The Finale

The piece ran at seven o’clock on the Sunday morning and I read it standing at a bus stop on Camberwell Church Street with a knife roll on my shoulder, because I had left my house at ten to seven and I was not going to read it at home.

Nine hundred and forty words minus three sentences. His name on it. No photograph, which he had insisted on.

I read it twice and then I put the phone in my pocket and got the 36 to Bermondsey and did not cry, because there were forty-one things to do before noon and because I have a rule about crying on buses that I have kept since I was twenty-four.

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A hundred and twenty covers in a railway arch.

Arch fourteen took eighty on the new plan; the production had taken arch thirteen next door for the overflow and put…