‘Well,’ Mary said, lying on her back with her arms stretched out, ‘let’s go out with Charlotte tonight. She will need cheering up I should think.’

‘Maybe we could all go to the cinema?’

‘Mmm. That’s a good idea.’

‘Okay. ‘Bye.’ He turned and opened the bedroom door.

‘Finn,’ Mary called out as he was about to close it. He poked his head back in the room and looked at her. She was sitting up in the bed clutching the sheet. ‘It was nice to sleep with you again,’ she smiled. ‘I missed you.’

Later, Mary got up and had a bath then went downstairs to the kitchen. Although it was still relatively early, half past eight, Charlotte had been out and was sitting at the kitchen table reading a newspaper. Mary made coffee.

‘I always have nightmares after I get evicted,’ said Charlotte rubbing her eyes. ‘I dream about big white men who smash down my door and come after me with sledgehammers. It’s not like they just want to evict me, they want to kill me as well as smash up the flat. It is as though they are punishing me for having the audacity to do something on my own. Yesterday I made sure that I was ready to go by the time they arrived. I like them to have to watch me leave, so they know I have offered some kind of resistance, however feeble. It makes me feel better somehow.’

‘I couldn’t wait for them, I don’t think,’ Mary said. ‘It would be too frightening, too much like waiting for the executioner or something. And I couldn’t bear to see them smash the flat. My sink, my bathtub, my windows; I’d feel like they were attacking me personally.’

‘Yeah, I know what you mean but I feel better when I see it happen. Otherwise it’s so difficult to believe. Why would anyone want to wreck a house? Besides, I need to feel I have a home somewhere, you know,  even if it is under siege.’

‘It’s not so much the idea of “Home” that I like,’ said Mary. ‘It’s more basic than that. Shelter. Territory.’

‘No,’ said Charlotte, shaking her head as she sipped her coffee. ‘For me it is definitely “Home” that I need. I never feel like I fit in anywhere else.’

‘Basically,’ said Mary, ‘I think we all want to be home¬owners but without having to buy the house. We’re house-stealers somehow…’

‘I have never stolen anybody’s house — nobody wants these bloody wrecks except us.’

‘Yes, but that’s not what I mean. It’s like we pretend to be homeowners — we knock down walls and do the garden and generally behave as though the houses are ours, outraged when anyone says anything to the contrary… Anyway, have you ever thought about going back to St Vincent?’

‘Back to St Vincent? No, I don’t really remember ever having been there anyway. St Vincent is like a folk memory to me, something I know only through my family. It’s their home, I suppose, not mine.’

The two women finished their coffee and got ready to go out. Mary locked the door and they set off across Vauxhall Spring Gardens, the patch of open land between Mary’s house and Kennington Lane. The Spring Gardens are a particularly windy and barren example of post-war urban planning blight which local charities and the borough council had made sporadic and unsuccessful attempts at improving and beautifying. They planted trees which failed to grow, encouraged small businesses to renovate their shops beneath the railway arches without success, and hired landscapers who built hillocks and pathways that failed to attract either picnickers, walkers, or children. The Spring Gardens seemed to refuse modification. The wind whipped across them in the winter, while the odd murder took place under the cover of night and the noise of the trains.

A colony of tramps lived at the far end, opposite Mary’s house. They socialised around large fires built out of rubbish and rubber tyres, arguing and drinking cider from the nearby off-licence. Not the kind of place where one wanted to wan¬der alone late at night, although Mary often strode across it, unafraid, on her way home from the Underground. She viewed all this from her bedroom window - the flowerless, peopleless green bordered by council estates, the backs of local shops and the garage, Kennington Lane and the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, the railway arches stretching between her house and the Thames Vauxhall City Farm, a community initiative which served as home to a couple of goats, pigs and ducks, stood out as a spot of brightness to the left and beyond these local landmarks lay the rest of Vauxhall, winding south to Kennington and Stockwell.

Before these modern developments, a network of tene¬ments built for workers in the late 1800s had stood on the Spring Gardens. Mary read somewhere that they had been knocked down after the last war, the narrow streets full of children and laundry making way for open, empty space. Mary’s house was one of the few survivors from that era and it was surrounded by the monumental blocks of council flats built in the 1930s and the later, post-war tower block monstrosities. Vauxhall is like a lexicon of public housing fashions, ravished by architects and their draftsmen’s hallu¬cinations, misconceived from the first foundation stone.

Mary had also read that further back in history, two hundred years or more - Vauxhall is nothing if not old — the green was the site of the Royal Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. From the time of the Restoration, 1660, until the end of the last season, 1859, a permanent summer-long fair¬ground offering every sort of entertainment available resided there. Fancy-dress balls frequently took place in the rococo splendour of the gardens: one night, in 1786, a jubilee was held and sixty-one thousand people attended in costume. Eventually, the area began to run down and mid-way through the nineteenth century the owners were bankrupted and the gardens, by then considerably lowered in reputation, were closed. Mary thought Vauxhall had probably been rather quiet ever since.

