LOST IN BRIGHTON
THE PRINCE OF WALES LAMENT
Kay Sexton

I heard while I was on the late shift. Two wide boys came in, talked with their mouths full, like wide boys always do. They'd seen a police car and an ambulance up by the Clock Tower; coppers in uniform putting up a tent. It was the talk of Brighton. Five weeks they reckoned he'd been there—face down, heels up—behind the boarded up face of the Clock Tower.

I didn't have to pretend to be sick, I was sick. On my way out I grabbed a Whopper off the rack and tucked it into my coat pocket. My supervisor would have to explain where it had gone. He'd have to explain where I had gone too, but at least I'd signed out, which was more than the Whopper had.

I found the Air Street rough sleeper and pushed the burger into his hand.

"Cheers! You're a good lass." He chewed while we watched. We couldn't see much; it was dark and the flashing blue lights of the police van—it wasn't a car after all—more unlit things than lit them. Inside their tent they had lights though. The canvas covered half the clock tower, wrapping round the Prince of Wales side like a shroud.

"Bastard," I said.

He gave me a sideways look.

"You knew, you bastard. That's why you tried sending me off down the Pier."

"I didn't know exactly. Just guessed. Thing is—no offence, right—but if he was already a goner, what good would it do for you to get mixed up in it?"

"In what? In exactly fucking what?" I was shouting. He waved the burger at me to shut me up and the waves of stench coming off him were enough to make me hold my breath, which did the job he wanted doing anyway.

"Shut up. 'f you don't shut up, I'm legging it, and then you'll get nothing."

I stared at the tent, scowling until the blue lights made a blur across my vision. I would not cry in front of this pathetic, stinking git.

He moved off, muttering, to rummage in one of the old sports bags he probably thought put him a cut above the other street people who only had bin-bags. I watched the shadows moving across the inside of the tent and wondered if he'd been there since the last time I saw him. That spreading stain had been him. What a shitty epitaph, I thought, to end as a stain on plywood.

"Here." Fungus the bogeyman was back. He stood alongside me and stared at the tent. After a couple of seconds I realised he was trying to pass me something behind his back. I took whatever it was, gingerly, wondering how much of whatever he had could transfer to me. Lice, crabs, tuberculosis, bad luck? No, the bad luck was with the blond lad, what was left of him, dumped at the Clock Tower.

I wondered about going back and finishing my shift. Bollocks to that, though. I was a one-woman wake for a boy who'd ended up as a smear behind a hoarding. The least I could do was skip work. I walked up to the bus stop. In the light of the bus shelter, I looked at what the rough sleeper had palmed me.

It was a little notebook with a cute terrier on the front. Inside were drawings. 'Not without talent' is what my graphics tutor would have said. Sketches of people he'd seen passing by. Me, in my Burger King tunic. Air Street. Palace Pier lit up like a drunk. West Pier sliding like rotten fish back into the sea. Me again. Caricatures. Long faces, fat faces. Faces with nicknames under them: Fenny, Scadge, Boot-boy. Mobile numbers. Dealers I guessed, numbers where he could score. Himself, with a face like a long dog, and a sleeping bag lapping his bony shoulders like a high tide. The rough sleeper from Air Street and his mate by a fire; the rough sleeper had a sausage on a stick held out to the flames, but the mate had a skewered seagull instead.

He'd sketched in biro, so my tears didn't smudge anything.

© Kay Sexton 2004

LOST IN BRIGHTON—AIR STREET REPRISE
Final installment just around the corner.

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