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1 APARTMENT INTERIOR/MORNING/BELYAYEVO, MOCKBA, ROSSIJSKAJA FEDERACIJA…   There is a T-shirt on the desk in front of him   Plain white Fruit of the Loom   He scrawls across its front with a fine-tipped Sharpie   The desk is from a former jam factory, although he doesn’t know this – in fact, it pre-dates his birth, which he’s also unaware of He dragged it here from an apartment on the ground floor in the block opposite, which had been broken into and vandalised once the old man who lived there had been ambulanced off to hospital, to cough out the last of his wretched days   They had dragged it – the desk, not the old man – across the parched grass that dissects the housing blocks, across the spaces where it is always great to be six, always boring to be sixteen, into what he laughingly calls home   Home sweet home, homie   He could be in Malmö, Belleville, or Detroit   But he isn’t   He could be a barista, a real-estate agent, or a code programmer   He is none of these   He wears tracksuit pants, tucked into Reebok socks, a pair of Adidas pool-sliders, and a string vest coloured in the red, green and gold of the followers of His Most Imperial Majesty Jah Rastafari!   King of Kings!   Lion of Judah!   He likes the story – no! – he loves the story about Hailie Selassie   The story, so he was told – in a bar near the sports stadia, on the outskirts of Moscow, near the river, that’s where you always hear these sort of stories; either there, or in a graffiti-tagged pedestrian underpass; or very early one morning in a half-empty Metro carriage; even, perhaps, after midnight, shouted over the BPMs of the Ceephax Acid Crew at the Solyanka Club; hell, just about anywhere – but the story he heard in that bar, before the derby between Spartak and CSKA at the Luzhniki Stadium, a football match that he wasn’t going to attend, was this:   That after the King of Kings was cremated, along with a greyhound, and a chicken – the ashes of all three were then mixed together and thrown onto the winds   He thought that