A tattooist and an empty store on the west side, a wig shop, a stationer’s and a dentist to the east. There were no rules against using public transport, but waiting at lights was intolerable. Walking, though ultimately slower, led to more opportunity. On a bus, he watched everything through a screen; outside he could smell the destitution, the fear, the avarice. He preferred to be among the shoeless and shillingless on the street than to steam past them in a charabanc with everyone glued to a phone or a freesheet.

In a cramped one bedroom flat above the dentist’s, Marcus Forster wearing a tweed jacket, corduroy trousers and sporting a fine Edwardian beard rummages through jigsaw pieces on his coffee table. He finished the last puzzle, five hundred pieces of a half-timbered thatched cottage in Shropshire and gave it back to the animal charity shop next door, and now he is working away at a thousand piece lighthouse in the Frisian Islands. His Times Atlas of the World informs him that the islands lie off the west coast of Denmark, Germany and Holland at a latitude of around 54º north, roughly level with Whitby. An atlas because Forster has no computer, nor even any internet; his two rooms cluttered with brown furniture, antiques, and oil paintings culled from charity shops. A grandfather clock keeps a serene beat as sirens and car horns pass on the street below. Fifty-year-old Marcus Forster who still calls his eighty-three-year-old mother “Mummy”, who eats supper and describes himself as a homosexual, never gay, who has no mobile phone and watches the five channels available on a television wired to a wall pokes around with his finger to find a piece of sky with at least one outie and two innies. A large ginger house cat, Mr Quivers purrs on the settee while Classic FM plays a Beethoven piano concerto by the Moscow RTV Symphony Orchestra on the nineteen sixties Bakelite radio which Forster calls his wireless. Above them, the ceiling has pock marks where Forster hits it with a broom handle during manic episodes, raging at the music played by the man upstairs who he hates. Forster who has never worked, waits for a call from his dealer on his landline. The HIV meds affect his libido, but it’s nothing that a puff or two of methamphetamine can’t put back in order. There. Now he needs two outies with a corner between them.