‘Maybe a week after the attack on Ralph, Mrs Jones make it clear that I have to find a next room. The English man who own the house, and advertise the room, just throw open the door but he don’t bother to turn on the light bulb. He gesture with an arm but I find myself watching the ash on the end of the man’s cigarette. “Well? It’s a double room like I said, with a small gas stove. You got your privacy in here, pal. You share a lav in the basement, but no hot water though. However, it doesn’t seem to bother anyone. Two pounds ten shillings a week for the room, no questions asked, just be sensible with the visitors and respectable girls only. I don’t want the house going down. A shilling for a shower at the local baths, which is three streets away, and that’s a coal fire, but you’ll have to get a guard. Well, you want it or not because it’ll go? I wouldn’t hang about because there’s plenty of people looking for a roof for the night, you do know that don’t you?” The man take a deep draw on his cigarette, then he stub it out on the wall and I watch the ashes flake down on to the nasty carpet. Back on the street I can see that these houses had once carried some style, but these days they broke down and paint peeling from them and the tiny front garden just pile up with rubbish. My head is hurt bad, and I push the scrap of paper with the addresses of the rooms to rent back into my pocket and I keep walking. Me, I done look at my last room for the day. Mrs Jones tell me I must leave because after what happen with Ralph her husband say he don’t want no more coloureds in his house. It’s not that he’s prejudiced, she say, it’s just that he can’t take any bother with coppers. And so I walking in London town, and the night smog starting to itch my eyes, and I can’t see more than ten yards ahead of me. The streetlights don’t help with the fog, because they just make everything look like ghosts everyplace. In my head I can hear people talking to me, but I try not to listen and I keep my eyes down and walk quickly until I find myself outside a restaurant. I go into the empty place, but as soon as I sit down the two men who work there look hard at me and start to talk to each other in their language. The scruffy, younger, man come over and hand me a dirty piece of paper with the menu printed on it, and I say thank you very much but I already know what I want. I just need a plate of rice. “Just rice?” Yes, I say, just plain white rice. The man take back the paper and I watch as he go into the kitchen with the older man. A few minutes pass and I stare out of the window into the black night, but I find nothing to see and nobody is walking by. These days, it dark going out to work and dark coming in again, and I try to think about this but it no use for the people in my head still talking. For a week now I been hearing these blasted people in my head, but nothing they say make any sense and I can’t seem to make them stop. Tomorrow I going look at some more rooms, because Mrs Jones don’t have to ask me twice. I’m not a dog or a cat. Nobody going put me out at night. The younger man come back through from the kitchen with a plate of rice which he put down in front of me and the man move off to one side and wait by the door. It’s then that I reach down in my pocket and take out the tin of sardines and start to open it with the metal key, carefully curling back the tin lid, then I tip the sardines on to the rice and stir them in good. I pick up the salt and pepper and flavour the food. By now the older man come out from the kitchen and the two of them staring at me. They come to my table and the older man start to wave his hands and shout. “Oh no, sir, this is not possible. You cannot do this. It is our food that you must eat.” I just keep eating and I ignore the both of them.
‘Three months later I follow Shirley into a Wimpy Bar and find a seat by the window. Shirley barely speak a word since she see me waiting by the factory gate as she come out from work. She stop and say something to the woman she is with, and the woman look up at me before saying goodnight to Shirley and walking off. Only when the woman pass out of sight does Shirley start to drag herself toward me, and it’s she who suggest that we go somewhere and talk. I can’t see why Shirley is treating me like this, because once she telephone my workplace I agree to do the right thing and come over to Manchester to meet up. We sitting in the crowded Wimpy Bar and I drop a lump of sugar into my tea before picking up the spoon and stirring it in. I tell her that after Ralph die I move out of Mrs Jones’s house and I now have my own room. I tell her I need the privacy if I going to study properly. I’m still working at the factory casting iron, but I want the woman to understand that at night I have some serious college work that I must do. I watch Shirley spread butter on her toast with two long passes of the knife, then she bite into the toast and look me in the eye and ask me if I need my privacy more than I need a wife and child because I better make up my mind as to my priorities. I swallow deeply and turn from the woman and stare at the back of a stranger’s head. The last time I see Shirley is at Ralph’s funeral, but I trying hard not to look anybody in the eye because I too upset. The wind start to blow the pages of the vicar’s bible, and for some reason the man clamp down his hand on the pages instead of just shutting the book for he already finish with it. Then I hear Shirley crying, and I mean real powerful crying not womanish sobbing, and I feel for the woman. The coffin-bearers start to ease down Ralph’s casket at an awkward angle, and soon after everybody step forward and begin to toss dirt on the box so it sound like rain falling hard. I’m thinking, Jesus Christ, Ralph must be frighten by all this noise. Why people can’t throw dirt quieter? I know that Baron and some of the boys soon heading off to the Red Lion, but I don’t know if I should go with them or stay and look out for Shirley. I know she won’t want to come with the fellars to the pub, but as people move off I find myself standing by the grave not able to make up my mind as to what I must do. It’s then that I see Shirley walking away without so much as a “so long” to me and now everything come clear. Me, I’m going to the pub. I reach and everybody in the lounge talking loud and carrying on with plenty drinking, but my spirit can’t take it and so I go in the public bar. It’s then that I notice Dr Davies from the college and I see the man is carrying some leaflets and moving up and down the place giving them out to people. The young woman behind the bar staring at me and waiting for me to say what I want to drink. The woman smiles, first with her lips and then with her eyes. “Well, what’s happening, love? You waiting for your premium bonds to come up? Concentrate dear, you look like you’re in Cloud-cuckoo-land.” I am concentrating and I trying to make myself small and hoping that Dr Davies don’t see me because I never been anywhere near the blasted college since the time I go to see the man with his feet up on the desk. Luckily he pass out of the bar without noticing me and so I order a pint of bitter from the woman who ask me if I belong to the wake in the lounge. I say “yes,” and then she tell me they call it a wake because nobody can sleep through the damn noise. The woman laugh and point at the door through which Dr Davies just leave and she ask me if I trying to avoid the chap from the college. Before I know how to answer she tell me that she don’t blame me for the man is always acting like a bloody nuisance with all this research into immigrants. Then the young woman just move off to serve somebody else. When I reach my room that night I find myself wondering about what happen to Shirley, but I realise she must have decide to go back to Manchester and that is good because I don’t want no repeat of the confusion of the night when Ralph is in the hospital, and especially not on the day that my best friend from home is going into the ground. But here I am sitting in a Manchester Wimpy Bar and the woman telling me that she is pregnant with my child and eating toast and drinking tea like it’s me alone who create this situation. I’m trying to be decent, I trying hard, but her behaviour simply don’t impress me. The woman finish with the toast and wipe her hands on a paper napkin, then she screw the napkin into a ball and push it under the rim of the saucer, and then she look across the table at me. “Well?”