Thicker Than Water

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"The hallway was only three strides long. At the other end of it, instead of doors leading to a living room or bedroom, there were stairs going down. I’d come across this sort of design before, when I’d lived in a council block off the Barking Relief Road: in the building trade it’s called vertical herringbone. Instead of having all the rooms for each flat laid out on a given floor of the building, you tessellate them in three dimensions: so you can have your door on the eighth floor, like Kenny, and the rest of your flat on the seventh - or if you’re unlucky, the seventh and eighth and ninth, depending on how awkward the space is and how ingenious the builders have been in not wasting any.

Most people I know who’ve experienced it hate it because it means that your bedroom can be right up against someone else’s den - their TV blaring away on the other side of a thin sheet of plasterboard while you’re counting sheep with less and less conviction.

I went down the stairs, which led directly into Kenny’s living room.

I was seeing it in the light from a lamp on the walkway immediately outside the window, because the curtains were half-open. I crossed over and closed them before turning on the light.

Nothing much here, either: an ageing three-piece, an aquarium in which a rainbow fish and a few neon tetras circled, a bookcase that held only a dozen or so books, a magazine rack stuffed to bursting with old copies of TV Quick, and a huge widescreen TV. I searched perfunctorily, then more thoroughly, looking under cushions and down the backs of chairs.

Nothing of a remotely personal nature surfaced, and a fortiori nothing that gave me the slightest idea of what Kenny had been trying to tell me: assuming - and I was feeling less certain of this now than I was when I’d walked out of the Uxbridge Road lock-up - that he’d been trying to tell me anything at all.

Only one other door out of the room, and it led to a second hall from which all the other rooms opened off. The first one I opened was a bathroom, decorated in light and dark blue with a striking missing-tile motif.

The second wa S Th. Ts a bedroom: large double bed, unmade; wardrobe and vanity table, the latter suspiciously bare; a cross hanging on the wall over the bed, which made me think - involuntarily and with a grimace - of my mum and dad’s room back in Walton, where the crucified Christ stared down on all their goings and comings. More than enough to give you functional impotence, in my opinion.