Spencer held the others mesmerised, a circus clown at home with an audience. He was down on one knee, animatedly describing to a circle of peers his last fuck.
I passed through garbage-fire gloom and sat on the grizzled river bank, smoking and sighing. It was raining again, the kind of rain that greases the streets like semen on sheets. A community of wretches is a community nonetheless. There was thirteen of us in The Basin, ten men and three women. People were usually brought in by someone already living here, though the women had all turned up as a group. They tended to stay like that as well. Right now, they were sat against one of the tunnels walls, sharing a can. I wondered if they grouped up as some kind of passive defense against the desires of the men around them. Truth be told, I think most of the men here had forgotten what sex was, and if any copulation happened, it was hidden and desperate.
The rain began to melt the clay of the bank, and it bled into the water like a gigantic wounded animal lying on its side. Looking back into the underpass was like looking down the throat of the animal, the trash cans glowing like sickly glistening tonsils, the silhouettes of people and boxes lining the mouth. I suppose the trains which rumbled through could be the slow and irregular heartbeat, but it’s not an animal, it’s just a stinking place under a bridge.
Josh Booker 