I think I may have been born to be wild, but it’s worn off a bit, Em Roberts thought.

            She watched her husband shambling across to the tower blocks. His body, tall but stooped, seemed to have a demolition notice on it. ‘I’ve burnt the candle at both ends, and now I’m paying for it,’ he’d whine to his lady listeners. ‘Had a motorbike when I was younger, chased after the ladies, partied till I dropped, lived for the day.’ A life of being on the razzle, and motor bike crashes, had left him as a crumbling exterior. His inside, Em believed, had been similarly gutted.

            All he did was sit at home and mope, or limp about the estate, both legs stiff like their bones had motorcycle steel embedded in them. In the summer he’d be outside a tower block, trying to impress this man’s wife, or that man’s woman, with recollections of his glorious past.  He still liked the ladies, and if you scrutinised his shambling body, and his unkempt grey hair, you might find a trace of former good looks, like a tint of blood at a road-crash decades after the event. Em had long stopped such scrutinising.