I. THE HUB

The Anchor public house stood at the corner of Mile End Road and Cambridge Heath Road, a three-storey Victorian brick building painted the colour of a lung, with frosted windows and a sign that had not been repainted since the coronation. The sign showed a ship's anchor suspended over water that was supposed to be the Thames but looked more like a streak of mud. Inside, the Anchor was two rooms divided by a bar of dark wood scarred with fifty years of cigarette burns, a carpet the colour of last week's tea, and a ceiling stained yellow from the smoke of a million Players No. 6. The pub had been run since 1963 by a man named Frankie Dolan, who was fifty-eight years old in the summer of 1985, who had been born in Bethnal Green, who had worked the docks from fourteen until his back gave out at thirty-eight, who had taken the tenancy of the Anchor with money borrowed from a brother who had since emigrated to Perth and never written. Frankie Dolan poured the pints, remembered the names, cashed the giros, kept the tab book in a drawer beneath the till, knew who was looking for work and who was looking to hire, knew whose husband had been laid off and whose son had been nicked, knew whose mother was in the London and whose rent was overdue. The Anchor was not a pub. It was a node. It was the point in the network where the lines crossed, where the information moved, where the money changed hands, where the stories were told and retold until they became the only currency that held its value. On the evening of Thursday, June 27, 1985, at ten minutes past ten, Frankie Dolan locked the door of the Anchor, walked up the stairs to the flat above, poured himself a glass of water, and died of a heart attack in the armchair by the window that looked out onto the Mile End Road. The glass of water was still in his hand when the woman from the bakery next door found him the following morning. The water had not spilled.

II. THE SHOPKEEPER

Rashid Khan, who was forty-one years old, who had come to London from Lahore in 1968 with sixty pounds and an uncle's address written on a bus ticket, ran a corner shop on Brick Lane, three streets east of the Anchor. The shop sold tinned goods and cigarettes and halal meat from a cold cabinet that rattled when the compressor kicked in. The shop was open from seven in the morning until eleven at night, every day except Sunday, when it closed at six. Rashid Khan had been robbed twice, once at knifepoint in 1979 and once with a cricket bat in 1982, and after the second time he had bought a shotgun from a man who drank at the Anchor, a man whose name he did not ask, and kept it beneath the counter wrapped in a cloth that had once covered his wife's sewing machine. The shotgun was loaded with shells that Rashid had purchased from the same man, three months after the gun, again through Frankie Dolan's introduction. Frankie Dolan had been the one who told Rashid about the shop when it came up for rent. Frankie Dolan had been the one who told him where to buy the cigarette stock at wholesale. Frankie Dolan had been the one who brought him to the Anchor on Sunday afternoons when the pub was officially closed and the men gathered in the back room to play cards and pass along the jobs that were not spoken of in the light. Through the back room of the Anchor, Rashid Khan had found the man who could fix the cold cabinet for twelve pounds instead of sixty. Through the back room, he had found the man who could get the window replaced at cost. Through the back room, he had found out that the council inspector was coming on Thursday and had hidden the shotgun three hours before the knock on the door. Now Frankie Dolan was in the ground at the cemetery on Bow Road, the funeral a thin affair of thirty-seven people in a chapel built for two hundred, and the Anchor was shuttered with a notice from the brewery taped to the door announcing that the tenancy was under review. The back room was dark. The card games had moved to a flat on Old Bethnal Green Road that Rashid did not know the address of. The man who sold the shotgun had disappeared. The men who came to the shop at nine in the evening to buy two tins of beans and pass along a message about a job or a delivery or a thing that needed doing had stopped coming. The shop was quieter now. The quiet was the wrong kind of quiet. Rashid Khan sat behind the counter at ten on a Tuesday night in early August, listening to the rattle of the cold cabinet, waiting for a knock that would not come, and wondered what a network was worth when the only thing holding it together was a man with a tab book in a drawer.

III. THE NURSE

Siobhan Doyle, aged thirty-four, born in County Mayo, resident of the East End since she was nineteen, worked the night shift in the Accident and Emergency department of the Royal London Hospital on Whitechapel Road. She worked from seven in the evening until seven in the morning, four nights a week, and on her nights off she drank two glasses of Guinness at the Anchor, always the same table, the one in the corner by the door to the toilets, always served by Frankie Dolan who knew to pour the Guinness first and let it settle while she took off her coat and then top it up and bring it to the table without her having to ask. Siobhan Doyle had no family in London. She had a room in a nurses' hostel on Ashfield Street that smelled of boiled cabbage and the disinfectant they used on the floors. She had a boyfriend for three months in 1982, a carpenter from Dublin who had left for Birmingham without saying goodbye. She had a collection of paperback novels she bought from the second-hand stall at the Roman Road market, each one with a corner of the cover torn off to indicate it had been remaindered. The Anchor had been the single fixed point in her life for six years. The two glasses of Guinness, the corner table, the sound of Frankie Dolan's voice calling out the closing time, the walk home through the quiet streets with the taste of stout on her tongue, these were the rituals that held the shape of a life that was otherwise a series of twelve-hour shifts separated by eight hours of uneasy sleep. After the closure, the ritual collapsed. Siobhan tried the pub on the other side of Mile End Road, a larger place with brighter lights and a television mounted above the bar showing the BBC news with the sound off. She drank one glass of lager, which she did not want, and left before she had finished it. The second night she walked past the shuttered Anchor and stood on the pavement for a long time, looking up at the dark windows of the flat above, and a girl on a bicycle nearly ran into her. The third night she did not go out at all. She sat in the hostel common room and watched a programme about the miners' strike on the television and thought about Ireland, about her mother's kitchen in Mayo, about the way the light came in through the window above the sink at four in the afternoon in June, and she cried without making any noise and without knowing why she was crying. The following week she put in a request for a transfer to a ward, day shift, regular hours. The request was approved. Her nights off came and went and she no longer needed a place to spend them and she no longer had a place to spend them and the absence of the need and the absence of the place cancelled each other out and left her at the hostel at half past nine every evening, reading the remaindered paperbacks with the torn covers, one after another, in a silence that was no different from the silence of the ward at three in the morning except that it was louder because there was no one else in it.

IV. THE DOCKER'S WIFE

Maureen Flaherty, aged forty-seven, lived at number forty-two Wadeson Street in Bethnal Green, a terrace house of four rooms with a toilet in the back yard and a kitchen that smelled of damp plaster and frying onions. Her husband, Joe Flaherty, had worked on the docks from 1953 until the closure in 1981. The closure had been gradual, not sudden. First the India and Millwall Docks went, then the Royal Docks, then the Surrey Commercial, and by the summer of 1985 the only thing loading on the Thames was a trickle of timber and scrap metal. Joe Flaherty had not worked in four years. The dole was thirty-two pounds a week. The mortgage was eighteen pounds a month, fixed since 1965, and Maureen Flaherty had paid it every single month, no matter what, by taking in washing from the families up the road and by cleaning offices in the City in the hours before dawn and by selling the jewellery her mother had left her, one piece at a time, to a man in a booth on Petticoat Lane who never asked questions because he already knew the answers. The Anchor, under Frankie Dolan, had functioned as an informal labour exchange for the unemployed men of Bethnal Green. Frankie Dolan knew a man who needed a fence painted and he knew a man who could paint a fence and he put the two together over a pint of mild. Frankie Dolan knew a builder who needed a labourer for three days and he knew a labourer who was three weeks behind on the rent and he made the introduction. Frankie Dolan had found Joe Flaherty a job in February 1984, emptying bins at a warehouse in Bow for three nights a week, cash in hand, nothing declared, just enough to keep the electricity connected. The job had come through a man named Terry who drank at the Anchor, who worked at the warehouse and had mentioned the need to Frankie Dolan, who had mentioned it to Joe Flaherty, who had taken it and kept it for fourteen months. The job ended on Friday, August 2, 1985. Terry, the man from the warehouse, had come to the Anchor to tell Joe that the warehouse was closing, the whole operation moving to Tilbury, and Joe had not been at the Anchor to hear it because the Anchor was closed and Frankie Dolan was dead and Terry had not known where Joe lived and had not bothered to find out. Joe Flaherty lost the job without ever knowing he had lost it. The electricity bill went unpaid. The gas bill went unpaid. The washing Maureen took in was not enough on its own. The last piece of her mother's jewellery, a gold locket with a photograph of a woman Maureen did not recognize inside, was sold to the man on Petticoat Lane for eight pounds on the morning of Thursday, August 8. In the photograph, the woman was wearing a dress with a lace collar and looking at something to the left of the camera. She had the same chin as Joe Flaherty. It was the only picture of his mother that Joe had ever seen, and by the time Maureen came home with the eight pounds and the empty locket in her hand, it was already in the man's display case, already priced at fifteen pounds, already being looked at by a young woman from Clerkenwell who bought it because the locket was pretty and the photograph was of someone else's life and that made it safe to wear.

