Broken Homes

proud – I didn’t blame him. I would have been too.
    We came out at the garage level and Kevin led me to one of his two official garages, both of which he used for storing just about anything other than a car.
    ‘I’m doing up a nice semi in Thornton Heath ready for when they throw us out,’ he said. ‘Get away from this shit hole.’ He unlocked the padlock on his garage and threw it open to reveal stacks of boxes. ‘See anything you like?’
    Most of the boxes were small-ticket consumer items but I found a compact flatscreen TV with built-in digital which Kevin let me have for a ton now and a ton by the end of the week – a saving on the retail of about fifty per cent, not counting VAT. I didn’t ask him where it all came from, because he would have just told me it was a mystery.
    As Kevin locked up again, I noticed that there were signs that fresh tarmac had been laid down in the last couple of months. It looked like a narrow trench had been dug from the base of the tower to the garages and then filled in and resurfaced. In fact, it was trenches plural. And, although I couldn’t be certain, I was pretty sure that they matched the lines of fresh cement I’d seen inside.
    ‘What’s all that about?’ I asked Kevin.
    ‘Don’t know,’ said Kevin. ‘Something to do with electrics I think.’
    Afternoon tea was not a concept much practised in my household. After school I had tended to get fed according to my mum’s schedule, not mine, although my dad, if straight, could whip up a mean cheese on toast. In the Folly, tea was available on demand to all members named Thomas Nightingale – me and Lesley had to get our own. So without any clear guidance, I turned up at Jake Phillips’ front door at seven minutes past five.
    ‘Come in, come in,’ said Jake when he opened the door. ‘Lesley not with you?’
    ‘She’s out job hunting,’ I said.
    ‘It kills me,’ said Jake. ‘To see young people like you thrown on the scrap heap.’
    Jake lived in a two-bedroom flat with the same layout as mine and Lesley’s but it was obvious as soon as I walked in that he’d been there for decades, and that the only way Southwark Council were going to extract him was feet first.
    The narrow hallway was lined with framed photographs while the far end was dominated by a faux movie poster for Gone with the Wind starring Ronald Reagan sweeping Margaret Thatcher off her feet while a mushroom cloud bloomed behind them. She promised to follow him to the end of the world. He promised to organise it.
    ‘We can have tea, or would you prefer a beer?’ asked Jake.
    I took the beer which turned out to be something called Young’s Special London Ale. We chinked bottles in the kitchen and walked through to the living room. Unlike everyone else I’d ever met, Jake still had thick shag pile carpet in his flat. To my professionally trained eye, professionally trained by my mother that is, it looked worn but scrupulously clean – here was a man who shampooed his carpet regular. A rare individual. Two of the walls were covered floor to ceiling with pine and steel bracket bookshelves and, despite being jammed solid, the books had spilt over onto an antique gateleg table and were piled on the side tables that stood beside a pair of venerable green leather armchairs which would have fitted right in at the Folly. A third wall was dominated by a huge reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica – and in case you’re wondering, we did it at school in year nine as part of an integrated project on the Spanish Civil War.
    ‘Since it’s a nice day,’ he said, ‘why don’t we go out into the garden?’
    So we took our beers out through the patio doors and into his garden. The first thing I noticed was the fricking palm tree growing in the far corner. Its trunk, at least three metres high, curved over the end of the balcony so that its fronds framed the view over the Elephant and Castle and the fraudulent wind turbines of the Strata building opposite. The trenches at the top of the walls were planted with pink and yellow flowers and a cascade of honeysuckle that fell down to the impossible lawn that covered the floor of the balcony.
    I squatted down and dug my fingers into the grass and the soil underneath.
    ‘Welcome to how Skygarden was supposed to be,’ said Jake. ‘What old Erik Stromberg really intended.’
    Two red, blue and white striped deckchairs were propped up by the patio doors. We unfolded them on the lawn and, after a