As he walked through
Stepney, he passed by the all-night caffs that cater for the exhibitionist
dregs of the vice trade and where, in the morning, a few survivors from the
last night’s marketplace remained: either disappointed hustlers of both sexes
who’d failed to connect and slept there, or dissatisfied clients who’d returned
from various squalid set-ups whither their earlier imaginings had lured them,
not to complain (for this was useless: and who to complain to?), but as the
beast returns from the smaller, empty water-hole to the larger. Among them was
a sprinkling of the different morning clientele: lorry-drivers, local workers
and a few from the west of the city who’d visited the gamble-houses and called
in for breakfast to count (mentally) their losses or more unlikely gains. It is
at this hour, when someone sleepy is sweeping out among this driftwood, and not
in the hopeful afternoon or the intoxicated evening, that moralists should
paint their portraits of Gin Lane.
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