BETWEEN FOUR JUNCTIONS ALISON DENNY Salt

It flavours food, melts ice … “Cleans wounds,” Sara remarked, as we escorted her across a silent city centre. There was a canister of table salt, blue and white – a cheap one –upright on the pavement where we passed by.

“My mother used to rub it on her face to heal a cut, when I was a kid.” She’d tucked her script for Subitol inside her bra; the rain was soaking and she had no coat.

It would not have occurred to me that salt meant disinfection. It is a parallel world, life on the streets, where fag-ends are currency and those who have a script, or welfare pay, need bodyguards to keep the crows at bay.