Over on the east side of the street, Lana Toohey pushes her double buggy into the Primark clothing store. She hasn’t told Lex about the babies, despite chatting to him for four hours last night. Hasn’t told him about Rico who she met last week in Costa’s café when Dylan and Eloise were at nursery; Rico who roughhoused her in the café toilets like she asked him to, the sleaze thrilling her and only the fug of his BO ruining the moment. She doesn’t know that Lex is catfishing her with a photo he found of a graphic designer from Ontario. He wants another picture. She parks the buggy by a rack of long sleeved jumpers, flicks through her photo feed and sends a pair of photogenic breasts belonging to a Russian porn star culled from a website hosted in Lviv. Her phone buzzes. Rico. An aubergine emoji. She giggles and replies with a bath and some soap, then pushes the buggy to the back of the store to buy coats for the twins. The clown looks up at the elegant art deco façade of the building, announcing the date of its construction on a parapet. 1930. An upmarket drapers and a Lyon’s corner house filling the original floorspace. At the turn of the century, this was a simple terrace of shop fronts, one of them a post office, with flats above. Before the terrace, a scattering of freestanding workers’ cottages with small gardens on the edge of the Fulk Greville Howard estate. Centuries of bucolic tranquillity until carts loaded with barrows, shovels and sledgehammers arrived to flatten, clear, dig and build. Numberless lives lived in these long vanished homes, people he saw but never knew, whose comings and goings he witnessed. Men and women who met and fell in love, who screwed in overcrowded bedrooms and created life; straw-haired girls in grey-white smocks running barefoot along the street, boys throwing coins at the wall of the bank on Belsize Road while women laundered sheets and mended stockings. People who died of tuberculosis, cholera and the pox. No tombstones legible enough to read their names any more and no one alive to grieve them; few left who realise they ever lived. He tries to recall a face, anything to remind him of the families whose lives played out before they raised an emporium, clad it with white tiles and lit it with great lead glass windows. He stares at the building as if trying to peer into a pictogram. A father and his boy. Sweeps. The two of them returning home in the early evening, ragged and dirty, the man in a tall hat always carrying the child who was aged around six, too exhausted from his labours to walk. He’d seen the man when he was young, less lucky with his own father who beat him for dallying. They all die, he thinks, and tonight it’ll be his turn. No quiet creeping to the grave for him; he’ll make damn sure this is a night that no one forgets.