Hussein Hassan runs past the Queens Arms pub, built, bombed and rebuilt. Today a mess of shops line the western edge of the wide blacktop where a tollhouse charged two shillings for a six-horse coach and a pair of pennies for a horse or mule. Eight-year-old Hussein Hassan, born in Las Khorey, Somali city of legend where, while rebels attacked his father’s fort in 1492, watchful servants hid the infant prince, Gerad Ali Doble in the stinking hold of a dhow bound for Aden. The same year the pirate Colón wrought evil on the land he named Hispaniola. Ali Doble ‘the fire bringer’, for once he had attained his majority, it was he who brought back gunpowder and cannon from his exile among the Yemeni caliphs. Ali Doble, Warsangali chieftain whose ruined redstone citadel bakes beneath Somali skies on the edge of the city where Darod factory workers fleeing civil war cradled the new born Hussein Hassan, eight years, three months and seventeen days before he sprints past Raina Bechara and her sister-in-law Carla Taha as they walk past a Ladbrokes bookmaker’s with Carla’s eleven year old daughter, Fatima. Raina wearing a peach-coloured silk headscarf and black Dior sunglasses that make her resemble a fat, startled insect. She talks loudly in Arabic, angry that her uncle has overlooked her husband for promotion, choosing instead her brother, useless Khalil with his flat feet and lazy eye and God knows what else he forgot to give him. Carla nodding but not listening, her mind on her sick mother; an irregular heartbeat and water retention that makes her feet swell. A waft of Raina’s perfume bringing her back, so aggressive on the nose and she always wears so much of it. Fatima neither caring nor listening to brash, old fashioned Auntie Ray; watching instead the skinny boy running towards them.

Past the nineteen sixties telephone exchange on the eastern side of the street that was once a fire station, past the Islamic Centre that was once a picture palace, Hussein Hassan runs, bag swinging, his ten pound blue jeans from Peacock a blur, across the junction where the road named Kilburn Priory hooks behind the glass and steel Marriott Hotel. Here he runs full pelt into a stationary clown, an awful green-haired, white-faced clown who breaks from whatever reverie he was caught in, sneers down at the child through face paint and kohl, and the boy shits himself.