Page Found On A Tube Station Platform

alive.

-‘Where is it then?’ the words crept through his beard.
-‘Where’s what?’
I was trying to get the tuna from the corner of the tin. I needed to concentrate: the tin looked as though it had been opened with a claw hammer. I doubted we’d find that in the skip. But you never knew. There! I held the chicken of the sea aloft in triumph. It only looked a little green, and anyway, how good does tinned tuna smell at the best of times?

-’Where is it?’ more urgently this time.
-‘Does it matter, really?’ I asked.

Malefactor seemed to ponder this. He picked something living out of his beard, eyed it suspiciously and swallowed it whole.

-‘No.’ He said succinctly and lay his head on the bicycle seat at the far end of the skip. It’s an odd name, I suppose. A nom de rue, in all probability. We all have them: our birth certificate entries long forgotten or discarded as of little use below the benefit line. I go by Ulysses myself, I just like the sound of it. Mal - as he didn’t prefer to be called - was an unlovely sleeper, even by the standards I have grown used to. In the gaps between snoring, vast spit bubbles formed, inflated and burst in a fragrant spray from his mouth. I measured one at a handspan once. What? You think I’d pick up a broken ruler when food is what we need?

If you lived like this food would be all you thought about. Unless, like Mal, all you thought about was alcohol. I’d assumed our brief conversation was about a bottle he thought he’d glimpsed amongst the bricks, bike and bad food in our current abode. Didn’t you know? People live in these. Brits call them skips, the yanks call them dumpsters. And we are the Dumpster People. It’s the rain you see. That and the cold. It’s not so bad: you don’t even notice the smell, eventually.

I went through Mal’s pockets. A military medal, some string and a conker. The string and conker were new. I’d ask him for a game later. Thing is, Mal had been one of us since before dumpsters existed, and I doubt he’d had a coherent conversation in twenty years. He certainly never had one with me. I spotted a soggy cigarette. No, I didn’t have a lighter, still don’t, point of fact. I’ve chewed tobacco for years. I don’t doubt it doesn’t taste the same as the product sold for the purpose. But we are not choosers.

A thin slit of light leaked between the rubber of the dumpster lid and the non-descript alloy of the sides. Morning. Or daylight, anyway. It was probably time to move. Before the massive wagons came. Best to be well out of the way. I decided to wake Mal. One day I wouldn’t. The non-sequiturs would get to me in the end.

-‘I am not worthy of being happy,’ he announced, letting out a cannonade of a fart.
-‘Ok, Mal, come on, lets go!’

I pulled him erect by his skinny arm and we stepped blinking into the light behind Sainsburys’. Shoppers turned away, averting their gaze.

-‘What shall we do today Mal? You decide.’
I used to do this just for a laugh, just to see what the answer would be.
-‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ he replied.
-‘You don’t know then? Ok, let’s go to the park, it’s summer. Let’s see what people throw away, eh?’

Malefactor turned to me, the wall-eye as disconcerting as ever,
-‘The possible ranks higher than the actual.’
And he spat out a tooth. I reflected that maybe it does, for some people. It wasn’t raining. That was good. People would be outside, snacking, picnic-ing at lunchtime. What people waste! As always people gave us a wide berth on the pavement. Maybe they thought homelessness was catching. Maybe it is. All of us lived somewhere once, even Malefactor. A policeman accosted us as we took a break on our trek to the park. We were standing in an Oxfam doorway.

-‘Move on please, Gentlemen.’
-‘We’re modelling the clothes,’ I said.

Malefactor kicked the policeman’s shin, shouting: