ONE: SHEILA BRIGGS

The kettle's gone cold again. I keep putting it on and then I forget, stand there at the window looking out at Roman Road like I'm waiting for a bus that's been cancelled, like there's something coming up the street that I need to see before it gets here. The social come round Tuesday, woman with a clipboard and a face like she's been sucking lemons for a fortnight, wanted to know why I hadn't been signing on. I told her my husband's been remanded, which she already knew because everyone in Bethnal Green already knows, the news went round faster than the giro on a Friday, but she still made me fill out the forms. UB40, housing benefit, some new thing they've brought in called the Social Fund which sounds like a charity but isn't, it's just more forms. She asked me if I had any savings. I laughed. I don't know why I laughed, it wasn't funny, but the look on her face made me laugh harder and then I couldn't stop and she left the forms on the table and said she'd come back next week.

The phone's been cut off. BT sent a red letter, then a redder letter, then a man came round with a clipboard of his own and a little device that he plugged into the socket and he said "disconnected as of the twenty-third" and I said "my husband's been remanded" and he said "I'm sorry about that Mrs. Briggs but the bill's three months overdue" and I said "my husband usually handles the bills" and he said "I'm sorry about that Mrs. Briggs" and I said "you've already said that" and he said "I'm sorry about that Mrs. Briggs" and I realized he was just a machine in the shape of a man, programmed to say the same three things over and over until you stopped talking.

Denny's solicitor is a man called Mr. Asquith who has an office above a dry cleaner's on Cambridge Heath Road and who smells of tobacco and something chemical, something like the fluid they use to dry-clean suits. He told me the remand hearing's been put back again, which makes it the third time, and he said "the magistrates are overwhelmed" and I said "overwhelmed with what" and he said "cases" and I said "what cases" and he said "the Wapping business" and I said "my husband was standing on a picket line with a placard that said SAVE OUR DOCKS, he wasn't throwing petrol bombs" and Mr. Asquith said "the charge is affray" and I said "the charge is bollocks" and Mr. Asquith said "please don't use language like that in my office Mrs. Briggs."

I went down to the remand centre in Brixton last Thursday, took two buses and the Tube, two hours each way for a forty-minute visit in a room that smelled of bleach and BO and something else, something underneath both of them, something that was just the smell of men being kept in cages and trying not to go mad. Denny looked smaller. That's the thing. My husband's not a big man, five foot eight and built like a whippet, but he's always seemed bigger than he is because he fills the space around him, pushes the air out of the room and puts himself in its place. In that visiting room he looked like someone had let the air out of him. He asked about the club. I told him Tommy Wilson was still training, which was a lie, I hadn't seen Tommy in three weeks. He asked about the pub. I told him Frank Cassidy was keeping an eye on things, which was another lie, Frank hadn't set foot in the Crown and Anchor since Denny was taken. He asked about the gas bill. I told him it was paid, which was the third lie and the worst one, because Denny knew I was lying, I could see it in his face, but he let me lie because he needed to believe it and I needed to believe he believed it, and that's what marriage is after twenty-six years, a system of lies you both agree to maintain so that the world doesn't collapse around you.

After the visit I sat in the bus station at Victoria and watched the pigeons and tried to remember the last time I'd paid a gas bill myself. It would have been before we were married, 1959, a bedsit in Poplar with a coin meter that ate shillings. Since then, Denny had handled the money. Denny had handled the bills. Denny had handled everything, not because I couldn't, but because that was the arrangement we'd fallen into without ever discussing it, the way water falls into a drain, pulled by gravity toward the lowest point. And now the drain was blocked and everything was backing up and I was standing in the rising water not knowing which pipe to unblock first.

The women in the street have been coming round. Eileen from number forty-two brought a casserole on Wednesday, Irene from number eighteen brought a fruitcake on Friday, Mrs. Khan from the corner shop sent her son Karim with a bag of tinned goods and a note written in careful English that said "if you need anything please ask." They mean well. They mean so well that I want to scream at them, because every casserole is a reminder that I am now the object of charity, that I am the woman whose husband is in prison, that I am the broken node in the network that Denny spent thirty years building. I thank them. I smile. I put the casseroles in the fridge where three of them are growing mould because I can't eat, I can't remember to eat, the kettle's gone cold again, the kettle's always going cold.

TWO: TOMMY WILSON

First thing you learn in Denny's gym is how to wrap your hands. He showed me when I was eleven, stood behind me with his arms around my shoulders, his hands over my hands, showing me how to loop the bandage between the fingers, round the wrist, across the knuckles, tight enough to protect the bones but not so tight you cut off the blood. "Your hands are your livelihood, Tom," he said. "You don't look after your hands, you might as well be a postman." I was eleven and I didn't know what a livelihood was but I knew what a postman was because my dad was a postman and he came home every night with his feet bleeding and his shoulders bent and I didn't want that, I didn't want any of that, I wanted what Denny had, which was a gym full of punching bags and a pub full of stories and a street full of people who looked at him like he was the answer to a question they hadn't asked yet.

I won the East London Amateur in eighty-three, welterweight, knocked out a kid from Stratford in the third round with an uppercut that Denny had been teaching me since I was fourteen, the one where you drop the left shoulder, make them think you're going for the body, then come up underneath the chin like you're trying to punch a hole in the ceiling. Denny was in my corner that night, and when the ref stopped it Denny climbed through the ropes and picked me up like I was still eleven years old and he said "that's my boy" and I cried, I'm not ashamed of it, I cried because it was the first time anyone had ever been proud of me and because I knew, even then, that it might be the last.

He got nicked in the spring, April the fourteenth, a Tuesday. There was a demonstration at the docks, the print workers had called for solidarity and Denny answered because Denny always answered, and the Old Bill turned up with their riot shields and their dogs and their faces like masks, and someone threw something, a bottle or a brick or just a word, and the police waded in and Denny was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong name on a list that the Special Branch had been keeping since the miners' strike, and they had him on affray, which is what they charge you with when they can't charge you with anything real but they want you off the street anyway.

Without Denny the gym started to empty out. The kids stopped coming first. Kevin Mellor's mum said it was too far to walk without an adult to supervise them. Then the amateurs stopped, said they'd train at the Repton if the Repton would have them. Then the seniors stopped, the ones who only came because Denny was there to wrap their hands and tell them they were better than they thought they were. I kept going for three weeks, hitting the heavy bag in an empty gym, the sound of my own fists against the canvas echoing off the brick walls like someone else was in the room with me, someone I couldn't see, someone who was laughing.

You can't train a fighter without a corner. You can't be a fighter without someone to wrap your hands. I know that now.

A bloke called Mickey French came round the week after Denny's bail was refused, offered me two hundred quid for an unlicensed fight in a warehouse in Canning Town. I said no the first time and the second time and the third time, and then the gas bill came and I remembered what Denny said about not being a postman, and I said yes. The fight was in a circle of men on a concrete floor stained with oil and old blood, no ropes, no referee, no doctor, no one to stop it if something went wrong. The other bloke was a heavyweight called Brick or Brock or something that sounded like a noise more than a name, eighteen stone and slow but strong, strong enough to grab me round the head in the fourth round and throw me into a steel pillar. I felt something go in my ribs, a crack like stepping on a twig, and I went down and stayed down and Mickey French gave me a hundred and forty quid, said he'd deducted sixty for the ambulance I didn't need, and I took the money and went home and wrapped my own hands and sat on my bed and tried to remember the way Denny used to say "that's my boy" and found that I couldn't, the words had gone, the voice had gone, everything had gone except the pain in my ribs and the money in my pocket and the knowledge that I would never fight in a proper ring again.

THREE: MRS. HAMEEDA BEGUM

The first time they came to the shop, in 1979, they broke the window with a brick wrapped in a copy of the National Front newsletter, which seemed to Mr. Begum like a kind of poetry, though he said it in Urdu and I translated it for the police and the police did not seem to find it poetic. Denny Briggs came the next morning. I did not know him then. He was just a man from the pub on Roman Road, a short man with a face like a disappointed bulldog and hands that looked like they had been broken and reset more times than he could count. He looked at the broken window and he looked at the brick and he read the newsletter, and then he said something that I have never forgotten. He said: "This isn't your problem, Mrs. Begum. This is the street's problem. And the street is going to solve it."

That evening, twenty men from the Crown and Anchor stood on the pavement outside the shop from six o'clock until midnight. They had no weapons. They had no placards. They stood with their hands in their pockets and their collars turned up against the cold, and they talked about football and the weather and the price of beer, and they made it clear, without ever saying it, that anyone who came near the shop with another brick would have to go through twenty men from the Crown and Anchor to reach the window. The National Front did not come back. Not in 1979, not in 1980, not in any of the years since. Denny Briggs made the street into a wall, and the wall held.

