The toppled rubbish bins discarded their entrails across my street; an act of minor violence from a black vested man child arrested as I walked past, for beating up his girlfriend - Calvin told me. Calvin knows a lot it seems, the front yard of his house forming a mirror of the street except in stark scrap metal bits. "Used to be a scrapper" he said, "Heard it on the police radio. Got it from a tow truck I scrapped." The button of his track pants was open, but Calvin didn't seem to notice. He was pretty laconic and as we shook hands and talked about the violence on the street, the black tire marks, I liked him. I liked him for his honest eyes, and his easy manner and the large amount of scrap metal in his garden. I liked the way that as we talked the sky was cloudless and the sun was perfect and the police squad cars were lined in a row and muscular police men talked to frightened women clutching children. Their hair is half dyed and half growing out naturally. I like that most days on the street there is something new, the desiccated vehicle resting like a carcass on the side of the road, the overgrown garden that indicates what the area will look like when the rapture comes. Because every time I come back home that is what it feels like.


Photograph by Richard Flett