The, probably, cherry trees lined one side of what had obviously been a children’s play area before the council had removed all the play equipment – presumably to stop children playing on it.
    Toby growled and I stopped to see what he was looking at.
    A white girl was watching us from across the