When Lewis returned to his rented room on the fifth floor of No. 7 Witfield Street, it was already two o'clock in the morning.
The rundown stairway was still as narrow as a crack, with peeling walls and loose floorboards. The sour and rancid smell from the neighboring cheese warehouse seeped in through the windows, turning the air sticky. Lewis usually felt a headache, nausea, and the urge to curse whomever was responsible whenever he caught a whiff of that smell, wishing he could torch the cheese warehouse to the ground.
But tonight, he didn't even frown.
As if the stench was not a stench, but a...a symbol of poverty, and for the first time in his thirty years, Lewis felt this symbol was drifting further away from him.
He should have been fast asleep in the reserved suite at the Green Hotel, a luxurious one-pound-a-night room, with pressed sheets, a bright fireplace, hot bathwater, and bellboys who would place a foot mat at your feet...