I have been in this country since 1962. I came from Lahore with Mr. Begum and one suitcase and a letter from his uncle who had a shop in Whitechapel and who said there was money to be made in the grocery trade. The uncle died six months after we arrived, and the shop he had promised became a different shop, smaller and darker and more expensive, and Mr. Begum worked nights in a textile mill in Hackney to pay the rent, and I stood behind the counter in the shop on Globe Road, selling tins of beans and packets of biscuits to women who would not meet my eyes. After twenty-three years, some of them still will not meet my eyes. But they come to the shop. They buy my bread and my milk and my tinned tomatoes, and they pay with coins and notes and sometimes with conversation, and that is enough. That is more than my mother ever had in Lahore. That is more than I expected when I stepped off the ship at Southampton in the rain.

Denny came into the shop every Tuesday and Friday. He bought twenty Bensons and a copy of the Mirror and sometimes a tin of soup if Sheila was feeling poorly. He never talked about what he had done for us. He never mentioned the wall of men on the pavement or the National Front or the brick through the window. He asked about Mr. Begum's back, which had troubled him since the mill, and he asked about Karim's exams, and he asked about my sister in Bradford who was having trouble with her landlord, and then he paid for his cigarettes and his paper and his soup and he went back to the pub, and the shop felt emptier when he was gone, as if he had taken something with him that I could not name.

He has been in Brixton for nine weeks. The graffiti appeared eight weeks ago. It was on the shutter when I came down to open the shop on a Monday morning, white paint, one word: "GO." Not even an exclamation mark. Just "GO" in capital letters, the paint still wet enough to smear when I touched it. I cleaned it with white spirit and a rag, and the smell of the solvent stayed in the shop for three days, mixing with the smell of the spices and the soap and the cardboard boxes.

It appeared again the following Monday. And the Monday after that. Each Monday, the same word in the same white paint on the same shutter. I have stopped cleaning it. What is the point of cleaning it when it will only reappear? Mr. Begum says we should call the police. I have told him the police will do nothing. The police never do anything about paint on a shutter. The police are busy with the miners and the printers and the men demonstrating at the docks. The police do not care about a word on a shutter in Bethnal Green.

If Denny were here, he would stand on the pavement with twenty men from the Crown and Anchor and the word would stop appearing. But Denny is not here. The Crown and Anchor is empty most nights. Frank Cassidy is drinking at home. Tommy Wilson is fighting in warehouses. The women from my street bring casseroles to Sheila but they do not come to my shop with their husbands and their brothers and their sons, because the wall was not made of women, it was made of men, and the men have scattered. Denny was the keystone. When you remove the keystone, the arch collapses. This is not a metaphor. This is architecture. This is physics. This is what happens when you take away the one piece that holds all the other pieces together.

Karim wants to paint over the word himself. He is seventeen, angry in the way that young men are angry when they discover that the world is not fair and never has been. I have told him no. I have told him that the word is just a word. But I am afraid. Not for myself. I am too old to be afraid for myself. I am afraid for Karim, who is learning that the wall his parents built around him was made of other people's courage, and that when those other people are taken away, the wall becomes a window becomes a door becomes an open wound.

FOUR: FRANK CASSIDY

Me and Denny started on the docks the same week, August 1952, the West India Dock, unloading sugar from a freighter that had come in from Jamaica. You could smell the sugar for three streets in every direction, sweet and industrial, like someone had tipped a ton of Tate and Lyle into a vat of engine oil. Denny was nineteen and I was eighteen and neither of us knew what we were doing, but that was the point, that was what the docks were, a place where you learned by doing and if you did it wrong you learned harder the next time. The union rep was an old fella called Arthur, Arthur Mott, who had been on the docks since the General Strike and who could lift a hundredweight sack with one arm and roll a cigarette with the other. Arthur took one look at Denny and said "this one's a natural" and he was right, not because Denny was strong, he wasn't particularly, but because Denny was one of those people who understands networks before anyone has told him what a network is.

You'd finish your shift at four and the pub would be the Crown, the one on Westferry Road before they pulled it down, and Arthur would be there and Denny would be there and twenty lads from the sugar gang would be there, and Denny would be at the center of it, not in the middle of the room where you'd expect the center to be, but off to one side, at a corner table, talking to one person at a time while everyone else orbited around him like planets round the sun. I asked him once, years later, what he was doing during those sessions at the corner table. He said he was just talking. But it wasn't just talking. It was connecting. He would hear from one lad that another lad's wife was in hospital, and he'd tell a third lad who had a car to drive the first lad to the hospital, and he'd tell a fourth lad whose wife was a nurse to check in on them, and he'd tell a fifth lad whose brother was a florist to send flowers, and on and on and on, a chain of connections that he maintained in his head like the rest of us maintain our shopping lists, automatic and unconscious and absolutely essential.

