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those to work in this grubby little place. You can do better.”
    The last remark was aimed only at Colette, who emitted thebeginnings of a timid giggle. As the girl stalked past the rows of pale green bucket seats and out of the job centre, Mrs Wimbourne said “Nothing wrong with my office that I can see.”
    She’d left just enough room for Dudley to swivel his chair. “The public spend all day playing on the computers where my mother works,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to work where you can’t be private.”
    The fan fluttered Mrs Wimbourne’s dress and swept her perfume at him before he could hold his breath. When she frowned he thought she didn’t want to be reminded that her centre hadn’t been converted to the open plan, but she said “I didn’t care for your client’s attitude. I hope none of it rubbed off on you, Colette.”
    Colette giggled a nervous denial as Dudley turned to the form on the counter. “Mark it terminated by the client,” Mrs Wimbourne said and watched Lionel lock the door. “That’s another day dusted. Fetch your belongings and we can hop off to our burrows.”
    As they converged on the dull yellow three-seater staffroom that smelled of stagnant tea, Vera said “Dudley, were you making up to that rude woman? You’ve a nice girl right here, or am I being an interfering old bag, Colette?”
    Colette bit her plump lower lip and shook her head vaguely and made a joke of hiding her round chubby suntanned face behind her long black hair as she stooped to grab the white rabbit that was her rucksack. Trevor bowed and passed it to her, then smoothed the remnant of his greyish hair over his glistening scalp. “I think as long as we’re saying what we think you can both do better.”
    Vera rubbed her forehead under her short dyed auburn hair as if to erase all the wrinkles and rounded her mouth until it tugged her thin cheeks against the bones. “I think they make a lovely young couple,” she objected.
    “Not better than each other, better than this treadmill. When I was your age, Colette, or even Dudley’s I wanted adventure. Don’t get stuck here or you’ll end up like me and Vera with nothing to look forward to but dying on a pension.”
    He ambled to the door to bow out Vera and Colette, and Dudley felt as if he might never escape the room that looked steeped in weak tea. The outer office had already grown stuffy now that the fan was still, but the instant he left the office behind he felt as if someone had thrown a pailful of sweat over him. A plastic bag from Woolworth’s up the sloping pedestrianised street lay exhausted outside Virgin, having failed to crawl to a pavement artist’s chalked seascape. Along the middle of the uneven pavement, the topmost branches of caged saplings fingered a breeze that stayed well out of Dudley’s reach, but he no longer felt trapped behind hot glass. Away from the job centre, he was himself.
    The world might have been a show staged for him. Beyond Blockbuster and the other shops on the ground floor of Mecca Bingo, boys in swimming trunks were too intent on fleeing from some mischief at Europa Pools to notice him. Inside Conway Park Station, which was tiled pale as an ice cream, a lift opened at both ends to him. Between two underground tunnels a train for New Brighton shed commuters to make room for him.
    The train snaked up into the sunlight at Birkenhead Park, stoking the interior and filling his nostrils with the hot dusty smell of the upholstered seats but leaving behind the harsh hollow roar of the tunnel. At Birkenhead North the nearest doors halted exactly opposite a passage too short to contain more than the ticket office. His mind seemed to own everything around him now: the two-storey terrace, hardly more than a wall with windows and doors in, that faced the station; the clash of a football against the wire mesh of a sports compound opposite a rudimentary supermarket; the frustrated smell of petrol fumes from carsbacked up by