A Weasel in the East. (Weasel excerpt).

I was out on the scavenge, a long trawl up along the Barking creek, round the stumpy brown box buildings and across the A13. Past the sewage works, gas works, building works, all spat out and left hanging here by the city to the West.
I was resigned to my plod.
Tangy smells hung in the odd-coloured chemical sky. The sky was big here out of the city, you could see you were going nowhere.
I sat in the ankle-high foundations of the Abbey, eating my findings. Peace and quiet, just me and the serious drinkers. They'd get up and holler, and their dogs might get lary, but it was all just fart and bollocks. Nothing touched me out here in the cold Eastern borders.
I finished half of my second fruit loaf and flung out the rest to the waiting eye-on-me pigeons. I aimed the choicest crumbs at the raggedy squawk that hopped round the edge of the flock.
That, I reflected, was all that I had now: the comings and goings had all come and gone, and my only affinity now was with a broke-feathered pigeon.
I dragged myself off the bench and out of the grounds, dawdled back over the A13 under the streak coloured sky to my shithole at the end of the world. It was a dry drag to dawdle in a life never so empty as now, and perhaps I should just lie down on the road and disappear into the concrete, breathe the last of my substance out into the Eastern marshland industrial air.
They'd certainly done their work out this way, sucked the marrow out of the bones, made it safe. They wouldn't know a witch out here if she gave them the pox.
Maybe it was like this everywhere now.
On a good day I could kid myself it was all as it was, because there'd never been anything out here to be taken away.
The big sky turned the same trick as the Richmond green river, when me and Ralph had gone boating. It was so spacious here, every noise echoed in from away, and seagulls made the most of this spot, flying in from miles to shower their disconsolate caws down on me, disturbing my sludge-bed of memories.
Every day was a hundred years, time enough to watch clouds waft and wander their tricky patterns and formations on their epic journeys. The ones that came over from London, on their way to the sea, I wondered if there was anyone left, in there, to look up in the gaps, and see.
To the eye, my present dwelling place appeared clean and bare to the point of austerity. Well windowed and aligned on the path of the sun, it was well lit up in all it barren, sterile glory.
My nose, however, fed me a different line. The house stank of piss, it was steeped in it, and by noon on a good clear day, it kicked out.
This may have been why it still stood vacant - I thanked the mystery urinators for their sterling work ' but it wasn't a home and had never been, just a functional block for the clerks and their papers, checking the ships and lorries that fetched up here in the old days.
Something must have changed in me for I was out more than I used to be, trips up the Creek, into the Abbey, then scavenging in the town, usually when it was late, or on dead days.
But there were still those times when I would have to withdraw. And if the sun was high, and the house warmed up, then the stink would lay me low.
But if ever I got adventurous and the stink got too offensive I would take myself off to clamber around in the dead factories that lined the banks of the river-wide, far from town and its hard-bitten denizens.
The factories were cold no matter the weather, hangar sized spaces lidded by arcing girdered bird-roost roofs.
Clutter-filled breezeblock cells clung to the sides of these dead chambers and spilled their jumble guts down concrete stairs to fill long subterranean halls.
The cold air tasted metallic, different to out there, and preserved the factory sanctity; the creeping weeds that cracked the tarmac made no headway here, although a rare brave rabbit would dash over the floor raising puffs of grey dust in its wake before disappearing beneath lifeless dials and wires.
In this hallowed silence and graceful decay, I experienced momentary bouts of peace, and stillness of the head.