The two women walked down South Lambeth Road, past the park which was ripe with late summer flowers. Old men, and men who looked old, lay sprawled at regular intervals on the grass, snoring and mumbling in an alcoholic haze. Beyond the trees people were playing tennis, and in the distance the children’s playgroup kicked footballs around. It was a warm morning.

They cut across the parking lot of a large supermarket and through the back entrance into Nine Elms New Covent Garden, the fruit and vegetable wholesale market and depot for Southern England. Produce comes to Nine Elms from all over Europe — convoys of lorries transport the peaks of the EEC food mountains there. Dodging the lorries and forklifts converging and diverging on the site, Charlotte and Mary began a tour of the market’s bins and rubbish heaps. They maintained a constant lookout for half-decent produce and the security patrol.

Once, not long before, Mary had been stopped by a security guard. He had snuck up behind her in a quiet three-wheel vehicle. Unrolling his window he shouted at her whilst restraining the Alsatian he had with him. ‘Put that back!’

‘But it’s been thrown away,’ answered Mary. ‘No one wants it and it will just go to waste.’

‘Put it back, I said. Do you want to be arrested? You are stealing that rubbish, it’s the property of Nine Elms Market.’

‘But, I’m not hurting anybody,’ said Mary.

‘Hurting is not the issue here, young lady, and, besides, that food is not fit for human habitation,’ he added trium¬phantly. ‘Put it down and I’ll give you five minutes to clear out.’

So Mary dropped the box of mushrooms and fled. The next time she came she was more cautious.

A lot of people frequent the bins of New Covent Garden; Mary had seen women with children and nuns from a local Catholic hostel and, on one occasion, she had spotted a group of Buddhist monks sorting through the discarded boxes. She wondered at the time what the security guard would have done if he had noticed them.

‘Look,’ said Charlotte suddenly, ‘there’s a whole box of avocados.’

‘Are they mushy?’

‘No, not bad at all,’ she said, picking one up. ‘Let’s take them. We’ll have avocado dip before the cinema tonight.’

That evening when Finn arrived Mary presented him with a huge bowl of guacamole. Smiling, he scooped some up with a tortilla chip and said, ‘Where did you get all the avocados from?’

‘Ahh,’ Mary said, ‘picked them up cheap somewhere.’

Finn took a bite. ‘Picked them up cheap?’ Swallowing and frowning he said, ‘You don’t still go to Nine Elms, do you?’ Mary nodded apologetically. ‘Oh, my God,’ exclaimed Finn, ‘that’s disgusting. Oh Jesus, Mary, I’ve never understood why you can’t shop like ordinary people. Ugh, I wish I hadn’t eaten that.’

‘You are such a puritan, Finn. It’s a matter of economics.’

‘I’m not a bloody Puritan, I’m Catholic for Christ’s sake, I just think it’s disgusting to eat other people’s rubbish.’

‘It’s not other people’s rubbish, it’s come straight off a lorry from Spain or wherever.’

‘Why did they throw the things away then? There must be something wrong with them.’

‘There’s something wrong with the lorry drivers, not the avocados.’

‘Besides,’ interrupted Charlotte, ‘they put out the nice vegetables when they see me coming, I’m sure.’

‘Right,’ said Finn, grimacing. ‘Just like they send in the nice bailiffs when they know it’s you they’re evicting.’

Charlotte and Mary continued to eat the dip and when the bowl was scraped clean, they went off to the cinema with a hungry Finn in tow. He sulked behind his dark glasses, and thought of the popcorn he would buy at the cinema. After¬wards on the bus back to Mary’s house they agreed the film had no redeeming features. It seemed that few films did any more. Finn claimed this was because all culture was American now, obsessed with teenagers and money.

‘Why are you so against the Americans?’ asked Charlotte.

‘Because I’m a Canadian. While American kids learn Amer¬ican history in school, Canadian children are taught Anti-American history: “How we kept the Yankee Imperialists from dominating our country, lessons one to one hundred.”’

‘You make it sound like you come from Central America or something,’ Charlotte said dismissively. While they argued Mary stared out of the window at the Thames. The view from Vauxhall Bridge was as industrial and grimy as ever. The moon hung between the chimneys of Battersea Power Station. Mary remarked to herself silently that the same moon had hung over the Romans while they practised their ablutions in her garden and this thought reassured her.

At home while Charlotte was upstairs in the bathroom Finn said to Mary, ‘So, what are you up to now?’

‘Going to bed probably, unless anything good is on the television.’

‘Oh yeah, going to bed with anyone in particular?’

‘I was thinking about inviting you, seeing you’re here anyway.’

‘Well, when you’ve thought about it for long enough, ask me.’

‘Okay, I will,’ replied Mary.

‘Okay,’ replied Finn.