Keys

You have to be careful not to catch your lip on the serrated bit.

It's now proper proper morning and I'm sitting in the plastic awning of small boy's pied-à-terre - a leaning conglomeration of corrugated iron, builder's membrane, scaffold poles, branches and damp rugs, somewhere in the middle maze of Torneira's outskirt shanty town.

His mother is within, coughing in an incense heavy retreat curtained off from the main room.

His father is dead in a ditch.

There's a copper kettle on a little fire, just away from a sideways box with a piss-poor collection of food-cartons in.

The boy, whose name is Menino, has been solicitous in tending to me (and making me feel like a stumbling giant, because he's tiny). He guided me with his little hand to sit by the fire, and put together some infusion that I'm now drinking (tastes like metal and toast, but is somehow satisfying).

It's a minute, or an hour, or a day, later, when I wake up.