I’ve spent the last hour rolling cigarettes. They’re all lined out carefully across the table. Any fragments of tobacco that have fallen out, I scoop back lovingly into the pouch. I had to forgo smoking a whole week to be able to get the money together for it. Skimped on a few meals, too. Just the smell alone excites me. Smoking is a luxury I’ll gladly pay for in illnesses when I’m older, but when I do smoke, I’ll enjoy every second of it.

Across the other side of the room, Benny and Elvis play speed chess for pound coins. The wooden pieces clang noisily across the marble board and both are so abysmal they never intentionally produce masterpiece games. Next to them, occasionally looking up from a cheap, water-damaged novel is Sterling. Me, Sterling, Benny, and Elvis. All living in an apartment with a sagging roof. It will one day kill us, but it’s cheap. Whenever we found work, you’d see us laying bricks, atop scaffolding, tarmacing, loading lorries, or anything that generally required use of our hands. Working for twelve hours, we’d come home to this place to read and smoke cheap cigarettes, play games, or drink.

Almost the only thing we shared money for was the rent. The building was falling apart. Pipes burst twice a day and were fixed with plasters and sellotape. Rats scurried across floors and bed bugs tore into skin. We all grew into our situations and learned to ignore the worst parts and just be happy that we even had beds. You don’t complain with this life, you are happy with what you have.

“You’re a damn cheater,” Benny’s middle finger flicked and toppled over his nearly dead monarch.

“How did I cheat? You lost. Again.” Elvis was nearly twenty. One of the hardest working young men I’d ever seen.

Benny, older by about ten years, was the closest to a complainer out of the four of us, but he got through it all with good humour. “I saw you been reading one of those instructional books.”

“Yeah, you saw ‘cause I offered it to you to read, you dumb arse.”

“Ah, shut up,” Benny stood, pulled a smoke out of a crushed carton, and walked to the apartment’s only window. Rusted shut and veiled with grime, it wasn’t much of a window. Behind it, the busy and dilapidated streets of the quarter the only possible view. “We going out to a bar tonight? I feel like going to a bar.”

No one answered. Sterling read. Elvis reset the pieces on the board. And I was slipping my beautiful cigarettes safely into the pouch they were born from.

“No one feels like it?” He asked again and turned to face us. “What about you, George?” He cocked his little ginger head at me.

“I don’t have the cash after I bought my pouch today.” I had enough change for lunch tomorrow while we went looking for more work. I had a tip that a lady needed a slab path in her garden and she’d pay enough for a day’s worth of work.

“What ‘bout you, Sterling?”

Sterling tried to be the most educated out of our group. He read a lot of books and stayed quiet. Most of the time I bet he was listening to what the rest of us, ‘the lesser educated’, were chatting about. Sometimes I swore he gave a smile when we told jokes but he’d never admit it.

He looked up to Benny to shake his head, “No, I need to have a bath tonight and I gotta save.” You needed to pay to have a proper wash in this building.

“You’re coming, aren’t ya, Elvis? You got the money you just won from me.”

“I suppose I could. Just for a couple, I guess.” Elvis stretched with his pound coins aligned in front of him.

Reason we called him Elvis was because, first time he came to us looking for work, his mum had gelled his hair into a quiff. I asked him why he’d get his hair done like that, he told us that she’d said, “They’ll see what a handsome man you are and set you up with some construction.” We laughed. Sterling was the one who said he looked like Elvis and it stuck. But we respected that boy for not giving a shit about us making fun of him. He had grinned and ruffled his hair up as messy as ours.

“Good lad,” Benny retook his seat and put another pound coin beside the board, made a move and then turned the egg-timer. We didn’t have a clock here. We went by whatever the sun was doing. Dawn, we left and looked for odd-jobs. When the sun dipped down again and we couldn’t see, we went home. As a group, we decided it was easier that way. Sterling had told us it was worse to be pigeonholed by time. We’d have more freedom, he’d said.

“Sterling, are you still seeing that girl from Robinson’s?” I asked, sealing the pouch and placing it in my shirt pocket.

“I haven’t seen her in a few weeks.”

“I saw her,” Benny said, taking one of Elvis’ bishops off the board with a rook.

Sterling looked up and tried to ask casually, “Oh. Where?” But he wasn’t a good actor.

“Out with one of those guys from Morley’s Builders. Holding hands. Saw ‘em snog a bit, too.”

“Oh.” He looked down at his book again, but I bet you he wasn’t reading. “Good for her.”