When the docks started closing in the sixties, containerization they called it, which was a clean word for a dirty business, Denny was the one who organized the meetings. Not the union meetings, those were up the road at Transport House with the full-timers in their suits and their company cars, but the real meetings, the ones in the back room of the Crown and Anchor with a crate of brown ale and a blackboard and forty men who had been told they were redundant. Denny would stand at the blackboard and draw diagrams, circles and arrows and lines connecting one thing to another, and he'd explain that the docks weren't just a workplace, they were a system, and if you broke the system the whole thing fell apart. The men didn't always understand the diagrams, I'm not sure I understood them myself, but they understood that Denny understood, and that was enough.

After Denny bought the Crown and Anchor in seventy-four, with the redundancy money from the docks and a loan from a credit union he'd helped to set up, the network moved with him. The pub became the new hub. The boxing club went upstairs. The pensioners' lunch club went downstairs on Wednesdays. The mothers' group got the function room on Tuesday mornings. The credit union kept an office in what used to be the landlord's flat on the top floor. Denny connected them all, the pensioners to the mothers to the boxers to the union men to the credit union members, and the pub hummed with it, the whole building hummed, like a transformer station stepping down the voltage from the mains into something you could use to light a room.

I go to the pub most nights. I used to go. Since Denny got nicked, I've been going less. Last week I went on a Thursday and there were five people in the bar, five people in a pub that used to have thirty on a slow night, and the jukebox was playing something by Spandau Ballet that I didn't recognize and didn't want to recognize, and the barmaid was a girl of about twenty who didn't know my name and didn't know my drink and didn't know that I'd been drinking in that pub since before she was born. I drank my pint, and I looked at the corner table where Denny used to sit, and it was occupied by a young couple who were holding hands and talking about something I couldn't hear, and I thought: they don't know. They don't know what this table was. They don't know that entire lives were rearranged at this table, that children were fed and old people were visited and jobs were found and fights were prevented and debts were forgiven, all because one man sat here and listened to people and connected one thing to another. They don't know any of that. They're just holding hands in a pub that used to be a network and is now just a pub.

I've started drinking at home. It's cheaper and it's easier and I don't have to look at the corner table. Sheila came round on Monday, said she hadn't seen me in a while, said I looked thin. I told her I was fine. She knew I was lying. She's been lying too, everyone's been lying, the whole street's been lying to each other since Denny went inside, maintaining the fiction that everything's normal when nothing's normal and nothing's been normal since April. She asked if I'd visit Denny. I said I would. I haven't. I can't see him in there, in that place, in a cage like an animal, my friend who built a network out of nothing, my friend who taught me that a system is only as strong as its connections. I can't see him like that. So I sit at home and I drink my beer and I watch the television with the sound off and I wait for the network to repair itself, knowing it won't, knowing that networks don't self-repair, knowing that when you remove the hub the connections dissolve and the nodes drift apart and the system collapses into its component parts, and the component parts of this system are just people, lonely people, sitting alone in their flats drinking supermarket beer and watching silent televisions and waiting for a knock on the door that will never come.

FIVE: JASON MULLINS

Ma said he got nicked for affray but my mate Dogger said it was for hitting a copper and my other mate Sprog said it was for organizing, which is worse than hitting a copper, organizing gets you put away proper not just a fine and a slap on the wrist. I don't know what's true. What's true is he's gone and he isn't coming back for a while and the thing he was doing for me isn't getting done no more.

What he was doing for me was this. Every Wednesday at half four I'd go to the gym above the Crown and he'd be there, setting up the bags, and he'd say "alright Jay, how was school" and I'd say "alright Denny, same as always" and he'd say "that bad, eh" and I'd laugh because he knew, he knew school was a joke, a holding pen for kids like me, kids who were going to leave without a single O-Level and go straight onto the dole and stay there until they were old enough to be forgotten. But Denny didn't treat me like a kid who was going to be forgotten. He treated me like a kid who was going to be remembered. He taught me how to wrap my hands, same as he taught Tommy Wilson, same as he taught every kid who came through the gym. He said "your hands are your livelihood, Jay" and I said "I don't want to be a boxer, Denny" and he said "it's not about boxing, it's about being able to hold onto things, and you're going to have things worth holding onto, trust me."

