Atherton Gardens

He checked his watch; it was 6pm. He had been walking for two hours. His stomach growled. He was starving and cold. Between two tower blocks to the north, the sun was dipping low, casting long black shadows. The sky looked bleak and threatening. A wind was starting to pick up; curling yellowed newspapers in little eddies around the empty entrance ways of the buildings. He then felt the first few spits of rain. A storm was coming in. His purloined overcoat would provide little cover. Despite the rising sense of dread at being lost in a storm in a veritable shit hole, he tried to calm himself. A storm would hamper the authorities' search. Witnesses were hard to come by when the wet set in.

He passed a giant slab of concrete jutting up from the parkland where it had violently been embedded. Peering up, he saw a huge cavity in the side of a building where it had come loose and crashed to the ground. Now it just lay there. Weeds were growing up through the cracks in its surface, covering the buckled metal framework exposed beneath. No effort made to clean it up or to repair the naked section of building that remained. He could see the shadows of people moving around in the shell of the room. They were tending a small fire, feeding it foam sections of a smashed-up couch. Their shadows rose and fell in the dim light.

He passed an overturned shopping trolley. Two of its wheels had been wrenched off and its wire frame was being slowly corroded by rust. In the middle distance he saw a children's playground. The jungle gym lay on their side in a distorted mockery of its original intent - a twisting mass of metalwork. Several rungs rose up from the ground as though making one last attempt to regain their former structure before abandoning the idea and relegating themselves to a fate of damp soil and weeds.

Icy water started to drip down his neck, and run down his spine, sending chills to his core. Shivering, he pulled his overcoat more tightly around him. Puddles were already forming on the walkway. Water cascaded in falls down the vertical sides of the buildings and splashed up from the over-worked drains. As he walked around the buildings, he noticed a basic system of ordering. Each building had a giant red letter painted on its north-south corner. He was nearing ‘Sector G – Atherton Gardens’.

- from a work in progress, working title ‘The Tect’.