V. THE RUNNER

Leonard Parkin, aged sixteen, known to everyone as Lenny, lived in a flat on the sixth floor of the Cranbrook Estate in Bethnal Green, a tower block built in 1963 and gone to seed by 1975, with lifts that never worked and stairwells that smelled of urine and the kind of desperation that made young men do foolish things. Lenny Parkin was not foolish, exactly, but he was sixteen and his mother was dead and his father was in Pentonville serving three to five for aggravated burglary and his older brother had gone to Milton Keynes with a girlfriend Lenny had never met. Lenny Parkin lived alone, officially a ward of the state but unofficially invisible, drawing a giro in his father's name and running numbers for a man called Mr. Lucas, who operated out of a betting shop on Roman Road. The numbers were simple: Lenny collected slips from the corner shops and the laundrettes and the pubs where men bet on the horses and the dogs and the football pools, and he delivered the slips to Mr. Lucas, and Mr. Lucas gave him ten pounds a week and the promise that his father would not be harmed in Pentonville, a promise that Lenny did not entirely believe but accepted because ten pounds was more than the dole. The anchor of his route was the Anchor. Frankie Dolan let Lenny sit in the corner of the public bar with a glass of lemonade that cost nothing, and the men who placed bets would come to the corner and hand over their slips folded into squares the size of postage stamps, and Lenny would tuck them into the lining of his coat and after an hour he would walk to Roman Road and hand everything over. Frankie Dolan was the only adult on the route who knew Lenny's real name and the only one who knew that his father was in prison and the only one who had ever asked Lenny if he was eating enough. In the winter of 1984, when the heating in the Cranbrook Estate broke for three weeks, Frankie Dolan had let Lenny sleep on the bench seat in the back room of the Anchor, wrapped in a horse blanket that smelled of damp wool and tobacco. Lenny had slept there for nineteen nights and had never told anyone. When Frankie Dolan died, Lenny lost the central collection point. The men who bet at the Anchor stopped betting, or bet elsewhere, or bet through channels that Lenny was not connected to. The flow of slips dried up. The ten pounds a week became five, then nothing. Mr. Lucas, who was not a patient man, summoned Lenny to the betting shop on the morning of Tuesday, August 13, and told him that if he could not collect the slips he could collect something else. What Mr. Lucas wanted him to collect was a debt from a man named Peter Costello who lived in a flat on Globe Road and who owed Mr. Lucas two hundred pounds on a horse that had broken its leg at Kempton Park. Lenny was instructed to bring a knife, which Mr. Lucas provided, a folding knife with a bone handle worn smooth from use. Lenny took the knife and went to the flat on Globe Road and stood outside the door for forty-seven minutes and did not knock. He thought about Frankie Dolan and the horse blanket and the taste of lemonade that cost nothing. He thought about his father in Pentonville and whether his father would have knocked. He thought about the sixth-floor flat on the Cranbrook Estate and the broken lift and the smell of urine in the stairwell. He put the knife in the rubbish bin on the landing and walked to the Tube station at Stepney Green and bought a ticket to Milton Keynes with the last five pounds he had and never came back to Bethnal Green. Mr. Lucas was arrested six months later on an unrelated charge and never spoke the name of the boy who had disappeared. Peter Costello, the man on Globe Road, won sixty pounds on the dogs the following Thursday and never knew that a sixteen-year-old boy had saved him from the knife by doing nothing but standing still.

VI. THE REORGANISATION

The Anchor was boarded up for six months. The brewery, a conglomerate based in Northampton that had absorbed seventeen smaller breweries in the previous decade, conducted a review of the property and determined that the pub was not profitable. The lease was not renewed. The building was sold to a developer who gutted the interior, removed the bar, stripped the carpet, painted the walls white, and divided the space into four flats of three hundred and fifty square feet each. The flats were sold in the spring of 1986 for prices that started at forty-eight thousand pounds and rose to sixty-seven thousand pounds by the end of the year. The new residents were not from Bethnal Green. They were young professionals who worked in the City and who had been priced out of Islington and Hackney and had been told by the estate agents that Bethnal Green was up-and-coming, a phrase that meant the people who had been coming up were now being moved on. The new residents did not know that the building had been a pub. They did not know that it had been a node. They did not know that the lines of a network that had taken decades to weave had been cut in a single night by a heart attack in an armchair at ten minutes past ten. They lived in the square white rooms and commuted to Liverpool Street and came home at seven and closed their doors and were never seen. The network healed itself, after a fashion. New nodes formed. A pub three streets east, the Royal Oak, picked up some of the trade, but it was a bigger pub with a different landlord who did not keep a tab book and did not know anyone's name. The card games scattered to three different locations and became three different games with three different codes of conduct and three different sets of men who did not trust each other. The information that had once flowed through the Anchor in a single stream was now fragmented across a dozen channels, half of them unreliable, the other half unknown. The hole that Frankie Dolan had occupied in the fabric of the East End remained a hole, and around its edges the fabric began to fray in ways that would not become visible for years, not until the estates were demolished and the shops were replaced by coffee bars and the faces on the streets were faces of strangers who did not know what had stood where they were standing, who did not know that they were walking through a graveyard of connections, who did not know that at the corner of Mile End Road and Cambridge Heath Road there had once been a man who poured the pints and remembered the names and held the whole thing together with nothing more than a tab book and a voice that called out the closing time.