The brickies told them they'd never had it so good before the Plough. Jackie hated the brickies. But, all things considered, reluctantly, he had to agree.

The Plough had brought peace, and while Jackie hated the brickies, that was a good thing because there were enough ways to die out here already. Hypothermia. Starvation. Barrels of chemicals that scalded and sizzled when you climbed into the skips looking for old buns from the burger vans. That was enough without some bricky alpha male sneaking out in the dead of night to stove your head in with a shovel because you scared his kid when they crept out to get that ball that had sailed too high and too far.

There was no need to hide any more. No tents draped in cardboard and used teabags, no scanning round for empty cans that might give you away when you rolled over in fitful and furtive sleep beneath a shroud of pallet wrap or an old car door. You could walk about on two legs in the sunshine, and the brickies would do nothing but glare balefully out from behind their winking windows and sulk until dusk. And no matter what the books said, looks can't kill.

It was a different life now. Not an easy one, but easier. Jackie had even been fed last week. A clingfilmed sandwich over the fence as he limped down the the little chain linked passage from the High Street to Meadow Lane. He didn't see who it was. Too much hair in his eyes and too little room for much else thought than the relief of a meal before it was too late. But there again, he thought, that might have been for the best. No calling out words of thanks. No need to antagonise them.

And there were the new faces. The new sights. Where there had been the slow death of the same names, the same morning in the old quilt and same afternoon at the dump and the same cheap whisky behind the bins over and over again, now there was something closer to living. Where there had been an alley, now Alleytown sprung anew.

Today Alleytown was starting up at the Silby Road end, the most plentiful time because this was where the poshest brickies live, the type that'd throw out a sack of potatoes at its best before date. It was also the place that used to be the most dangerous, where old brickies with nothing to do but go to church and compare flowers would channel their boredom into angry little neighbourhood watches to clean up the alleys of undesirables that threatened to knock a few hundred off their property values. Most of the vigilantes here could afford tasers.

But since the Plough, the watches never came.

Fresh start, fresh town. The heavy metal gates stood open now, no need to go scrabbling up a pipe or pick the locks with bent tools from the abandoned warehouses out east. This time, there was a clothes shop nestled by the hinges, a proper little shack with a roof and stands and hangers and everything. Jackie didn't know the man he gave his cigarette stubs to in exchange for a half-decent leather jacket, but that was the beauty. It was like travelling in a car two towns over. Every time an adventure. Most times safe.

The alley was swept clean. Jackie put down his pack in a space in the neat rows of tents and sleeping bags, and made himself a home.

The next day, there was a barbers across the way. He waited in line for most of the day to get his trim, but time was the one thing he had plenty of. There were beers and cider with a nice couple next-door in the evenings. The party grew as more wanderers came in from the cold and unwelcoming streets beyond Alleytown. Everyone had something to give. Blankets, food, and stories of better times. They were all needed to survive. Everyone played their part.

As the days and nights went by, Jackie marvelled at how Alleytown grew and prospered more with each passing cycle. There were generators now, with petrol from who knew where but with no questions asked, because they powered the little radiators to get them through the chilly nights and the lamps with which they read their scraps of newspaper to laugh at the troubles of the brickies. Dirty children played ball long into the nights, snug in the stuttering glow and the watchful gaze of the volunteer guards. A couple of yells from across the walls, a tossed stone here and there, but the back gates stayed sealed beneath their crowns of glass and barbed wire.

In his room of plastic and plywood, Jackie only laughed at the complaints. It wasn't like the alley folk didn't have work in the morning too. Life was for living. They played cards long into the night.

And each night, before sleep, Jackie put another mark in his notebook.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

The week wound on. Brickies in suits and jeans spat insults through the gates as they hurried past. But none lingered to dare more. The guards had crowbars and axes. Within, the town grew. Butchers and bakers with gas stoves. A row of portable toilets dragged from a forgotten construction site. A market, where grizzled old men exchanged metal sheets for whiskey, and wrinkled ladies sold hand-carved animals for daisies. A doctor's office, where an old woman who had lost her equipment to a tribunal laid out the knowledge that could never be taken from her. And for the first time, a florist, from where wheelbarrows of poppies and cornflowers hauled from the meadow below the ringroad by young lads were snapped up to festoon tent poles and washing lines all along the twists and turns of the long rows of family homes. Jackie spent one of his pound coins from begging by the supermarket to get a fistful of buttercups for Sally and the kids next door. It was good to have company. Comfortable.