Real women, not the ones you paid for, were hard to come by. You could go to a pub and chat up one who had a few kids and move in a few weeks later. But you were guaranteed to be working more than you ever had before feeding all those mouths.

“I thought you two had really hit it off, Sterling,” I was grinning now. The second best thing in this life, aside from smoking in the morning, was taking the piss out of your friends.

“Yeah,” he didn’t look up from his book to see my expression. “I thought we did too.” He trailed off and now I just felt sorry for him.

“Ah, come on. If she goes out with you and then another bloke a couple weeks later, that means she’s a tramp and you know it.”

“Not worth your time,” Elvis added. He was a good kid.

“She was a bit fat, too. Being a baker and all.” Benny’s contribution wasn’t as helpful, but he meant well and Sterling was bright enough to see it.

“Yeah. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be alright,” Sterling said, turning a page and probably reading for real this time. Women were just annoying, in my opinion. If they weren’t whining, they were stealing your cigarette money and drinking you dry. At least in this place. I hadn’t been outside of the quarter in leisure time for years. Maybe they were nicer and more polite. But I don’t think I’d ever know.

There had been times when we had nothing for weeks on end. We never stole. Well, I didn’t. The other men told me they didn’t either but starvation and thirst do nasty things to your mind. Between gin shots at the old bars at the edge of town and maybe the occasional fumble with a woman with a transferrable rash, not much, if any, remained of our wages. Each Monday - we never worked Sundays and always tried to work Saturdays - we said we’d put aside some money for the end of the week. The closest we ever got was ten pounds in a jam jar on the kitchen table. A radio with a winder to give it charge arrived at the local pawn shop and we voted to buy it. Someone, and none of us admitted to it, must’ve told someone else about our new radio and they must’ve broke into the apartment to take it. That and the few pennies left in the jar. At that point we still kept the saving money mantra but we all preferred to enjoy our wages with things that couldn’t be stolen.

I had my hands folded and was lost in a daydream when Benny tilted slightly on his chair to break wind. None of us gave a damn until the smell drifted and attached itself to our nostrils. Sterling threw his book and caught him across the forehead. Elvis was laughing and I was shaking my head. I got up and left.

Outside, the climbing smoke from roofs full of chimneys rose uninhibited by an absent breeze. You could smell smog and rot and sewage. Damp chewed through wood and grew mould on impenetrable plastic and homes slowly collapsed in on themselves. The poor quarter, a few miles from the centre of town, was home to quite a few people. I didn't know most of them - didn't want to know most of them - but we all lived in roundabout the same squalor. The state forgets about you when you contribute nothing to it. It collected no tax from this place for decades so we got few services in return. Except the riot police when protesters threatened to march towards the proper citizens.

As I was saying, the place reeks.There is no one to clean up anything. A couple years back a Christian family got lost and drove through here. They were so shocked by what they saw, they went back to their parish and said that they needed to do something about all these poor people. So they came with their paint buckets and window cleaners and plumbers. The paint and the brushes were stolen, the window cleaners couldn't find clean water, and the plumbers were assaulted with their own tools. So the quarter stayed dirty. And smelly.

In the summer, if I was walking home with one of the boys, we'd have competitions to find the oldest pamphlet or flyer on the pavement. Elvis once found a lottery ticket from eleven years ago. Eleven years worth of grime. Could barely read anything on it. It was underneath a noodle box that expired four years ago. But that did little to preserve it.

Benny and Elvis came out the side door, talking loudly. "I shoulda smacked him," Benny growled.

Elvis could only nod. Benny the hot head. He probably wasn't always like that. He used to be a bank clerk. He earned thirty thousand a year and drove a nice enough car and had a girlfriend. He only ever spoke of his story once when Sterling promised to share his too (which he never ended up doing). When the collapse happened, the bank had quickly shed everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary and Benny had been fat that needed trimming. Without a warning, millions of jobs had been destroyed overnight. He liked to joke that he felt sorry for those who had made money out of the crash because it must be horrible to be hated so much. It wasn’t a joke we found funny anymore though. He walked into the bank that next morning to be told he no longer had a job. He phoned his girlfriend to tell her what happened. Before he could say, “At least we still have each other, babe,” she’d hung up on him and, apparently within a week, she was going out with one of those bankers who had sold their shares in all things formerly successful to become a millionaire. When he told us, he’d said he was happy for her. But I reckon I wasn’t the only one out of the group that wanted to punch her in the face. And that banker, too.

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Arthur Blair

Just a Cheap One