A soft hammering woke me up too early, from the flat above perhaps but who knows in this block where sound is coming from. I slept. Up, I noticed a parked police car and went out onto the balcony to see where the police were and to make sure, first off, they weren’t for Gary, below right. They wouldn’t be for Sarah, below. They were outside Caleeb’s, talking to a girl by the sounds of it on a garden chair beneath the canopy of the balcony. I hoped Caleeb wasn’t risking his court case against eviction by giving the landlord an excuse. A policeman noticed me and I went back in. From a reflection in the windows opposite I saw the two policemen were out by the gate at the top of the steps. Combining reflection with direct viewing, I observed them, masked, making notes on their pads and talking back to a black hooded figure who, coming forward, was a dark-skinned girl with a pony tail and front side ringlets without a mask. She exchanged fist bumps with a policeman before going off down Eton St.
I leant on the balcony wall for no apparent reason. Sarah hove into view on Towers Place and waved. I waved back and waited. She told me of the noise from Caleeb’s as his flat was trashed and that she, Gary too, had been involved by a girl crying rape who called the police. Caleeb in a towel asked for his keys back and pushed the girl. His neck and chest were scratched, consistent with the girl’s claim I considered. She wanted back in. “You don’t want back in to a rapist’s flat! I’m fed up with women being treated as victims on their say-so,” and trusted the police didn’t, as they hadn’t, without proof. “It’s his word against hers,” Sarah shrugged. “She’s mentally disabled. It’s the girl!” Sarah said sotto voce when Gary came out and went in by the back door to the block and through the stairwell. I wondered if he fucked her, they were in long enough and I couldn’t envisage either listening to the other for any length of time. “I’ll take a look out the front.” Gary and the girl were rounding on to Paradise Rd by Eton House. When Gary came back I asked “was it Claire?” a sex ex of his. “No! I had the same thought!”
I texted he had a penchant for Claires, and they for him. Nothing to do with him, he replied, he’d seen her into a taxi. ‘Did you pay for it!’ No. ‘She came back deliberately.’
John's space 