The streets were barely wide enough for two people to pass, where the staggered shacks ran all along the high brick walls of the brickies' back gardens. But the town went on for a mile or more into the tangles from the main gates. Jackie walked until the shacks turned to the wall of skips where they had been rolled away from the metropolis as it sprawled on. He wondered how much deeper Alleytown could go, how many yards of cobbles lay beyond before the next gate. It was a worry for another time.

By the end of the week, Alleytown was more colourful than ever. Outside the gates, the council planters lay barren and brown.

But before long, as always, Jackie had to ring the bell.

He got the stares, the muttered insults as always, but he knew his neighbours didn't resent him really. He didn't print those little council pamphlets he kept safe in his top pocket wherever his wanderings took him. He didn't make the schedules. Those that spat at him were only projecting their pain. Without a word, he forgave them. Then he put away the bell in his pack and watched.

Alleytown dissolved. That was the best word for it. No orderly evacuation from east to west, just the unmooring of souls that had become unlost for a while. All along the line, tents crumpled and shacks disengaged into piles of wood on rusted pallet trucks. People who had become friends and lovers shook hands and said their goodbyes. The town became an alley once more.

In three hours, Jackie was left cold alone. He stood, put away his things, and set about the second part of his job. It was much easier now that people had accepted. There were no stragglers to clear any more, no old ladies huddled up in tears against gates telling him that they couldn't go on. Because where there had once been fear, hope had grown. With all its noise and smells and flowers and life, Alleytown would rise again.

Planned obsolescence was a beautiful thing.

In his slow, careful walk to the wall of skips and back, Jackie encountered one punnet of rotten strawberries and a polystyrene cup. The irony wasn't lost on him. The residents of Alleytown valued everything. There was absolutely nothing for that crawling hulk of steaming metal they called the Plough to clear. They'd send it down anyway, no matter the cost. It was the threat of it that mattered to the brickies. If the machine didn't come, then who knew who might decide to stay. Then the violence would come again. It was better this way.

The first ploughmen had arrived by the time the alley coughed Jackie out onto the unwelcoming street. The planters were still there, brown and withered things twisting beneath the reflective buttocks of the smoking workmen. They greeted him by name. One offered him a cigarette. Jackie paused long enough to check his collection schedules against the official logs, then thanked them for their time and hurried off, head down, towards the flyover. It wouldn't do to linger long. Besides, he had a few old friends to seek out in cracks and crevices out by the old retail park. Word about the next safe location would be everywhere by the end of the day, and brickies all over town would already be peering anxiously out their back windows, and praying them away.

Someone shouted something from a window high above, but the ploughmen did their best to ignore it. The insults turned to roars of indignation, but soon everything was lost in the growing thunder of the huge thing which lumbered inch by inch up the straining road. With a grinding shudder, the Plough came one way, and the Plough returned. The men smoked as casually as they could and watched with trepidation as the scouring neared completion. All too soon it was over.

Deadbolts groaned back on hinges. Gates rattled in their frames. Grumbles rose into a cacophony as respectable folk heaved out their mountains of refuse onto the path and shook fists at the lazy ploughmen who hadn't bothered to line the skips back up at convenient intervals. But the workers had turned and strode after their lumbering machine before any real trouble could begin.

It wasn't long before the clamour died down to the staccato mutterings of friendly neighbours. Bin Day had come at last, and there were other problems to discuss now, things those dirty vagrants wouldn't understand like mortgages and car engines. Of course, the binmen had already been, had just gone in fact, but no-one would ever venture out to get rid of their waste when the vagrants were here. Better not to risk any altercations. Better to wait till now. Everyone said so.

Footsteps in concrete yards. Clipped farewells over walls. The screech of rusted bolts, safe and sound in their latches. And then, silence.

And so, finally, to the soundtrack of plastic rattling in the breeze from the lids of overstuffed skips, beyond the black flicker of returning rats, beneath the miasma rot of its own filth, the street settled into peace at last.