Gerald Seymour: Rat Run

The supplier further diluted the purity of the heroin with flour, chalk or washing powder, made more divisions and traded with dealers, the street gangs who controlled a small area of territory in a country town, a provincial city or in the capital. The supplier took his share.

The dealers sold on the street, but only after further dilution. They were the last in line and their cash rewards were as meagre as those of the mountain farmers. The dealers had the addicts begging them for wraps – tonnage reduced down to a single gram, enough for a day's hit. No cash, no sale. Without money the addict was shut out as a customer.

Thieving, begging, mugging, stealing were the only ways the addict could feed the need.

On a housing estate in south-east London, the trail marked out for one little share of Afghanistan's poppy harvest came to an end.

Malachy knew her life story, and more. He had been led into each cranny of her existence. He sat opposite Mrs Mildred Johnson and drank tea poured through a strainer that caught most of the leaves, a present from a distant relative on her wedding day. He ate ham and cucumber sandwiches, her late husband's favourite filling for his lunch when he'd driven a double-decker bus in London.

Not expected to talk, only to listen, he occasionally nodded and tried to be attentive. He knew her life story because the same mixture of anecdote and memory was served up each fortnight, but he never showed signs of boredom or irritation at the repetition. He would be there for two hours. She had a small carriage clock with a tinkling chime – a present from her nephew, Tony – and at four o'clock on the first and third Thursday in the month the knock would come on the wall, and at six o'clock, without ceremony, and always the refusal that he should wash up the cups, saucers and plates, when the hour was struck, he would be told that it was time for her to dress to go out to bingo. He was then dismissed.

He knew she was seventy-four. She had been widowed twelve years back after thirty-nine years of marriage. Her husband, Phil, had left no money and she survived on the state's meagre generosity. Her elder brother, Graham, and her sister-in-law, Hettie, were dead. Her only living relative was her nephew, Graham and Hettie's son, Tony – something important in the police', and she'd snort.

He thought she must spend the first three hours of each day scrubbing, cleaning, dusting her one-bedroomed flat. It was spotless. If a crumb from a sandwich fell from his mouth, Malachy was always careful, immediately, to pick it off his trousers so that it should not fall to the carpet.

Her first married home, when she was a school-dinner lady, had been in a terrace that had been demolished to make way for the Amersham. She, Phil and the budgerigar had moved into the first block to be completed thirty-two years ago. After his death she had been transferred to block nine, level three, flat fourteen. However bad it became, she said each fortnight, she was not leaving the Amersham. She had stayed on, refusing to cut and run, while all her friends and long-time neighbours had either died or left.

The nephew, Tony – and she did a good imitation of the whip of his voice – had alternately nagged and pleaded with her to quit, even to come and live with his family. She had refused… She liked to tell that story. Tony had paid for the grille gate: three hundred pounds, even though the fire people at the council had warned that a locked grille gate made a potential death-trap for the elderly. She was staying on.

To entertain Malachy to tea, and he reckoned it one of the reasons he was asked on those two Thursdays a month, she wore every item of jewellery she possessed. Her fingers were ablaze with rings, her wrists with bracelets, her throat with chains and a Christian cross, and he thought that if she had been able to plug into the lobes more than a single pair of earrings she would have. He assumed they were kept in a box under her bed for just these occasions. She would not have worn them outside because she was street-wise. She had told him: she never took money with her that she did not need to spend when she went to the outdoor market stalls. She only went to the bingo on a Thursday night with Dawn, from flat fifteen. She read the weekly paper, and sometimes over tea with Malachy she would recite the reporting on the most violent crime on the Amersham. He had been listening again to the story of the last coach outing of the Pensioners' Association to Brighton, four months ago, when she changed her tack abruptly:

'You want to know what Tony says you are?'

'I don't think it's important/ He shrugged but he could feel the cold at his back and his hand shook. The last tepid tea slopped on to his lap.

'Tony says you're a loser. He's cruel, Tony is. What Tony says is that you're a loser, Malachy, and a failure.'

'I expect in his job he has to make evaluations – probably the right judgement most of the time,'

Malachy said quietly, simply He had not spoken to Tony, the nephew, since the first day. He had kept his distance, had stayed behind his locked door.

'What happened in your life to bring you down here? Must have been something awful. You don't belong with us. Something awful, worse, an earthquake.' She seemed to struggle for the words, and the abrasive independence that was her hallmark wavered. 'Tony says you're a waste of space and I'm not to spend time with you… Was it something I couldn't understand, like a catastrophe?'

He said, 'It's nobody's business but mine. I… '

The clock chimed. He did not wait for the final stroke of six. He was up, out of his chair, and scurrying for the door. He didn't thank her for the tea or the sandwiches. He thought he would be dissected with Dawn that evening at the bingo – and when the next knock came on the common wall, on a Thursday, he would ignore it. He closed her front door behind him, fastened the gate and ran next door to his own refuge.

With the lock turned, the chain across and the bolt up, he sat on the floor and the darkness blanketed him. He did not know that, outside on the walkways and in the alleys, shadows gathered and searched for the price of a wrap of brown to feed a needle.

'I can't come, Millie. I got the flu, pain where I didn't know pain was. I'm sorry.'

Dawn was tall, would once have been beautiful. She had the ebony skin of wet coal, was from Nigeria, and cleaned Whitehall offices. Perhaps her generosity was used, or perhaps Mildred Johnson truly regarded her as a friend – but never as an equal. Her one son was in the merchant marine, a deck-hand for a Panamanian-registered company, and he never came home. Dawn minded her neighbour, and was occasionally thanked for it.

She was in her dressing gown. 'I tell you, just to come from my bed, get myself to the door and your door, that was agony. I mean it.'

They went to the Tenants' Association evenings and on the Pensioners' Association outings and sat beside each other at the Senior Citizens' Christmas Lunch.

They were together on shopping trips and at the East Street stall market. She was with Millie on one Sunday a month when they went on the bus to the cemetery where Phil's ashes were buried. Together, once a week at the Cypriot cafe, they splashed out on pie and chips and milky tea. Dawn was always there if Millie was ill and cared for her. She had been told that everything in the box under Millie's bed was left in the will to her, not the nephew's stuck-up woman. She saw annoyance spread on the slight face below her own.

'Well, that's it, then.'

Dawn croaked, 'I'm sorry, Millie, but I'm really sick.

I'm going back to bed. I can't help it.'

'I didn't say you could.'

'Get the man, him…' Dawn gestured feebly to the next door on the level three walkway. 'Get him to walk you – or don't go.'