God, man, what does it take you to talk? Don't you understand when you're being helped? Did you fall that far?'

Before the hostel, he had been at the cardboard city in the underpasses of the Elephant and Castle junction. His own space had been a carton in which a twenty-eight-inch widescreen colour television had been packaged, and another that had held a stand-up fridge/freezer. He had begged during the day and drunk at night before sleeping, wrapped in the blanket of a man who had not woken one morning, had been dead when the first commuters had tripped past. Malachy had fallen that far. He had queued for soup; he had shied away from the young policemen who patrolled at night; he had stayed clear of the junkies. Some days he had walked on the bridge beyond the station and had looked down into the muddy swirl of the river, but had not had the courage to lever himself up on to the wall. If he had, and his thin, fleshless fingers had not been able to take the weight, it would have ended.

'When I saw those shoes, stuck out from under your blanket, half covered over with the cardboard, I said,

"Sure as God walks this earth, Ivanhoe Manners, this man can be given a hand up." With me, my friend, you get one chance, one chance alone. You fuck that chance and you don't see me back. Plenty of others to spend my time on. You live under the cardboard, you beg and you drink, and your future is an ambulance in the morning and a space left in an underpass. You want that, you can have it, but the warden told me that since you went into the hostel, there was no smell of drink on you – but it's still one chance with me, one chance alone. I can't do it for you.'

What he possessed were the empty olive-green rucksack, which had been filled with old newspapers to make a pillow in the underpass, the fibre dog-tags that listed his name, number, religion and blood group, the clothes on his back, and the shoes.