Three's a crowd, my mum used to say, glaring at me from across the dinner table whenever she wanted me to make myself scarce, so she could get it on with her piece-of-shit boyfriend. 

I wondered if I was making the same face at Gilly now as I silently willed him to leave, just fucking leave, but if he was receiving my psychic message, he wasn't budging. Alice had begged him to stay and that had seemed good enough for him. Not that I could blame him. If Alice had asked me to walk over hot coals for her, I would have done it, just to see her smile or feel her lips pressed against mine.

We sat now, the three of us, him close to the edge of the bridge, Alice and I halfway in with nothing but a few metres between us and him. With his back against the wall and legs crossed underneath him, he was concentrating on the battered tin of beans in his lap, scooping up the cold beans with his fingers and greedily shovelling them into his mouth. A couple spilt down his coat, but he found them quickly and ate them too, not wanting to miss a morsel.

I'd reluctantly given him a can, having managed to scavenge a couple from the bins at the back of the supermarket before security came out and chased me down the high street. The other tin I held, my stomach growling to be fed, but the nausea growing by the second as I watched Alice watch him.

He glanced up as he finished, running his fingers around the inside of the can to catch all the tomato juice and sucking on them voraciously, like he was gnawing away on succulent pork ribs.

'You not eating?' he asked Alice, frowning as he looked at her.

'She ate earlier,' I answered. And is probably hungry again.

I pulled her closer and glared at him.

'Fair enough,' he shrugged, avoiding my gaze. He knew I didn't want him here, I'd made it very clear that he could stay one night, but if he tried anything, or did anything I didn't like, then I'd do more than blacken his bloody eye.

'What happened to you?' Alice said. I didn't care. Didn't want to know. Conversation seemed pointless. Conversation would only prolong his stay and I wanted him gone. I wanted him to get up and walk away and never bloody come back.

Gilly sniffed, cuffing his nose and mouth with back of his hand, which trembled as he raised it to his face. 'Bloody bastards, the lot of them. I didn't even have much, who out here has? But they took it anyway and gave me a right good hiding. Why do people have to be like that, eh? I mean, taking my stuff is one thing, but why did they have to beat the crap out of me too?' The tears sprang to his eyes again. 'Is it always like that out here?'

'You haven't been on the streets long then?' Alice said, shifting as if edging closer to him. I tightened my grip on her waist.

'Two months,' he said, his face crumpling under the burden of street-life. We all carried the same burden out here and Gilly wore it harder than anyone I had ever seen. His story might as well have been tattooed all over him. I could see every hopeless night lying in some piss-stinking doorway or rat-infested underpass. I could see every time someone had spat in his face or chased him off or told him he was a dirty scumbag-loser. I could see it all.

'Why are you here, Gilly?'

I shot Alice a hard look. We didn't ask. We didn't pry. People's business was their own and the less you knew the better it was. Don't get involved. Don't be nosey. And don't ever, ever feel sorry for anyone. Sympathy was a luxury for the privileged. The ones with food in their bellies, roofs over their heads and a warm, clean bed to sleep in at night.

'You wouldn't believe me if I told you,' he said.

'Yeah, we would. We would, wouldn't we, Kris?' She nudged me, urging me to agree but I could only shrug and stare into the can of beans, the lumps of cold bean reminding me of the lumps of congealed gum flesh from my dream.

'Nightmare,' mumbled Gilly, biting on his fingernails. His eyes snapped to Alice. 'You ever have one of those nightmares that feels real? The ones when you know you're dreaming, you know you should wake up, but you just can't? You just keep running and running and you can't escape, you can't do nothing but let it all happen?'

Yes, I thought. Yes, yes, yes.

'Only I'm not dreaming, you see? It's real. It's all real and I can't escape, because there's nowhere else to go. I can't run from it. I can't wake up, because I'm already awake.' A small almost inaudible sob bubbled from his throat like a hiccup. 'Nine months ago I had everything. Everything you could possibly want. A house. A wife. A couple of kids. And now I have this.'

He pulled off his cap and even Alice, who seemed mesmerised by him, made a little gasp beside me.