I trusted him. Everyone trusted him. That was the thing about Denny, you trusted him even when you didn't believe what he was saying, because he believed it, and that was enough, that was infectious, that was like a disease you wanted to catch.

The last time I saw him was the day before the demonstration. He was in the gym, wrapping his own hands for once, getting ready to do a few rounds with Tommy. He looked tired. I don't think I'd ever seen him look tired before, not properly tired, not the kind of tired that goes all the way down into your bones. He said "how's your mum" and I said "same as always" and he said "that bad eh" and neither of us laughed. He said "Jay, if anything happens, you keep coming to the gym, you understand? You keep wrapping your hands. You keep holding on." I said "what's going to happen" and he said "nothing, probably nothing, just keep coming to the gym."

I didn't keep coming to the gym. The first Wednesday after he got nicked, the gym was locked. I waited outside for twenty minutes, thinking maybe Tommy would come, maybe someone had a key. No one came. The second Wednesday, the lock was still on the door and a sign had been pinned up, handwritten on a piece of cardboard torn from a beer crate: "GYM CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE." The third Wednesday I didn't go. The fourth Wednesday I was in Mile End with Dogger and Sprog and a lad called Chisel who had a car and a plan and a bag full of tools I didn't want to look at too closely.

Chisel was older, maybe twenty-three, twenty-four, with the sort of face that looked like it had been in too many arguments and lost most of them. He ran a crew out of a flat in a tower block on the Burdett Road estate, one of those flats where the lift never works and the stairwell smells of piss and every door has three locks on it. The crew did small things, petty things, shoplifting from the big chains on the high street, nicking car stereos, selling knock-off videos from a market stall in Romford. It wasn't big crime. It wasn't the Krays. But it was crime, and it was something, and it was people who looked at me like I was part of something, which was more than school did, more than my mum did, more than anyone did except Denny.

The arrest was almost inevitable. The fifth job I went on, a warehouse in Stratford, electronics, video recorders still in their boxes, fetch and carry for Chisel while he did the actual work. Someone had tipped off the Old Bill. I don't know who. Dogger said it was Sprog's cousin, the one who'd been in Feltham and come out with a snitch's habit. I don't know. What I know is I was in the back of a police van at four in the morning, hands cuffed behind my back, and the only thing I could think about was wrapping my hands, the way Denny had shown me, between the fingers, round the wrist, across the knuckles, tight enough to protect the bones but not so tight you cut off the blood.

The duty solicitor was a woman with a kind face and a tired voice who asked me if I had anyone who could vouch for me, a teacher or a social worker or a family friend. I gave her Denny's name. She wrote it down and then she stopped writing and looked up from her clipboard and said "he's currently remanded at Her Majesty's Prison Brixton on charges of affray and conspiracy to cause a public nuisance" and I said "what's conspiracy to cause a public nuisance" and she said "it's what they charge you with when you try to stop them closing the docks" and I said "that's not a crime" and she said "it is now."

I'm out on bail, back at my mum's flat, sitting in my room with the window open even though it's cold, listening to the traffic on the Mile End Road and the sirens and the distant sound of someone's telly turned up too loud. I should be in school. I'm not in school. I should be in the gym. The gym is closed. I should be wrapping my hands the way Denny showed me, tight enough to protect the bones. Instead I'm sitting here thinking about networks, about how Denny used to draw those diagrams on the blackboard in the back room of the pub, all those circles and arrows and lines connecting one thing to another, and I'm thinking about what happens when you remove the central circle, the one with all the arrows pointing to it, the one that was holding the whole drawing together. The lines snap. The arrows point at nothing. The circles drift to the edges of the board and fall off and roll under the table and get swept up at the end of the night and thrown in the bin.

That's what's happened. To me, to Tommy, to Frank, to Mrs. Begum, to Sheila, to all of us. We were a network. Denny was the hub. They took the hub away and now we're just dots on a whiteboard with no lines between us, waiting for someone to draw us back together, knowing no one will, knowing that the only person who knew how has been locked in a three-by-four cell in Brixton for eleven weeks and counting, and the kettle's gone cold in the flat upstairs, and the gym is locked with a cardboard sign, and the graffiti appears every Monday on the shutter of a shop on Globe Road, and a man sits alone in his flat drinking beer and watching silent television, and a young boxer wraps his own hands and waits for a voice that says "that's my boy" and hears nothing, hears nothing, hears nothing at all.