matchbook

fter locking themselves in, she and Benício climb through the skylight out to the roof, its asphalt afternoon-warm in that hottest of all Ipswich summers. Indignant for the men who now have nowhere, they spit arcs of toothpaste down to the street, shout ‘Solidarity with the dispossessed’ into the silence, attempt to sleep on a grimy mattress above four floors of emptiness. Annaliese weeps for the men they still want to help, with their piss-stiff trousers and cider-soaked breath, their sad rheumy eyes and hair-sprouty ears, their lumpy knuckles and nicotined fingers. At midnight, after making love under a benign Ursa Minor, they talk quietly about their lost boys: about Rob’s throat rattling as he gargled cusses; Graeme grieving for his dog, long-dead or more likely imagined; Del railing at the dyslexia no-one had named. They bandy names for children of their own – Boaz, Milo, Mariella – before pledging anew to bring succour to the needy and hope to the lost from whatever make-do-and-mend shack in whatever locust-stripped shanty town to which God should call them. At dawn, they wash one another pure in the dew, before dressing in angel-white robes delivered by doves. They marry that morning, there on the roof, the men lined up as their guard of honour, booted and suited, brushed and beaming, cheering as they throw carnations before the silk-slippered feet of the bride and groom: Annaliese and Benício, house mother and father to them all.