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multi-million pound cathedral in which they were performed.
                  The stadium was behind him now, a few more streets and he was nearly at his destination, not so much home but a temporary resting place. His pace quickened as another downpour filled the skies, an icy rain that stung his eyes and face. Ahead was the three-storey block that housed his bedsit and his treasures. Once a proud Georgian guest house, it was now just a squalid ensemble of self contained apartments. But it was better than nothing, Marcus reminded himself as he searched for his keys.
                  Marcus Smith lived on the third floor of the once grand building and, each night, he would close the heavy wooden door behind him, pace the threadbare lobby carpet and clasp the banister to aid him up the many stairs to his room. A host of familiar sounds – babies bawling, music throbbing, snatches of conversation from the soporific soap operas, a heated argument from one of the second floor suites, soon to descend into violence – greeted him. He did not choose them but they were part and parcel of his life nonetheless. The staircase narrowed as he reached the last flight of steps. His chest wheezed with the effects of cigarette smoke as he climbed it. A second door, a second key, which Marcus fumbled with before turning it and pushing his way into his darkened sanctuary. As the door closed behind him, the sounds from below deadened. Neglecting the light for a minute, he waited in the darkness, breathing in the dust of time. Surrounded once again by things that were old, antiquated objects from another era, Marcus Smith finally sensed his tension easing. Marcus felt calm.
     
                  He sat, as always, in the deep 50s armchair, the sound of Mozart’s 24th piano concerto filtered through the room from his antique gramophone. To most of his contemporaries his bedsit would have seemed more like a junk shop, a seedy back street room cluttered with ancient wooden furniture, strange brass ornaments and sepia tone or faded colour photographs of long dead people in odd looking clothes. But few of Marcus’s contemporaries had ever found their way into his quiet haven and he was inevitably alone each night with his treasured icons.
                  Almost in time to the morose melody of the piano, he leaned forward and lifted the Victorian teapot from the 70s maple and glass coffee table, gently pouring his instant tea into a chipped bone china cup, circa 1936. The milk had curdled but he did not mind. At least it was not the powdered kind. Adding a spoonful of sugar from the matching blue-patterned bowl, he reclined, stirring the liquid in his cup. He did not like sweet tea particularly, but he thrilled at the ritual he had mimicked from his collection of period dramas that he had transferred, at great expense, from ancient videotape to laserdisc. If only he could have afforded real tea leaves, or even teabags.
                  Marcus looked around the room and the faces in the many photographs gazed back. They were frozen moments…real people who lived real lives…people who were interesting. A rugby team posing with a trophy, a rag and bone man with his horse and cart, two old men playing cards, a shift of coal-blackened miners emerging from the pit shaft, a woman scrubbing at her husband’s shirts in a foam-filled wooden tub. The rich variety of once-upon-a-time real life. Marcus loved them. He named them. And, each day, he told them: “I will be like you.” Yes, one day he would join them. He, too, would find a meaning to his life.
    Later that evening Marcus rose from his armchair and tidied away his tea set. Returning from his pokey little kitchen, he collected his cigarettes and ashtray and left his friends in darkness, moving to his bedroom. There, hanging in solitary splendour above his ageing four-poster bed, was the painting. It was the only painting he possessed, for he