Gilly wasn't old – at least, not as old as our parents – but underneath his cap, his hair was thinning and in some places, completely bald. Sore, dry patches were dotted over his scalp where the hair had fallen out, puce scabs encrusting the skin, which he picked at every now and then, the dry flakes falling from his head and settling like dust on his shoulders. He looked sick – really sick – and I suddenly wondered if that was the case and felt the guilt ache hard in my chest that I had been so hostile towards him.

'Are you sick or something?'

'Sick?' Gilly scratched at his head erratically, knuckles protruding white through pale, thin skin, dirty nails scraping at his forehead again and again until it turned red and angry-looking. 'I don't know. I think I might be. I think I am. They said I can't be. They said they didn't give me nothing bad. They reckon they didn't give any of us anything bad. But they still wanted me to go back. Examine me just to be sure. Procedure, they said. Bloody procedure, my arse. They knew what they'd done alright. They knew. They just didn't know this would happen.'

He began to rock slightly, wrapping his arms around himself, eyes moistening with tears.

'Who do you mean, Gilly? Who did this?' Alice was good with people. Always had been. Her voice was soft, cajoling, and I felt a burst of love for her then, that even after everything she'd been through, she still had it in her to care for others.

'I had a good job, you know,' Gilly said, ignoring her question. 'Worked bloody hard, earned good money. Maybe I should have seen it coming, loads of my work mates reckoned they did. The managers were spending all sorts of money. New cars, new laptops, refurbishing the offices. I just thought it meant the company was on the up, but it wasn't. They'd just lost control. Then the next pay day came around, we checked our bank accounts and nothing. No wage. They just didn't pay us. There was no warning. One day we had a job and the next day we were all out on our ear. After that, I struggled to get a job, there was just nothing out there, so I took a shitty job in a restaurant kitchen just to keep us going, but it wasn't enough.'

A tear slipped down his dirty cheek as he glanced around, almost as if he was scared somebody else was here listening to his story.

'Someone who worked there told me about this scientific research program. Drug-testing. You went along to this place, stuck on a hospital gown, they gave you the drug and you got paid. It was as easy as that. Too easy, I suppose and I wasn't sure whether I should do it, but my mate told me that it wasn't drugs at all. It was all psychological.' He tapped at his forehead. 'They wanted you to think you'd been given something.'

'You mean like a placebo?' I said.

Gilly nodded, clearing his throat as he spoke and wiping away the tear and smudging dirt across his face. 'Yeah, that's it. A placebo. They paid well, I mean, really bloody well and I suppose I should have realised then, because anyone willing to pay that much, probably isn't just doing psychological tests, but I was desperate. Melinda – that's my wife – was already on my back twenty-four-seven, nagging me to get another job. Bills were piling up. We couldn't pay the mortgage. We thought we might even have to start using the food banks, that's how bad it got. And so, I went.'

'And they didn't give you a placebo?' Alice was practically sitting on my lap by now and I pulled her even closer, feeling a horrible empty desperation in my stomach listening to Gilly's story and needing her warmth more than I ever had.

'I don't know what they gave me,' Gilly whispered. 'I don't know what drug they put inside me, but it wasn't a bloody placebo. There was about twenty of us at the facility that morning and they took us all in, told us to get changed into the gowns and then put each of us on a bed in this huge room. The funny thing was, it didn't look like a hospital ward, you know. I could smell fresh paint, like they'd only done it all up recently. Something about it just seemed odd, but I told myself I was being paranoid. A few of us got talking, even had a little joke about how weird the set up was. Talked about what we were going to do with the money. Then they came in, all these nurses, with the most beautiful smiles, being all nice and shit. They wired us up to all these machines and then they did it. They stuck needles in our arms, and all the time, bloody smiling about it. Like it was a holiday camp or something.'

His face twisted bitterly at the memory of it all and he chewed on his lower lip, trying to smooth back what little hair he had left.

'Everything seemed fine at first. I got paid. I went home. Melinda was happy. The kids weren't hungry. But then, everything began to change. I began to change.'

'What do you mean?' I asked, having to begrudgingly admit to myself that I was becoming enthralled by his story too.

