Goldsmiths - University of London

Ossie arrived at the beginning of the term with a woman who said she was his auntie. She was charming, courtly indeed, addressing me with elaborate respect and laughing a lot. Ossie, scrubbed and smart then, was silent, looked down at the carpet, didn't seem to want to shake my hand. Didn't speak except to mumble a response in his own language to the auntie. He was a top student in our country, she said. He had very good grades. He is staying with me till his mother comes shortly. She had proof of address and his mother would be bringing over his birth certificate.

Since then we haven't seen her and Ossie wanders into school at about eight in the morning looking like he's slept behind the bins. Then he got in trouble last week for stealing from Daniel's packed lunch. Actually, given his generous encumbrance of flesh, Daniel could do with eating a little less packed lunch or maybe even cutting it out altogether and walking to school rather than being driven by his mother (who, God help us, is actually called Jocasta) in her big silver whatsername car that looks like it was made in a giant jelly mould. Of course I didn't say that and listened while she rehearsed her outrage. She was keen, stridently so, to know what I was going to do about it. I can't remember what I said but I can remember what I thought. I'm worried that one day soon the stuff I think while I'm talking my emollient talk will start spilling out. As Bob says somewhere:

If my thought dreams could be seen

They'd probably put my head in a guillotine

Since the Daniel incident I've given Ossie a banana and a piece of bread in the morning. He eats with single minded concentration. This boy knows about hunger in a way that I don't. Come lunchtime he always has seconds and at the end of the day eats again in the after-school club.

One of the parents tells me that she sees him wandering about the estate. She says she's worried about him, he seems so alone and vulnerable. She thinks he has to hang around till his auntie comes home. Why hasn't he got a key and why, as I suspect, doesn't he get to eat in the evening or wash in the morning? The auntie gave us a list of numbers but they're all useless so before I call the S.S. in the morning and fill in one of their interminable questionnaires, I've need to make this visit.

Voltaire Point and its fellow stalagmite towers must once have been a Martian colony. You know that because it couldn't have been designed by a human. Eons ago the Martians all died out in a terrible plague that turned them into piss. The ozone stench of their residue and the strange electric daubings of their forgotten language on the stairwells and passageways are their ghosts. Earthlings now inhabit the burrows of their dwelling units and some wag in the People's Republic of Lambeth in its glorious heyday decided to rename them after eighteenth century philosophes and radicals. 'Voltaire' is a better joke than its neighbours 'Danton' or 'Saint-Simon' because he said 'cultivate your garden'. A good spot of irony that on the nineteenth floor, which is where I'm headed.

The journey up in the metal coffin lift is interesting in that as the rest of you ascends, your stomach remains below. The hallway when the doors exhale is dark. One of the lights is broken, the other fits spasmodically. No knocker on the door of 96 so I have to bang on it like a debt collector. I hear movement from within, a television, someone shouting. The knock is ignored. This is the point where I always check my address card to see if I've got the right place. I know I'm going to knock again, only really loudly and it would not be nice if it was the wrong door. I am right and I do knock. The television stays on – it's someone exploring their sexuality on East Enders (an activity seeming to necessarily require volume) but the shouter stops and I hear someone coming to the other side of the door. They don't open it, they linger there; a shadow across the spy-hole and then nothing. I can feel their presence through the door. I knock again. The letter box is pushed open and a warm human smell drifts through it.

"Yes?" says the doorkeeper.

I explain who I am and why I've come.

The voice apologizes for my non-admittance and explains that it's not her house. Ossie is OK. His auntie will be back this evening. She will come and see me in the morning. I am thanked for my trouble. In the morning she will come. I ask to please make sure that she gets the message. I know that this will happen because behind this door, this bit of wood, is Ossie's auntie. It's her I'm talking to but I can't work out how to call her a liar. I call out goodnight. I'm told goodnight and thank you. In the morning she will come.

I go back to the lift. My irritation is beginning to get the better of me and when the lift light stays blinking on at the ninth floor, the “fuck” I shout echoes loudly round the tattered hallway. I start to walk down the stairs.

Halfway down, I'm in a German expressionist movie. I'm just turning the corner from the tenth to the ninth floor, when there's this huge elongated shadow floating on the wall, a great curved head with a pointy cap. I turn the corner and standing outside the lift, which is jammed open, is standard mugger from central casting. We have the Captain Oates style polar explorer coat, the unlaced boots, the shades and the baseball cap. He looks up at me and I down at him and he says, "Got a cigarette?"

"No," I reply and start down one more stair.

"You got money, then" he says flatly. This is not a question. Clearly he transacts business in installments.

Now you must understand that I am already in a terrible mood. I'm fed up with a day which has filled me with heaviness. I'm annoyed with her upstairs and her lying to me through the letter box. I'm generally upset about Voltaire Point and I'm hungry, really very hungry and tired. So him with his sabotaging the lift and his menacing routine sends me right into one.

"No, I'm not giving you any money. Get out of my way." I sort of spit this out.

He tenses and reaches inside the tent-like coat. Safe to assume, even at this height, that he's not going for the Kendal Mint Cake. His gesture, like that of the matador, is emblematic. He is going for the blade.

This sends me mental. "What the fuck have you got in there, your sausage? You imbecile prick. Get out of my fucking way." I'm yelling this stuff so hard my throat is hurting and at the same time I'm jabbing my finger in his face. I can do this because I'm still a few steps above him, although he is in fact bigger than me.

He backs away, raises his arm above his face and says, "Alright man, safe…safe."

"I'll give you safe; I'll kick your fucking head in. Get out of my way!" The last word is screamed as I push past him.

A strange thing happens. He decomposes. I don't mean corpse rot. I mean the careful composition of his demeanour and clothes into an icon becomes separated. He is a frightened boy in a baggy coat and a silly hat with cheap sunglasses falling off his face.

I continue down the stars and out into the night. All the time I'm muttering and fizzing to myself like an old firework. Bournemouth style words like 'outrage' are spattered like cake crumbs from my mouth.

At the top of Fitzalan Street, my legs stop working properly and I have to sit down on a wall. A weariness has come upon me as completely as being suddenly covered in a sheet. Then I start to shake and realize that my bowels, if not my legs, are ordering me to go home now. The last few yards to the house are painful. I've become an old man.

I open the door, thankfully the house is empty. The children are away and the lodgers are out drinking. I just make it to the toilet and void all that is inside me. I climb into bed, shoes off but coat still on, pull over the duvet and sleep.

An alternative piece of recent history in a nightmare brings me to startled wakefulness in the half light of the small hours, the rain drumming against the glass.