‘She has burgundy hair. You must help me, help me please’ he shrieks, alone or in company, he often knows not which.

‘Please help’ he screams. ‘Please help’ he cries to the streets and the drunks. Time is lost. He sobs and shakes, unfed then bloated with bile for he hates her, dreams of tearing her to shreds, her clothes, her hair, her soul as she has his. Yet still he loves her, wants her back in his arms, because perhaps love really makes his soul.

Many times he walks close by the Thames, the sludgy snake of death that flows a miasma dredge through the city, along the mossy wharves and piers, past broken-down sail-makers and dingy pubs, rat-running streets wet with blood, painted dollies with pencilled brows, cut-throats and sailors, Lascars and Chinamen, Mulattos and Bengalees in turbans, for the alleys of Shadwell are no longer England, the language the broken tongue of Europe, the rash bite from the Orient, along the river and into another London, the London of the doomed baking beneath an unforgiving sun, the smoky refuge of Lethe, the shivering forgetfulness of the Chinaman’s pipe in the opium den, gone to join the shrunken ghosts fallen on a fancy for the smoking-house, gone to slink with the pig-tailed Chinaman, a four penny smoke, heavy-lidded and retching, because only in sleep does he no longer mourn, only in the warm dreamless sleep can he live, weeping for Peking, sleep, sleep, sleep.

This is where the handsome Malay becomes the broken man with the broken face and the smashed teeth, the empty body lost of soul; this is where the miserable come to suck on the devil’s pipe for a respite from life; this is where people come to have the very life plucked from their hearts; the final ship that is sailing nowhere, the passage the hardest one in the world.