Therapy

against one wall and his feet against the other, and his head sunk on his chest. He looked young, with a pointed, foxy face and long, lank hair falling down over his eyes.
    I felt quite shocked to see him there, then angry. What a nerve! He was taking up the whole porch. It would be impossible to go in or out without stepping over him. Not that I wanted to go in or out any more that night, but one of the other residents might turn up, and in any case it lowered the tone of the property to have him camped there. I thought about going downstairs and telling him to push off, but I was already in pyjamas and I didn’t fancy confronting him in dressing-gown and slippers or alternatively going to the trouble of dressing myself again. I thought of phoning the police and asking them to move him on, but there’s so much serious crime in this part of London that I doubted whether they would be bothered to respond, and anyway they would want to know if I had already requested him to move on myself. I stood there, staring at the fuzzy black and white image, wishing that sound as well as vision could be activated from inside the flat on the entryphone, so that I could bark, “Hey, you! Piss off!” through the loudspeaker, and watch his reaction on the video screen. I smiled at the thought, then felt a bit of a bastard for smiling.
    These young people who beg and sleep rough on the streets of London, they bother me. They’re not like the tramps and winos who have always been with us, filthy and smelly and dressed in rags. The new vagrants are usually quite nicely clothed, in new-looking anoraks and jeans and Doc Martens, and they have thickly quilted sleeping bags that wouldn’t disgrace an Outward Bound course. And whereas the tramps skulk like insects in dark neglected places like under railway arches or beside rubbish tips, these youngsters choose shop doorways in brightly lit West End streets, or the staircases and passages of the Underground, so that you can’t avoid them. Their presence is like an accusation — but what are they accusing us of? Did we drive them onto the streets? They look so normal, so presentable, they ask you so politely if you have any change, that it’s hard to believe they couldn’t find shelter, and even work, if they really tried. Not in the West End, perhaps, but who says they have a right to a home in the West End? I have one, but I had to work for it.
    Thus and so went my self-justificatory interior monologue, as I went to bed and, eventually, to sleep. I woke at four and went for a pee. On my way back to bed I pressed the video button on the entryphone, and he was still there, curled up inside his sleeping-bag on the tiled floor of the porch, like a dog in its basket. A police car flashed past in the background, and I heard the strident blare of its siren through the double-glazed windows of the living-room, but the youth didn’t stir. When I looked again at half past seven this morning, he had gone.
     
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    Thursday afternoon. I’m writing this on the 5.10 from Euston. I meant to catch the 4.40, but my taxi got trapped in a huge traffic jam caused by a bomb alert in Centre Point. The police had cordoned off the intersection of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, and the traffic was backed up in all directions. I said to the cab-driver, “Who’s trying to blow up the building — the IRA or Prince Charles?” But he didn’t get the joke — or, more likely, he wasn’t amused. These bomb scares keep the tourists away and hurt his business.
     
    I dropped in on a rehearsal this morning, as is my usual practice on Thursdays. When The People Next Door was new and still finding its feet I used to attend rehearsals practically every day, but now it runs like a train (or like a train should run — this one has suddenly slowed to a crawl for some reason, and we haven’t even got to Watford Junction) and I just put in an appearance once a week to check that everything’s going smoothly, and maybe do a little fine-tuning on the script. Rehearsals are held in a converted church hall near Pimlico tube station, its floor marked out with lines corresponding to the studio set in Rummidge. Walking in there on a winter’s day would disabuse you of any illusion that television light entertainment is a glamorous profession. (I think that’s the first time I’ve ever used the word “disabuse”. I like it — it has a touch of class.) The brick walls are