Therapy

to tell. He had a faint smear of gingery bristle on his chin. “I wasn’t asleep,” he said.
    “I’ve seen you sleeping here before,” I said. “Hop it.”
    “Why?” he said. “I’m not doin’ any harm.” He drew his knees up inside the sleeping-bag, as if to let me pass without stepping over him.
    “It’s private property,” I said.
    “Property is theft,” he said, with a sly sort of grin, as if he was trying me out.
    “Oh ho,” I said, covering my surprise with sarcasm, “a Marxist vagrant. What next?”
    “It weren’t Marx,” he said, “it was proud one.” Or that’s what it sounded like.
    “What proud one?” I said.
    His eyes seemed to go out of focus momentarily, and he shook his head in a dogged sort of way. “I dunno, but it weren’t Marx. I looked it up once.”
    “Anything wrong, sir?”
    I turned round. Blow me if there weren’t a couple of coppers standing there. They’d materialized as if in answer to an unspoken prayer. Except that I didn’t want them now. Or not yet. Not at that precise moment. I surprised in myself a strange reluctance to hand the youth over to the power of the law. I don’t suppose they would have done anything worse than move him on, but I didn’t have time to work that out. It was a split-second decision. “It’s alright, officer,” I said, to the one who had spoken to me. “I know this young man.” The young man himself had meanwhile scrambled to his feet and was busily rolling up his sleeping-bag.
    “You live here, do you, sir?” said the policeman. I produced my keys in an over-eager demonstration of ownership. The two-way cell radio clipped to the chest of the other policeman began to squawk and crackle with some message about a burglar alarm in Lisle Street, and after a few more words with me the two of them walked away in step.
    “Thanks,” said the youth.
    I looked at him, already regretting my decision. (“If you shop him you will regret it, if you don’t shop him you will regret it, shop him or don’t shop him, you will regret both... ”) I was strongly tempted to tell him to bugger off, sharpish, but, glancing up the street, I saw the two coppers eyeing me from the next corner. “I suppose you’d better come in for a few minutes,” I said.
    He looked at me suspiciously from under his hank of hair. “Yer not queer, are yer?” he said.
    “Good God, no,” I said. As we silently ascended in the lift, I realized why I hadn’t taken advantage of the miraculous appearance of the two policemen to get rid of him. It was that little phrase, “I looked it up,” that had thrown me momentarily off balance, and on to his side. Another looker-upper. It was as if I had encountered on my doorstep a younger, less privileged image of myself.
    “Nice,” he said approvingly, as I let him into the flat and switched on the lights. He went over to the window and looked down into the street. “Cor,” he said. “You can’t hardly hear the traffic.”
    “It’s double-glazed,” I said. “Look, I only invited you here to stop the police hassling you. I’ll give you a cup of tea, if you like “Ta,” he said, sitting down promptly on the sofa.
    “-I’ll give you a cup of tea, but that’s it, understand? Then you’re on your way, and I don’t want to see you here again, ever. All right?” He nodded, rather less emphatically than I could have wished, and took a tin of rolling tobacco out of his pocket. “And I’d rather you didn’t smoke, if you don’t mind,” I said.
    He sighed, and shrugged, and put the tin back in the pocket of his anorak. He was wearing the regulation kit of the young West End vagrant: quilted anorak, blue jeans, Doc Martens, plus a grubby fawn knitted scarf so long it dangled to his ankles. “Mind if I take this off?” he said, shrugging off the anorak without waiting for my permission. “It’s a bit warmer than I’m used to.” Without the artificial padding of the anorak, he looked thin and frail in a threadbare jersey out at the elbows. “Don’t use this place much, do yer?” he said. “Wherjer live the rest of the week?” I told him. “Oh, yeah, up north, ennit?” he said vaguely. “Wodjerneed two places for?”
    His inquisitiveness made me uneasy. To stem the flow of questions, I asked him some myself. His name is Grahame — with an “e”, he informed me, as if this mute suffix was a rare and aristocratic distinction. He comes from Dagenham, and has the kind of background you