Squatting down in a shop's doorway, wrapped in a tatty pink blanket, the youth, pale faced, stares out unblinking as if pedestrians passing by are invisible. But he is aware of his dog curled into a contented ball of brown and black fur. His hand, constantly strokes the mongrel's bullet shaped head as if in the knowledge that, despite their feral existence, both are a constant in each others lives.

The glazed stare of the youth is looking outwards, past rushing legs, to the place where he once lived; a place he fled from at the age of fourteen and as he thinks about that place, a woman sits in her kitchen, one hundred and three miles away studying a cherished photograph.

From the sitting room, she hears the TV blaring and she knows, without checking, that her husband sleeps on the settee after a hard day's drinking and she traces a finger across the image of her son, all neat and clean in his school uniform.

And as she looks at the photograph, her tears fall like rivulets of poison blurring the smile into a sneer on her son's face. But she's glad that her child escaped from the fists that daily rain down and she prays that her child has found a safer place.

And as she finishes her prayer, the TV goes off and the ominous silence has her slididng the photgraph under a newspaper. Alert but terrified, she listens to her husband's staggering approach down the hall towards the kitchen.