'It started with small things. The kids were too loud. Melinda's voice grated on my nerves. The neighbour's dog barked too much. It made me angry, all of it made me angry. I'd shout at Mel and the kids. I mean, really shout at them. I thought it was stress, you know, because of losing my job and not having enough money, I thought maybe it had all got on top of me. But after that, it just got worse. I'd go crazy, throwing things, kicking furniture, even kicked the neighbour's fence in when the bloody dog wouldn't stop bastard yapping. It wasn't like me. I'd never been aggressive before, never. I went to the Doc's and they just said I was depressed and recommended therapy or drugs but I didn't want all that. This went on for a few months, then one night, I lost it completely. I did something I've never done in my whole life – I raised my fist to Melinda, in front of the kids too.'

Alice gripped my hand, fingers clutching mine tightly.

'The next day, her dad and brothers turned up, threw me out, with barely anything. Just a bag with a few clothes. The thing is I didn't even feel that sorry, not then. I was just angry all the time. I kipped at a friend's place for a while but he threw me out. Then this started to happen.' Gilly pointed to his hair, tugging on a short tuft which came free easily and drifted softly to the ground. 'By that point, I realised something was really wrong and that maybe it was the drug trial. I got in touch with the facility and they assured me it was nothing, they said I hadn't been given the drug and there wasn't any need to worry about it. Even suggested I should go on holiday to de-stress! Where was I going to go, eh? I had no money, no home, no family. And the anger hadn't gone away. My hair was falling out. But that's not the worst of it.'

I stared at him wide-eyed as he held out his trembling hand, pointing at it with the other.

'It's like there's something under there. Under the skin. I don't know what it is or what they did to me, but it's like an itch that never goes away. And you can't get to it, because it's inside. It's inside. I hardly sleep these days because of it. I just scratch and scratch and it hurts so bloody much because no matter how hard I scratch, the itch never goes away.'

He collapsed into sobs, great guttural sobs that seemed to wrack his skinny frame so much I feared he might crumble in front of my eyes. I was struck-dumb, unable to do anything but sit and watch him cry. I'd never seen someone so utterly broken. Not even Alice had seemed this broken, despite her dad's efforts to tear her to pieces. There had still been that spark of hope, that unquestionable fire in her eyes that made my heart burn just to see it. But Gilly was something else. He was like a ghost, drained of light and life, just an empty shell and if I reached out, I swear my hand would have gone right through him as if he wasn't even there.

I hadn't wanted to feel sorry for him, but I did. I turned to look to Alice for something to say – she always knew what to say - but instead of seeing the same sadness in her eyes that I felt weighing heavily upon me, I saw something else. Something that brought me back to reality, to the nightmare I couldn't wake up from.

When Gilly spoke, it took me a few seconds to drag my gaze back to him.

'I think they're still looking for me.'

I blinked. 'What? Who is? Who's looking for you?'

'Them,' he said. 'I told you, they wanted me to come back. They said they'd got me mixed up with someone else, that there was a possibility I hadn't been given a placebo after all. No shit Sherlock! They wanted me to come back in and be tested. They said they could help me. But there was no way I was going back in that place to have them stick needles in me all over again.'

'But they might help you?' I said, puzzled. 'Wouldn't you want them to help stop all this?'

Gilly laughed then and in the moonlight that broke through to the edge of the bridge where he sat, I could see his blackened gums and grey teeth.

He's dead, I thought. He's already dead.

'Help me?' he scoffed. 'Why would they want to help me? Haven't you learnt anything from being out here? People like that don't want to help the likes of you and me. We're nothing. Less than nothing. We're no better than vermin to them, only fit to be experimented on or wiped out. They have all the power and we have none.'

'But who are they? Who did all this?'

He leant forward, grinning a dead man's grin, staring at me with a dead man's eyes.

'The government, of course. The bloody government. It was a military-run operation, controlled by those who sit behind Number 10 Downing Street. Those toffee-nosed, privately-educated bastards who are grinding this country into the dirt, who are crushing the people and starving our kids, just to keep us where they want us – under their control. Don't you see what's happening out there? The rich are getting richer and the rest of us are being left to burn.'

