PREVIEW:

Five kids under a streetlamp. Five deaf kids signing. Under the streetlamp because it was the only place they could see each other. In the dark they had no chance. In the dark there was absolutely nothing, nobody, no chance of chatting and hanging out. Deafening silence. Two in the morning. Everything’s easier than eating with your hands.

I recognised him from the other side of the street. He was in the same Bermuda shorts that looked like old curtains and he had the yellow reflector on his right shoe. I recognised him by the way he walked, by his fiesta swagger, like a handsome man who’d gone to seed, like Sánchez. I knew I was bound to find him here, by the vending machines, the only place to get food and drink at this time of night in this neighbourhood of office blocks. I watched him from the car. I’d parked on the pavement opposite and I’d been sitting there for ages, with the lights off and my feet on the dashboard.

He put in a coin. The machine swallowed it. Then he put in another one, then another, but the machine still gave him nothing in return. He didn’t seem bothered. He still had big hair, curly, like a vulture’s nest. After the fourth coin, the machine spat out a can. Sánchez leant his back against the icy surface of the glass, opened the ring pull and the sound echoed back over five long seconds from the five enormous Mayan temples of the Azca Complex.

I shouted.

“Sánchez.”

He turned round. I waved so he could see me. He took a long swig from the can whilst he looked at me; he didn’t move until he’d made up his mind then he came over, dragging his feet. He looked tired. It’s a thing these days, isn’t it? Being knackered and jumpy at the same time. Living with high blood pressure.

“You’ve got make-up on.” That was the first thing he said. Like he’d seen it all before.

“I’ve been at a party,” I said. I was still sitting in the driver’s seat. I didn’t want to get out of the car if I didn’t have to. “Some Colombians who are in town.”

“You never used to go to parties.”

“I’ve got make-up on because I’ve not slept for three days,” I lied.

“Not slept for three days, she says. Try five. Or a whole fortnight.” He was in a foul mood. His eyes were bloodshot, and he looked like he’d not had a shower for days. “A month. The nights go on, Nikki, on and on and on, it’s constant, noise from the fridge, noise from the street, it fucks me off, I feel it in bed, I hear cars and dogs and the girls down on the corner walking about, I even hear the filaments burning in the light bulbs.”

“Buy yourself an alarm clock. It’ll put you straight to sleep, I guarantee.”

“If I carry on like this, I’m going to end up doing smash and grabs at jewellers.”

He yawned. He took another swig from the can and swilled it around his mouth before swallowing.

“What are you up to these days?”

He didn’t answer me, just narrowed his eyes as if his mind was racing to come up with something to say. He could have looked properly sharp, like someone who’d walk into the sea in a cape. He had some money put away but in some moment of panic he’d decided he’d rather live as if every day was his last, at top speed, where everything real ended up going to shit.

“I rent out show flats.”

God, I love Madrid, I thought. We’re so good at making the most of leftovers. Off-cuts of meat, football stadiums. One day they’ll give us an international award for recycling, and we’ll see what we can turn that into.

“I’ll take you home,” I suggested.

“Which home.”

I opened the door so he could get in. He thought about it for a second or two. He looked both ways up the Castellana, at the zebra crossings on the Castellana, in rows one after the other, like a thousand lines of coke. He looked at the blurs of cars speeding past at this time of the morning. He got in. The seat was covered in bits of paper and notebooks and packets of cigarettes. I moved them to the back seat and found a dozen carefully stacked cardboard boxes. Sánchez threw the wrapper from his Twinkie on the floor and stuffed it down in one go.

He was still keeping himself going on plastic, on wrappers, on insulin spikes. He sat down next to me.

“Who’ve you nicked this heap of shit from?” he asked.

“Some deaf kid.”