...The floorboards creak as I walk across the room to where my coat hangs, like a condemned man, on its hook. The material under my fingers is warm from the heat of the house and when I lift it to put it on the faint musty smell of the outdoors wafts into my nostrils. A butterfly of hope flutters in my heavy, empty stomach. I shrug it on and stare out at the advancing dusk, a welcome captor, as it starts to drape round the stiff, sharp buildings of the estate, coating them in a softness that daylight never reclaims. Night time is kinder to the ugly, I think. It gives that elusive chance of partial anonymity and a veil under which the flaws that daylight so starkly illustrates can hide, undetected, until dawn exposes them, like cheats. Heads bowed, slinking away until another breath of darkness beckons them with it's seductive musk of protective gloom. Nocturnal temptress of the understated and over criticized.
The air in the corridor of steps is cold and smells slighty of sly cigarettes smoked by youths and men who were meant to have given up. That one last drag. my footsteps resound in the empty stairwell, rubber making that buffered 'ping' as i bounce down the stairs, avoiding the handrail again, eager for the taste of the night air. The lift creaks in its shaft as I descend, passing as i go a sallow faced mother and her vacant child. The stares of the ill educated and socially inept follow me down, the air suspending the crackle of threat that always hangs about these people. It's easier to lash out than just to say 'hello'. Suspicion thickens the air like a foul smell as her eyes seek a reason to defend herself in my innocent passage out of the flats.

The air outside is sharp, the last feeble remnants of the mans cigarette roll to my feet and i tread on it. Some small buzz of satisfaction in that act tweaks the corner of my mouth to a personal smirk at somehow ending 'The Story Of The Man'.