'Oh, come on,' I said, suddenly irritated. 'What reason would the government have to run experiments like this? Why would they want to create drugs that make people turn violent? Surely they want the masses docile, not bloody angry enough to start causing trouble? It doesn't make any sense.'

'I never said this drug was for the masses,' he said, scratching frantically again at his forehead, which was now starting to bleed a little. 'I told you, this was military-run. They're looking for the ultimate weapon. They're testing this stuff out to beef up their military power for when the people rise up. Can't you feel it in the air? The tension. The unhappiness. People are getting angry. Food supplies aren't what they were. There's no jobs, no money. People can't feed their kids. Everyone's suffering. And what do people do when they suffer? They fight back. The world is changing out there, Kris, and the government need to be in control. They need an army capable of turning against the common man. They need an army that'll do literally anything to keep order on the streets. Even if that means killing the innocent.'

He put his cap back on and pulled his hood up over the top. A thin trail of blood was trickling down the side of his face.

'A storm is coming. You mark my words. And what they did to me was just the first step. End of the world. End of the bloody world.'

***

Gilly wandered off down the alley to have a piss, leaving Alice and I staring after him.

End of the world? A drug-enhanced army ordered to kill the poor?

'Dear God,' I whispered. 'He's bloody mad. He's actually bloody insane. I knew we shouldn't have let him stay. We have to tell him to go, Alice, right now before he flips out on us.'

'I want him.'

Her voice was small, tiny, like a child's voice, but so chilling to hear that I shivered involuntarily, goose-bumps erupting over my skin. I turned to look at her, but she was still staring at the mouth of the alleyway where Gilly had disappeared into the urban jungle, her eyes sparkling with desire.

'Alice, no!'

'I want him,' she repeated. 'You heard him. He's on the run. No one knows where he is. His family and friends have disowned him. He doesn't have anyone. No one will miss him. No one will even know that he's gone.'

'Alice, this isn't a cat we're talking about. It's a man. We're talking murder here!'

'I don't care. I want him.'

I pushed myself away from her, heart hammering in my chest, nausea spiking hard and strong in my gut. 'You don't mean this. You don't. Look, I'll get you a dog, okay? Something bigger, but not this, not him!'

Alice jumped to her feet, her small frame shaking with anger, her face pained and full of fire. 'You promised me,' she hissed. How could someone so tiny suddenly look so big? 'You said you'd always look after me. You said you'd do anything for me and that you'd always protect me. You're a bloody liar!'

I scrambled to my feet then, grief-stricken that she would say that, that she would even think it.

'I never lied to you. I would never do that. Please, Alice, I love you, you know I do.'

'If you did, then you'd do this. You'd do this for me but you won't. You don't love me at all! How can you stand there and talk about love when you'd let me hurt like this? I'm hurting, Kris. I hurt all the time.' She clutched at her stomach. Practically clawed at it. 'This is the only thing that's going to stop the pain and if you won't do this for me, then I'll find someone who will. Someone who really loves me.'

I was free-falling. Plummeting. The ground had opened up beneath my feet and I was tumbling into darkness. She was going to walk away and leave me alone and that would be it. And the thought of that, of her not being there every day, of not feeling her body nestled next to mine when I woke up, of not seeing that smile, it hurt like someone had taken a knife to my stomach and ripped me apart. I needed her and there would never be a time in my life when I wouldn't need her, when I wouldn't need her so desperately that I would do anything – literally anything – to keep her by my side. She was everything. My heart. My blood. My life.

'Please, Alice,' I begged. 'Please, I love you.'

'Then prove it. Get me what I want.'

She was like a tornado, like the oncoming storm, and she was going to end my world.

Footsteps. A rustle of bushes. No. Don't come back. Please.

'That's better,' the dead man said, appearing from the alley and smiling with relief. He settled himself down on the blanket we had loaned him, barely glancing at us as he got himself comfortable. 'Everything okay?'

'Actually, Gilly' I said. 'Everything's not okay. Everything's not okay, at all.'

I bent down to pick up the brick.

'But it will be. I promise.'