He was not asked what he wanted and the banter between the staff and the social worker did not include him. The clothes were from house clearances, or from the dead- They were chosen for warmth, because autumn was closing in and the air carried a spit of rain. Two pairs of trousers, three shirts, underclothes, socks, a brown-flecked overcoat that a stooping old man might have worn, an anorak, a sports jacket and a pair of bulging trainers were piled on the counter, paid for, then forced into the mouth of the rucksack.

They stopped at a supermarket. Milk, bread, margarine, a jar of coffee, a packet of teabags and a pile of chilled meals for one person were dropped into the basket. He had nothing to decide: the food was chosen for him, and the dusters, the toothpaste, the disposable razor blades and the shoe polish.

He was driven on.

He saw the wide smile, the flash of the teeth.

'Oh, don't thank me, don't bother to. Don't think of thanking me because you don't know yet where I'm taking you… There's a cop I know at Walworth Road who says, where I'm taking you, it's best not to go there unless you're inside a battle tank. It's what he says.'

Behind them was the street market that he was told was a den for pickpockets, and the little corner shop that had been robbed twelve times in the last twenty-four months, and then the estate loomed.

'Welcome to the Amersham. The contract architect came back five years after it was finished, walked round and saw what he had created. Then he drove home and topped himself, that's what they say.

Welcome to the Amersham. estate.'

A concrete edifice, his guide remarked, that was home to eleven thousand souls, and now him, towered through the windscreen on which the wipers worked hard. He could have asked his driver to stop, could have pushed himself up out of the car, taken the rucksack and emptied it out on to the back seat, could have walked away into the thickening rain. They came into the forest of the blocks from which high walkways branched. On the begging pitches, in the underpass and the dormitory of the hostel, there had been a clinging sense of camaraderie, and he knew that if he came on to the estate he would be without that comfort.