And the street was empty. Tony was gone.

Michael blinked and looked around him, up and down the pavement. When he looked back, he saw the guard hobbling towards him, pressing a handkerchief to his face. He'd been hit.

'Where did he go?' the guard shouted at Michael, strands of spit between his lips. 'Where the fuck did he go?'

'I don't know!'

'Bastard!'

Michael tried to look at the guard's lip.

The guard ducked away from Michael's tender touch. He demanded, snarling, 'What's his name, where's he from?'

Michael did not even have to think. 'I've no idea. He just followed me.'

'Oh yeah. Just followed you, did he? If I press charges, mate, you'll bloody well have to remember.'

The guard pulled the handkerchief away and looked as if expecting to see something. He blinked. The handkerchief was clean, white and spotless.

This seemed to mollify him. 'You better watch the kind of person you pick up, mate.'

Then the guard turned and proudly, plumply, walked away. For all your arrogance, Michael thought, in five years' time you'll be bald and fat-arsed.

Michael stood in the rain for a few moments, catching his breath. What, he thought, was that all about? Finally he turned and walked up Chenies Street, mostly because he had no place else to go, and he began to cry, from a mix of fear, frustration, boredom. Christ! All he did was go to the sauna. He didn't need this, he really didn't. He looked up at the yellow London sky. There were no stars overhead, just light pollution, a million lamps drowning out signals from alien intelligences.

Michael lived in what estate agents called a mansion block: an old apartment house. It was covered in scaffolding, being repaired. He looked up at his flat and saw that no lights were on. Phil wasn't there again. So it would be round to Gigs again for a takeaway kebab and an evening alone. Involuntarily, Michael saw Tony's naked thighs, the ridges of muscle.