“I was on my own in Hackney, walking home. It was a residential street. As I walked I noticed that between the cars, tents had been set up by homeless people. I pointed these out to myself as I went (earlier in the day, awake, I was walking with friends along the seafront in Brighton, noticing the new tents set up along the strip of grass between the promenade and the street). I walked closer to one of the cars and looked through the window. A tent had been set up inside of it, crammed into the backseat. Then I looked through the window of the next. People were sleeping everywhere: strewn across the floor, in the boot, falling out of the open doors. Others were curled around the wheels for warmth. (At around this time I noticed that I was wearing a large double-breasted green coat.) The people in the cars were waking up and reaching out, wordlessly, like ghosts; I thought that they were mostly Eastern European (echoes of a conversation with a racist teenager in Battersea last week, who told me that the growing population of homeless were all foreigners). Then I looked down at my chest. A homeless person was growing out of it in profile, pushing its way up out of the front flaps of the coat. His face was like a slice of ham, compressed and distorted in bunches. The features were much larger than mine. One massive, distorted, leaking eye curved out of my chest up to my shoulder, looking like the neck-tumour health warning you see on cigarette packets. The eye was disproportionately large; about the size of a basketball. It seemed cartoonishly tired and miserable. Its mouth was small and down-drooping. I wanted so much to get it out of me. I was panicking. There were homeless people everywhere now, exhausted and unshaven people, worn out people, prematurely aged people, all waking up and flowing out of the cars. I knew that the only way to get the face out of my body was to evict it. It was renting me, I had to find a way to stop it leasing this space in my chest. I woke up frightened and lay half awake for a long time, trying to remember the names of my friends. They kept flowing into one another and mutating: weird portmanteaus, wrong guesses and hybrids, like my own body, with this terrifying stretched face pushing its way lugubriously out of it.”